My name's Jim Malinson. I'm a scholar of Sanskrit and yoga's history. And today I'm
going to tell you a little bit about how the practice of Yoga fits into the context
of Tantra how the two histories are kind of intertwined and they diverge and come together.
Helping us out here today we've got Ruth Westoby and Zeena Kalisperidis who are both expert yoga
practitioners. What they're doing is going to be to show how the postures I'm talking about
can be manifested. I'm just coming to the end of a five-year project on the the history of physical
yoga practice based at SOAS here in London. So we've made a lot of discoveries and a lot of
it concerns the relationship between physical yoga practice and Tantra. Yoga has come a long way from
how we understand it in its earliest sources that we have from India. The yoga that you see
practiced or you may practice yourself down the gym has evolved considerably from that
time. In fact it's evolved a lot just over the last 100, 150 years. Through looking at
art historical materials and manuscripts and reports from outsiders coming into India we can
kind of piece together a picture of how yoga's evolved over the last two and a half thousand
years. And a really important part of that story is how Tantra affected yoga. Tantra is not as old
as yoga itself. Tantra first appears around the fourth or fifth century A.D and yoga had
already been around for a thousand years. But up to that point it had really been the preserve of
mainly male, and some some female practitioners, but male ascetics who had renounced normal life.
You know who lived outside of society and had dedicated themselves to achieving enlightenment.
Liberation freedom from the constant torment of being forever reborn into this world of
suffering. It's quite a negative world view but then Tantra comes along and not just with yoga
with its ritual practice more broadly understood it kind of puts a more positive spin on things.
Prior to about a thousand A.D all the postures we hear about in any text on yoga, Tantric or
otherwise are seated postures for meditation. The earliest yoga texts they associate yoga very
closely with meditation and breath control. Those are the techniques that you use to
to get enlightenment and in order to do those you need to sit in a solid steady
seated position. Tantric texts do elaborate further on these postures and you know you would
get lists of 30 or 40 in some texts. But again they're all still seated postures. They're not the
dynamic more gymnastic or contortionist postures that you might associate yoga with today.
The most famous of which being probably the the Lotus position Padmāsana in Sanskrit.
This image of the yogic body this wonderful image comes from a manuscript which is now in the
British Library. Probably the finest illustrated manuscript of yoga postures and yoga related
ideas in the world I think we might be able to say. And this image portrays the yogic body.
And what we find with Tantric images of the body is that the whole cosmos is in the body. Along the
central channel the elements of the of the cosmos are aligned in an increasing more subtle series.
So you start by meditating on the points at the bottom of that central channel and you slowly
move upwards. And that is the process in your mind of reabsorbing the cosmos. There's an early
corpus of Tantric text going from the fourth or fifth century up to about the 10th century
and then at that point we see these new methods of yoga appearing, which have more physical methods.
A key point of difference again that we see appearing at this moment a thousand years ago, so
Tantra is well established by then, we have this idea of the of the yogic body but the very first
text, a text called the Amritasiddhi which we've been working on at SOAS over the last five years.
It says very specifically that 'everything that you find in the cosmos is located within the body,
but there are special substances within the body that are not found elsewhere in the cosmos.'
So it's only by manipulating these vital energies within the body that you can become enlightened.
So this new movement comes along in which you kind of individualize the practices that are taught
in Tantra. So you can do all the all the stuff of Tantra within your own body on your own and
the techniques used for that also become much more physical. Different more complicated
balancing postures start to appear. Postures that cannot be held indefinitely. In particular
and probably the very first one we have any record of is what's called the Peacock pose, Mayūrāsana.
Where the body should be extended like a stick parallel to the ground. And then
pretty soon after that we get what's called the the Kukkuṭāsana pose or the Rooster pose.
Which is the Lotus position but then you stick your hands through between your
lower leg and the thighs and lift yourself up off the ground.
These are postures that you know you'd be hard pushed to hold for more than a few minutes,
so something's going on here. Something's changing. What we find from the 16th century
onwards is a big proliferation in descriptions of Asana practice. Then there's a text in the 15th
century called the Hatha Pradipika which means the Light on Yoga, that teaches 15 postures.
And seven of those are kind of these non-seated more or complicated positions. We find things that
when they first appear in text were not taught even as yogic postures. So a nice example of that
is Śavāsana or the Corpse pose. Which is basically just lying on the ground like a corpse. And the
earliest treatments of it as a yoga posture do say, yes it's for removing tiredness and so forth,
but prior to that it was taught it wasn't a posture it wasn't an asana
it was a specific method of meditation. Grouped with various different esoteric techniques for
attaining Samādhi. You know the ultimate goal of yogic meditation. Probably the next one we find is
the Headstand. We get kind of travellers reports and textual references, and sculptures, from about
12th or 13th century accounts of headstands. The headstand is quite interesting because
it's quite closely associated with yoga practice today. It's seen as an iconic yoga Asana. But it
doesn't appear as a yoga Asana until really quite late in the text 17th 18th century. It does appear
as a method of austerity, what they call Tapas in Sanskrit. You know, doing one of these really
hard hardcore things like standing up for years on end or holding one or both arms up in the air for
years. It's kind of grouped with those methods. We also find within these Hatha yoga texts
the idea that if you invert yourself that is a way of manipulating the vital energies within the body
the ones that are normally all flowing downwards and out. That you want to keep them. You want to
keep them in the head ideally, so if you stand on your head you can use gravity to bring that about.
When that's introduced it's classified as a mudra one of these seals. One of these
techniques for manipulating the vital energies but later on in this Yoga Pradipikar text,
it's classified as an Asana. The name when it's one of the esoteric techniques is Viparītakaraṇī
which means the inverter. Or the reverser. That which reverses the flow of what's going
on in the body. And then it gets taught in this text as the Viparīta mudrā. It looks
kind of like a shoulder stand really. Normally in the text the position is not really specified it
can be any way that you turn your body upside down. Because even though these texts become very
keen on teaching lots of postures the postures are always very much preliminary. They're kind of
to make the body strong and lean and ready for long periods of meditation and breath
control. This new movement of physical practice arrives about a thousand years ago
and takes on the ideologies behind Tantra but provides new methods of achieving its its ends.