Step by step I learned about the teacher-disciple relationship, which involves trust, love, and the constant willingness to be tested and go beyond one’s imagined limitations. I benefited from the wonderful opportunity for self-transcendence this kind of circumstance presents. But in due course I also experienced its drawbacks. For I discovered that my teacher not only was an accomplished master of Hatha-Yoga, but he also used his charisma and paranormal powers to manipulate others. So long as enlightenment is not attained, the ego is not transcended, and there is the ever-present possibility of abusing one’s yogic abilities for egoic purposes rather than for the spiritual uplift- ment of others.
When I tried to break loose from that close-knit relationship, I learned another invaluable lesson: Psychic powers are a reality to be reckoned with, and some teachers will use them to hold their disciples. Although I had severed my external ties to my teacher, he continued to influence my life through psychic means, which proved most disturbing.
Fortunately, I never suffered the terrible agonies of a fully awakened but misconducted life force (kundalinî), as described by Pandit Gopi Krishna. It was he who made the kundalinî a household name among Western spiritual seekers. Nevertheless, I experienced firsthand some of the disturbing side effects of a kundalinî that had been tampered with, particularly states of dissociation from the body. It took many years, and the benign help of another spiritual personage, before the link was finally broken and I could get on with my life. Even though the experience had been rewarding overall, it left me disappointed, and for a good many years I steered clear of Eastern teachers.
In the meantime I had developed an interest in learning Sanskrit and studying the great religious and philosophical writings of the Hindus in the original. I channeled my frustrated spiritual impulse into a professional career in Indology. I regarded my studies and writing as a form of Karma-Yoga, of self-transcending action, and I also pursued in my daily life the great ideal of “witnessing,” which is central to Jnâna-Yoga.
Periodically I dabbled with this or that yogic technique and meditative practice, and even taught Hatha- Yoga for a few years in the evenings and on weekends. However, not until 1980 did I again make a more decisive spiritual gesture. A series of life crises brought the spiritual impulse to the fore, freeing up my attention to ponder the great question Who am I? more seriously. I began to look for a competent teacher and a supportive environment.
Since 1966 I have enjoyed the spiritual friendship of Irina Tweedie, a Sufi master in England whose invaluable diary, Daughter of Fire, was published in 1986. During my spiritual crisis, I deepened that relationship, and she helped me immensely in those days of reorientation. Thanks to her I experienced my first real spiritual breakthroughs. Also, unbeknownst to me, she groomed me for a much greater spiritual adventure.
In 1982 I had my first meeting with the American-born adept Da Free John (born Franklin Jones, now Adi Da), whose early writings, especially The Knee of Listening, had both stimulated me intellectually and touched me deeply at the emotional level. This time around, with fifteen years’ worth of learning behind me, it was rather more difficult to follow my intuition and entrust myself to the spiritual process under the guidance of a teacher. To make matters worse, Da Free John fitted none of the stereotypes I had come to associate with spiritual teachers. He was not a mild- mannered, gentle sage but, as he himself put it, a “wild character” and a “fire.”
Yet, despite all my many misgivings about this larger-than-life teacher, I knew I should avail myself of his guidance. I both dreaded and felt excited about the prospect of having the artificial boundaries of my personality scrutinized and challenged by an adept who is well known for his uncompromising approach. As it turned out, my discipleship was exceedingly challenging but enormously beneficial, confronting me with aspects of myself that I had been able to ignore before.
In 1986, my discipleship came to a close when I felt that I had learned whatever lessons I was capable of learning from that teacher and that it was time to move on. I could no longer negotiate the inner conflict I was feeling about his controversial teaching approach, and did not wish to lose the benefit I had gained in the preceding years of my discipleship. In my book Holy Madness, first published in 1990, I have analyzed in great detail the crazy-wisdom method of teaching favored by Da Free John and several other contemporary adepts. Despite my serious concerns about the crazy-wisdom approach to teaching and my intellectual and moral differences with Da Free John, I remain grateful for having had the opportunity to deepen my self-understanding.
