Infinite Variety

by Madhavi Menon

  Scholars are at pains to note that these two strains of yoga and kama coexisted with one another rather than either one trying to stamp out the other. Nonetheless, what remains true is that Patanjali yoga in India seems to have developed as the opposite of kama rather than as an expression of it. Yoga focuses on freeing the mind and stilling it, while kama studies the means by which to excite the body and heighten its pleasures. Many centuries after Patanjali, Gandhi becomes the embodiment of these two conflicting strains. As Sudhir Kakar points out in Intimate Relations, Gandhi’s ‘excessive’ interest in sex as a young householder gave way to an obsession with celibacy. Much of this obsessiveness, says Kakar, grew out of intense conversations between the young Gandhi and his jeweller friend Raichandra: ‘...it is evident that a central concern of their earnest exchanges was the relationship of sexuality to “salvation”, the transformation of sexual potency into psychic and spiritual power.’ In other words, how to use yoga to overcome kama.

  While the Rig Veda accords pride of place to kama as the very first thing that came upon the creator, the later Upanishads (around 800 BCE) suggest that kama might not be the only or primary path available to its followers. In addition, they outline the path of the renunciate, the ascetic who gives up on bodily pleasure in order to tame the mind. This latter tradition was embraced by the Buddha as he tried to still the upheavals of an uncertain world by anchoring the mind away from the distractions of the body. The downgrading of the body for him took several forms, all of which revolved around the renunciation of desire—starvation, celibacy and meditation. The Buddha lived sometime between the 6th and 4th centuries BCE, and the first mention of the word ‘yogi’ to mean ‘ascetic’ dates from between the 2nd and 4th centuries BCE. But the Yoga Sutra’s emphasis on meditation (rather than asanas) does not focus on the deprivation model that formed the core of Buddhist meditation. For Patanjali, yoga is not about self-mortification, but rather, about reflexive self-restraint. But even as the Yoga Sutra does not prescribe deprivation, it is far removed from the sensuous indulgence of the Kamasutra’s postures.

  This debate between yoga and kama, stillness and excitation, is also a debate within the histories of yoga. If Patanjali yoga sought to create ascetics who control the body and mind, then the tantric traditions that arose around the 2nd century CE (and flourished towards the end of the millennium) problematize that understanding of yoga. For the tantrics, that which binds you—desire—is also what will set you free. Tantric scriptures did not outlaw alcohol or meat from their recommended yogic diets. Neither did they outlaw sex. In fact, for many tantrics, the inner energy that yoga sought to distil was to be found in bodily and sexual fluids that are otherwise considered taboo. According to David Gordon White, ritualized orgies were organized—often in graveyards—between tantric yogis and female ‘messengers’ of the goddess who were termed yoginis.

  With its close alliance to both gastronomic and sexual pleasures of the flesh, tantra yoga defied most of the ascetic practices of Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. What tantra also shows is the faultline along which yoga has historically been constructed. Hatha yoga, the postural yoga that developed out of tantra between the 11th and 15th centuries, considered the body as a hydraulic system that needed to be worked upon in order to channel sexual fluids. Unlike Patanjali’s yoga, which was incredibly cerebral, hatha yoga both arouses the body and allows for mastery of that arousal; it highlights the centrality of a desire that must be controlled. It draws the line between the sensualist who accumulates karma by allowing his seed to spill, and the ascetic who moves his seed upwards and therefore gets out of (obtains moksha from) the cycle of karmic accumulation.

  Little wonder, then, that the majority of tantra yoga practitioners are Shaivite, or followers of Shiva, the God of Destruction. Being a tantra yogi is to harness the sensual power of Shiva and turn it into millennia of yogic meditation. This is why many tantrics continue to this day to wander around naked with ash smeared over their bodies, and hair grown out in matted locks in imitation of what Shiva is assumed to look like.

