A Scholar’s Balancing Act: Myths, Misconceptions, and Textual Evidence in Yoga History. An interview with Dr Jason Birch.

In this interview, renowned yoga historian Jason Birch discusses common myths surrounding yoga’s history, arguing for increased philological study of Sanskrit and vernacular sources to reconstruct multifaceted developments empirically. Outlining formative influences from his specialized textual research, Birch proposes groundbreaking theories on the medieval origins of Rāja and Haṭha yoga traditions while advocating an enhanced understanding of yoga’s shifting social roles across eras. Demonstrating an enduring passion for meticulous scholarship complemented by direct ethnographic encounters, Birch thoughtfully balances academic critique with respectful elucidation of yoga’s intricate embodiments throughout Indian history.

Dr Birch discusses common myths and misconceptions about yoga history, including the notion that yoga has remained the same for 5000 years. He notes that studying historical texts is vital for understanding yoga’s history empirically, but these texts have limitations in what they reveal about actual practices. He outlines his specialized focus on the philological study of Sanskrit texts. Birch talks about critical ideas and hypotheses that have shaped his understanding of yoga history, including how Rājayoga originates from Tantric Shaiva traditions rather than Patañjali’s yoga and how Haṭhayoga works forcefully on internal energies rather than being a form of painful asceticism. Birch also touches on his experiences studying, traveling, and living in India, shaping his perspectives.

The Interview

Wittich: What are today’s most common myths or misconceptions about yoga history?

Birch: Well, I suppose a commonly stated myth within the yoga scene is that yoga is very ancient, 5000 or more years old, and has been transmitted over the centuries in an unchanging form. This implies that the practices and the ideas of yoga today are very ancient, which is a strategy that has played an interesting role in the history of yoga itself. Pre-modern yoga traditions usually looked back at older traditions of yoga to give weight to their teachings and even to sanction innovations. This is also the case with yoga in the modern era. There has been an enduring appeal of ancient teachings, particularly in Europe and America, around the late 19^th and early 20^th century. Underlying it is the notion of a perennial philosophy or an ancient wisdom that can be exhumed from ancient texts to solve our problems and improve the quality of our lives. I think yoga fits that mold very well because there are yoga texts composed in the first millennium and practices, such as breathing exercises, postures, and meditation, that can, in some cases, enhance people’s health. And then on top of that, there have been charismatic Indian religious figures, such as Vivekananda, who have translated old ideas into contemporary ways of thinking, which they have embedded in their teachings on yoga. This fusion of the ancient with the modern has been very appealing to a lot of people.

Wittich: This greater appeal is for current practitioners but also people in the past, as you mentioned.

Birch: Yes, it raises the interesting question of why some people like ancient teachings and the classics of literature. We often believe that a classic text has endured because it has been tried and tested over the centuries, and what’s come down to us is a distilled truth of some sort. But, in other cases, people want the latest research and technology concerning health and fitness, and I suppose, more generally, the way the world works. So, this creates a dynamic between ancient and modern teachings within yoga communities. I’ve seen that for some yoga teachers and practitioners, the history can be an unwanted restraint on their enthusiasm for synthesizing new modes of bodywork, spirituality, or science with yoga. They can lose interest very quickly in conversations about historical texts, particularly if they contain statements that challenge modern teachings that are thought to have the weight of tradition behind them. But it’s also the case that historical teachings on yoga can sometimes provide different perspectives to the modern systems, as well as details of practices that are not taught in modern yoga and insights into some of the techniques commonly done today, which is why, I think, many yoga practitioners have a keen interest in the history.

Wittich: So when you meet these people, what is your approach?

