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ERC Consolidator Grant 2014

Research proposal [Part B2)]1
Part B2: The scientific proposal
Section a. State-of-the-art and objectives
Yoga is one of the worlds most popular and fastest growing pastimes. In 2012 the American magazine Yoga
Journal estimated that there were 20.4 million regular practitioners of yoga in the United States (8.7% of
adults) and that the yoga business there was worth $10.3 billion, up from 15.8 million practitioners and $5.7
billion in 2008.2 Yoga is also central to Indian religious practice and culture. From probable origins among
heterodox ascetics in the first millennium BCE it gradually became part of almost all of Indias religious
traditions. Key to its importance in both the modern world and Indian religious traditions are its physical
techniques. These are as ancient as yoga itself but were not codified in texts until the beginning of the second
millennium CE, when a corpus of works on haha as the method of yoga in which physical practices
predominate is called was composed.
Despite its importance for an understanding of India's religious and cultural history, and modern globalised
yoga, serious scholarship on haha yoga is in its infancy. The only sources on it from the period in which it
was formalised (11th-14th centuries CE) are textual manuals of its practice, the majority of which were
written in Sanskrit. Until recently, no texts on haha yoga from this formative period had been edited and
discussions on the history and development of haha yoga tended to be based on three later works, the
Hahapradpik, ivasahit and Gheraasahit, which were edited uncritically and translated a century
ago. This partial view of the tradition, together with an unwarranted linking of yoga practice with south
Indian Siddha alchemical traditions,3 has resulted in analyses of haha yoga which preliminary critical
examination of the early haha texts shows to be flawed.4
Over the last two decades attempts have been made to improve the textual foundation of the study of haha
yoga, in particular through pioneering work by Christian Bouy and subsequent critical editions of yoga texts
by three doctoral students of Professor Alexis Sanderson (James Mallinson, Csaba Kiss and Jason Birch) at
the University of Oxford,5 but these have only served to highlight the inadequacy of our understanding of the
field as a whole.
Completely absent from academic discourse on haha yoga has been analysis drawn from ethnographic
observation of its ascetic practitioners in India today, who are the direct heirs to the earliest yogis. This is
partly because such ethnography is extremely difficult: ascetic yogis are very few in number and will usually
only divulge their methods to initiates of their traditions. It is also because among the Nths, the ascetic order
in which haha yoga is said to have originated, ethnographers have been unable to find practitioners of the
physical methods of haha yoga.6 This is explained in scholarship with claims that the Nth order is
degenerate and that the practice of haha yoga has died out among its members as a result. When ascetics of
other traditions are seen to practise it, it is thought to be a corrupt form of an original Nth yoga.7
I (James Mallinson, the PI) have spent much of the last twenty years studying the texts of haha yoga and
living with its ascetic practitioners in India. My textual studies and fieldwork have made it clear to me that
1 This is a revision and abridgement of the original Part B2 of the research proposal. The proposal was successful and
the project started in October 2015.
2 Comparable figures on the practice of yoga in Europe are unavailable.
3 This connection appeared in one of haha yogas first studies (Sastri 1956) and has been repeated in all subsequent
works. Influential works on yoga that draw on Sastri include Eliade 1973 and White 1996.
4 Mallinson forthcoming (2014).
5 See Bouy 1994, Mallinson 2007, Kiss 2009 and Birch 2013. Editions of some later (post-1450 CE) texts on haha
yoga have been produced by the Kaivalyadhama and Lonavla Research Institutes, but, despite their being founded on
collations of large numbers of manuscripts, philological and historiographic acumen has not been applied in their
selection of variant readings or their contextualisation of the texts within the broader history of yoga.
6 E.g. Bouillier 2008.
7 E.g. Eliade 1973:302 and van der Veer 1989:92.

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the received history of haha yoga and its practitioners is in need of revision. In particular, my textual studies
have shown that the texts of haha yoga were not developed exclusively by yogis of the Nth tradition, but
that a quite separate and older ascetic tradition was responsible for developing haha yogas physical
practices and composing several of its texts.
Furthermore, my ethnographic observations have shown me that this latter tradition is alive and well in India
today, where it is represented by lineages found within the two largest Indian ascetic orders, the Daanm
Sanyss and the Rmnands.
The Hatha Yoga Project seeks to draw on these two untapped sources, haha yogas textual corpus and its
current ascetic practitioners, in order to reconstruct the history of its practice. Its central questions will be:
- What were haha yogas practices at the time of its formalisation?
- Why was it formalised when it was?
- By whom and for whom were its texts written?
- How were its texts used?
- Who practised it?
- Was it practised by laypersons?
- Why was it practised?
- How and why did its practices and practitioners change over time?
- What constituted yoga in India on the eve of the development of modern globalised yoga?
- Which of the practices of modern globalised yoga are found in premodern haha yoga?
- How and why do todays ascetics practise haha yoga?
- How is ascetic practice of yoga in India today changing under the influence of modern globalised yoga?
In order to answer these questions the HYP will critically edit and translate ten Sanskrit manuals on haha
yoga. Six are from the period in which it was first formalised (11th-14th centuries CE) and four chart key
moments in its subsequent development up to the 19th century. The texts are each important subjects of study
in their own right (for their details see below); as a whole they chart the development of the haha yoga
tradition. In order to contextualise each text within the corpus, specific questions will be asked of it: Where,
when, why and for whom was it composed? Within what sectarian tradition? What verses does it share with
other texts? What practices does it teach? What is the purpose of those practices? The findings drawn from
the texts will be complemented by other sources, in particular ethnographic study of ascetic practitioners of
haha yoga in India today, which, as my preliminary work has already shown, can shed considerable light on
the history of its practices and social context.
Both the textual and ethnographic sources of the HYP are in danger of being lost. Most of the manuscripts of
the texts to be studied were written on paper and are located in sub-Himalayan South Asia where extremes of
climate and the depredations of insects mean that they rarely last more than 300 years before crumbling to
dust. Prior to the advent of printing in India such manuscripts were copied before deteriorating but this
practice is now very unusual. Furthermore, some of the texts crucial for understanding the early history of
haha yoga (particularly the Vivekamrtaa and Gorakaataka) fell into obscurity or were heavily redacted
soon after their composition and are only available in old manuscripts in poor condition. Time is of the
essence for all studies dependent upon Indian manuscripts, but it is particularly so in the case of those on the
subject of haha yoga.
The ethnographic picture is changing spectacularly fast under the influence of information technology and
the rapid proliferation of modern globalised yoga. Indian ascetics distinguish between their traditional yoga
practice and the modern forms taught in Indian metropolises and on Indian television (some refer to the
former with the Hindi yog and the latter with the Sanskrit/English yoga) but their practices are starting to be
influenced by those of modern yoga. Three years ago at a Nth monastery at Jwalamukhi in Himachal
Pradesh I was surprised when a young Nth ascetic was said by his peers to be a master of yogic sanas or
postures. Throughout my previous fieldwork I (like other ethnographers of the Nths) had singularly failed to
find any Nth practitioners of the physical techniques of haha yoga, but Yog Bb Anp Nth, after
verifying my insider credentials, gave me a virtuoso display of contortionist sanas. Some of the practices he
showed me have no premodern Indian antecedents but are found in modern globalised yoga. Thus it appears
that the Pizza Effect, in which cultural exports return home in a modified form, is changing the yoga

