The Science of Yoga: The Risks and the Rewards (6 page)

The building was judged to have no hole that could admit air, and no passageway through which food could pass. Sentries kept watch day and night. A senior officer
of the court came by periodically to check on security and report back to the maharajah.

The interment lasted forty days and forty nights—a period that, from biblical times, has stood for completeness and unbroken cycles. Then the king rode up on an elephant, dismounted before his assembled court, and surveyed the results.

The linen bag looked mildewed, as if it had lain undisturbed for a long time. The yogi’s legs and arms proved to be cold, stiff, and shriveled, his skin pale. No pulse could be detected.

Then his eyes opened.

The yogi’s body convulsed violently. His nostrils flared. A faint heartbeat could now be heard. After a few minutes, his eyes dilated. His color returned.

Seeing the king nearby, the yogi asked in a low, barely audible voice, “Do you believe me now?”

Yoga in centuries past was a mystic wonderland in which the practices differed from our own in ways that ranged from the mundane to the almost unimaginable. Take instruction. It was done in private rather than in classes. More important, relatively few women did yoga. That was understandable given the chauvinistic leanings of old societies. The most radical difference centered on the lifestyles of the men.

Yogis were often vagabonds who engaged in ritual sex or showmen who contorted their bodies to win alms—even while dedicating their lives to high spirituality. The Punjab yogi was no exception. Chroniclers report that he always did his burial feats “for good compensation,” as one put it. After surviving his forty-day interment, he was presented with a pearl necklace, gold bracelets, pieces of silk, and shawls of a kind “usually conferred by the Princes of India on persons of distinction.”

Yogis were as much gypsies as circus performers. They read palms, interpreted dreams, and sold charms. The more pious often sat naked—their beards uncut and hair matted—and smeared themselves with ashes from funeral pyres to emphasize the body’s temporality.

The Kanphata yogis, a large sect, had reputations as child snatchers. To obtain new members, they would adopt orphans and, when the opportunity arose, buy or steal children. Understandably, good families dreaded their presence. At times, bands of yogis would prey on trade caravans and descend on
merchants to extort food and money. When hired as guards, violent orders formed what we would now call protection rackets.

Some yogis smoked ganja and ate opium. Some carried begging bowls. A few were surely saints. But British officialdom as well as educated Indians came to resent the holy men as not only potentially dangerous but as economic drains on society. A British census summed up the condescension tartly by putting yogis under the heading “miscellaneous and disreputable vagrants.”

No small part of the disrepute centered on sex. Spiritually, the objective of the yogi was to achieve a blissful state of consciousness in which the male and female aspects of the universe merged into a realization of oneness. That union (the word “yoga” means union) resulted in enlightenment. But a main path was sexual ecstasy—a veiled part of the agenda that modern research has recently uncovered. David Gordon White, one of the field’s preeminent scholars, who teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara, noted in a 2006 book that the ancient yogis sought a divine state of consciousness “homologous to the bliss experienced in sexual orgasm.”

The path to the ecstatic union was known as Tantra. Hugely popular, it rejected the caste system, pulled in converts by the cartload, and gave rise to religious authorities who wrote thousands of texts and commentaries. It reveled in magic, sorcery, divination, ritual worship (especially of goddesses), cultic rites of passage, and sacred sexuality.

In the West, Tantra is best known as an originator of sexual rites. And rites there were—enough to raise protests from the Hindu and Buddhist orthodoxy of the day. The main charge was that Tantrics indulged in sexual debauchery under the pretext of spirituality.

So too the Punjab yogi, a good Tantric. As his reputation rose, his behavior became so bad that the maharajah considered throwing him out of the kingdom. But the yogi left of his own accord. He did so with spirits high, eloping to the mountains with a young married woman.

Over the centuries, Tantra underwent various degradations that reached their nadir with the Aghori—a cannibal sect that ate the flesh of human corpses, drank urine and liquor from human skulls, lived in cremation grounds and dunghills, and reviled all social convention, supposedly to court public disapproval as tests of humility. The primal ascetics also practiced ritual cruelty
and seasonal orgies. Scholars of religion tend to avoid the gory details but do mention such things as an Aghori predilection for incest. In any event, the worst behaviors associated with Tantra were so extreme that the overall practice came to be condemned as a threat to society.