  ‘Sadhu with Long Hair’ (ref. CSWC33/OS16/28). Courtesy of the Centre for the Study of World Christianity at the University of Edinburgh

  For tantrics like the 10th-century CE Kashmiri yogi Abhinavagupta, the point of yoga was to unite the male and female principles—Shiva and Shakti—within one’s self. This union is pointedly non-sexual even as it is deeply physical. The figure of Shiva embodies this paradox—the erotic intensity of his unions with his first wife Sati and then with the reincarnated Parvati is the stuff of legend. But an equal part of the legend is his ascetic lifestyle and secluded abode on top of Mount Kailash. Shiva is both sexual being and renouncer of sexuality. He is a renunciate who understands the intensity of sex. And a sexual being who embraces the value of renunciation.

  When Sati immolates herself to protest her father’s refusal to accept the rough and rude Shiva, the god goes mad. Ramesh Menon’s retelling of the Siva Purana describes Shiva’s state of mind and body after Sati’s death:

  Initially, my distraught mind would not be still and her face haunted my every thought as a peerless fury. I saw her in life and death. I saw not merely her face; I saw her body with its velvet folds, each a vale of Brahman to me. I saw her breasts, nightblack nipples taut; I heard her whispered and screamed ecstasies. Ah, why was I punished so cruelly? Then, I took firm hold of myself. I shut her out from my mind as irrevocably as she had shut herself from my life by dying. Slowly, peace came back to me, absorption... In time, my dhyana was immaculate again and I knew nothing save eternity then... I lost myself, as I never had before there was Sati. Fleetingly, I thought this was why she came into my life, to make my tapasya purer when she left.

  In Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra, the main goal of yoga is samadhi, or absolute absorption in the moment. Shiva’s reaction to Sati’s death reveals the conditions of turbulence in which yoga can intervene to restore the stillness of the mind. That this turbulence is inevitably sexual is another of hatha yoga’s insights. In Ramesh Menon’s fictionalized narrative, Shiva talks about the absorption that is required in order to still the self and acquire a bliss comparable to the bliss he enjoyed with Sati. For Shiva in the Puranas, the bliss of samadhi is as intense as erotic bliss—the latter gets channelled into the former once Sati leaves the scene.

  The non-Shaivite branch of yoga—Vedanta—has sought to undertake a systematic ‘purification’ of yoga to leach it of any tantric influence. Its most eloquent spokesperson was Swami Vivekanada who, in the 19th century, led the movement both to purify yoga and make it more ‘scientific’. He was strict about discarding all pleasures and excesses of the flesh: his version of yoga was aspirationally pure. For Vivekananda, tantra was the evil to be shunned because it would routinely run afoul of the dominant social mores—it moved with ease across caste, class, religion, and even gender; its flirtation with desire seemed to him to be the opposite of both purity and modern science. But despite his adherence to Patanjali—the 1896 Raja Yoga is Vivekananda’s influential reinterpretation of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra—the Swami also incorporates asanas from the tantra tradition into his yoga. This is because his ‘scientific’ outlook made him interested in building the body, and seated meditation alone was not conducive to building a six-pack. But equally, Vivekananda was also interested in the question of desire, though he completely disavowed the sexual realm. It was Vivekananda who popularized the notion of the kundalini, or the coiled feminine energy at the base of the spine that is to be tapped by yogic practice and sent upwards into the brain. The kundalini was understood to be the seat of the body’s sexual energy. Symbolized by a triangle with a serpent coiled up in it, the purpose of yoga for Vivekananda was to harness the power of this sexual energy.

  Thus, even as the Vedanta school tried to leach yoga of all its tantric trappings, it nonetheless held on to the relation between yoga and desire. Patanjali’s text, in comparison, makes no mention at all of the kundalini. For Patanjali,
yoga is vai-raga or lack of desire, but for the tantrics, yoga is raga, or desire. Tantra yoga takes sexual desire seriously, but here too, the understanding of desire involves an absolute absorption in the moment—to be in the moment without shame or the accumulation of karma. For both the tantrics and the Vedanta-adherents, the non-accumulation of karma depends on the non-spillage of semen. The ‘vital fluids’ have to be maintained within the body and sent upwards into the brain rather than being ‘wasted’. This rechannelling of desire seems to be the fundamental principle of yoga.

