Pittsburgh Alpha to Omega

But what I really would like to know is whether the yogi in the Trader Joe’s parking lot was Bhandarināth fifteen years later, or, if not, whether he was part of some cosmic plan in which I too had a minor role to play.  I cannot help but think, now that I live in the city that is synonymous with the movie industry, of the David Lynch film Mulholland Drive, named for the winding road that runs not more than two miles above the very parking lot where I met the second yogi (or maybe the first yogi, for the second time).  That movie – which as far as I can understand it tells two widely divergent stories of the same person who has recently come to Los Angeles – ends with miniaturized versions of all its characters running as if impelled by the invisible hand that had conjured up all of their life stories.  Then there is a gunshot and the screen goes to black.

Both Bhandarināth and the guy I met in the Trader Joe’s parking lot called themselves yogis.  But what was their yoga?  There was no stretching or contorted poses, no deep breathing, no meditation or mantras.  They both did tricks for me and then asked me for money.

It had not been my intention to write this book.  I was well into a project on the history of South Asian polytheism when I came across a passage from a late portion of India’s (and the world’s) greatest epic, the Mahābhārata, that stopped me cold.  Here is what that passage says:

Yogis who are without restraints [and] endowed with the power of yoga are [so many] masters, who enter into [the bodies of] the Prajāpatis, the sages, the gods, and the great beings.  Yama, the raging Terminator (Antaka), and death of terrible prowess: none of these masters the yogi who is possessed of immeasurable splendor . . . A yogi can lay hold of several thousand selves, and having obtained [their] power, he can walk the earth with all of them.  He can obtain [for himself] the [realms of the] sense objects.  Otherwise, he can undertake terrible austerities, or, again, he can draw those [sense objects] back together [into himself], like the sun [does] its rays of light.  Without a doubt, the powerful yogi who is a master of binding [others] is [also] possessed of the absolute power to release [others from those same bonds].”

When I first read that passage, sometime in the winter or spring of 2003, I realized that my research had to continue.

Elaine Pagels, Ken Wilber, Ralph Ellis and the Trimondis are still rad and all – but after reading his new book Sinister Yogis, I’ve determined that David Gordon White is my favorite living scholar of religion.  Thanks to my favorite living yogi, John Allen for the recommendation.

5/5 stars

In the first chapter, “Tales of Sinister Yogis”, White traces the tropes (“the king who is transformed into a parrot and who uses his wits to regain his human body and the throne; the king’s possession of occult knowledge,” “the use of a bird’s body as a temporary residence of the soul – which is itself identified as a bird called the ‘gander’ (hamsa) in many Indic traditions,” “and, of course, a sinister yogi as the villain of the piece”) of Mahadevprasad Singh’s mid-20^th century Bhairavānand Yogī to their medieval literary sources, then to those sources’ sources in Indic religious texts and folktales, then does likewise with the south Indian story of “The Little Devotee” and its tropes of yogic cannibalism and child sacrifice.

Bhairavānanda is also the name of the hero in a late fourteenth-century play by the same name, written by the Nepali playwright Maņika.  Better known is the tenth- to eleventh-century play Karpūramañjarī, written by Rājaśekhara, a court poet to the Pratīhāra and Kalacuri kings of central India.  In this drama, Bhairavānanda is the name of a tantric thaumaturge who, through his occult arts, elevates a king to the status of cakravartin, a universal conquerer, by magically causing Karpūramañjarī, the eponymous heroine of the story, to miraculously appear in his royal court.  That the powers of such figures did not translate directly into respect for them is made clear by a soliloquy placed in the mouth of Bhairavānanda himself:

I don’t know mantra from tantra,

Nor meditation or anything about a teacher’s grace.

Instead, I drink cheap booze and enjoy some woman.

But I sure am going on to liberation, since I got the Kula path.

What’s more,

I took some horny slut and consecrated her my “holy wife.”

Sucking up booze and wolfing down red meat,

My “holy alms” are whatever I like to eat,

My bed is but a piece of human skin.

Say, who wouldn’t declare this Kaula Religion

Just about the most fun you can have?

White then explores Nāth Yogī lore in which barren women are rendered fertile, with the boon-granting guru often subsequently appropriating the body of the youngster.  So, do these yogis literally “take over” the bodies of other humans, like the agents of Iain Banks’ Concern, or what?  A more mundane, though no less creepy interpretation White offers is that,

As for the social realities of renunciation and yogic initiation, it is the case that the poor families in north India have frequently given up their sons to the Nāth Yogīs and other religious orders, simply to survive.  Narratives explaining the miraculous birth of sons through the intervention of Nāth Yogīs – who sometimes “reincarnate” themselves through them – would serve, in such cases, as rationalizations for such transactions in which children are, in fact, “sacrificed” into what has been termed the “slave culture” of the yogi orders.

