Yoga is hugely popular around the world today, yet until now little has been known of its roots. This book collects, for the first time core teachings of yoga in their orginal form, translated and edited by two of the world’s foremost scholars of the subject, It includes a wide range of texts from different schools of yoga, languages and eras: among others, key passages from the early Upanisads and the mahabharata, and from the Tantric, Buddhist and Jaina traditions, with many pieces in scholarly transaltion for the first time. Covering yoga’s varying definitions across systems, its most important practice, such as posture, breath control, sensory withdrawal ad medition , as well as models of the esoteric and physical odies Roots of Yoga is a unique and essential source of knowledge.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR James Mallinson
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 hathayoga. He has edited and translated several texts on hathayoga from its formative period, the eleventh to fifteenth centuries CE, and published encyclopaedia 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 20I3 Kumbh Mela festival. He is currently leading a five-year, six-person research project at SOAS on the history of hathayoga, funded by the European Research Council, whose outputs will include ten critical editions of key texts on hathayoga.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Mark Singleton
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 trans- national history of hathayoga. 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 20I3 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 encyclopaedia 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 hathayoga 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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