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practice of modern ascetics. When I asked Anp Nth from where he had learnt his yoga he told me that it
had come to him automatically, direct from guru Gorakhnth (Gorakhnth was the c. 12th-century founder
of his order). Anp Nth also had a smartphone. When I introduced my companion as a television actor, he
handed it to me and demanded that I find a clip of him on YouTube. Anp Nth had also been viewing
websites on modern yoga and lamented to me, If only I knew English, I would be world-famous.
I have remained in touch with Anp Nth and last saw him at the Kumbh Mel festival at Allahabad in early
2013, where he and another Nth ascetic were daily performing displays of sanas on a stage at the front of
the Nth camp. This innovation authorised by the orders senior officiants appears to be a response to the
rising global popularity of yoga and the resultant increase in interest among lay Indians, and in the numbers
of foreigners coming to India in search of ascetic practitioners of yoga. As a result of the latter certain Nths
have begun to recruit foreign disciples, particular from countries of the former USSR. The ethnographic
fieldwork undertaken as part of the HYP, in addition to making these significant developments known to
scholars of Indian religion, will seek to document the traditional yoga practices of Indian ascetics before they
change further under the influence of modern yoga.
I have already presented some of the findings of my textual and ethnographic research in a series of articles,
encyclopedia entries and book chapters. For some years I have been working on a monograph which will
ultimately present a comprehensive overview of early haha yoga and its practitioners. It has become clear to
me, however, that for the monograph to be completely rigorous its philological sections need to be grounded
in critical editions of the texts it draws upon. Furthermore, additional ethnographic fieldwork would greatly
benefit both the monographs treatment of early haha yogas practices and the development of its
practitioners different sects. And a thorough treatment of traditional haha yoga as a whole would require
much more than a monograph; thus the idea for the Hatha Yoga Project was born.
I had planned to include in the monograph a bare-bones survey of haha yogas textual development after its
classical synthesis in the 15th-century Hahapradpik. In 2013, however, I examined the doctoral thesis of
Jason Birch, which was an edition of the Amanaska, a yoga text whose two parts date to the 11th and 16th
centuries CE, but which were widely drawn on in subsequent texts on yoga compiled and composed by
scholars from the 16th to 19th centuries. Birch provided a comprehensive survey of these later texts in his
thesis and has obtained copies of several of their manuscripts. During this period the practices of haha yoga
taught in texts proliferated enormously and haha yoga finally became completely integrated with orthodox
Hinduism, through, for example, the incorporation of passages and sometimes whole texts from the
earlier corpus in a series of newly composed Yoga Upaniads. Thorough study of textual and other sources
from this period would provide a picture of how haha yoga developed after its formative period and of what
constituted yoga practice in India on the eve of its co-option into modern globalised yoga. In my research I
have not worked closely with many texts on yoga composed during this period but I have attempted to
delineate the contemporaneous development of the orders of yoga-practising ascetics. That of the Nths
seems relatively clear (as outlined in Mallinson 2011b), but the complex early modern history of the
Daanm Sanyss and Rmnands remains to be mapped out satisfactorily. These orders were
responsible for the production of the texts on haha yoga in the early modern period and a close study of
them will undoubtedly contribute to our understanding of their development as sects.
Birch is keen to carry out postdoctoral research on the texts of this period and so I have invited him to work
on the HYP, both as an editor or co-editor of some of the texts of the corpus and as the author of a
monograph on haha yoga in early modern India.
Until recently I considered my research areas to be quite distinct from modern globalised yoga. But with the
rise in its popularity many scholars and practitioners of modern yoga have looked to my work to gain an
understanding of modern yogas antecedents and I myself have sought to understand modern yoga better in
order to make sense of its new influence on traditional ascetic practice, and to be better aware of the
concerns of some readers of my work. It was Mark Singletons groundbreaking doctoral thesis, revised for
publication as Yoga Body, that first made sense for me of the development of globalised modern yoga. Just as
my interest was turning towards modern yoga, Singletons was turning to yogas premodern history in order
to understand better the Indian antecedents of modern physical yoga practice. We decided to collaborate on
an anthology of translations of classical yoga texts, Roots of Yoga, aimed at the general reader (forthcoming
2016, Penguin Classics). As a result of this collaboration I invited Singleton to join the HYP, in which he will