In 1993, my spiritual life took a new turn. I discovered the living dimension of the Buddhist bodhisattva ideal. It might seem strange that after so many years of considering and practicing various aspects of Hindu Yoga I should now be engaged in a Buddhist sâdhanâ. But this strangeness evaporates when we adopt a long-range spiritual perspective, realizing that we are the product of all our past volitions, not merely the volitions of the present life. Moreover, Hinduism and Buddhism have many concepts and practices in common, which in the case of some of the medieval siddhas even makes it difficult to determine whether they were Hindus or Buddhists. Apart from this, as the nineteenth-century saint Sri Râmakrishna so ably demonstrated, if we follow any of the great spiritual paths to the end, we encounter the same spiritual truths and, ultimately, Reality or Truth itself.
I accepted long ago that spiritual life is a never-ending path of discovery that continues until we draw our last breath, and beyond. It is wonderful to know that for the dedicated aspirant there is always timely help in taking the next step. In my own life, I have received such help in bountiful measure, though often in unexpected form. This was never a matter of “guru hopping,” but one of opening myself to learning opportunities as they presented themselves.
I felt it necessary to begin this volume with a brief autobiographical note, because even the most “objective” treatment is shot through with personal qualities: I approach the history, philosophy, and psychology of Yoga not as an antiquarian but as someone who has the deepest appreciation for India’s spiritual genius honed in the course of many millennia. I have witnessed some of its effectiveness in my own person and in others who are spiritually more adept than I.
I am, clearly, in basic sympathy with the spiritual traditions of India, which are authentic efforts at transcending the self. My practical experience of them encourages me to assume that their fundamental in-sights are genuine and worthy of serious consideration. I further maintain that anyone who wishes to disclaim any of these insights or goals must do so on the basis of personal experience and experimentation rather than from mere theory. To put it simply, a person who has experienced the ecstatic state (samâdhi) cannot possibly call into question its intrinsic value and desirability. The experience of blissful ease in the nondual state of consciousness, wherein all sharp differences between beings and things are “outshined,” inevitably changes how we look at the whole spiritual enterprise and the world’s sacred traditions, not to mention how we view everyone and everything else.
At the same time, I have come to appreciate that such higher states of consciousness, though extraordinary accomplishments, are not inherently more significant than our everyday awareness. Any experience is useful as long as it facilitates our spiritual awakening and growth, but only enlightenment—which is not merely a transitory state of mind—is of unique significance because it reveals Reality as such. Prior to enlightenment, what matters is how we use the perspective gained in uncommon states in our daily relationship with others and life in general.
The fulcrum of spiritual life is self-transcendence as a constant orientation. As I understand it, self-transcendence is not merely the pursuit of altered states of consciousness. It also implies a constant willingness to be transformed and, in Meister Eckehart’s sense, to be “superformed” by the larger Reality whose existence and benignity are revealed to us in the meditative and ecstatic condition.
This volume is the
distillate of nearly three decades of scholarly and practical preoccupation with the tradition of Yoga. It has grown out of my earlier and long out-of-print Textbook of Yoga, published in 1975 by Rider & Co., London. I borrowed three months’ time from my postgraduate research at Durham University to write that book in the summer of 1974. Even though the volume was well received, I was from the beginning diffident about its many shortcomings, which I saw perhaps more clearly than most readers. Ever since then, I had been waiting for an opportunity to revise and expand the text, and then it became apparent that a completely new book was called for. Thus, when Jeremy Tarcher expressed an interest in a comprehensive handbook on Yoga, I jumped at the opportunity and wrote an entirely new and substantially larger book, which was published in 1989 under the title Yoga : The Technology of Ecstasy.
