The Yoga Tradition

by Georg Feuerstein

  and meditation the ashes smeared on their body.

  May the thought of death be their patched garment,

  chastity their way,

  and faith in God their walking staff.

  May universal brotherhood be their order’s highest goal,

  and may they understand that by controlling the mind

  they can subdue the world.

  Although the sacred canon favors the lifestyle of the householder rather than the ascetic, Sikhism also has had its ascetical orders, notably the Udâsîs, Nirmala-Sâdhus, and Akalîs.

  The lovers of God must do everything possible to actualize the ideal of unity in all their thoughts, words, and actions. In Sikhism this is exactly what bhakti stands for. Yet spiritual discipline is not a sufficient precondition for sainthood. There also must be God’s grace (nâdar or prasâd, Sanskrit: prasâda) pouring into the disciple’s heart. Then he or she can truly grow in the stages of the path. There are five such stages or “realms” (khând):

  Dharam-khând (Sanskrit: dharma-khânda, “realm of virtue”): Here the disciple lives in accordance with the law of cause and effect, which is seen to be valid not only in the material world but also in the moral dimension of life.

  Gyân-khând (Sanskrit: jnâna-khânda, “realm of knowledge”): Through increasing insight into the nature of existence and awareness of the vastness of the cosmos, the disciple’s grip on the ego is loosened and a more and more benign life is made possible.

  Saram-khând (Sanskrit: shrarm-khânda, “realm of effort”): In this stage, the disciple becomes an adept radiant with spiritual illumination.

  Karam-khând (Sanskrit: karma-khânda, “realm of divine action,” that is, “grace”): This is the stage of the great masters who are united with God and who dwell in diverse realms blazing with spiritual energy.

  Sac-khând (Sanskrit: satya-khânda, “realm of truth”): More than a stage on the path, this is the ultimate abode of the Divine itself, which is absolute Truth.

  Through deep meditation upon the Divine, the disciple can hear the “unstruck sound” (anâhad shabad, Sanskrit: anâhata-shabda), which liquidates the ego and makes a gurmukh (“guru-facing”) adept out of the man-mukh (“self-facing”) or self-cherishing individual. Obviously, for Nânak this experience represents a very advanced stage of yogic practice, and thus we must not confuse this concept with the parallel notion in Hatha- Yoga, where it represents a lower state of ecstasy.

  The various means of Sikh Yoga are all designed to overcome separation (Sanskrit: viyoga) and to cultivate union (Sanskrit: samyoga). All disciplines aim at surpassing the ego, which creates otherness where there is only oneness. The countless egos are like transparent bubbles arising from the same ocean and reflecting the same sunlight. That is to say, we are separated from others only by a thin skin, which is of no ultimate consequence and can easily be removed by realizing the divine Being. This realization tears down all barriers between people and does away with conflict. The person in whom divine unity, or the divine name, is alive transcends good and evil and becomes a potent transformative spiritual force.

  Sikhism subscribes to the ideal of embodied liberation (Sanskrit: jîvan-mukti), to which supreme state Nânak also applied the term sahaj (Sanskrit: sahaja, “spontaneity” or “naturalness”). This state, which is empty of all forms, is not different from God.

  III. YOGA IN CONTEMPORARY SIKHISM

  Although Guru Nânak, as we have seen, incorporated certain key yogic practices into his tradition, which can be viewed as a form of Bhakti-Yoga, most Eastern Sikhs do not consider Yoga as part of their faith. This stands in stark contrast to the numerous Western orders of Sikhs established in 1969 by Harbhajan Singh Khalsa—better known as Yogi Bhajan (1929-2004).

  After emigrating from India in 1968, Yogi Bhajan created the Healthy,

  Happy and Holy Organization (3HO) in Los Angeles. Three years later, he took eighty-four American students to Amritsar for a pilgrimage to the Golden Temple. His purpose was to expose the students especially to the spiritual heritage of Guru Râm Dâs and to wash away their sins in the pond built by the fourth Guru. Yogi Bhajan had mopped the marble floors of the temple for four-and-a-half years and in the process had purified his own mind.

  Yogi Bhajan does not consider himself a guru, which would be heretical in the Sikh tradition, although in many ways his role as guide corresponds to what in Hinduism would be considered that of a guru. He attributes his own mission in the West to Guru Râm Dâs’s blessing and guidance, and points to him as particularly worthy of emulation and veneration.

