Sunday, March 4, 2012

Yoga, tantra, colonialism

Note: the story told here is long, winding, and one I have thought much about and far too little about.  This is the tip of the iceberg, written quickly for the New York Times, although it was not published. I hope it reads well.

William J. Broad wrote an article about Yoga and sexual scandal, published in the New York Times last week.  Mr. Broad is badly in need of a history lesson.

Broad contends that its no surprise to find out that that John Friend, the founder of Anusara Yoga, has been sleeping around... and not just because famous yoga teachers have been exposed in sexual scandals numerous times.  According to him, yoga is designed to arouse the libido.  Here's my mash-up of the article: there's lot's of bad history and cultural insensitivity, which I'll try to address.   

Yoga teachers and how-to books seldom mention that the discipline began as a sex cult... Hatha yoga — the parent of the styles now practiced around the globe — began as a branch of Tantra.  In medieval India, Tantra devotees sought to fuse the male and female aspects of the cosmos into a blissful state of consciousness... The rites of Tantric cults, while often steeped in symbolism, could also include group and individual sex... Hatha originated as a way to speed the Tantric agenda... It used poses, deep breathing, and stimulating acts — including intercourse — to hasten rapturous bliss. In time, Tantra and Hatha developed bad reputations... Early in the 20th century, the founders of modern yoga worked hard to remove the Tantric stain... if students and teachers knew more about what Hatha can do, and what it was designed to do — they would find themselves less prone to surprise and unyogalike distress. 

Of all the misconceptions here, the most widespread may have to do with Hatha-Yoga being "the parent of the styles now practiced around the globe".  Which is to say, that Hatha-Yoga is where we get contemporary asana, or postural practice from.  I want to emphasize contemporary asana.  If we go back to Patanjalis Yoga Sutras, perhaps compiled in the second century, asana refers to postures conducive to meditation.  In the Bhagavadgita, Krishna tells his disciples to "sit (asana) focused entirely on me".  In both cases, asana is the physical posture allowing for yoga to take place: defined by Patanjali, yoga means achieving or striving to achieve complete stillness of mind, whereas the Bhagavadgita uses it more in the sense of unifying with the divine.

The later development of hatha-yoga, described in the 14th century Hatha-Yoga Pradipiki, is no different: the asanas described are not the asanas of today; they are still poses designed to keep the body still for long periods of time in order to do internal, spiritual work.  Asana in Hatha-Yoga allows for the practitioner to focus for long periods on the visualization and manipulation of energy in the body, which is the focus of tantric-yoga.  The same can be said for pranayama, or "the discipline of the breath".  For Patanjali, pranayama,  like asana, focuses on stilling the mind; in tantrism, the focus is on using the breath to cultivate energy (which also involves stilling the mind).  Yoga in tantric contexts usually refers to a union or harmonization of the bodies energies, and tools for internal visualization and manipulation of energy such as chakras are used.  When Broad says that "hatha yoga originated as a way to speed the Tantric agenda", he may be misunderstanding tantrisms claim that the cultivation of energy is a more accessible path to realization than the path of pure meditation. 

Tantric scriptures are extremely esoteric, and their sexual nature must be understood within this esotericism.  Broad is right that Hatha-Yoga is a branch of tantrism, but he doesn't seem to be aware that the vast majority of sexual activity described in the tantric literature functions as symbolic and esoteric references to magical, alchemical, and spiritual processes: chemicals, elements, and herbs 'mating' to produce new elements and energies; internal energies (manipulated through mantras and chakras) 'mating' to produce higher states of consciousness; deities 'mating' to create all the different aspects of this world.  I doubt he understands that there have been hundreds of tantric traditions, that tantric traditions have had an enormous cultural impact all over Asia, that kings (from Islamic rulers to Chinese emperors) regularly hired tantrikas (tantric practitioners) as alchemists, doctors, and ritual specialists, or that forms of tantrism have been state-sponsored religions in numerous countries.  Is he even aware that Tibetan Buddhism is tantric, and the Dalai Lama a great tantrika?  To say that there is a "tantric tradition" is to admit that one knows nothing of the historic diversity and complexity of tantrism.  Various forms of tantrism have certainly had agendas, but not the sort that Broad is ahistorically fantasizing.    

Part of that diversity and complexity does, indeed, involve ritual sex.  Very few tantric traditions utilize ritual sex, but the topic should not be discarded: rather, we should attempt to understand the baggage we may bring to that concept, what misconceptions we may be prone to, and how different such an activity could look in a completely foreign culture: one where semen or menstrual blood were powerful substances, worthy of being offered to gods or used for magical purposes.  In the tantric traditions that did use sexual rituals, the focus was not on orgasmic bliss: rather, the ritual would produce an especially powerful sexual substance... especially if a professional prostitute - a ritual specialist enacting the goddesses energies - or a monk who had long been celibate produced the sexual substances.  In such a context, words such as sex, orgasm, sexual fluid, and prostitute carry completely different meanings than Broad imagines.  Most tantricas that participated in these rituals were actually ascetic - they engaged in the ritual use of the substances but usually not in sexual activity as we think of it.   