The present volume is a thoroughly revised and greatly enlarged edition of that work. The changes made in the text are so substantial that a new title seemed justifiable. In addition to revising the existing text, I have more than doubled the number of pages, primarily through inclusion of my English renderings of major Sanskrit scriptures on Yoga, including complete translations of the Yoga-Sûtra of Patanjali, the Shiva-Sûtra of Vasugupta, the Bhakti-Sûtra of Nârada, the Amrita-Nâda-Bindu- Upanishad, the Amrita-Bindu- Upanishad, the Advaya-Târaka- Upanishad, the Kshurikâ-Upanishad, the Dakshinamûrti-Stotra, the Mahâyâna-Vimshaka of Nâgâijuna, the Prajnâ-Pâramitâ- Hridaya-Sûtra, and the hitherto untranslated Goraksha-Pad- dhati. There are also many renderings of sections of other significant Yoga scriptures, including Haribhadra Sûri’s Yoga- Drishti-Samuccaya, ably translated by Christopher Chappie. In addition, I have added a new section on the adepts of Maharashtra and a whole new chapter on Yoga in Sikhism.
“Yoga is said to be the unification of the web of dualities.”
- Yoga-Bîja (84)
“Yoga is the union of the individual psyche with the transcendental Self.”
- Yoga-Yâjnavalkya (1.44)
The objective of this volume is to give the lay reader a systematic and comprehensive introduction to the many-faceted phenomenon of Indian spirituality, especially in its Hindu variety, while at the same time summarizing in broad outlines what scholarship has discovered about the evolution of Yoga thus far. This presentation will enable the reader to grasp and appreciate not only the astonishing complexity of Yoga but also its intricate relationship to other aspects of India’s complex culture. Inevitably I have had to deal with some rather involved ideas that will be foreign to those who have no background in philosophy, especially Eastern thought. I have tried, however, to introduce such ideas in as graduated a fashion as possible, without at the same time watering anything down.
The first few chapters are intended to provide an overview, and the subsequent chapters basically follow a roughly chronological order. Thus I begin with a discussion of yogic elements in the early Indian civilization as we know it from the archaeological digs at towns like Harappa and Mohenjo Daro and also from a careful study of the archaic Rig-Veda. This is followed by a treatment of Yoga in the early Upanishads (a particular genre of esoteric Hindu literature), the epic literature (including the Bhagavad-Gîtâ), the later Upanishads, the Yoga-Sûtra and its commentaries, and then the diversified forms of Yoga in the Post-Classical Era. The historical review ends with Tantra and Hatha- Yoga. I have refrained from a discussion of modern manifestations of Yoga, as this would have rendered the present volume prohibitively large.
For the benefit of the nonspecialist, I have appended a short glossary of key terms and a chronology beginning with the earliest known human presence on the Indian subcontinent in 250,000 B.C. and ending with India’s independence in 1947.
The emphasis throughout this work is on comprehensiveness and intelligibility. While I did my best to give each facet of Yoga a fair hearing, in accord with its significance in the overall picture, I could treat many issues only to a certain depth given the scope and purpose of this volume. My other publications and the works of other scholars can help to fill in some of the gaps. I want to emphasize, however, that our knowledge of the Yoga tradition is incomplete, and in some cases pitifully so. This is particularly true of Tantra- Yoga, which has developed an elaborate esoteric technology and symbolism that is barely intelligible to those who have not been initiated. Readers wishing to pursue this particular tradition might want to study my book Tantra: The Path of Ecstasy, which offers an introduction to Hindu Tantrism.
While this volume is specifically geared toward a lay readership, I believe that its efficiency as an orientational tool also extends to specialists in the history of religion, intellectual history, theology, the study of consciousness, and transpersonal psychology. Obviously, it was not possible to proffer detailed treatments of all the different aspects of the Yoga tradition, but I have endeavored to make my portrayal as balanced as possible.
I am hoping that this book will be particularly useful to Yoga teachers and also serve as a reliable reference work for Yoga teacher training programs around the world. In order to make the materials in this volume more accessible, I have created an 800-hour distance-learning course, which is available through Traditional Yoga Studies.