Birch: I get on very well with those who want history based on empirical evidence because we’re on the same page. We can talk about texts, artifacts, and ideas about history based on evidence. When it comes to practitioners who are trying to interpret the teachings and the practices in their own way, usually to make it work for their benefit or to teach to others, I have to tread more carefully in a sense because if I’m discussing or presenting something that doesn’t fit with their view of yoga, then they may not be so receptive to it. And that’s fine. Historians have to be tactful with any particular presentation of yoga and its history because there are different viewpoints, and the evidence can be interpreted different ways. So, over the years, I’ve learned to converse with a wide range of different practitioners. The yoga community is very diverse, and I’ve liked that diversity myself as a practitioner and scholar. My own practice of yoga is a composite of teachings from many different teachers and traditions, and the enormous depth and diversity of India’s religious and philosophical traditions makes the study of yoga’s history a lifelong pursuit.

Wittich: Why is studying historical texts so important in the academic study of yoga?

Birch: I think if one wants to understand the history of yoga from an empirical point of view, then a lot of the evidence is textual. There’s also material evidence: sculptures, paintings and, murals, and so forth, and we need to study the broader history of Indian religions, languages, and society. But the bulk of our information about what people practiced and thought about yoga comes from textual evidence. I suppose my academic training has enabled me to pursue an interest in the texts, which has followed from an interest in Indian languages. When I had completed a year of a classics degree at the University of Sydney, I became interested in Eastern philosophy and changed my major to Indian studies. The lecturer, Dr. Peter Oldmeadow, had been trained in a tradition of European philology by Professor Jan de Jong, a Dutch Indologist who knew many Asian languages and wrote some rather acerbic reviews in the Indo-Iranian Journal. Peter taught me Sanskrit within the context of Indian religions and philosophy. After attending the University of Sydney, I did my doctorate at the University of Oxford with Professor Alexis Sanderson, where the focus was on dealing with Sanskrit manuscripts, editing texts, and writing history through textual criticism. So that’s really my specialty and why I focus on textual criticism as opposed to methods developed in anthropology, art history, or some other discipline.

Wittich: And what do you think is lacking in these texts?

Birch: The texts are prescriptive, so they’re telling us about what people thought yogis should do rather than what yogis actually did. So, the texts are not necessarily based on observation. In other words, it wasn’t as though someone sat down and decided to write an account of a yogi’s life like a journalist might write a biography today. Pre-modern yoga texts were more concerned with establishing rules for practice and a framework for combining different techniques and even types of yoga to achieve liberation from transmigration, which was the overarching goal of Indian religions and philosophies. As I mentioned before, the authors of yoga texts often tried to disguise innovations by presenting them as ancient traditional teachings. So, the challenge for any historian is to try to see what’s new in each text, how the tradition might be changing at the time it was composed, and the implications of this on the broader history of yoga.

Another problem is that the texts were not written to answer many of the questions that academics and even today’s practitioners would like to ask. The texts were written for a different audience: practitioners of the time who would have been familiar with the current issues that an author or commentator would be addressing. This is why it can be very easy for us to pick up a newspaper and understand today’s news. We know the context, it’s our current day-to-day living in a particular country. But if one picks up a newspaper that’s a hundred years old, one might have to do some research, to know more about the politics and society of the time to understand the content of the articles. There are large gaps in a yoga text that readers of the time would have known, but we don’t. And, we want to ask wide-ranging questions such as who was practicing yoga, how much practice they did, whether the practice changed depending on the practitioner’s age, and how they integrated their yoga practice with their religious, work, or family obligations. In most cases, yoga texts were not written to answer these questions directly.

A good example of a question that I get asked a lot and that the texts don’t answer in a satisfactory way is whether women practiced yoga in medieval India. If women practiced yoga, were they practicing all the techniques the same way as men, or did they have a different practice? Were the techniques taught to them differently? Were they practicing alongside men or separately? Were there female yoga teachers, and did they have the same status as male teachers? Unfortunately, the texts don’t provide much information on this, just small clues that historians try to piece together and combine with art history and anthropology to some extent, but there’s still a lot of holes, large black holes in the history. Historians should acknowledge the black holes and speak cautiously when answering these questions rather than speculate too much and possibly mislead people.