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focus on the development of the physical practices of yoga from its beginnings at the time of the Buddha up
to the early modern period, the eve of yogas co-option by the international physical culture movement that
gave rise to modern globalised yoga.
My MA thesis was an ethnographic study of Indian asceticism, but my ethnographic work since then has
been subordinate to my philological studies. In order to ensure that the projects ethnographic research is
methodologically rigorous I decided that it would be necessary to have a specialist ethnographer on the
project team. Colleagues drew my attention to the work of Daniela Bevilacqua, whose doctoral thesis was a
study of the Rmnand sapradya, which is India's largest ascetic order and includes a small number of
practitioners of yoga among its members. On account of her expertise on modern Indian asceticism,
Bevilacqua is, to my knowledge, uniquely qualified for the role of the projects postdoctoral ethnographer,
and I invited her to join the team. During extended periods of fieldwork in India, she will gather information
on the practice of haha yoga by traditional ascetics, including women. Furthermore, Dr Bevilacqua will
record ascetics emic understandings of the theory of haha yoga, together with their methods of its practice,
in order to verify whether these are shared by ascetics from different sapradyas and to compare them with
textual and scholarly understandings of haha yoga, and the techniques of its modern practitioners.
The urgency of the project because of the danger posed to its textual and ethnographic sources is
compounded by the rapid rise in popularity of modern globalised yoga and the proliferation in its methods.
The HYP will not and cannot seek to identify an original or authentic yoga (yoga is multifarious and changes
considerably even over the core period covered by the project) but by delineating physical yoga practice in
India prior to the development of modern yoga it will at least allow yoga practitioners to know which of their
practices are of premodern Indian origin and, for those who wish to do so, to chart a course for modern yoga
that keeps it connected to its Indian roots.
The primary output of the HYP will be four monographs. The first, mine, will analyse haha yoga and its
practitioners in the period in which it was formalised, the 11th to 15th centuries CE. The second, by Birch,
will document its subsequent proliferation and development, and identify what constituted yoga practice in
India on the eve of colonialism. The third, by Singleton, will focus on haha yogas physical techniques in
order to chart their history and identify continuities with and differences from the practices of modern
globalised yoga. The fourth, by Bevilacqua, will describe Indian ascetics practice and perception of haha
yoga by comparing those of past and present ascetics, and those of ascetics and lay practitioners. A secondary
output will be critical editions and annotated translations of ten previously unpublished Sanskrit manuals of
haha yoga: the six earliest texts on the subject together with four later texts that were key to its subsequent
development. Further outputs will include peer-reviewed journal articles and volumes of the proceedings of
two conferences to be held as part of the project. In addition it is expected that the project team will act as
consultants and interviewees for a documentary film series on yoga.

The Texts
I have identified the texts of the early corpus (Nos. 1-6) through finding passages borrowed from them in the
c.1450 CE Hahapradpik.8 Birch has identified the four later works (Nos. 7-10) as key to understanding the
subsequent development of haha yoga.
Each of the texts that is to be edited in the HYP is a worthy object of study in its own right and is described
in detail below. They include the earliest text to teach any of the practices of haha yoga (Amtasiddhi), the
first text to teach a haha yoga called as such (Datttreyayogastra), the first text to teach physical practices
for the raising of Kualin (Gorakaataka), the first text to combine the practices of the tantric and ascetic
yoga traditions (Vivekamrtaa), the first Nth text to call its practices haha yoga (Yogabja), the first text

8 Mallinson 2014.
4

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to attempt to combine haha and rja yoga traditions (Yogatrval) and the first text to describe individually
each of the 84 sanas (Yogacintmai). The most recent of the texts to be edited, the Kaplakuruakahahbhysapaddhati, scans of the single known manuscript of which have recently been obtained by Birch,
is of particular interest for scholars and practitioners of globalised modern yoga: various features of it (on
which see below) suggest that it might be the lost Yoga Kurunta from which T.Krishnamacharya took
much of his teaching.9 Krishnamacharyas students include B.K.S.Iyengar, T.K.V.Deshikachar and Pattabhi
Jois, the most influential teachers of modern yoga. It is hoped that through text-critical analysis in
combination with Singletons work on Krishnamacharya the HYP team will be able to establish whether or
not the Kaplakuruakahahbhysapaddhati is indeed the same as the Yoga Kurunta.
1. Amtasiddhi. 284 verses, ten known manuscripts, of which the team has scans of nine. Editor: Mallinson.
This is the first text to teach any of the practices that were later systematised as haha yoga, including
mahmudr, mahbandha and mahvedha. These techniques are used to control the breath and semen
(bindu). The Amtasiddhi also introduced a scheme of four stages of yoga practice (rambha, ghaa,
paricaya and nipatti) which is found in many later texts. The text is aiva iva is its principle deity
but a more detailed identification of its sectarian origins, which would be an important step in establishing
the origins of haha yoga practice, is yet to be made and will, the project hopes, result from more detailed
study of the text. The Amtasiddhi is also important for understanding the relationship between aiva yoga
practice and tantric Buddhism. Despite the texts clear aiva affiliation it was included in a cycle of texts that
were given canonical status within Tibetan Buddhism by Bu ston Rin chen grub in 1322 CE.
The Amtasiddhis oldest manuscript was copied in the early to mid-12th century and is much the oldest
manuscript of any haha yoga text. The manuscript is also unique in that it is bilingual: the Sanskrit text is
transliterated and translated into Tibetan. I have recently obtained scans of this manuscript, which is held in
Beijing,10 and I have collated sections of it with a Devangar manuscript of the Amtasiddhi held in the Man
Singh Pustak Prakash, Jodhpur (which I have transcribed in full). Birch has also collated the readings of
seven manuscripts for the first six of the texts thirty-eight chapters, which we read with Professor Alexis
Sanderson in Oxford in 2012. In addition to the manuscript witnesses there are several citations of the
Amtasiddhi in later texts which will be collated for the edition.
2. Datttreyayogastra. 169 verses, seven known manuscripts, scans of all of which have been obtained by
the team. Editor: Mallinson. This text was probably composed in the 13th century and is the first to teach a
haha yoga named as such, the first to teach some of the central practices of haha yoga (specifically the
khecar and vajrol mudrs) and the first to teach the subsequently widespread scheme of four yogas: mantra,
laya, haha and rja. The Datttreyayogastra was the catalyst for my identification the of non-Nth ascetic
tradition of haha yoga. Certain features of the text show that it was produced within a Vaiava ascetic
milieu and its haha yoga is quite distinct from the yoga taught in contemporaneous Nth texts (the
Gorakaataka and Vivekamrtaa) in that, like that of the Amtasiddhi, it does not use Kudalin and one
of the key aims of its practices aim is the preservation of semen (bindu).
I have collated all seven known manuscripts of the Datttreyayogastra and produced a working critical
edition, which was read in Oxford in 2012 with Professor Alexis Sanderson, after which I produced a
translation of the text.11 Citations of the text in some later works remain to be collated for the edition to be
complete.
3. Gorakaataka. 101 verses, four known manuscripts, of which the team has scans of one. Editor:
Mallinson. This text, which is likely to have been composed in the 13th century, is the earliest (with the
Vivekamrtaa, on which see below) text of haha yoga produced in the tradition of the tantric Nth order,
and the only text to teach a purely Nth physical Kualin yoga uninfluenced by the bindu-oriented yoga of
the Amtasiddhi and Datttreyayogastra. It is the first text to teach the akticlan mudr, its teachings on
which are found in many subsequent texts. However, in all but the Haharatnval, they are in a corrupt form
which renders the practice unintelligible.

