The Dattatreyayogasastra

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This book introduces, edits and translates the Dattatreyayogasastra, a Sanskrit text on yoga composed in about 1200 CE in South India. It teaches four types of yoga practice but devotes the majority of its 193 verses to hathayoga, which it divides into two varieties, one which consists of the eight auxiliaries first taught by Patanjali and one which has nine physical methods. It is thus the first text to combine the astanga system of Patanjali with physical techniques, and its teachings were highly influential on later authors and commentators of yoga texts. The book is addressed primarily to scholars but will also be of interest to students and practitioners of yoga.

James Mallinson is Boden Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Oxford. From 2013 to 2023 he worked at SOAS University of London, where in 2018 he established the SOAS Centre of Yoga Studies. From 2015 to 2020 he was Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded Hatha Yoga Project and from 2021 to 2024 Principal Investigator of the AHRC/DFG-funded Light on Hatha project, which produced a critical edition of the Hathapradipika.

I started studying the Dattatreyayogasastra in the early 1990s. Avasthi's edition of the text was one among various pamphlets of hathayoga texts my guru Balyogi sri Ram Balak Das had instructed me to buy from a bookshop in Varanasi's Kachori Gali. I read it with him at his ashram adjoining the island temple of Dattatreya in the river Kadwa at Kundewadi in Maharashtra.

During my doctoral studies at the University of Oxford (1995-2001) 1 tried to make sense of the early corpus of hatha texts and identified the Dattatreyayogalastra as the first text to teach a system of hathayoga named as such. This flew in the face of received opinion that the Natha Sampradaya was responsible for the development of hathayoga, and in various publications I proposed that "classical" hathayoga as found in the Hathapradipika came about as a result of overlaying the visualisation-based yoga of a proto-Natha tantric tradition onto the physical yoga of a more orthodox brahmanical ascetic tradition, of which the Dattatreyayogasastra was a product. I still think that this twofold division is a useful way of understanding early hathayoga, but work by me and others in intervening years has complicated the picture. In particular, the identification of the Amrtasiddhi, a work written by an unorthodox school of tantric Buddhism, as the earliest text to teach any of the practices and principles of hathayoga, and of the Natha Amaraugha, which draws closely on the Amṛtasiddhi, as the first text to teach a named hathayoga, forced me to rethink the place of the Dattatreyayogasastra in the early barba tradition, and to give some credit for its origins back to the Natha Sampradaya.