Likewise, reading the “Ocean of Rivers of Story” from Somadeva’s  1070 CE Kathātharitsāgara, and earlier versions of this story, in light of coeval cultural data yields the following mundane insight about its villain’s portrayal:

When Ksāntaśīla is first introduced, a neutral term indicating an affiliation with a non-Hindu religious order (i.e. sramana, bhiksu, or digambara) is employed, whereas when he is unmasked for the villain that he is, he is called a yogi.  This use of terminology is reflective, I would argue, of a situation in which independent yogis without allegiance to any particular religious or spiritual institution were perceived as threatening to those very same institutions.

What’s an ambitious institution to do but redefine the terms and attempt to co-opt the competition?

Already mentioned in a late portion of the MBh, the Pāśupatas were responsible for the composition or recomposition of several Purānas in the centuries that followed.  Their institutional presence is widely documented in nearly one hundred medieval inscriptions attesting to lands, monasteries, and temples donated to or administered by the Pāśupatas between the fifth and twelfth centuries CE.

Doctrinally, the Pāśupatas took the yogic god Śiva to be their model, and accordingly, yoga was defined by them as the union or contact of the individual soul with god, by virtue of which the human practitioner partook of the attributes – that is, the eight supernatural powers or “masteries” (aiśvaryam) – of the Great Master (Maheśvara).  In all of the tantric systems that follow – Śaiva, Vaisnava, Śākta, Buddhist, and Jain – this is the reading of yoga that remains operative: yoga is a soteriological system that culminates in union or identity with a supreme being.

Salvation/liberation, not yoking/possession, dig?  Having introduced his basic concepts and approach (basically, to pull up the roots of yoga through the treasury of texts describing the activities of yoga practitioners), White spends the next chapter tracing the expansions and contractions of the semantic field of the term “yoga” through the centuries (more interesting than it sounds) and tackling Vivekananda’s categorization, cribbed from none other than Madame Blavatsky, of rāja yoga/hatha yoga.

The Amanaskayoga (AY), an eleventh- to twelfth-century text attributed to Gorakhnāth, entitles its first chapter “Rāja Yoga,” but uses the term in ways that are at variance with the teachings of the YS.  In one verse (2.32), the AY identifies “rāja yoga that is free of mental constructions” as the necessary precondition for bodily perfection.  While this reading could be construed in a patañjalian mode, it bears noting that this mention of rāja yoga appears at the end of a list of practices that includes the sexual technique later known as vajrolī mudrā, or “urethral suction,” by means of which a male draws his shed semen together with his partner’s sexual discharge back from her vulva into his own body.  An allied definition of rāja yoga as the union of female discharge (rajas) and semen in the central channel is found in passages from the fifteenth-century Yogabīja and the Yogaśikhopanisad. Clearly, the rāja yoga referenced in these works is not the “classical yoga” that Vivekananda had in mind.

White helps the reader grok the different ways yogis are portrayed in narrative,

Here the three modalities of the biosciences’ concept of symbiosis (“living together”) may serve as a useful heuristic.  When one organism attaches itself to another for the benefit of both, as in the case of yogic initiation, that is the form of symbiosis known as mutualism. When the same occurs to the benefit of the “yoking” organism, but with no benefit or harm done to the “yoked” (i.e., the host) – as in the case of Śankara’s takeover of the dead body of King Amaruka – this is commensalism. When, however, the same occurs to the sole benefit of the “yoking” organism, and at the expense (if not the death) of the host, this is parasitism. Here we are in the familiar territory of the sinister yogis of the Vikrama Cycle and other medieval narratives, in which the range of possibilities of yogis who practice the “numinous” mode of yoga are cast in an entirely negative light, not unlike the “evil wizards” or “mad scientists” of Western literary and cinematic traditions.