9 Singleton (2010:184-186) discusses the Yoga Kurunta.

10 I thank Professors Leonard van der Kuijp and Kurtis Schaeffer for granting me permission to use the scans.
Professor Schaeffer, a Tibetologist, has written an article on the text and this manuscript highlighting their importance
both for understanding Sanskrit-Tibetan codicology and the development of Tibetan Buddhism (Schaeffer 2002).
11A preliminary translation of the Datttreyayogastra is available on my academia.edu page.

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I have transcribed and translated one manuscript of this text (Mallinson 2011a). I know of no citations of it in
later compendia or commentaries; it seems that the text fell into obscurity once the Vivekamrtaa started to
be known as the Gorakaataka.
4. Vivekamrtaa. 173 verses, one known manuscript, of which the team has a scan. Editors: Mallinson and
Birch. This text is also likely to date to the 13th century and is the first in the Nth tradition to combine
tantric Kualin techniques with the bindu-oriented practices taught in the Amtasiddhi and
Datttreyayogastra, thus paving the way for classical haha yoga as taught in the 15th-century
Hahapradpik and all subsequent works on the subject.
I have transcribed the text as found in its one known manuscript, which was copied in 1477 CE, making it
the oldest known Indian manuscript of a text on haha yoga. This manuscript will form the basis of the
edition, to which alternative readings will be added from the texts later expanded recension, which came to
be known as the Gorakaataka (perhaps out of confusion with No. 3 above), and which has been edited
from just four of its hundred-plus manuscripts by Nowotny (1976). The HYP will collate the readings of
Nowotnys edition, citations of the text in pre-1700 compendia and commentaries (after 1700 the citations
are all taken from the later recension) and any more pre-1700 manuscripts of the text that can be found.
5. Yogabja. 190 verses, 20 known manuscripts, of which the team has scans of seven. Editors: Birch and
Mallinson. This c. 14th-century text is the earliest work to combine tantric Kualin yoga with the
techniques of the yoga of the Amtasiddhi and Datttreyayogastra and call the result haha. It is also the
first haha yoga text to give a philosophical justification for the practice of yoga.
Editions of the Yogabja which appear to be diplomatic transcriptions of single manuscripts have been
published by the Gorakhnth Mandir in Gorakhpur and the Keavnand Yoga Sasthn, and I have
transcribed the readings of the former. These editions readings will be collated for the HYP critical edition
together with those of the manuscripts we can obtain and the many citations of the text in later compendia
and commentaries.
6. Amaraughaprabodha. 74 verses. Seven known manuscripts, of which the team has scans of one. Editor:
Birch. This c.14th-century text, which is to some extent a compilation of verses from earlier works, teaches a
haha yoga derivative of the techniques taught in the Amtasiddhi but puts it in a Nth framework.
I have transcribed a diplomatic transcription of a single manuscript of the Amaraughaprabodha published by
Mallik (1954).
7. Yogatrval. 29 verses. 24 known manuscripts, of which the team has scans of two. Editor: Birch. This c.
15th-century text is the first to combine haha and rja yoga traditions. It is cited by T. Krishnamacharya, the
most important guru of modern yoga, and is a key text for the hugely popular Aga school of modern
yoga established by Krishnamacharyas student Pattabhi Jois. Aga yoga classes usually begin with
chanting of the Yogatrvals first verse.
There have been several Indian editions of the Yogatrval but none is philologically rigorous. Birch has
located 24 manuscripts of the text whose readings he will collate together with those of the printed editions.
8. Yogacintmai.12 3423 verses plus prose auto-commentary, 24 known manuscripts, of which the team has
scans of ten. Editors: Birch and Singleton. This voluminous 17th-century compendium consists mainly of
quotations from approximately 90 works, among which are the Amtasiddhi, Datttreyayogastra and
Yogabja. The HYP will edit only its sana section, which in different manuscripts varies in the number of
sanas described from 55 to 120. Some of the sanas are found in earlier works, some are unique and some,
significantly, are found only in a contemporaneous Persian work on yoga, the Bar al-ayt.
Birch has transcribed the most extensive sana description found so far in any of the manuscripts of the
Yogacintmai (Scindia Oriental Institute, Ujjain, ms No. 3537). This will form the basis of the HYP edition.
9. Hahasaketacandrik. Total length unknown; sana section to be edited in the HYP c. 60 verses with
prose commentary. Eight known manuscripts, of which the team has scans of three. Editors: Birch and

12 For more details on the Yogacintmai see Birch 2013:139-145. The Yogacintmai quotes the Yogabhskara, a
yoga text attributed to the famous seventeenth-century Advaitavedntin philosopher Kavndrcryasarasvat, who was
an advisor to the fifth Mughal emperor, Shh Jahn. This text is thought to be lost, but Birch has located a manuscript
entitled Yogabhskara in a recently published Indian library catalogue. If the quotations in the Yogacintmai confirm
that this manuscript is Kavndrcryasarasvats Yogabhskara, it would be a significant discovery.

