Ruth Westoby

The SOAS Centre of Yoga Studies is delighted to host a series of online seminars with leading scholars at the heart of Philosophy and Yoga Studies. Please join us for this opportunity to go deeper into the material with researchers, graduates in the academic study of yoga and students of yoga more broadly. Sessions will be held over Zoom. Spaces are limited to facilitate exchange of ideas and participants are asked to register in advance. Readings will be shared prior to the sessions. Timings are British Summer Time. To register email Ruth Westoby at ruth_westoby@soas.ac.uk. Please include a short description of your area of related research or study.

This study group brings together leading scholars, early career researchers and graduates to present their research and discuss in a seminar setting, using primary sources on yoga and gender. Significant research is being carried out at SOAS on yoga and gender. The examination of yoga and gender from cross-disciplinary approaches-philology, ethnography, sociology and critical theories-explores themes of gender, sex, power and abuse within lineages, the esoteric feminine and ferocious goddesses in historical and contemporary contexts. Attendees are asked to register for their space in advance. ​ Priority will be given to those who are able to attend all the sessions. Attendee numbers will be capped to ensure maximum exchange of ideas. Those registered will receive readings in advance. There will be 5 sessions, at 5-6.30pm every Tuesday from 23rd April 2019. To register email Ruth Westoby-​ ruth_westoby@soas.ac.uk​. ​ Please include a short description of your area of related research or study.

If the most pressing issue of our times and our future is the consequences of environmental degradation – not just a health crisis for humanity but an existential one for all species - can a turn to early haṭha yoga texts and contexts of bodies and cosmos frame a remedial mode of being human in a future world? ‘Ancient wisdom’ is no sticking plaster for modern malaise and I am cautious of the prescriptive approach. Nevertheless, the articulation of the identity of body and cosmos, of body and cosmos as consisting of the same materiality in early haṭha sources, at once insists on the imbrication of body as cosmos yet also gestures to yogic sovereignty over cosmos.

This presentation analyses the materiality of body and yogic body in relation to the elemental world in early haṭha yoga. What is the nature of the identity of body and cosmos? How do the yoga materials articulate mastery of the universe and prescribe the techniques to achieve it? Is this purely mastery over or is there also an ethic of symbiosis? Drawing on articulations of body and cosmos in the Amṛtasiddhi and Gorakṣaśataka, and the materiality (jaḍa) of the body in the Yogabīja and Śivasaṃhitā, I find the body and cosmos to be already near identical without the intervention of ritual inscription of body as cosmos. The mastery of body and cosmos could be propogandist but does not appear to be in extractive mode familiar from contemporary scenarios. However, the sources do centre the individual vis à vis their body, other beings, and the triple world.

This paper draws on the Sanskrit corpus of early haṭha texts, 11th-15th centuries CE, to argue that the organising principles of yoga praxis derive from concern over seminal depletion with a genealogy in medical and sexual accounts of reproduction and masculinity. The sources focus on seminal retention for male practitioners, who in the process develop perfect bodies. This is not sexual puritanism. Although it appears that the preoccupation of the texts with semen retention (bindu) and the sublimation of sexual arousal (kuṇḍalinī) are fully accounted by a psycho-analytical explanation of anxiety over virility, a more specific genealogy is found in the histories of medicine and the yogic body. I argue that the function of the yogic body in the haṭha corpus builds on medical accounts of reproduction to engineer a reverse embryology. I productively explore this through the rubric of masculinity studies.

A living body is a warm body. Energy and artifice regulate heat and calibrate homeostasis. The yoga body defies heat. Effort and artifice are used to create heat, conduct heat—and subvert the rules of homeostasis. The yoga body is cooked in the fire of yoga (Yogabīja 32) and the yogi’s imperviousness to cold and heat resonate across yoga literature.