as a lead-in to a discussion of solar apotheosis – hitching one’s wagon to a star.  Vedic chariot warriors did it, vedic priests did it, later yogis did it (with a few drastic mods) and, according to Dan Winter, you can do it too!  White continues his discussion of “piercing the disk of the sun” in the next chapter, “Embodied Ascent, Meditation, and Yogic Suicide”, which includes instructions from the Mālinīvijayottara Tantra for using the “Razor of Night which is Death” mantra and conflicting rationales for employing it.  The fourth chapter, “The Science of Entering Another Body” explores concepts of the yogic body and of yogi perception (biophotons, anyone?) with a little help from Gopinath Kaviraj, who in 1964 “published a chapter entitled ‘Parakāyapraveśa,’ in which he synthesized both his intellectual and experiential knowledge of the power of entering a foreign body.”  White summarizes,

Rather than being unidirectional in its extension beyond its visible physical contours, the body bristles with openings and extensions that are nothing other than the rays of perception that flow out of every sense organ to “touch and take the measure of every being at every level in the hierarchy of transmigrations” and, in the case of the sun, yogis, enlightened Buddhas, and gods, to penetrate those beings and transform them as they please.  Lastly, these accounts of the body’s extensions buttress McKim Marriott’s theories of Indic transactions in substance-code, according to which “pervasive boundary overflows” are the rule in a system in which “dividual” or “divisible” persons are constantly absorbing and diffusing particles of one another’s “coded substances.”  Before it was closed off from the world to ensure the splendid isolation (kaivalyam) of spirit from matter, or the vacuum necessary for the “hydraulic” practices of hatha yoga, the yogic body was conceived as an open system, capable of transacting with every other body – inanimate, animate, human, divine, and celestial – in the universe.

The fifth chapter, “Yogi Gods” deals with deities (like Śiva, Krsna and Visnu) who inhabit other bodies (or are/are present in all other bodies) in the Mahābhārata, Purānas and Bhagavad Gītā, as well as the deification of human yogis.  The final chapter, “Mughal, Modern, and Postmodern Yogis” deals with yogis (many of whom found worldly success as healers/purveyors of botanical and mineral elixirs [including aphrodisiacs], poisoners, mercenaries, spooks, power-brokers, even regents) in travelers’ accounts (which tend to be pretty amusing) of the Mughal period.  The Nāth Yogīs in particular, who “expanded their economic positions through land grants, control of temples and pilgrimage sites, warfare, and, eventually, banking” put me in mind of the Knights Templar.  The sub-chapter “Yogis in the World, in Their Own Words” describes how

Mastnāth, the eighteenth-century Nāth Yogī revered as the founder of the Asthal Bohar monastery in Rohtak (Hariyana), was, according to his hagiography, the Śrī Mastnāth Carit (ŚMC), born through the miraculous intervention of Gorakhnāth, who projected himself into an infant body at the request of a childless couple.  The ŚMC is a precious source, inasmuch as it is a fully emic yogi exemplum and account of the ways of the Nāth Yogīs.  Written in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century by a Nāth Yogī from the monastery that Mastnāth had himself founded, the work interweaves historical events with perennial Nāth Yogī mythemes.  The picture that emerges is one of a wonder worker who treats the high and the humble in the same evenhanded way, granting boons to those who respect his powers and bringing down plague and disaster upon those who do not.  His life is a succession of miracles, his “supernatural play” (adbhūt līlā), which take him from the village of his childhood to the pinnacle of imperial power near the end of his hundred-year life.  As a child, he shows himself to be possessed of multiple bodies, simultaneously appearing in his village to play with his friends and tending his flocks in the forest.  He causes rain to fall in a time of drought and supplies milk to an entire wedding party from a single inexhaustible pail.  After he has taken initiation and begun his life as a wandering yogi, Mastnāth begins to attract people from village and city alike, all of whom are hungry for his miracles.  He restores the body of a limbless, hunchback woman to wholeness, causes the blind to see, bestows three sons on an elderly barren woman, and raises cows from the dead.