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Singleton. The HYP will edit only the extensive sana section of this 18th-century work. Like the
Yogacintmai, the Hahasaketacandrik has parallels with the Persian Bar al-ayt.
10. Kaplakuruakahahbhysapaddhati. Prose; 24 folios in a single manuscript, of which the team has a
scan. Editors: Birch, Mallinson and Singleton. This text, as shown by its title, is attributed to one Kaplakuruaka. This attribution and its inclusion (as the longest chapter of the text) of descriptions of 110 sanas
which are identical to those taught in the rtattvanidhi, a text composed in Mysore in the mid-19th century
and associated with the Mysore palace yoga tradition, suggest that the Kaplakuruakahahbhysapaddhati may be the Yoga Kurunta, which was said to be the source of his yoga techniques by T. Krishnamacharya, the yoga teacher at the Mysore Palace in the first half of the twentieth century whose students
have been the most influential teachers of globalised modern yoga.
Ethnographic Case Studies
I shall identify ascetic yoga practitioners to interview during the fieldwork program of the HYP by making
inquiries at the Kumbh Mela festivals to be held in north India in 2016 and 2019. Below I shall give brief
profiles of four ascetic yoga practitioners with whom I have already established close relationships and
whom I expect to be among the projects primary interviewees. Further details of the fieldwork programme
can be found further on, in the methodology section.
Blyog Rm Blak Ds
I first met Rm Blak Ds at the 1992 Ujjain Kumbh Mela, where he initiated me into the Rmnand order
and I have stayed in his camp at every Kumbh Mela held since then. Rm Blak Ds, who is approximately
50 years of age, has small ashrams in Gujarat and Maharashtra but is mostly itinerant. He is renowned within
his order for his mastery of a range of yoga practices which were taught to him by his guru when he was a
boy (he became an ascetic at the age of ten). Among them is vajrol mudr, by means of which liquids may
be drawn up the urethra and which is praised in haha yoga texts as the ultimate yoga practice for its ability
to bring about either sexual continence or the absorption of the mixed products of sexual intercourse,
depending upon the tradition in which it is taught. In all my years of fieldwork I have only ever met one
other ascetic yogi who can perform vajrol. Rm Blak Ds has demonstrated its practice to me and taught
me how to perform it myself. Rm Blak Ds will, like all the projects interviewees, be questioned about all
aspects of the yoga tradition but special focus will be paid to vajrol, which is key to understanding the
history and purpose of haha yoga (Mallinson 2016).
Jagannth Ds Yogrj
Jagannth Ds is part of the same sublineage of the Rmnands as Rm Blak Ds. Approximately 35 years
of age, he has an ashram on the border of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, but spends most of his time travelling
with a jamt or troop of Rmnand ascetics, for which he is the pjr or priest. Unlike Rm Blak Ds he
combines his yoga practice, which includes the performance of sanas and mudrs, with dhni-tap, the
ancient ascetic practice of spending several hours every day during the four months of the hot season
meditating and practising yoga under the summer sun while surrounded by cow-dung fires. Interviews with
Jagannth Ds will inquire in particular about this combination of yoga and extreme ascetic practice.
Yog Bb Anp Nth
Anp Nth, who has been mentioned above, is a young (approximately 23 years old) Nth ascetic who has a
small kuy (hut) in the Himalayan pilgrimage centre of Manikaran but who is predominately itinerant. As
noted above, he is a master of sana practice, but his practice is innovative within the Nth tradition and
some of it derives from modern globalised yoga.
Blak Nth Kohr
Blak Nth, who is approximately 30 years of age, is the Kohr or storekeeper at the Nth monastery at the
temple of Jwalamukhi in Himachal Pradesh. He does not practise the physical techniques of yoga, but has