Wittich: And why do you think these texts were written in the first place? You answered it a bit, but I would like you to elaborate.

Birch: So, I think I mentioned practical reasons, such as providing a practitioner with a framework for the theory and practice of either a specific type of yoga or yoga more generally. But there were also, no doubt, some broader social and political reasons for writing the texts. Different traditions codified techniques that they were doing, to disseminate their ideas to a broader interested audience. A text aims to create a nucleus of the teachings that may be used to discourage unwanted innovation and affirm particular associations, perhaps with an older tradition. So, a text could provide a degree of continuity and authority for the transmission of a particular take on yoga.

A text might also proclaim a break with the past. It might present a new interpretation of an old yoga practice. A good example is the Amaraugha, which took the physical techniques of a Buddhist Vajrayāna text called the Amṛtasiddhi and adapted them for Śaivas. Obviously, Śaivas were not so interested in reading the Amṛtasiddhi, though there were attempts to rewrite the text to make it more palatable to non-Buddhists. But basically, the Buddhist text was supplanted by Śaiva works, like the Amaraugha, that integrated the physical techniques within a framework that Śaivas liked. In breaking with the past, the Amaraugha contained many innovations as well. It was probably the first text to synthesize Haṭha and Rājayoga. Composing Sanskrit verses to explain this new scheme and attributing them to Gorakṣanātha, the supposed founder of Haṭhayoga, was probably an effective way to sanction such innovations.

In other instances, a new teaching may simply be a slightly different interpretation of an older one. For example, in Patañjali’s time, a yogic posture was basically a seated position for breath control or meditation. In the medieval period, the role of posture in Patañjali’s eightfold format became the conduit for complex postures where yogis balanced on their hands, twisted their bodies, folded forward, moved repeatedly in some way, put their legs behind their heads, etc., to cure illnesses, strengthen digestion and make the body fit and strong for long hours of meditation.

Wittich: Why do you think there are more yoga texts at certain times, and in other times, there are fewer texts? What could be the motivations for this?

Birch: We certainly have examples in history where texts were produced through patronage, such as the collection of manuscripts that Maharaj Man Singh of Jodhpur funded in the early 19^th century. He patronized the Nath sect, which is famous for yogis, among other things, because the Naths supported him when he was trying to ascend to the throne and had to fight his cousin Bhim Singh, who had seized Jodhpur. When he succeeded in becoming king, Man Singh paid for an amazing collection of yoga texts to be scribed for the Naths. People were sent to libraries around India, particularly in Varanasi, to collect and bring yoga texts back to Jodhpur. These texts were then copied, in some cases, many times. For example, a manuscript of the Yogabīja at the Man Singh Pustak Prakash (today’s library in the Jodhpur fort) was taken from Varanasi and copied over a dozen times in Jodhpur. Thanks to Man Singh’s patronage of the Nath sect, there are hundreds of manuscripts of yoga texts at the library in the Jodhpur fort.

In other cases, texts were copied and widely disseminated because they had become iconic in the sense that they successfully defined basic principles within particular traditions of yoga. Of course, Patañjali’s Yogaśāstra is an obvious example of the more philosophically orientated traditions. Relative to other yoga texts, there’s a large number of manuscripts of this work in libraries throughout India. It was the basis of a commentarial tradition, often the focal point for critiques of yoga, was paraphrased into Arabic, and frequently cited in medieval yoga compendiums. All the evidence at hand suggests that this text has remained an important and relevant treatise on yoga throughout the centuries. In the tradition of physical yoga, the Haṭhapradīpikā is a good example because I think it defines the basic relationship between physical and meditative practices. It outlines a very clear framework for how the physical practice should be done: āsana is the first auxiliary, and then prāṇāyāma, the breathing practice. If excessive fat or phlegm prevents the student from undertaking prāṇāyāma, six therapeutic interventions called the ṣaṭkarma are prescribed. The practice of prāṇāyāma requires the application of three internal muscular locks called bandhas, which are described as mudrās in the third chapter. Other mudrās were added, creating a repertoire of physical methods that are supposed to result in the yogi being able to meditate on the body’s internal sound, called nāda. Absorption in the sound is the practice of Rājayoga, the sovereign yoga, so-called because it was the goal of all other yogas and brings about liberation.

