PENGUIN CLASSICS

ROOTS OF YOGA

JAMES MALLINSON is Senior Lecturer in Sanskrit and Classical Indian Civilization at SOAS, University of London. His research focuses on the yoga tradition, in particular the texts, techniques and practitioners of traditional haṭhayoga. He has edited and translated several texts on haṭhayoga from its formative period, the eleventh to fifteenth centuries CE, and published encyclopedia entries and journal articles on yoga’s history. His primary research methods in addition to philology are ethnography and art history. He has spent several years living with traditional Hindu ascetics and yogis in India and was honoured with the title of ‘mahant’ by the Ramanandi Sampradaya at the 2013 Kumbh Mela festival. He is currently leading a five-year, six-person research project at SOAS on the history of haṭhayoga, funded by the European Research Council, whose outputs will include ten critical editions of key texts on haṭhayoga.

MARK SINGLETON is Senior Research Fellow in the department of Languages and Cultures of South Asia, SOAS, University of London, where he works with James Mallinson on the Indian and transnational history of haṭhayoga. He taught for six years at St John’s College (Santa Fe, New Mexico), and was a Senior Long-Term Research Scholar at the American Institute of Indian Studies, based in Jodhpur (Rajasthan, India). He was a consultant and catalogue author for the 2013 exhibition ‘Yoga: The Art of Transformation’ at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC, and has served as co-chair of the Yoga in Theory and Practice Group at the American Academy of Religions. He is a manager of the Modern Yoga Research website. His research focuses on the tensions between tradition and modernity in yoga, and the transformations that yoga has undergone in recent centuries in response to globalization. He has published book chapters, journal articles and encyclopedia entries on yoga, several edited volumes of scholarship, and a monograph entitled Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice. His current work involves the critical editing and translation of three Sanskrit texts of haṭhayoga and new research on the history of physical practices that were incorporated into or associated with yoga in pre-colonial India.

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This edition first published in Penguin Classics 2017

Introductions, original translations and editorial material © James Mallinson and Mark Singleton, 2017

All rights reserved

The moral right of the translators and editors has been asserted

Cover: tapkara asana (the ascetic’s posture). From a c.1830 illustrated manuscript of the Jogapradipaka © The British Library Board

ISBN: 978-0-141-97824-6

Note on the Reference System and Diacritics

The translated passages are numbered sequentially from the beginning to the end of the book, and are referred to in the introductions by these numbers, which are given in bold type. In cases where the chapter arrangement is entirely chronological, the first number indicates the chapter and the second the translation itself. So, for example, 3.4 denotes Chapter 3, translation 4. In cases where the chapters are arranged thematically, the first number indicates the chapter, the second the thematic section, and the third the translation. So, for example, 6.2.1 denotes Chapter 6, section 2, translation 1.

Historically, Sanskrit has been written using many different scripts. Since the advent of printing, the most common of these, especially in northern India, has been Devanāgarī (). It is important to understand, however, that these scripts are not Sanskrit itself but systems for representing its sounds. The Roman alphabet (used for writing English and other European languages) cannot represent the full range of sounds in Sanskrit, and so we must add diacritical marks to certain letters. In this book we follow the conventions of the International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST), which allows for the lossless representation of the Sanskrit syllabary in Roman script.