Writing The Yoga Tradition has been both a challenging and a rewarding experience, because I was able to integrate materials that had been gestating in me for very many years and also because I was obliged to make my ideas as intelligible as possible, which always benefits the writer as well. To what degree I have succeeded in meeting this challenge of integration and clear presentation will be determined by my readers. I hope that they will find this book as enjoyable to read as I have found it to write.
Nâmas te
Georg Feuerstein
Traditional Yoga Studies
www.traditionalyogastudies.com
PREFACE TO THE UNABRIDGED REVISED EDITION
This new edition is in response to the expressed wish of many students for a more compact version of what some have started to call the “Yoga telephone book.” I am grateful to Hohm Press for their responsiveness. May this new edition serve better.
G.F.
AUTHOR’S REMARKS ON THE 2008 EDITION
This third edition of The Yoga Tradition contains a number of changes. Apart from necessary updates, I have made a few additions, notably the Addendum on page xxx, the brief discussion about Green Yoga on page 426, and the Addendum to Hatha-Yoga literature on page 425. I have also made corrections throughout the text based on the German translation of this work, which afforded me an opportunity to scrutinize the book once again.
The most significant change is the new foreword by Prof. Subhash Kak. I had the pleasure of working with him on In Search of the Cradle of Civilization, which was a joint effort between him, David Frawley, and me.
Over the years, I have come to value Subhash for his impressive knowledge in such diverse fields as Indian philosophy and history, the Indus script, archeoastronomy, literature, and quantum physics, and as well as his unfailing kindness as a fellow researcher. He is professor and head of the Dept, of Computer Science at Oklahoma State University at Stillwater. I am very grateful to him for furnishing this edition with a new foreword.
I also wish to extend my thanks to Hohm Press for allowing me to continue to tinker with this work and for being so responsive to my expectation to use recycled paper for all my publications.
Note on Gender:
* * *
The Sanskrit texts reflect the gender bias of traditional Vedic and Hindu society. For the sake of fidelity I have preserved their preference for masculine pronouns in all translations. In my own statements, however, I have tried to take modern sensibilities into account as much as possible by using the third person plural (“they,” “them”) or by using both masculine and feminine pronouns. One exception to the latter is my use— for simplicity’s sake—of the term “yoginwhich technically refers only to a male practitioner, but which should be assumed by the reader to also include the female pract
itioner (yoginî) in most contexts.
* * *
Many individuals—friends, colleagues, and teachers—have contributed to the making of this volume. I am beholden to all of them.
The person who encouraged me the most in the early stages of my writing career, possibly without suspecting it, is Dr. Daniel Brostoff, a former editor-in-chief of Rider & Co., London. He adopted my first four books, when I was still struggling with the English language and publishing etiquette. Unfortunately, I have lost contact with him. Wherever you are, Daniel, I am greatly in your debt.
In my research I have particularly benefited from the fine scholarly works of J. W. Hauer and Mircea Eliade, two giants of Yoga research who are unfortunately no longer among us. The vast scholarship of the late Dr. Râm Shankar Bhattacharya of Varanasi, India, has also been an inspiration. More than any other researcher known to me, he was sensitive to the fact that scholars engaged in Yoga research need to be informed by Yoga practice. His always prompt and informed advice has been invaluable.
Another person whose intellectual labors have inspired me for the past two decades is my friend Jeanine Miller. In her own field of Vedic studies, she also seeks to combine scholarship with spiritual sensitivity. I have drawn on her pioneering works for my treatment of Yoga in ancient Vedic times. In this connection, I would also like to acknowledge the numerous favors and the illuminating research of my friends David Frawley and Subhash Kak, both of whom have done much to rectify our picture of ancient India. I had the pleasure of coauthoring with them In Search of the Cradle of Civilization. The first edition of The Yoga Tradition owed much to the enthusiasm and fine editing of Dan Joy. At that time I also received much-appreciated practical help from my friends Claudia Bourbeau and Stacey Lynn. My thanks go to Ty Koontz for the professional index.
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