So, the Haṭhapradīpikā became a popular work, in my view, because it succeeded in bringing together earlier disparate traditions of Haṭhayoga and rolled them together into something that became a blueprint for subsequent generations. It was frequently quoted as an authority on yoga in compendiums that followed and was widely disseminated across India, which I think indicates it was a very successful text. In contrast to this, there are other texts that have incredibly interesting information and sometimes many unique details on the practice of yoga, and yet we have only one or two manuscripts of them. A good example of this is the Haṭhābhyāsapaddhati, which has an extraordinary āsana practice of 112 postures in six sequences, composed probably in the 18^th century, and also has some extraordinary details about vajrolī and khecarī mudrās. And yet, we have one manuscript that’s more like a notebook created by someone who jotted it down for their own personal use. And we have a beautifully scribed manuscript of it in a palace archives, and that’s it. There’s really no reference to it in any other primary source or catalog, and no information on other manuscripts that might have existed or been reported. So, it can be very unpredictable what comes down to us today from the past.

Wittich: Why is the philological study of Sanskrit texts important for academic yoga studies? And what about texts in vernacular languages?

Birch: I think it’s helpful here to separate the art of philology from knowing languages. I think philology is important for scholarship whether you’re studying Sanskrit, Hindi, Brajbhasha, Marathi, or whatever. Philology is the knowledge of how to use historical documents for writing history. It ranges from how to find and handle manuscripts, which mainly concerns how to transcribe and edit them, to understand the historical context of documents, their content, and how to translate and use them for writing history. I think philology is an essential training for any historian, and it is quite separate in some respects from simply learning a language. In my case, I’m studying Sanskrit texts because I have studied the Sanskrit language in my undergraduate and postgraduate degrees. It’s the main language I work with. But my expertise as a historian of yoga has more to do with the work I have done examining manuscripts of primary sources, understanding their content and chronology, contextualizing them within the history of Indian religions and society, working out how a text has been transmitted and changed over time: all this is what I would call the work of philology, and the act of translation is the thin facade of it.

Many Sanskrit yoga texts need studying, editing, and translating, so it has become my life’s work. However, there are also vernacular texts on yoga that need good philological research done on them. I would really like to see experts in old Hindi, Brajbhasha, Marathi, etc., create good critical additions and translations of yoga texts like the Jogapradīpyakā, Haṭhayogamañjarī, and Vivekadarpaṇa. It would make my life so much easier. But as far as I know, this work is not being done by anyone. I suppose scholars of these languages are working on other texts, which is extraordinary about scholarship on India. An enormous amount of manuscript material hasn’t been properly studied. Texts are waiting for academics and scholars to restore, study, and bring their contents to light. I suppose in Europe, America, and Australia, Indian studies is a very small department, if it exists at all, in a university. In modern academia, philology has diminished in recent years because it is not directly associated with any particular profession or career path. So, academic work on vernacular yoga texts is not being done to the degree needed, and it’s a real problem because editing and translating primary sources is the starting point for much of the work done by academia. Once we have a good edition and translation of a primary source, it enables scholars from all walks of life to study it. And in the case of yoga, practitioners as well. Without good editions, there’s no reliable basis for the research of non-specialists in this area. So, the philological work needs to be done, and I think at the moment, there’s a lack of funding for it and a lack of opportunities to learn the necessary philological and language skills. The glimmer of hope is the increasing interest in scholarship on yoga’s history over the last twenty years, and there are more people now than ever before applying for PhD.s and postdoctoral positions to do further research in yoga. That’s healthy for our field, and there are still some good universities at which one can study the languages of India and get solid training in philology. So, it’s not a hopeless situation; there’s a lot of work that remains to be done, and I hope that funding for it in the future becomes available.