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been initiated into the ritual- and visualisation-based tantric practices which are the traditional preserve of his
order and which are claimed in texts and by Nth ascetics to bestow supernatural capabilities. He will be
interviewed about this aspect of his religious practice in particular and asked how it relates to the physical
practices of haha yoga.
Impact
The outputs of the project will be of interest to a general audience curious about the history of yoga and to
yoga practitioners seeking to understand better the origins of their practice. They will also be beneficial to
academic researchers in a variety of disciplines, not just philologists and ethnographers who study yoga.
Scholars of Indian religion will understand better yogas development and place in Indian religious history,
in particular its important contribution to the establishment of a pan-Indian Hinduism over the course of the
last millennium. The different yogas taught in yoga texts are the products of different sects; by identifying
them historians of India will get a better understanding of sect-formation in the medieval period, a process
whose importance in Indias religious history is only now beginning to be appreciated. This will benefit art
historians too yoga-practising ascetics are the subject of a wide variety of paintings in the pre-modern
period but their identification has hitherto been obscured by a lack of understanding of the sectarian milieu of
which they were part. Ethnographers and historians of the ascetic orders which have members who practice
yoga will gain a better understanding of their subjects. Philologists studying the use of texts within a
scholarly tradition, together with manuscript practices and dissemination, will benefit from an understanding
of how the texts of the haha corpus are interrelated and how they are borrowed from in other works. The
project also provides philologists with an unusual opportunity to study the interaction of text and practice.
Preliminary readings suggest that the texts were not just descriptive of yoga practice but used prescriptively
too: corruptions in textual transmission have led to variations in practice (Mallinson 2011a). The creation of
a searchable digital corpus will be of use not only to scholars of yoga but to Sanskritists in general and
scholars of textual corpora. The place of the Amtasiddhi within the corpus will shed light on the
development of Tibetan Buddhism and its relationship with non-Buddhist religion in India, and the parallels
between some of the texts teachings on sana with those found in Persian works will improve historians
understanding of Hindu-Muslim interaction in precolonial India. Finally, scholars of the growing field of
Modern Yoga will have a clearer understanding of the historical antecedents of their subject and a solid body
of data from which to identify continuities and innovations, and to steer a course between the conflicting
claims that yoga is a 5000-year-old religion or nothing but gymnastics.
Section b. Methodology
Program
As soon as the project is given the go-ahead I shall invite leading scholars whose work is relevant to the HYP
to join its advisory board. Invitees will include philologists (Professors Alexis Sanderson, Harunaga
Isaacson, Dominic Goodall and Dominik Wujastyk) , historians (Dr Matthew Clark, Dr Elizabeth de
Michelis), an ethnographer (Dr Vronique Bouillier) and an art historian (Dr Debra Diamond). The advisory
board will meet once at the beginning of the projects second year and once at the beginning of its final year.
The project team have been invited by Gaj Singh, the erstwhile Maharaja of Jodhpur, to advise on the
establishment of a yoga research institute at his Maharaja Man Singh Library at the Mehrangarh Fort in
Jodhpur, Rajasthan, which houses the worlds largest collection of manuscripts on yoga. Once the HYP is
given the go-ahead I shall recruit a local research assistant who would be the institutes first full-time
employee and whose duties for the HYP will include locating, obtaining copies of and transcribing
manuscripts from libraries all over India. I shall also recruit a research assistant to be based at the cole
franaise d'Etrme Orient (EFEO) in Pondicherry whose duties will be similar to those of the Jodhpur-based
research assistant but who will be cognisant of south Indian scripts in which Sanskrit may be written a
considerable number of manuscripts of haha yoga texts are written in such scripts, particularly Grantha.

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I shall arrange for the team members to be affiliated with a government-funded Indian research institute in
order for them to be permitted to conduct fieldwork. This will be with either the Jodhpur institute should it
have attained the necessary status or the EFEO.
The work of editing the texts and collating manuscripts will start as soon as the project is officially
underway. During the first year of the project, from October to March, Mallinson, Singleton and Birch will
travel weekly to Oxford to read the Amtasiddhi with Dr Pter-Dniel Sznt of All Souls, University of
Oxford. Dr Sznt will help with transcribing and translating the Tibetan registers of the Beijing manuscript
and contextualising the text within the world of tantric Buddhism.
During the first year we shall make institutional and practical preparations for fieldwork. We shall hold a
series of team meetings to establish protocols for the conduct of collaborative work, lines of financial
accountability, authorship and copyright of outputs, and the responsibilities of team members towards one
another and the project.
At the beginning of the second year of the project a workshop will be held at SOAS to which scholars
working on texts related to haha yoga (particularly those on tantra and earlier forms of yoga) will be invited.
The team members will lead sessions reading sections of the texts to be edited, while the invited guests will
do the same for texts on which they are working.13 Birch will spend six months of the second year of the
project in India, based in Jodhpur but travelling throughout the country to collect manuscript scans. Singleton
will do the same in the projects third year.
Libraries holding manuscripts of texts to be edited in the project whose scans have not yet been acquired by
the team include the following: Oriental Insitute, Baroda; Government Oriental Manuscripts Library,
Madras; Adyar Library, Madras; Benares Hindu University; Jodhpur Oriental Research Institute; Palace
Library, Trivandrum; Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Pune; Kurukshetra Vishvavidyalaya;
Hemachandra Jain Mandir, Patan; Saraswati Mahal Library, Tanjore; the Library of the Maharaja of Bikaner;
Nagari Pracharini Sabha, Varanasi; National Archives, Kathmandu. Team members have successfully
acquired scans of manuscripts from all of these libraries in the past, except for the Library of the Maharaja of
Bikaner. In recent years scholars have been frustrated in their attempts to copy manuscripts in this library.
Through a third party I have made preliminary contact with the librarys custodian and am hopeful that we
will be given permission to copy manuscripts in the Bikaner collection.
The critical editions and annotated translations of four of the texts (Nos. 1, 2, 6 and 9) will be completed by
the end of the second year of the project, along with four articles which will constitute preliminary work on
parts of the team members monographs: Tantric Buddhism and early Hahayoga (Mallinson), The
proliferation of sana practice in early modern India (birch), Yoga and global physical culture (Singleton)
and Yoga Pedagogy in Ascetic Traditions (Bevilacqua). At the end of the third year editions of three further
texts (Nos. 3, 4 and 10) will be completed, and Singleton and Birch will complete an article on sana in
the Hahbhysapaddhati and its implications for the history of yoga. At the end of the fourth year editions
of the three remaining texts (Nos. 5, 7 and 8) will be completed. The team members will submit their
monographs for publication at the end of the project period. Other articles and book chapters to be published
by the team during the project will include Yoga and Sex (Mallinson), A History of the Man Singh Pustak
Prakash's Collection of Yoga Manuscripts (Singleton and Mahendra Singh Tanwar), Yoga and yurveda
(Birch), A History of Rjayoga (Birch), A History of Hahayoga (Mallinson), Hahayogas Tantric
Idiom (Mallinson), More meanings of Haha (Bevilacqua and Mallinson), Yoga and Bhakti
(Bevilacqua), Body Practice in Tantra (Birch, Mallinson and Singleton), Yogic Inversions (Birch and
Mallinson) and Physical Culture in Precolonial India, and its Relationship to Yoga (Singleton).
In the first and fourth years of the project (April 2016 and February 2019), I and Dr Bevilacqua will spend a
month at the Kumbh Mela festivals at Ujjain and Allahabad in northern India. These triennial festivals are the
largest gatherings of Indias ascetics and thus provide the best opportunity for obtaining ethnographic data on
traditional yoga practice. I and Dr Bevilacqua shall question informants from the various different yogi
traditions in the light of the findings of the HYP. We shall remain in India for two months after each festival
in order to have in-depth interviews with the most useful informants in more peaceful locations.
13 The workshop will follow the format of the recent workshop on early aiva manuscripts and inscriptions held in
Paris, at which I was a guest speaker: http://www.efeo.fr/uploads/docs/PosterAtelierMars-2014.pdf.