  Yogi Bhajan laid the foundations for the Sikh Dharma in the Western hemisphere and not only brought about a revival of Sikhism but also added a new dimension to it, namely that of Yoga practice. In particular, he teaches “white” Kundalînî-Yoga entailing postures, vigorous breathing exercises, and meditation (mostly combined with chanting). He understands Kundalînî-Yoga as “the yoga of awareness,” by means of which the “total potential of the person becomes known to the person.”2

  For Yogi Bhajan, the kundalinî is a person’s creative potential. He derives the word from kundala (“ring”), explaining it as a “lock of the beloved’s hair.”3 This potent force must be “uncoiled” through the steady practice of japa. By chanting t he divine name, a “special heat” is created that completely bums up the practitioner’s karma. That heat is not merely figurative but can manifest quite dramatically in the yogin’s body. Yogi Bhajan leaves it open which divine name a person should chant, though he recommends sat nam, pronounced sa ta na ma, which was first given by Guru Nânak and which he explained as “Truth manifested.” The individual syllables have the following meaning: sa is totality; ta is life, na is death; and ma is resurrection. “The fifth sound,” explains Yogi Bhajan, “is the ah sound which is common to these four. It is the creative sound of the universe.” The chanting is to be done as follows:

  As you chant, the thumbs are touched to each fingertip in rhythm with the mantra in order to channelize [sic] the energy through the nerve endings in the finger which are connected to the brain centers relating to intuition, patience, vitality, and communication. On the sound of Sa touch the thumb to the first finger, with Ta to the second finger, Na to the third, and Ma to the fourth.

  Chant the mantra in three ways: out loud, in the voice of the human being; whispering, in the voice of the lover; and in the silence of your own consciousness, the voice of God. From the depth of your silent meditation, come back to the whisper and then to the full voice. Throughout the meditation, each syllable of the mantra should be projected mentally from the back top of the head, down, and then straight out the third eye point, which is located between the eye-brows at the root of the nose.

  Sit in a comfortable posture with your legs crossed. Keep the spine straight. Chant the mantra out loud for five minutes; whisper for five minutes; and then silently meditate, internally repeating the syllables for ten minutes. Again chant in a whisper for five minutes and then five minutes out loud. Now, inhale and stretch the arms up. Hold the position and exhale. Inhale again, exhale again. Relax. The total time will be thirty-one minutes … If you spend two hours per day in meditation, God will meditate on you the rest of the day.4

  Nânak firmly believed that as long as one surrenders to God, the spiritual process will unfold naturally in one’s life. He rejected the fast track promised by certain schools of thought and favored the spontaneous (sahaj, Sanskrit: sahaja) approach to practice. Everyone, he affirmed, grows according to his or her innate capacity, and forced asceticism or severe self-discipline are ill advised. In all matters, however, he advocated selfinitiative. The teacher’s role is simply to make the seeker aware that the sought-for treasure lies within.

  “Practice (prayoga) is the instrument [of liberation], O Goddess. Bookish scholarship is not [such] an instrument. Theory (shâstra) is everywhere readily available, but practice is very difficult to accomplish.”

  —Vinâ-Shikha-Tantra (137)


  I. BODILY PLEASURE AND SPIRITUAL BLISS—THE ADVENT OF TANTRA

  The quest for immortality and freedom is fundamental to human civilization. We see it expressed as much in the pyramids of Egypt and in the cathedrals of medieval Europe as in the modern medical search for the fountain of youth and in the race to the stars, as well as in the aspiration to create utopia on Earth. But nowhere has that quest become so obvious a shared cultural motive as in India. Already the Vedic seers were preoccupied with discovering the immortal domain that is the homeland of the Gods, beyond all grief, and even beyond the delightful realms of the ancestral spirits. Later, the Upanishadic sages made the revolutionary discovery that immortality is not part of the topography of the hereafter—even the deities must die—but is an essential characteristic of the ultimate Reality, or Ground of all existence. Consequently, they taught that we only need to realize our inmost nature in order to enjoy the Self, or Identity, of all beings—here and now.