Wittich: What developments in yoga research are you most excited about lately?

Birch: I am most excited by research in an area where new texts or artifacts are likely to be discovered rather than research on old evidence. Because in the field of yoga studies, so much of the history remains unknown, and so much remains to be discovered, that new evidence can dramatically change current thinking. Regarding my research, I’m becoming more interested in the relationship between yoga and svarodaya, which was a system of predicting the future through knowing one’s nasal dominance at certain important times. I think there’s much to be discovered in this area. During my doctoral research, I studied several yoga texts with sections on svarodaya and the yoga practices that can change nasal dominance. Now, I’m more interested in finding svarodaya texts with yoga sections. Svarodaya was a more worldly type of knowledge system than yoga. Kings and nobles used it to predict the outcomes of war, births, harvests, and other things. For example, if a king was going to war, the chances of success were considered higher if the king’s breath was dominant in the right nostril when the battle started. If conception occurs when the breath is moving in a particular nostril at a particular time, then the child’s gender could supposedly be predicted. That would interest kings who want an heir, of course. So it’s likely that yogis became involved in svarodaya to advise nobles and kings, which would provide them with a way of gaining patronage. It’s also interesting that yogis known for svarodaya practiced and taught strenuous forms of physical yoga, including complex postures and breathing exercises. It’s quite easy to change nasal dominance. One can do it by putting a piece of cotton in one nostril, lying down on one side of the body, or placing a T-shaped bar under one armpit. These yogis were doing much more than that. So, I suspect that, on the one hand, they were pursuing very demanding practices and systems of yoga, perhaps for their own liberation or to establish their status within a particular sect. On the other hand, they were also pursuing the knowledge of svarodaya for broader social reasons, to attract patrons or play some role in royal courts or the business affairs of the wealthy.

Wittich: I remember we discussed what they were in the Tirumandiram.

Birch: Yes, svarodaya is also in that text, isn’t it? It is surprising where it crops up. It’s an interesting topic, and the contexts in which it appears can be diverse. I’d like to investigate its roots in the first millennium and look more closely at its relationship with other forms of astrology (jyotiṣa). It’s an area that requires a lot of work. Scholars seem to think that the Śivasvarodaya is the definitive work on svarodaya but I suspect that it is just the tip of an iceberg of the textual material on svarodaya that’s waiting for us in libraries. There are many related texts with similar names, such as the Pavanaviyaya, Pavanavidhi, Svarodaya, Svarodayajñāna, Svaracintāmaṇi and so forth. And no one has surveyed these works. In my very preliminary efforts to do so, when I have looked at manuscripts of a text called Svarodaya, I have seen different works by the same name and significant variations in the same works. So, I’m not convinced that the Śivasvarodaya represents this literature genre. I think that svarodaya literature is much more diverse than we currently think.

Wittich: Are you considering expanding this to a big project like the Haṭha Yoga  Project you’re now finishing?

Birch: Yes, I think it deserves a project, and it would require a large one because a lot of the material is in Sanskrit, Persian, old Hindi, and other vernacular languages. So, ideally, one would like to have a group of scholars working together on various texts in different languages. There is the social history to explore as well. There’s a role for an anthropologist and, maybe, even a political scientist who might explore how svarodaya, or astrology more broadly, is used in modern Indian politics. So, perhaps, there is a case for a large project that looks at the medieval and modern history of svarodaya. The benefit of large projects is that they enable collaboration between scholars. So, rather than just working by yourself with a limited skill set, you can work with a group of scholars from different disciplines. And nobody’s really attempted, as far as I know, to write the history of svarodaya based on a broad philological survey of its literature, from the earliest period right through to the modern. And the modern dimension of svarodaya has not been sufficiently studied. How extensively is svarodaya used by Indian astrologers today? What are the sources of their information on svarodaya and is this knowledge transmitted orally or via texts? Is it restricted to certain communities or strata of Indian society? I’m sure there are many opportunities for interesting fieldwork on this.