  Consider what a present-day yoga guru and holy man, Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev, has to say about the relation between tantra and sexual desire:

  The Guru-shishya relationship is to deliver the shishya to a higher dimension of consciousness, not trap one into the compulsive nature of sexuality. Above all, this sacred relationship is definitely orgasmic, but not sexual. I am talking about upgrading your technology. You don’t have to huff and puff to get into an orgasmic state. If you sit with your eyes closed, you can drip with orgasms in every cell of your body. Those who have failed to achieve an orgasmic state of existence will associate an ecstatic state with sexuality because that’s probably the highest level of experience they have known.

  One of the main goals of yoga is to overcome desire and tame it. But yoga does this, especially in the tantric tradition, by exciting desire, by engaging the body if only to go beyond it. What is interesting from a historical perspective is that this desire seems to get rid of the couple form—it is desire that feeds only (on) itself. The bliss created by yoga is orgasmic, but without a sexual orgasm. It is post-coital without the coitus.

  Such an experience can perhaps best be described by reference to the Pali word sukha. The Yoga Sutra follows the Buddha’s lead in relation to the concept of sukha (joy, bliss, happiness) and sthira (stillness, stability, peace), both of which are described as characteristics of the yoga asanas. In the Buddhist canon, sukha refers to a state of lasting rather than transient bliss, to be gained by meditation and centred in the stabilized self. This is the sukha that is divorced from worldly pleasures and absorbed in meditation. For Patanjali, sukha is to be achieved by yogic meditation and attention to breathing. But in the present-day, sukha (or sukoon) also refers explicitly to sexual pleasure. In North India, one of the blessings given to newly-married women is sada sukhi raho—be happy at all times—where ‘sukh’ is understood to mean the state of marital/sexual bliss. This is also the meaning of ‘sukh’ in the popular phrase ‘shadi-shuda jeevan ke sukh bhogna’ (reaping or consummating the pleasures of a married life). Equally, in slang terms, one speaks of ‘nain sukh prapti’, which means achieving pleasure with/for the eyes. This is usually the ironic term used to describe voyeuristic pleasures that cannot be translated into genital ones. Sukha is today the term popularly associated with material sexual desire even as yoga has tried for centuries to remove it from the sphere of the sexual.

  Indeed, it is this doubleness of the relation between yoga and bliss—is it sexual or is it not?—that has made yogis sexually rampant beings in the popular imagination. The famous American songwriter Johnny Mercer hilariously expresses this vexed relation between desire and yoga in his lyrics for a song in the 1941 film You’re the One:

  The Yogi Who Lost His Willpower

  There was a yogi who lost his willpower

  He met a dancing girl and fell in love.

  He couldn’t concentrate or lie on broken glass

  He could only sit and wait for her to pass.

  Unhappy yogi, he tried forgetting, but she was all that he was conscious of.

  At night he stretched out on his bed of nails

  He could only dream about her seven veils

  His face grew flushed and florid every time he heard her name

  And the ruby gleaming in her forehead set his oriental soul aflame.

  We remember, of course, the split tendencies in Hindu philosophies out of which both yoga and kama are born. Is ‘Hinduism’ to be defined by the yogic practice of material detachment, or by the kamic practice of sensual attachment; by sukha or sukha? This question is rarely one of stark binaries in the history of India. For example, even Vatsyayana, who wrote the Kamasutra, was a practicing ascetic (and in all probability a yogic one) as he wrote about the 64 sexual positions. Sudhir Kakar even titles his fictional biography of Vatsyayana The Ascetic of Desire.

  Yoga depends for its existence, then, on mixing with kama. Indeed, this kind of impurity seems to be the very ether in which yoga thrives. Even though it is marketed now to the world as an ‘ancient Hindu’ tradition, yoga, like almost everything in India, is the product of a syncretic history. The first mention of ‘yoga’ is in the 15th-century BCE Rig Veda, where the word denotes neither meditation nor austerities but rather a chariot in which the yoke holds together the wheels and the horses. ‘Yoga’ is etymologically linked to the English word ‘yoke’. Several hundred years later, in the Mahabharata (circa 4th century BCE), this yoking of horse and chariot starts to be understood metaphorically as the coming together of the body, senses and the mind in a unified whole. Later sections of the Mahabharata (200-400 CE) develop this idea of yoking from materials available in the 3rd-century BCE Katha-Upanishad, which in turn picks up on the breathing meditations outlined in Buddhist and Jain sources to gain control over body and mind. Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra codifies these meditations with the goal of achieving samadhi, or absolute stillness of body and mind, oblivious to all that is external to the self.