  The sages believed that the immortal Self (âtman) could never be known, because it is not an object, but that it could be realized through direct identification. Such realization consists in a radical shift of our identity- consciousness, of who we experience ourselves to be. Whereas the ordinary mortal thinks of himself or herself as a specific, limited body-mind, the Self-realized being no longer identifies himself or herself as a skin-bound individual but as the timeless quintessence of all beings and things.

  The way to that sublime realization, the ancient sages believed, lies in the difficult path of renunciation and asceticism. They maintained that the splendor of the transcendental Reality reveals itself only to those who turn their attention away from the affairs of the world and instead, by exercising conscientious control over body and mind, focus their attention like a laser beam upon the ultimate concern of Self-realization. In the last analysis, in order to become the Absolute (brahman), one must transcend the human condition and human conditioning. One must desist from investing one’s energies in the usual preoccupations through which people reinforce the illusion of being separate entities.

  While the Upanishadic ideal of living liberation (jîvan-mukti), of enjoying the bliss of the Self while still in the human body, was an important step in the evolution of India’s spirituality, it did not entirely overcome the habit of dualistic thinking. This idea raised the following question: If there is only the one Self, why should there be such a struggle involved in realizing it? In other words, why do we have to think of the world, and thus the body-mind, as an enemy that has to be overcome? To put it still more concretely: Why do we have to abandon pleasure in order to realize bliss?

  The New Approach of Tantra

  A new answer and a new style of spirituality were proposed by the masters of Tantra, or Tantrism, who made their appearance in the opening centuries of the first millennium C.E. Their teachings are embodied in the Tantras, which are works similar to the Shaiva gamas and the Vaishnava Samhitâs, but dedicated to the feminine psychocosmic principle, or Shakti.1 It is sometimes difficult to distinguish between an gama and a Tantra work, because the boundaries between Shaivism and Shaktism are rather fluid.

  Goddess worship, which is central to many Tantric schools, existed already in ancient Vedic times. The Tantric masters and practitioners merely drew on the existing sacred lore and ritual practices revolving around the Goddess, as current especially in the rural communities of India. Some scholars have therefore assigned to Tantra an age equaling, if not surpassing, that of the Vedas. As a literary phenomenon, however, Tantra does not appear to have emerged much before the middle of the first millennium C.E.

  It is widely believed that the Buddhist Tantras came first and were closely followed by their Hindu counterparts, though some scholars vehemently contest this. In any case, the Buddhist Manjushrî-Mûla-Kalpa (“Fundamental Rules of Manjushrî”) and the Guhya- Samâja-Tantra (“Tantra of Secret Communion”) were probably compiled in the period between 300 and 500 C.E. In the opening chapter of the Mahâcîna-câra- Krama (“Process and Conduct of Mahâcîna”),2 the Goddess advises the sage Vashishtha to undertake a pilgrimage to Mahâcîna (Tibet, Mongolia, or even China) where he could study with Janârdana in the form of the Buddha.

  The earliest Hindu Tantras appear to have been lost, and we know of them only from references in later works. Significantly, the seventh-century South Indian saint Tirumûlar refers to a group of twenty-eight Tantras. The Vînâ-Shikhâ-Tantra (9), which is the only extant left-hand Tantra text dating from around 1200 C.E., mentions the classic set of sixty-four. This suggests that there was considerable literary activity by Tantric masters in the preceding centuries, especially as we know that there were many more Tantras even then. One of the oldest extant Tantras is the Sarva-Jnâna- Uttara-Tantra (written Sarvajnânottaratantra), which probably was composed in the ninth century C.E. This work understands itself as containing the essence of many earlier Tantric scriptures.

  The original Tantras are typically presented in dialogue form and are attributed to the Divine rather than to a particular human author. Their Sanskrit is frequently poor and is grammatically and metrically defective. Later works, especially the summaries, tend to be attributed to human authors and generally are of better grammatical and stylistic quality.

  Since Tantrism—whether Buddhist or Hindu— represents a vast, complex, and ill-researched field of study, I am here confining myself to the Hindu Tantras, which are more immediately relevant to the Yoga tradition arising out of the Vedic heritage.3 It should be noted, however, that the Buddhist Tantras—as preserved in Tibetan and partly in Sanskrit—are also very important sources for understanding certain yogic processes, especially meditative visualization (dhyâna, bhâvanâ) and other higher stages of spiritual practice, as well as the rituals accompanying them.