Wittich: Yeah, and it’s a practice. It’s a practice technique today as well.

Birch: Yes, that’s right. Some Indian astrologers use it. And it’s also known in the diaspora as well, which might be another interesting avenue of inquiry. And it can be found in modern yoga. Swami Satyananda wrote a book on it called Svarayoga. So yes, some modern gurus have written about it. But whether they taught or used it in any significant way has not been properly studied.

Wittich: So, have you spent time living, studying, or traveling in India, and if so, how did that shape your understanding of yoga?

Birch: Yes, I have spent time living, traveling, and studying in India, and my undergraduate degree required it to a certain extent because I also studied Hindi as a major, and that required two semesters of study in India. The first semester was my first trip to India, in Rishikesh, funnily enough, so I was exposed to a lot of yoga, mainly Sivananda’s style. Since my undergraduate degree, I have returned many times to India to consult manuscripts. It has taken me to different parts of the country, mainly the big cities such as Calcutta, Delhi, Mumbai, and Chennai in particular. That’s where the large library libraries are. But I’ve also visited more remote libraries, as well as places that teach yoga, such as the Kaivalyadhama Yoga Institute in Lonavla, which I think is quite an interesting part of yoga’s modern history in itself. The ashram is like a museum for me, with a fantastic library. I’ve also sought out individual yoga teachers wherever I happened to have been in order to learn more about different styles of yoga. I’ve spent time in India as a tourist, visiting temples, galleries, museums, sacred sites, and nature parks. But I’m not such a good tourist as I’m usually exhausted by the hustle and bustle after a day or two. My wife and I love long-distance train rides in India. So, we always favor trains over planes or buses if we can. And, of course, I’ve also formed friendships with quite a few Indian people, mainly through study but also through serendipitous encounters.

Wittich: When was your last visit then?

Birch: Last year, I went to Rajasthan, Bikaner, and Jaipur, then down to Mysore in Karnataka, and finally to Pondicherry in Tamil Nadu to attend a workshop on a yoga text. I’ll return to Pondicherry for a second workshop in June of this year. So, my research keeps taking me back to India, which I’m very happy about.

Wittich: What are some of the most significant texts or sources that have shaped your understanding of ancient yoga traditions?

Birch: Well, I suppose I’d have to say that the texts I’ve worked on intensively are those that I know the best and have shaped my understanding of particular types of yoga. For example, the Amanaska, the text I worked on for my doctoral thesis, is the basis, or the starting point if you like, for my hypothesis about the history of Rājayoga, that it was a unique type of yoga that emerged from Tantric Śiva traditions. When I did my doctorate, it was generally believed that Rājayoga was Patañjali’s yoga because of Swami Vivekananda’s book, Raja Yoga, which is still widely read. But when I started to study the Amanaska, the second chapter of which teaches Rājayoga, it did not take me long to realize that it was not teaching Pātañjalayoga. As I looked for references to Rājayoga in other pre-modern works of the same era, I found common themes and, since the Amanaska had a very early date compared to other Rājayoga texts, I could then see how this type of yoga emerged and developed. And so I have been able to map out the history of Rājayoga. And that was one of the main ideas in my doctoral thesis.