  The Sufis then picked up on this yogic desire for meditative control over one’s baser instincts, and embraced it eagerly. So much so that the Shattari tariqa (or Order), which was the Sufi tariqa in India most closely associated with yoga, adopted not only yogic mechanisms with which to control breath, but also took on board vegetarianism and abstinence from liquor. Dara Shikoh, the Sufi brother of Aurangzeb, belonged to the Shattaris; his absorption in the sufic-yogic world of meditative practice cost him the crown of Mughal India as the ambitious younger brother stole a march upon the ascetic older brother.

  In fact, the Muslim interaction with yoga in India was so profound that it has shaped what we understand by ‘yoga’ today. The dissemination of the Yoga Sutra in India was helped greatly by al-Biruni’s Arabic translation in the 11th century, which rekindled interest in Patanjali. But what is remarkable is that the yoga in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra (both the Sanskrit version and al-Biruni’s Arabic translation) does not quite resemble the yoga that we now practice. One fundamental difference is the attention paid to asanas or postures. Patanjali mentions asanas in only 1 out of 196 sutras. For him, yoga is more about the practice of mindful meditation and less about bodily contortion. It is only texts like the Hathapradipika (Light on Hatha) from the 15th century that draw on Sanskrit texts on asanas from the 11th and 13th centuries to start outlining multiple bodily postures. One of these earlier texts proclaims that there are 84 lakh asanas (8,400,000), even though it describes only two.

  The 17th-century Hatharatnavali (String of Jewels of Hatha) and the nearly contemporaneous Yogachintamani (Wish-Fulfilling Gem of Yoga) started to describe asanas in greater numbers—84 are named in the former book and 35 are described in the latter. But the embodied asanas that we now associate with the practice of yoga derive from a Persian text—the Bahr-al-hayat (Ocean of Life)—that dates from the 16th century. This Persian text is the translation of an Arabic source—the Hawd-al-hayat, or The Pool of Life. In turn, The Pool of Life claims to be a translation of a Sanskrit text by the name of Amritakunda or The Pool of Nectar. But to date research has not been able to locate any such text in the Sanskritic tradition. Scholars speculate that Bahr-al-hayat’s composer—the Sufi Shaykh Muhammad Ghawth Gwaliyari—might have consulted several living yogis because none of the asanas outlined in his text appears in any earlier written version. In his text, these asanas are described in great detail and matched by beautiful illustrations that were commissioned by Prince Salim, the future
Emperor Jahangir. The Pool of Life describes and depicts 21 yogis performing complicated asanas.

  The yoga that is traceable back to Patanjali, then, does not emphasize asanas. And the asanas we practice today derive from an illustrated Persian manuscript. Such is the complicated provenance of yoga in India.

  But when the British were faced with a culture in which desires and religions were hopelessly mixed up with one another, they decided that the practice and practitioners of such mixed-up desire needed to be demonized. First, they discredited yogis as criminal troublemakers, whom they finally managed to squash in the so-called Sannyasi and Fakir Rebellion in late-18th-century Bengal. (Hordes of yogis had, throughout the course of the 18th century, managed to convert pilgrimage routes into trade routes, directly competing with the British for wealth and influence.) And then they decided that ‘Hinduism’ was irrevocably sensual, and therefore dangerous. In Reading the Kamasutra: The Mare’s Trap and Other Essays on Vatsyayana’s Masterpiece, Wendy Doniger cites an English ‘Supreme Court ruling from 1862 that states that “Krishna...the love hero, the husband of 16,000 princesses...tinges the whole system (of Hinduism) with the strain of carnal sensualism, of strange, transcendental lewdness.”’ India is both transcendental (or yogic) and lewd (or carnal). For the British, the sukha of yoga was inseparable from the sukha of sexual desire. It was all just ‘strange’.