How does heat function in Sanskritic sources on physical practice from the first half of the second millennium CE? I consider the sites of heat such as fire and sun (agni and sūrya), modes of heat production (prāṇāyāma, kuṇḍalinī) and the rhetoric of cooking, baking, burning and consuming. I do so to suggest that heat can be considered a paradigm of the yogic body.

The heating model of the yogic body has antecedents in ascetic practice, as well as being reflected in Vajrayāna’s gtum mo or caṇḍālī, and seems to contrast with other models of the yogic body refined in a Śaiva context—semen and menstrual blood (bindu and rajas) and kuṇḍalinī—that turn on the interplay and possible transcendence of duality. I place this model of heat alongside these interlinked paradigms to ask whether heat can be read as a unitary phenomenon or, like these other models, incorporates dualistic dialectics.

This paper draws on close textual readings contextualised within intellectual history to probe the forces and function of the yogic body. It contributes to the ongoing dialogue in yoga studies that seeks to understand how yoga works.

The Haṭhayoga canon offers cryptic glimpses of female practitioners drawing their menstrual blood (rajas) upwards and preserving it (Dattātreyayogaśāstra, Haṭhapradīpikā and Jyotsnā commentary). Nüdan, Daoist female inner alchemy, prescribes a practices of refining menstrual blood. Comparison between Nüdan and Haṭha suggests a radical reading for female practitioners of Haṭhayoga. The Chinese sources offer a developed and systematic account of female inner alchemy, Nüdan, that does not have a parallel in Indian sources, whether āyurvedic (medical) or alchemical. Nüdan describes a practice of voluntary amenorrhea known as ‘slaying the crimson dragon’ whereby menstruation is halted, breasts shrink and the practitioner becomes alike to a prepubescent boy. This paper proposal would set out a textual and doctrinal comparison of Haṭhayoga and Nüdan. Haṭhayoginīs may have preserved their rajas as part of their practice, but there is as yet no evidence that they halted menstruation in parallel with female practitioners of Nüdan. The Daoist model frames a reading of the Haṭha sources as yoginīs potentially halting their periods through preserving their rajas.

Approaches that posit the yogic body as a ritual construct mapping a dualistic relation between the material body and immaterial mind fail. They impose both European Cartesianism and a secularism that fails to read the divinity implied in the ontology of the body. An exploration of gender in the yogic body enables a turn towards the goddess as both ontological substrate in the form of śakti and as organising dynamism of yogic praxis in the form of kuṇḍalinī. This paper uses gender as an organizing principle to probe the structures and purposes of the yogic body and uses the eightfold ontological nature of kuṇḍalinī to bring into focus the divine materiality of the yogic body. Disciplinary-wise an intellectual history, my method is one of textual synoptic analysis bringing together hitherto unexplored texts.

Premodern Sanskrit texts on Haṭhayoga describe kuṇḍalinī, 'she who is coiled', as the female gendered serpent energy sleeping at the base of the yogic body. The texts prescribe physical, breathing and meditative techniques to awaken kuṇḍalinī and raise energy through the yogic body for empowerment and enlightenment. This paper reads passages on kuṇḍalinī from the Haṭha corpus alongside one another to analyse the language, function, and development of this key concept. Passages are selected from the Amanaska, Vasiṣṭhasaṃhitā, Vivekamārtaṇḍa, Gorakṣaśataka, Amaraughaprabodha, Yogabīja, Khecarīvidyā, Śivasaṃhitā and Haṭhapradīpikā. These sources have not before been brought together in such a synoptic reading.

The c. eleventh century CE Amṛtasiddhi conceives of a bindu-oriented (semen) model of the yogic body which may be leveraged for yogic ends. Verse 7.8 teaches bindu to be of two kinds: bīja is male bindu, rajas is female bindu; when united internally, one is a yogi. This paper reads the bindu passage in the Amṛtasiddhi to explore the function of bindu and rajas in this text: the conception of these constructs as physical and psycho-spiritual power substances, the methods with which they are to be manipulated, and the ends towards which this effort is directed. In order to probe the nature of the female element, rajas, the paper will seek to historicise the bindu-rajas oriented model within textual precedents such as Āyurveda and bring the Amṛtasiddhi into conversation with the later haṭhayoga corpus.