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Two conferences, open to all and chaired by me, will be held at SOAS in the second and fourth years of the
project. The first will be on Yogis, practitioners of yoga. Scholars in a wide variety of disciplines (ranging
from ethnographers and art historians to experts in historical Sufi traditions) will be invited to speak at the
conference. The team members will each give papers. In addition to facilitating the dissemination of the
teams preliminary findings, the conference will help contextualise the texts studied in the project. The
second conference will be on Yoga. Scholars of the broader field of yoga studies will be invited (from those
working on the origins of yoga practice at the time of the Buddha to specialists in modern globalised yoga).
As in the first conference, the team members will each present papers in order to disseminate their findings,
and the other scholars presentations will subsequently be drawn on to situate the project within the field of
yoga studies as a whole. The papers given at both conferences will be revised for publication.
Throughout its duration the project will be collaborative: we shall work closely together as a team, sharing
research materials, maintaining regular communication, discussing themes to be shared by the project
outputs, exchanging drafts of editions, translations, papers and book chapters, and holding regular informal
meetings and workshops.
Method
Below I shall give details of the process of implementation of the projects two main methods of acquiring
and analysing data, namely text-critical study of Sanskrit texts on yoga and ethnography.
The ten texts to be edited as part of the HYP will not be the only ones studied during the project. The
introductions and notes to the editions, the monographs and the peer-reviewed articles will all draw on any
known relevant texts, either published editions or manuscript copies already obtained. In addition, when
collecting scans of manuscripts of the texts to be edited in the project, the team will identify in the catalogues
of each library visited any other manuscripts which may be of interest and have them scanned too so that
they may be consulted and drawn on if relevant.
In addition to Sanskrit texts and ethnography, the researchers will draw on further sources in order to
contextualise the projects findings. These will include: inscriptions which mention the divine and human
teachers of the texts of the corpus; foreign travellers historical reports of yogis; representations of yogis in
temple statuary; Mughal, south Indian and colonial-era paintings depicting yogis; medieval texts on haha
yoga in languages other than Sanskrit, including Tamil, Marathi, Braj Bhasha and Persian; and ethnographic
studies of modern transnational yoga.
Philological method
Ten is a large number of texts to edit but they (or the passages from them which will be edited) are all
relatively short (ranging from 29 to 284 verses) and scans of many of their manuscripts have already been
obtained by the team. Working editions of some of the texts have been established and at least one
manuscript of every text has been transcribed. Thus, even in the very unlikely event of scans of no further
manuscripts of a text being obtained, it will be possible to establish an edition of it.
Editing the texts will follow the same procedure as carried out by Birch and myself when we edited texts for
our doctoral theses, and which I have used for subsequent texts or passages of texts. A detailed description of
the procedure can be found in the technical appendix submitted with this application, which I shall
summarise here. We shall make sample collations of passages from a text to be edited in order to establish, if
possible, a stemma of the manuscript witnesses, from which we can evaluate the readings to be adopted in
the textus criticus. Once this has been done and the editing process is under way we shall input the text and
variants in XML. As soon as the team members have a working edition of a text they will start on its
translation and the notes to the translation. The team will hold regular meetings to read through the working
editions. When members are away from SOAS, these will be carried out via Skype.
The finalised XML editions will be deposited at SARIT (Search and Retrieval of Indic Texts
http://sarit.indology.info). They will also be converted from XML to HTML and published as a project-

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specific website hosted by SOAS Research Online in a new format developed by Andrew Ollett and others,
which presents editions and their translations side-by-side, and makes viewing variant readings as simple as
hovering the mouse over the lemma word.14 It is my hope that by using and promoting this groundbreaking
method of displaying textual variants the HYP will encourage scholars previously intimidated by dense
critical apparatuses to engage with text-critical scholarship, which I am convinced is essential for a correct
understanding of not just Indian religious history but any historical subject studied through written sources.
The same XML sources will be converted to LaTeX in order to typeset them for publication as books. These
books, together with the projects monographs and conference proceedings, will be published in a dedicated
SOAS Yoga Library series, which it is hoped will continue long after the end of the project.
Ethnographic method
Dr Bevilacqua will engage in six months of fieldwork each year of the project, as a result of which the HYP
will provide the first ethnography of yoga practice among traditional Indian ascetics, who have always been
its practitioners par excellence. This will be directed ethnography, aimed primarily at understanding ascetic
practice of yoga, but also at understanding the development of the sects whose members practise yoga. It will
not be an ethnography of Indian asceticism in general nor of a specific sect or sublineage (excellent
ethnographies of these kinds have already been done by Burghart (e.g. 1980), van der Veer (1989), Gross
(1992), Hausner (2007) and Bouillier (2008)).
Furthermore, I and Dr Bevilacqua will go to the Kumbh Mela festivals to be held at Ujjain and Allahabad in
April 2016 and February 2019 respectively. We shall stay in the camp of the sub-lineage with which I am
affiliated, which includes at least four practitioners of haha yoga (two of whom have been described in the
case studies above). Through casual conversations we shall seek to identify further yoga practitioners to
interview formally, both within our camp and in the camps of other ascetic orders including the Nths, the
Daanm Sanyss and the Udss. I have acquaintances in all these orders who I expect will be happy to
help us in our search.
We shall try to interview the yoga practitioners that we identify while at the festival, but this may not be
possible, in which case we shall arrange to meet informants afterwards (this is much easier than it used to be
many ascetics and/or their disciples now carry mobile telephones). It is also likely that we shall learn of
yogis who are not at the festival but whom our informants there tell us will be suitable interviewees.
Likely locations for the interviews to be conducted after the festivals include the higher reaches of Garhwal
Himalaya and Himachal Pradesh, which are frequented by ascetics and yogis in the hot season that follows
the Ujjain festival. After the Allahabad Kumbh Mela, likely venues for further fieldwork include Chitrakut
and Varanasi, where ascetics of, respectively, the Rmnand and Daanm traditions often repair to relax
after the rigours of the festival.
The formal interviews will be recorded and, if we think it suitable in instances when informants demonstrate
yogic techniques, filmed. (As with all our data collection from informants, sound recording and filming will
only be carried out with the informants written or filmed consent as outlined in the Ethical Issues Annex
submitted together with this proposal.)
Prior to embarking on our fieldwork trips we shall draw up a list of questions to put to our informants. Key
questions will include the following:
- What yoga practices do they do?
- How are they done?
- Why do they do them?
- How did they learn them?
- To whom do/will they teach them?
- Do textual sources inform their yoga practice and teaching?
- Can laypeople practise yoga?
14 See Olletts sample file at http://www.columbia.edu/~aso2101/lilavati/lilavati_sample-dn.html.