  As indicated above, the Hindu tradition indicates there are sixty-four Tantras, but the actual number of these works is much higher. Only a few of the most important texts of this genre of Hindu literature have been translated into European languages. Noteworthy are the Kula-Arnava-, the Mahânirvâna-, and the Tantra-Tattva-Tantra. The scope of topics discussed in the Tantras is considerable. They deal with the creation and history of the world; the names and functions of a great variety of male and female deities and other higher beings; the types of ritual worship (especially of Goddesses); magic, sorcery, and divination; esoteric “physiology” (the mapping of the subtle or psychic body); the awakening of the mysterious serpent power (kundalinî-shakti); techniques of bodily and mental purification; the nature of enlightenment; and not least, sacred sexuality.

  The revolutionary spirituality of Tantra is best captured in the definition of the term tantra as given in the old Buddhist Guhya-Samâja-Tantra, which explains that “tantra is continuity.” The word is derived from the root tan, meaning “to extend, stretch.” It is generally interpreted as “that by which knowledge/understanding is extended, spread out” (tanyate vistaryate jnânam anena).

  A second meaning of the word tantra is simply “book” or” text,” as in Panca-Tantra (“Five Tracts”), which is a famous Indian collection of fables. Thus a Tantra can be defined as a text that broadens understanding to the point where genuine wisdom arises. All Tantric adepts are agreed that liberation is possible only through the dawning of wisdom (vidyâ). Wisdom is liberating because it establishes the Tantric practitioner in the “continuity” of the finite and the infinite dimension, as noted above. The idea of continuity expresses the nature of Tantra well, because this pan-Indian tradition seeks in a variety of ways to overcome the dualism between the ultimate Reality (i.e., the Self) and the conditional reality (i.e., the ego) by insisting on the continuity between the process of the world and the process of liberation or enlightenment.

  The great Tantric formula, which is fundamental also to Mahâyâna Buddhism, is “samsâra equals nirvâna.” That is to say, the conditional or phenomenal world is coessential with the transcendental Being-Conscious- ness-Bliss. Therefore, enlig
htenment is not a matter of leaving the world, or of killing one’s natural impulses. Rather, it is a matter of envisioning the lower reality as contained in and coalescing with the higher reality, and of allowing the higher reality to transform the lower reality. Thus, the keynote of Tantra is integration—the integration of the self with the Self, of bodily existence with the spiritual Reality. Orientalist and art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy made this pertinent observation:

  The last achievement of all thought is a recognition of the identity of spirit and matter, subject and object; and this reunion is the marriage of Heaven and Hell, the reaching out of a contracted universe towards its freedom, in response to the love of Eternity for the productions of time. There is then no sacred or profane, spiritual or sensual, but everything that lives is pure and void. This very world of birth and death is also the great Abyss.4

  It is important to realize that the Tantric revolution was not the product of mere philosophical speculation. Though connected with an immense architecture of old and new concepts and doctrines, Tantrism is intensely practical. It is, above all, a practice of realization or what is called sâdhanâ. Thus Yoga is central to it. Historically, Tantra can be understood as a dialectical response to the often abstract approach of Advaita Vedânta, which was and still is the dominant philosophy of the Hindu elite. Tantra was a grassroots movement, and many, if not most, of its early protagonists hailed from the castes at the bottom of the social pyramid in India— fishermen, weavers, hunters, street vendors, washerwomen. They were responding to a widely felt need for a more practical orientation that would integrate the lofty metaphysical ideals of nondualism with down- to-earth procedures for living a sanctified life without necessarily abandoning one’s belief in the local deities and the age-old rituals for worshiping them.

  So the teachings of the Tantras are marked by an astonishing synthesis between theory and practice based on a vibrant eclecticism with a strong penchant for ritualism. The Tantric teachings were designed to serve the spiritual needs of the “dark age” (kali-yuga) that is thought to have commenced with the death of Lord Krishna after the great battle related in the Mahâbhârata epic. The psychotechnology described—or, more often than not, only hinted at—in the Tantras was invented for those who are barely able to channel their aspirations to the Divine but are easily distracted by their conventional ideas and expectations.