The characterisation of rajas is a key aspect of the overall research project which is to study constructions of gender within the premodern haṭhayoga corpus. Gendered yogic body models are both esoteric and corporeal, where the female principle is at once physical and power substance - generative, divine, and impure. An overarching research question is the extent to which gendered models are generated by socio-historical factors or have an inherent function in haṭhayoga’s soteriology. The project considers the scope of gender as an explanatory model in researching haṭhayoga and what these findings can illuminate of the lacuna of female practitioners.

Ādiśeṣạ, the primordial snake supporting the cosmos, is gendered male. Kuṇḍalinī, the esoteric serpent energy coiled at the base of the yogic body, is female. What role does the gender of kuṇḍalinī play in premodern Haṭhayoga? This paper interrogates the gendered presentation of kuṇḍalinī in Sanskrit texts on Haṭhayoga. Kuṇḍalinī is the coiled, snake-like energy, synonymous with the female pole of the godhead, śakti. The reception history of this concept, refracted through psychoanalysis and New Age thought, has articulated a sexually, socially and psychologically liberating interpretation. By contrast, in the early Haṭha corpus, 11th-15th centuries, kuṇḍalinī is manipulated through physical and meditative techniques to realise gnoseological and soteriological empowerments. This paper delves into the textual record in Sanskrit texts such as the Gorakṣaśataka, Yogabīja and Khecarīvidyā to outline first how kuṇḍalinī is gendered feminine, and second, why.

This article discusses the concept of rajas in the Hathayoga corpus and compares it with material in Ayurveda and Daoism. Rajas is the red blood of menstruation, female sexual fluid, and one aspect of a gendered binary with bindu or semen. In texts deriving from a male celibate context, rajas occurs within male practitioners without the interaction of a woman. In some paradigms of the yogic body, bindu is drawn upwards and preserved alongside rajas using the technique of vajrolimudra, conferring success (siddhi) and immortality (amrta). Women appear infrequently in Hatha texts, but those who preserve their rajas are said to be yoginis. Rajas in Ayurveda functions in embryology as a vital essence, thus explaining its power in Hathayoga. Daoist materials are more detailed and cohesive than Hatha, and female inner alchemy (Nüdan) describes a practice of voluntary amenorrhea, ‘slaying the crimson dragon’—the halting of menstruation. The Daoist model enables an interpretation of the scant Hatha sources to suggest that yoginis who preserve their rajas potentially halt their periods.

There are many varied but overlapping conceptions of the body in India. Each offer different accounts of the body, its function and purpose. There is the medical body, the āyurvedic body, the wrestler's body, the subtle body and the yogic body. This entry was initially titled the subtle body (sūkṣma śarīra) but reoriented to the yogic body as, despite overlays in terminology and thought, the yogic body is distinct from the sūkṣma śarīra. This entry will define the yogic body, describe its characteristics, summarise the techniques and purposes of manipulating the yogic body and historically contextualise the perceptions and misperceptions of the yogic body. The yogic body describes the relationship between the physical, 'real' body of flesh and blood, the psychical realms of consciousness, and the ritualistic leveraging of these connections. The body of the practitioner is doctrinally and ritually 'written on' (Flood 2006). As developed by the Indian tradition, yogic bodies offer a sophisticated and practical account of the realm and relationship between body and mind (Samuel and Johnston 2013). They are purposeful, describing an energetic map to be manipulated for the purposes of power, longevity and liberation. There are, in fact, a range of yogic bodies described across time and traditions-some complementary, some contradictory. The yogic body is a network of conduits or channels through which 'substances' (whether ontologically real, energetic or ritually imagined) travel.