Asanas of the Yogacintamani- The Largest Premodern Compilation on Postural Practice

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Jason Birch (DPhil. Oxon.) is a co-Director of the Yogacintamani project at the University of Massachu- setts Boston and an associate of the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Oxford. His recent publications include The Amaraugba and Amaraugbaprabodha of Goraksanatba: The Genesis of Haşha and Rajayoga, a critical edition of the Hathapra- dipika (with colleagues of the Light on Hatba project) and On the Plastic Surgery of the Ears and Nose: The Nepalese Version of the Suirutasambită (with colleagues of the Suiruta Project). At SOAS University of London (2015-2023), he was a Senior Research Fellow of the Light on Hatba project and a Post-doctoral Research Fellow of the Hatha Yoga Project. He is a founding member of the SOAS Centre of Yoga Studies and the peer-reviewed Journal of Yoga Studies.

THE CHANCE DISCOVERY of a heavily annotated manuscript of the Yoga- T cintamani at a library in Ujjain was as close as I will ever come to unearthing a wish-fulfilling gem. The discovery was a eureka moment in my efforts to reconstruct the history of yoga postures (asana). The Ujjain Yogacintamani contains a unique account of a large collection of asanas that is unprecedented in extant literature written before the seventeenth century. When read with other yoga texts that give details of postural practice, the Ujjain Yogacintămaņi is a salient example of the extent to which asanas proliferated in yoga traditions of the early modern era.

Prior to encountering the Ujjain manuscript, I had read much of Sivananda's Yogacintamani in the course of my research on the Amanaska, a Sanskrit text that was the focus of my doctoral thesis at the University of Oxford (2013). The historical importance of the Yogacintamani was made apparent in two articles by Parashuram Krishna Gode (1953, 1954), the first curator of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune. He proved convincingly that Sivananda's work was based on an earlier text of the same name composed by Godávaramiśra, a minister of the Orissan king Gajapati Pratiparudradeva. Gode's scholarship was followed by Christian Bouy's book on the Yoga Upanishads (1994). Bouy was interested in the role of yoga in the history of Advaitavedänta, and his study of the Yogacintămaņi led him to believe that Advaitavedäntins created such compendiums in the centuries preceding the Yoga Upanishads because of the lack of authoritative vedantic works on contemporary forms of yoga.

After I presented my research on the Ujjain Yogacintamani at the University of Vienna's conference Yoga in Transformation' in 2013, James Mallinson proposed that we include the Yogacintamani as one of the term texts to be studied by the ERC-funded Hatha Yoga Project. At the second workshop of the Hatha Yoga Project, James Mallinson, Somdev Vasudeva Csaba Kiss and Jacqueline Hargreaves read and commented on a first draf of the section on asana in the Ujjain Yogacintamani, which I created with the help of Mark Singleton. I owe Mark a great debt of gratitude for his assistance with the first draft of the edition and translation.

The Yogacintamani

THE WISH-FULFILLING GEM OF Yoga (Yogacintamani) is a large and eru T dite compilation composed by Sivanandasarasvati, a monk (sannyasin) of the Dasanami order who lived in Varanasi in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. With the aim of revealing the secrets of Hatha and Räjayoga for the delight of yogis, Sivananda attempted to integrate yogic praxis and theory of different religious and philosophical traditions into a coherent discourse largely based on the eight auxiliaries of Patañjalayoga. He amassed quotations of many diverse texts and cited them with attribution to the name of the author or work. His own commentarial remarks, which are often sparse but judiciously placed, act like a thread to knit the quotations together and embroider the work with the gnostic teachings of his own tradition of Advaitavedänta.

The Yogacintamani is an important historical document of the early modern period because it attests to the enduring appeal of Patañjalayoga among erudite ascetics and Brahmins, and it reveals how Hatha and Rajayoga were appropriated and reinterpreted by those who believed that yoga could reveal the gnostic truths of the Upaniṣads. Sivananda's fusion of vedantic philosophy with the eightfold format of Patañjalayoga and the physical praxis of Hatha produced a rich, sophisticated discourse on yoga that in some ways anticipated the early twentieth-century renaissance of physical yoga within the neo-vedantic thinking of Hindu reformers, such as Swami Vivekananda.

This book presents a critical edition and annotated translation of the section on postural practice (asana) in an enlarged version of the Yoga- cintămaņi, a manuscript of which is held at the Scindia Oriental Research Institute, Ujjain. Created in the seventeenth century at the height of the Mughal empire and on the eve of British colonialism, this unique manuscript contains additional text, usually in the form of marginal and interlinear notes, that is not found in other manuscripts of the Yogacintamani. The sources for much of the additional information on asana are untraced.