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

destroy all diseases, annihilate old age, obviate evil, and achieve immortality—not to mention doing away with constipation, wrinkles, and gray hair.
    Yogi warriors made miraculous claims to enhance their battlefield image, according to William Pinch, a scholar at Wesleyan University. Yoga, he said, conferred a reputation of invincible power. “There was a clear tactical advantage of believing, and having your enemy believe, that you were immortal.”
    The basic accomplishment that bestowed the gift of the miraculous on the lowly practitionerwas the attainment of samadhi—the state of transcendent bliss in which the yogi became one with the universe. The adept did so after learning how to move all the currents of prana, the body’s energy, up the spine into the head. At that point, according to Hatha Yoga Pradipika , the yogi became “as if dead.”
    Some yogis entered the euphoric state for the purposes of spiritual enlightenment. Others—like the Punjab yogi, true to the diversity of the Tantric brotherhood—did so for entertainment and profit.
    The dramatic success of the live burial astonished many people—and not just at the court of Ranjit Singh. Books describing the feat were published in Vienna, London, and New York. The educated world marveled at the accomplishment and wondered at its explanation. Claude M. Wade, the British liaison to the maharajah’s court and an eyewitness to the yogi’s exhumation, cautioned his peers that it would be “presumptuous to deny to the Hindoos the possible discovery or attainment of an art which has hitherto escaped the researches of European science.”
    At the time of the burial, N. C. Paul was entering medical school in Calcutta (today known as Kolkata) and, as a new scientist, paid close attention. After all, the spectcenter1e appeared to defy the laws of nature. His curiosity led him to write a book— A Treatise on the Yoga Philosophy.
    It featured the live burial and, as it turned out, marked the birth of a new science.
    Who was Paul? No scholar or book gave him more than a passing reference. I knew little until I went to Calcutta, a city crackling with energy despite the monsoon heat.
    Blaring horns and bad traffic greeted my cab ride to his medical school—a place I expected to bear the tidy imprint of its British founders. Instead, it was bedlam. Stray dogs, sick people, and students roamed a warren of broken buildings and fallen trees. Walls bore faded posters. I grew apprehensive as I neared the library, increasingly uneasy but still eager to learn about the world’s first scientist who sought to free yoga from its mythic past.
    I climbed a circular stairway past loose wires, cobwebs, and pieces of shattered concrete. The library had a high ceiling and dark wood that bespoke past elegance. But decay had set in. Cabinets with glass doors held row upon rowof old books—the dust inside so thick that it obscured the titles. With a start, I realized that the cases had become mausoleums. Overhead, gauzy spider webs hung down like props in a horror movie. The smiling librarian in her colorful sari seemed slightly embarrassed—but not too much. It turned out that she, like everyone else, knew nothing of Paul and little of the school’s early days. The Bengal Medical College had been founded in 1835 as the first school of European medicine in Asia, its red brick and white trim meant to symbolize a new era.
    In a panic, I sped across town to the National Library, a colonial relic on a lush campus. For days I pored through old books and reports. Nothing. Not a trace. Some records were so fragile that they fell apart in my hands. Worms had eaten their way through many books, leaving trails of missing letters and words. I made little piles of debris at my desk. Book after book. Nothing.
    Finally, in the last volume, there it was—a life sketch of Paul. He was included in a list of graduates from the Bengal school who had gone into the colonial medical service. Dates.