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- If so, do they teach yoga to their lay followers?

If any informants answer yes to the last question, we shall attempt to interview their lay followers. Many of
the texts to be edited as part of the HYP teach that laypeople may learn its techniques. Indeed, this is likely to
be part of the reason that the texts were composed and we hope that ethnography may shed light on how this
might have happened. And we will be open to the possibility of identifying and interviewing members of lay
lineages of traditional yoga practitioners, although a thorough search for, and ethnography of, such lineages
would require a separate project, in particular because they are likely to have been strongly influenced by
modern yoga practice.
In our ethnographic analysis, we shall be wary of reading too much of the past from the present. My previous
studies have in particular shown me how sectarian developments have resulted in changes in the doctrinal
frame of yoga practice. My understanding of the historical development of the yogi sects allows me to
identify instances of this and discard them when drawing on ethnographic observation to understand the past,
and I shall guide Dr Bevilacqua through these potential pitfalls.
All the data acquired during our ethnographic fieldwork will be accompanied by a detailed description of the
process and context of its acquisition in order to facilitate its subsequent analysis.
Monographs
In conclusion I shall give a brief summary of the content and structure of the three monographs that will be
produced as the HYPs most significant outputs.
1. Mallinson. Working title: Yoga and Yogis: the Texts, Techniques and Practitioners of Early Hahayoga.
Two parts: (1) Yoga and (2) Yogis. The first part will identify and summarise the texts of the early corpus,
analyse the various methods of yoga taught in them and seek to identify their antecedents. In particular it will
show how the classical haha yoga formulated in the Hahapradpik is a combination of two separate
traditions of practice. The second part will identify the practitioners of haha yoga during its formative
period and show how they are divided into two groups corresponding to the two types of practice.
Delineating the development of the two traditions will require analysis of both their antecedents and those
who succeeded them.15
2. Birch. Working title: Yoga on the Eve of Colonialism: the Historical Foundations of Modern Indian Yoga.
This monograph will ask how medieval haha yoga was transformed into modern Indian yoga. The first of its
two parts will be philological, drawing on Sanskrit texts to document the transformation of haha yoga from
an ascetic practice into a yoga more palatable to orthodox Hindus. The second part wil present new evidence
for the influence of this late medieval Brahminical yoga on the founders of modern yoga by extending
Professor Christopher Minkowskis survey (2012) of Advaitavedntin authors and works from the fifteenth
to seventeenth centuries, as well as Christian Bouys work (1994) on the eighteenth-century Advaitavedntin
authors who took an interest in earlier yoga traditions.
3. Singleton. Working title: A History of the Physical and Postural Practices of Indian Yoga, from Antiquity
to the pre-Colonial Period. This monograph builds on Singletons prior work on the history of transnational
postural yoga practice in the modern age. It will focus on the development of the physical practices of yoga
from its beginnings at the time of the Buddha up to the early modern period, the eve of yogas co-option by
the international physical culture movement that gave rise to modern globalised yoga. Drawing on Sanskrit
and vernacular textual sources, as well as travellers accounts and artistic representations of practising yogis,
the book will enhance our understanding of physical yogas development, and amplify the pre-modern
contexts that influenced modern, posture-based systems. In addition to yoga traditions sensu stricto, the
study will consider physical practices from allied traditions like wrestling, dance and martial arts which may
have subsequently been incorporated into yoga.

15 The investigation of the antecedents of haha yogas practices and practitioners will in part complement the Beyond
Boundaries project hosted by the British Museum and funded by an ERC Synergy Grant.

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4. Bevilacqua. Working title: Let the Sdhus Talk: Past and Present Emic Understandings of Yoga and Yogis.
This monograph will be composed of two parts, the first historiographic, the second ethnographic. The first
part will describe the social background of premodern practitioners of yoga. It will draw on textual
descriptions of yoga practitioners by ascetics and cryas and attempt both to verify whether these
descriptions changed along with social and political conditions, and to understand how these changes
affected the number and typologies of haha yoga practitioners. The second part will describe traditional
ascetic practitioners of haha yoga today and their emic understandings of its practice and purpose. In so
doing, the study will provide a comparison of past and present haha yoga practitioners, as well as a
confrontation of the emic ascetic perspective of haha yoga with that of scholars and modern lay
practitioners.

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