Yoga & Yogis - fascinating article by James Mallinson →
YOGA & YOGIS
James Mallinson
This essay is a revised version of a lecture I gave at Columbia University, New York, in September 2011, in Sheldon Pollock’s Mellon Sanskrit series. As you might expect from the title of that series I am a Sanskritist. My doctoral thesis was a critical edition of a Sanskrit text on yoga called the Khecarīvidyā, for which my supervisor was Professor Alexis Sanderson, the world’s foremost scholar of tantric Śaivism.
I am also something of an amateur ethnographer. I even did an MA in ethnography, with a dissertation on asceticism in India, but I was deterred from continuing down the path of formal ethnography by what Sheldon Pollock has called “the hypertrophy of theory” which afflicts the humanities, so for my doctoral thesis I returned to philology, seeking to make sense of Indian asceticism through texts.
I did continue my ethnographic efforts, however, albeit on the side. The Khecarīvidyā is about khecarīmudrā, a yogic practice in which the tongue is loosened and lengthened so that it can be turned back and upwards into the cavity above the palate, in order to access the amŗta, the nectar of immortality, dripping from the top of the skull. In order to shed light on the text, I sought out traditional yogis in India who practise khecarīmudrā - but I made sure I didn’t do so much ethnography that I had to justify my methods.
I met my first such yogi in Kullu, at the Dussehra Mela of 1995. It was the final night, the full moon of Karttik, also known as Sharat Purnima, the autumn full moon. I was staying in the Rāmānandī camp and asked my guru if he knew of any practitioners of khecarīmudrā at the festival.
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