As Mastnāth’s reputation spreads, he moves from rural into urban contexts, where he finds himself in competition with members of other religious orders for economic resources and symbolic capital, that is, alms.  In these situations, in which Mastnāth and his band of disciples are treated as “outsiders,” his supernatural displays take on a darker tone.  A visit to a town in the “country of Patiala” brings him into conflict with the abbot of a nearby monastery who prohibits the townspeople from offering alms of any sort to the yogi and his disciples.  Mastnāth has his disciples dump piles of tattered cloth in the middle of the town and orders the townspeople to take that rubbish to the monastery or suffer the consequences.  The abbot of the monastery refuses to allow the rags in his establishment, and the townspeople are compelled to carry everything back to the town center.  There a group of boys sets about tightly wrapping strips of the cloth into balls, with which they begin to play games.  As they throw the balls at one another, each child begins to cough up blood, and returning to their homes, they spread fever and plague, the fruit of Mastnāth’s curse.  The town is entirely depopulated, and the monastery that was responsible for the townspeople’s stinginess reduced to a state of penury.  This pattern repeats itself in another town, where a sādhu named Devīdās, jealous of Mastnāth’s renown, demands that the wild yogi perform a miracle before he will advise the townspeople, who are loyal to him, to offer alms to him and his entourage.  With the exception of one person, whom Mastnāth spares, the hapless townspeople obey their local holy man; and the miracle that Mastnāth then performs is to set fire to the entire town.  When Devīdās is unable to quell the flames, the townspeople rebuke him and rue the day they had taken him into their midst.  They repent and venerate Mastnāth, who then restores the town he had reduced to ashes.

I mean, criminy, you know?  White goes on to discuss why British colonizers were not fans.

I have already quoted a portion of Tod’s acerbic account of the Nāth Yogī Deonāth’s (Āyas Dev Nāth’s) strategic intervention in raising young prince Mān Singh to the throne.  Tod concludes his narrative with the following jeremiad:

Lands in every district were conferred upon the Nāt’h, until his estates, or rather those of the church of which he was the head, far exceeded those of the proudest nobles of the land; his income amounting to a tenth of the revenues of the state.  During the few years he held the keys of his master’s conscience, which were conveniently employed to unlock the treasury, he erected no less than eighty-four mindurs [temples] . . . with monasteries adjoining them, for his well-fed lazy chelas or disciples, who lived at free quarters on the labour of the industrious . . . This [Cardinal] Wolsely of Marudes [mārudeśa, i.e., the western desert] exercised his hourly-increasing power to the disgust and alienation of all but the infatuated prince.  He leagued together with the nominal minister, Induraj, and together they governed the prince and the country.  Such characters, when exceeding the sphere of their duties, expose religion to contempt.

Here we may safely parse Tod’s righteous indignation at Āyas Dev Nāth and his yogis as a case of British sour grapes, given the fact that Bhīm Singh – the victim of the dose of poison so mysteriously administered in the eleventh hour for the rescue of young Mān Singh – was the man the British had been backing as the successor to the vacant throne.  In addition, Mān Singh had offered asylum for no fewer than eleven years to Madhu Rāj Bhonsle (Appa Sahib) of Nagpur in open defiance of the British – housing him throughout that period in the Mahāmandir temple, the centerpiece of the Nāth Yogī presence in Jodhpur – and this following his signature of a treaty with the British!  Well after Āyas Dev Nāth’s 1815 murder, the Nāth Yogīs remained a thorn in the side of the British in Marwar.  After having used a show of armed force to persuade Mān Singh to remove the yogis from positions of power in the kingdom in 1839, they found them back in power again in 1841.

Those rascals!  By the end of the nineteenth century, though, “Jogis”, categorized as “Miscellaneous and Disreputable Vagrants” by the 1891 British imperial census, were on the decline.

However, like postmodern man, who has in recent decades been smitten by a sort of remorse and nostalgia for the various plant and animal species he is responsible for having annihilated, in the latter half of the nineteenth century the British in India began to romanticize the yogis whose lifestyles and livelihoods their policies had largely contributed to wiping out.  In urban middle-class society in particular, the bogey of the wild, naked, drug-crazed warrior ascetic was gradually airbrushed into the far more congenial image of a forest-dwelling meditative, spiritual renouncer, something far closer to the ideal of the sages of vedic lore.

When Blavatsy and Vivekananda hitched their wagons to this zeitgeist, then, the modern, nonsectarian yoga was conceived, refined by Krishnamacarya and again by his disciples and born unto the masses.  As White spells out, “the bedrock of the West’s modern-day, billion-dollar yoga industry, with its celebrity gurus (most of whom claim one of Krishnamacarya’s three disciples as their master), glossy journals, fashion accessories, trademarks, franchises, and lawsuits, is Indian yoga, but a reinvented Indian yoga that dates from no earlier than the 1930s.”

In the last hundred pages are contained extensive notes to the chapters, bibliography and index.

So there yinz have it.

If you practice, or, for heaven’s sake, teach any form of yoga, you’ll definitely want to read Sinister Yogis. If you’re just a dilettante like me,  you’ll probably still want to read it – if you don’t, the yogi will come and take you away.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you, happy reading and cuídate.