As detailed in our last post, the Bhagavad Gita expounded classical yoga with an epic drama. Patañjali’s Yoga Sutras then expanded classical yoga with a how-to manual of mystic proverbs. However, this inward spiritual quest for the eternal soul and ultimate reality left much confusion regarding outward physical reality. Was the body a prison of the spirit as Greek philosophy mused or a temple of the spirit as Jewish scripture held? Is the world a garden of delight, a hellhole of suffering, or just an illusion? For a thousand years, this controversy swirled around India weaving diverse philosophical strands into a sturdy rope called Hatha yoga, which is encapsulated in the Hatha Pradipika text we will discuss in this essay.
The more physical yoga that became Hatha began in a Buddhist context. Yet, Buddhism soon shifted eastward from India. Hindu monasteries kept the flame alive and later produced texts like the Hatha Pradipika. Two strands contributing to Hatha were Nath Saivism (worshipping world-destroyer Shiva) and Tantric Vaisnavism (worshipping world-sustainer Vishnu).
The former tended to reject the world and mortify the body; the latter tended to embrace the world and glorify the body. The former flirted with extremes like fasting unto starvation or holding up limbs until amputation. The latter dabbled in ritual meat, wine, and orgies. In the Hatha Pradipika, ascetism and libertinism are woven into Hatha yoga. But who exactly was the ancient weaver?
“Matsyendra and his student Goraksha are revered as founders of hatha yoga.” Thus, a 21st century Yoga Journal article pinpoints hatha yoga’s origin. The 15th century author of Hatha Pradipika sings from the same songbook, referencing Matsyendra and Goraksha eight times in a short work. Likewise, few of the Nath ascetics or householders living between those centuries and tracing their lineage to Adinatha, Matsyendranatha, and Goraksanatha would refuse credit for hatha yoga’s invention. Yet, history is murkier.
The most ancient root of hatha yoga is probably the inversion posture for preserving or reversing the flow of bindu seed (semen) found in the Mahabharata. Such early celebate asceticism was mostly within the philosophical tradition of seeking liberation or enlightenment. The Mahabharata denotes the sacred chariot transporting the heroic warrior heavenward as yoga. Likewise, the earliest ascetics struggled heroically in their battle for salvation.
However, from earliest texts to medieval times, there existed a gap between such yoga practice and yogi practice directed toward supernatural powers and immortal bodies. Liberation from the body and liberation in the body developed as parallel strands seen in first millennium CE ascetics and tantrics. While the earliest Sanskrit hatha works are attributed to Nath founder Gorakh, this guru hails from the latter strand of practice.
Today, hatha yoga aims at both mukti liberation and siddhi powers. So, with ascetics sweating and straining for liberation from the yogis of the Mahabharata to the modern Ramanandis and Dasanami samnyasis, how did an interloper from the gangs on the tantric side of the street get himself declared founder of hatha yoga? Therein lies a tale.
The Bhagavad Gita and Yoga Sutra were concerned with human liberation through a concentration on Krishna or a meditation on Self. Such a raising and expanding of the consciousness remained a core yoga principle. Early tantrics raised their consciousness and their bodies up through levels of the universe to the abode of deity. Later, with the subtle or yogic body, an inner cosmos was raised up within the body. The kundalini’s rise through the cakras may have replaced a yogini’s flight through a temple roof.
Tame exoteric tantra practices like visualization, rituals, worship, and mantras were in time supplemented with wild esoteric practices like forbidden substance consumption, forbidden sexual transaction, and self-deification. To those treading the Himalayan ascetic road, the tantric route could seem like taking the easy road and the low road.
Matsyendra and Goraksa likely lived in southern India in the 9th to 12th centuries CE. At this time and place, tantric practice was both flourishing and responding to charges of worldliness from the other-worldly ascetics so prevalent in the subcontinent’s north. The northern forerunners of the Nath tradition were celibate and remained so through the formal organization of the Nath Sampradaya that continues today. Contrarily, the many householder Naths still living in southern India can point to early Nath texts with yogis enjoying wine, meat, and sexuality. The earliest accounts also indicate that neither Matsyendra nor Goraksa was celibate. To be or not to be sexy: that was the question.
The Shiva Samhita, likely composed by forerunners of Dasanami samnyasi before Hatha Pradipika, wrestles with the same widespread tension. We are told yoga practice offers perfection even to one who indulges the senses, and yoga’s goals can be achieved here on earth even after enjoying all pleasures, so yogis should practice while having lots of fun. Then we are instructed in the next chapter that the greatest hindrance to liberation is enjoyment, and pleasures are obstacles on the yogi’s path. Not only Naths struggled to reconcile ascetic and tantric perspectives and practices received from exalted gurus.
Yet, Goraksa has long been associated with hatha innovation, and the Naths have long been associated with Goraksa. So, is hatha yoga really Natha yoga? Not quite. Hatha yoga’s earliest extensive formulation Dattatreyayogasastra was not composed in a Nath context. Early hatha was somewhat incompatible with the sexual rites and kundalini raising of the southern Nath forerunners. Only after the Hatha Pradipika synthesized this laya yoga with hatha did the new and improved Natha hatha become dominant. Plus, after they adopted, adapted, and coopted hatha, Naths mostly left it to the ascetics who began it.
So, why did the Naths crash someone else’s hatha party then not stick around to dance? Just as many southern yogis had sought to deemphasize left-hand tantra to gain wider acceptance, 16th century northern ascetics got organized and sought pan-Indian status through cooperation with the sexy heretics of the steamy south. In this give and take unification, Shiva and Goraksa overwhelmed Shakti and rival gurus. Plus, northern ascetics “accepted” tantric householders by condescending to them as fallen yogis.