When Broad condemns the sexuality of tantrism, he does so knowing nothing of it - of the real sexual rituals, or of the much more commonly used esoteric sexual symbolism of tantra, and just as importantly, of the colonial legacy of condemnation.  Broad says "in time, Tantra and Hatha developed bad reputations... Early in the 20th century, the founders of modern yoga worked hard to remove the Tantric stain...".  This is true in a sense, but why?  On the one hand, for many hundreds of years, the word "yogi" was most commonly used in India to refer to ascetic beggars and wanderers - figures that much of the public had an ambivalent relationship withAdditionally, some forms of tantrism focused on completely separating the self from society by breaking all of societies moral and sanitary rules: such tantrikas lived around cremation grounds, covered themselves with the ashes of burned bodies, and ate out of human skulls.  Once again, the Indian public had always had an ambivalent relationship with these yogis, who were often considered very powerful ritualists, magicians, and healers... but who were also mistrusted and the subject of frightening children's stories.  (see David Gordon White's awesome book, Sinister Yogis).

However, the condemnation that Broad is likely thinking about probably began with British missionaries condemning these figures as satanic, with British travelers and storytellers weaving popular racist yarns about Indian deviance and irrationality, with horrified (and fascinated) European scholars reporting their completely misunderstood readings of tantrism, with the British colonial government using Indian "irrationality", epitomized by tantra, as an excuse for rule - and with the way the Indian elite reacted to those judgments.  These elites - some of whom were actually tantric themselves - fiercely condemned tantrism and portrayed it as a stain on the true purity and philosophical genius of India.  These Indian elites demonized the yogis as nothing but unsuccessful homeless wanderers living off of everyone's hard work, using austerities (not asanas!) to force sympathy in much the same way that beggars in London feigned sickness..  They portrayed India as a land of high philosophy, their religions as far more scientific and reasonable than Christianity.  The yoga made world-famous by Vivekananda in the 1890's was that of Patanjali's "stillness of mind", all magic edited out, all practices filtered through western logic.  Vivekananda, riffing off of Nietzsche's famous quote, stated that while God had died in the West, God could not die in India, because in India, the paths to God were in harmony with science.  The western world ate this story up.  Vivekananda was a disciple of one of India's great tantric masters, Ramakrishna, but through Vivekananda, Ramakrishna's extraordinary teachings were rewritten and made palatable (scientific and rational) for the west.  (For this story, see the extraordinary book Kali's Child, renowned by scholars and demonized by many Hindu's and followers of Ramakrishna, who know this saint only filtered through Vivekananda's telling).

In other words, when Broad says that "the founders of modern yoga [such as Vivekananda] worked hard to remove the Tantric stain", he's unknowingly referring to the strategy of Indian elites condemning tantrism and re-conceptualizing their traditions in response to western prejudices and misunderstandings. 

Only now does asana come into play.  The industrial revolution in the west had led to a major revisioning of the body: a widespread belief developed that men, living under factory conditions, were becoming lethargic and "unmanly".  The lethargic body began to become associated with immorality and irreligiousness, and numerous movements promoting exercise for the sake of mental health and spirituality developed in the 1880's and 1890's.  Most important was the muscular Christianity movement and the physical culture movement, out of which arose the first olympics, sports such as basketball and volleyball, and a world-wide weight lifting, wrestling, and gymnastics craze.  The sophisticated western man of this time was rough and tough - a Teddy Rooosevelt.  The pettycoat wig-wearing founding fathers would have been judged positively effeminate in the western culture of the 1880's.         

In the context of a the physical culture movement, British colonial rulers worried about the "effeminate" Indian male body: it was not useful for war, and it was prone to immorality and lazy, irrational magical thinking of the sort that would entertain the crazy ideas of tantrism.  Through rigorous exercise, the racist colonial thinking went, Indian men might become more masculine - which also meant more rational and more Christian.  Harry Crowe Buck, the director of the YMCA in India, came up with a solution: he toured India, searching for Indian physical culture.  Buck "Indianized" western gymnastics by including Indian wrestling and austerity postures in the gymnastics regimen that thousands of Indian men participated in through the colonial YMCA. (The Young Men's Christian Association was born out of the muscular Christianity movement).  Indian men of the time decided to destroy the myth of the "effeminate Indian" once and for all: they took the ball and ran with it, becoming some of the best gymnasts, weight lifters, and wrestlers in the world - and by elaborating on and taking ownership of the new asana tradition, which, over time, was then combined with all manner of much older spiritual techniques, some of which do come from hatha-yoga.  For a few decades, however, modern asana was a highly masculine endeavor in India: it was a part of the global physical culture movement, not the yoga movement led by Indian elites such as Vivekananda.  Iyengar himself describes his teacher (of this founding era) as having few spiritual interests.  Some of the first to dabble in combining modern asana with older yoga practices came not from India, but from westerners such as Aleister Crowley... but those creative misinterpretations and fantasies, which give us our contemporary understanding of tantrism, are stories for some other time.      

For more on this, check out Mark Singleton's Yoga Body, and the Modern Yoga Research website. 







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