The Science of Yoga: The Risks and the Rewards by William J Broad Read Free Book Online

postural yoga. The principles were laid out in the Hatha Yoga Pradipika . The holy book of the fifteenth century represents the discipline’s earliest extant text.
    The book lavished attention on body parts that have nothing in common with the modern focus, including the penis, vagina, scrotum, and anus. Over and over, it recommended sitting postures meant to exert pressure on the perineum—the area between the anus and genitals that is sensitive to erotic stimulation. “Press the perineum with the heel of the foot,” the text advised. “It opens the doors of liberation.”
    Today, the term of art for a yoga posture is asana . But the word in Sanskrit actually means “seat”—harkening back more than a millennium to the days when postural yoga referred to nothing more complicated than sitting in a relaxed position for meditation. The Hatha Yoga Pradipika put bold new emphasis on sitting postures and stimulating acts. It said nothing of standing poses or the kinds of fluid movements so popular in contemporary yoga classes.
    The book also told how to extend the duration of lovemaking—and focused its advice on males, reflecting yoga’s ancient bias. It called for “a female partner” but conceded that a willing consort was something “not everyone can obtain.”
    One instruction claimed that a particular technique would produce such steely control in sexual relations that the yogi would release no semen even if “embraced by a passionate woman.” The goal was to slowly raise the levels of excitement, the couple approaching but never quite reaching orgasm, their ecstasy going on and on, the two becoming one, transcending all opposites.
    If such depictions of Hatha yoga strike the modern reader as bizarre, it is because contemporary books and teachers seldom refer to the origins of the practice. But in truth, Hatha is a branch of Tantra . It was developed as a way to speed the Tantric agenda, to make enlightenment happen by the precise application of willpower and the redirection of libidinal energy rather thanby some nebulous mix of piety and contemplation. The Sanskrit root of Hatha is hath —“to treat with violence,” as in binding someone to a post, according to the Monier-Williams Sanskrit dictionary, by an Oxford professor. So, too, Hatha means violence or force. The discipline arose in a carefully structured campaign of vigorous activity meant to promote the quick attainment of enlightenment through ecstasy.
    So it is that a number of scholars translate Hatha yoga as “violent union.” Other specialists render it as “union from violence or force” to put the emphasis on the illumination rather than its means of attainment. In either case, such definitions seldom—if ever—show up in the popular literature. The New Age approach is to embrace the poetry of Sanskrit and divide Hatha into ha and tha, for sun and moon. That interpretation casts the word itself as an esoteric uniting of opposites and typically omits any reference to force or violence.
    A final way that old yoga differed from our own was its emphasis on the miraculous. For ages, the sacred literature of India had portrayed yogis as able to fly, levitate, stop their hearts, suspend their breathing, vanish, walk through walls, project themselves into other bodies, touch the moon, survive live burial, make themselves invisible, die at will, walk on water, and—like Jesus of Nazareth—bring the dead back to life. They were hailed as miracle workers. Their unusual abilities had a name— siddhis . The Sanskrit word means success or perfection and is a yogic term of art for the otherworldly powers. Patanjali, the Indian sage who laid out the fundamentals of mystic yoga some sixteen centuries ago, devoted an entire chapter of his aphorisms to the otherworldly feats, including such talents as reading minds and predicting the future.
    Astonishing claims filled the pages of Hatha Yoga Pradipika. It said practitioners could neutralize poisons,