Svatmarama’s composition of the Hatha Pradipika around 1450 was ahead of this trend and was a prime mover in the union of hatha with laya and ascetics with tantrics. “Onto the bindu-oriented hatha yoga was overlaid the laya yoga of Kaula tradition associated with siddhas such as Matsyendra and Goraksa, which came to be known as that of the Naths.” Hatha Pradipika is the first systematic fusion of bindu and kundalini paradigms, paralleling the Nath evolution to strict celibate asceticism from the Kaula tantric roots of their founding gurus.
The medieval Naths thus deserve less credit for hatha’s past origination and more for its future propagation. While the Hatha Pradipika is not directly attributed to a Nath author, its content is closely related to Nath terminology, and the Hatha Pradipika is not alone among Nath-related literature in its genius for marketing and publicity. The informal Nath canon includes Sanskrit texts, hagiographic narratives, and poetry. The texts, lore, and poems are often attributed to Gorakh and Matsyendra. One of the hero stories, in which Gorakh rescues Matsyendra from the Land of Women, is at least 400 years old. Thus, it emanates from the aftermath of the Nath sorting out of tantric and ascetic roots.
The main details of the story can be gathered from the Gorakh carit, Gorakhnath caritra, and Goga Mahapuran texts. Matsyendra became the lover of Queen Mainakini in the Land of Women in the Kadali forest. To rescue him, Gorakh had to fight the monkey god Hanuman at the border and kill Matsyendra’s beloved son. He urged Matsyendra to forsake Kaula tantric practices, because they dry up the nectar of immortality and also interfere with yoga progress. Matsyendra forsook the party music for the mantra.
The legend aims to draw a line between Nath yogis and Kaula tantrics, and is told from a Nath not Kaula perspective. One can read battling Hanuman as fighting animal desire and killing the son as family renunciation. Matsyendra leaves the “worldly” lifestyle of leader, husband, and father for the “spiritual” life of recluse celibate yogi. Gorakhnath awakens his guru from the music of pleasure with his drum, which reminds one of the nada drum beats that awaken the kundalini and soundtrack the spiritual journey in the Hatha Pradipika. This story can easily be read as yogi archetype rather than past event.
This tale is quite reminiscent of Siddhartha’s abandonment of rulership and familial responsibility for the life of a wandering sage and a Buddha who has been awakened. Yet, this rejection of work and family life is a far cry from Krishna’s appeal in the Gita for Arjuna to fulfill his dharma in karma yoga while renouncing results. Surely, those oversexed tantrics considered their path to be just as much a spiritual pursuit as those undersexed ascetics who came to represent the iconic Indian holy men and yogis.
Nath hagiography in general rejects the sexual rituals of the tantrics, but Sanskrit yoga manuals like Hatha Pradipika include methods to control them, such as vajroli-mudra. Perhaps, there is a desire to include in hatha those who do not reject sex like Buddhist Mahasiddhas. (Hatha Pradipika lists gurus from the Tibetan Tradition along with the Nine Naths.) Though the origins of Nath are surrounded in mist, the legend and Hatha Pradipika suggest that parts of the Nath community wanted to distance practice from their tantric roots without cutting their branch off from its trunk or other branches.
Even if we admit that hyperbolic claims like those in the Hatha Pradipika and tall tales like Matsyendra’s escape from the Land of Women allowed Natha hatha to go viral, what should one make of such unscholarly fare? Well, they say all publicity is good publicity. If Naths can surround themselves with literal smoking cow dung in order to enhance tapas power, why not surround ancient gurus with mythical steaming bullshit to enhance narrative power? Does anyone doubt that the story of Matsyendra’s rescue from the land of women will be remembered long after this amateur foray into the land of academia? I think not.
For further study, here are sources I read in researching this essay:
Busch, Colleen Morton. The Heroes, Saints, and Sages Behind Yoga Pose Names. Yoga Journal, August 28, 2007. https://www.yogajournal.com/yoga-101/heroes-saints-sages
Mallinson, James. Hatha Yoga. In Brill Encyclopedia of Hinduism. Edited by Helen Basu, Knut Jacobsen, Angelika Malinar, and Vasudha Narayanan. Leiden: Brill. 2011. pp. 770781.
Mallinson, James. Nath Sampradaya. In Brill Encyclopedia of Hinduism. Edited by Helen Basu, Knut Jacobsen, Angelika Malinar, and Vasudha Narayanan. Leiden: Brill. 2011. pp. 407-428.
Muñoz, Adrian. Matsyendra’s Golden Legend. In Yogi Heroes and Poets: Histories and Legends of the Naths. Edited by David Lorenzen and Adrian Muñoz. Suny Press. 2012. pp. 109-127.
Swami Svatmarama. Hatha Yoga Pradipika. Translation by Brian Dana Akers. YogaVidya.com. 2002.
Swami Svatmarama. Hatha Yoga Pradipika. Translation by Hans Ulrich Rieker. The Aquarian Press. 1992.
Swami Svatmarama. Hatha Yoga Pradipika. Translation by Pancham Sinh. Public Domain. 1914.
The Shiva Samhita: A Critical Edition. Translation by James Mallinson. YogaVidya.com. 2007.
White, David Gordon. Yoga, Brief History
of an Idea. In Yoga In Practice. Edited by David Gordon White.
Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2012.
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