Another text that has been instrumental to my understanding of Haṭha and Rājayoga is the Haṭhapradīpikā. It’s an important work in the history of Rājayoga, as its fourth chapter is devoted to this topic. But as I studied the rest of the text, I realized that Haṭhayoga was not a form of painful asceticism, which is how much of the secondary literature of the 20^th century has tended to characterize it. So, I asked why Haṭhayoga was called ‘haṭha’, which means ‘force’ or even ‘violence,’ early on in my doctoral study. My study of the early Haṭha and Rājayoga texts, such as the Amaraugha, Yogabīja, Gorakṣaśataka, Vivekamārtaṇḍa, and Yogatārāvalī, have enabled me to propose that Haṭhayoga is so-called because its proponents believed that it worked forcefully on internal energies, such as prāṇa and apāna. The natural flow of apāna is down, and Haṭhayoga forces it upwards. It also forces the serpent energy kuṇḍalinī to awaken and straighten, like a stick hitting a snake. It primarily works by applying internal muscular locks during breath retentions. So, seeing how references to force were used in early Haṭha texts and the emphasis on its physical practice led me to think that Haṭhayoga wasn’t a form of tapas and did not require bodily mortification. In fact, pre-modern Haṭhayoga was more concerned with overcoming illness so that one could manipulate internal energies to achieve Rājayoga, a profound state of meditation more generally known as samādhi. This line of inquiry resulted in my article on the ‘Meaning of haṭha in early Haṭhayoga’, which was an early attempt to outline a hypothesis that I further elaborate on in my forthcoming book on the Amaraugha.

My study of yoga texts in the early modern period has led to a hypothesis that I call ‘Haṭhayoga’s floruit,’ a period from the 16th to the 18th century when literary activity on Haṭha and Rājayoga flourished or reached its zenith if you like. It’s based on the observation that the known literary works on Haṭha and Rājayoga that were composed before the Haṭhapradīpikā are quite basic, almost skeletal in their presentation of the subject matter. They just give us just the bare bones, very little theory, and only the basics of practice. The early works are more concerned with presenting the main techniques and a basic structure of how, for instance, Haṭhayoga fits with Rājayoga. However, after the Haṭhapradīpikā was written, large compendiums on yoga were composed that are much larger than the earlier texts; in some cases, they contain hundreds of more verses, describe more techniques, and elaborate on the theory. Like the Haṭhapradīpikā, many of these texts foreground Haṭhayoga. There were also wide-ranging compendiums on yoga that were also composed at that time. These compendiums are not specifically about Haṭha and Rājayoga but bring Haṭha and Rājayoga into their discussions on topics such as āsana, prāṇāyāma, mudrā, and samādhi. So, in a sense, the authors of these compendiums were modernizing yoga at that time. They modernized aṣṭāṅgayoga, for example, by bringing in some of the contemporary practices that were in physical traditions. Material on Haṭhayoga texts was used in discussions of āsana and prāṇāyāma and material on Rājayoga supplemented sections on samādhi. That’s when Haṭha and Rājayoga started to go mainstream, so to speak.

A text that has been instrumental to my understanding of this is the Yogacintāmaṇi of Śivānandasarasvatī, who lived in Varanasi in the late 16^th and early 17th century. I’m very lucky to be currently working on a translation and edition of this text with Shaman Hatley and James Mallinson for a project funded by an NEH grant at the University of Massachusetts, where Shaman has a post. It is a very large work, perhaps around 3500 verses in length, and will provide practitioners and scholars with a lot of new and diverse material on yoga because it borrows material from all sorts of religious and philosophical traditions to create a seamless discussion on yoga, tackling many topics still of interest, no doubt, such as what is yoga, who should practice it, when and where should it be practiced, and so on. Unlike earlier texts in a low Sanskrit register, the author of the Yogacintāmaṇi was quite erudite and well-read. When people have access to a translation of the Yogacintāmaṇi, they’ll start to see that some of the dialogue on physical yoga in India in the late 19^th and early 20^th century was anticipated by the syncretic efforts of authors like Śivānandasarasvatī in the early modern period. Some of the strategies of Vivekānanda, Sivananda of Rishikesh, Kuvalananda, etc., had been tried in the 16^th century. And so I think an edition and translation of the Yogacintāmaṇi will be very useful for future research on the history of yoga.

Wittich: Well, thank you very much for that. My questions are over. Do you have anything else to add?

Birch: No, I think we covered quite a lot, Agi. Thanks very much.

Wittich: I’m very happy we got the chance to have it. Thank you very much.

Birch: OK. Thanks very much.