Another way that old yoga differed from our own was its formulation of Hatha—or postural yoga. The principles were laid out in the
Hatha Yoga Pradipika
. The holy book of the fifteenth century represents the discipline’s earliest extant text.

The book lavished attention on body parts that have nothing in common with the modern focus, including the penis, vagina, scrotum, and anus. Over and over, it recommended sitting postures meant to exert pressure on the perineum—the area between the anus and genitals that is sensitive to erotic stimulation. “Press the perineum with the heel of the foot,” the text advised. “It opens the doors of liberation.”

Today, the term of art for a yoga posture is
asana
. But the word in Sanskrit actually means “seat”—harkening back more than a millennium to the days when postural yoga referred to nothing more complicated than sitting in a relaxed position for meditation. The
Hatha Yoga Pradipika
put bold new emphasis on sitting postures and stimulating acts. It said nothing of standing poses or the kinds of fluid movements so popular in contemporary yoga classes.

The book also told how to extend the duration of lovemaking—and focused its advice on males, reflecting yoga’s ancient bias. It called for “a female partner” but conceded that a willing consort was something “not everyone can obtain.”

One instruction claimed that a particular technique would produce such steely control in sexual relations that the yogi would release no semen even if “embraced by a passionate woman.” The goal was to slowly raise the levels of excitement, the couple approaching but never quite reaching orgasm, their ecstasy going on and on, the two becoming one, transcending all opposites.

If such depictions of Hatha yoga strike the modern reader as bizarre, it is because contemporary books and teachers seldom refer to the origins of the practice. But in truth,
Hatha is a branch of Tantra
. It was developed as a way to speed the Tantric agenda, to make enlightenment happen by the precise application of willpower and the redirection of libidinal energy rather than
by some nebulous mix of piety and contemplation. The Sanskrit root of Hatha is
hath
—“to treat with violence,” as in binding someone to a post, according to the Monier-Williams Sanskrit dictionary, by an Oxford professor. So, too, Hatha means violence or force. The discipline arose in a carefully structured campaign of vigorous activity meant to promote the quick attainment of enlightenment through ecstasy.

So it is that a number of scholars translate Hatha yoga as “violent union.” Other specialists render it as “union from violence or force” to put the emphasis on the illumination rather than its means of attainment. In either case, such definitions seldom—if ever—show up in the popular literature. The New Age approach is to embrace the poetry of Sanskrit and divide Hatha into
ha
and
tha,
for sun and moon. That interpretation casts the word itself as an esoteric uniting of opposites and typically omits any reference to force or violence.

A final way that old yoga differed from our own was its emphasis on the miraculous. For ages, the sacred literature of India had portrayed yogis as able to fly, levitate, stop their hearts, suspend their breathing, vanish, walk through walls, project themselves into other bodies, touch the moon, survive live burial, make themselves invisible, die at will, walk on water, and—like Jesus of Nazareth—bring the dead back to life. They were hailed as miracle workers. Their unusual abilities had a name—
siddhis
. The Sanskrit word means success or perfection and is a yogic term of art for the otherworldly powers. Patanjali, the Indian sage who laid out the fundamentals of mystic yoga some sixteen centuries ago, devoted an entire chapter of his aphorisms to the otherworldly feats, including such talents as reading minds and predicting the future.

Astonishing claims filled the pages of
Hatha Yoga Pradipika.
It said practitioners could neutralize poisons, destroy all diseases, annihilate old age, obviate evil, and achieve immortality—not to mention doing away with constipation, wrinkles, and gray hair.

Yogi warriors made miraculous claims to enhance their battlefield image, according to William Pinch, a scholar at Wesleyan University. Yoga, he said, conferred a reputation of invincible power. “There was a clear tactical advantage of believing, and having your enemy believe, that you were immortal.”

The basic accomplishment that bestowed the gift of the miraculous on the lowly practitioner
was the attainment of samadhi—the state of transcendent bliss in which the yogi became one with the universe. The adept did so after learning how to move all the currents of prana, the body’s energy, up the spine into the head. At that point, according to
Hatha Yoga Pradipika
, the yogi became “as if dead.”

Some yogis entered the euphoric state for the purposes of spiritual enlightenment. Others—like the Punjab yogi, true to the diversity of the Tantric brotherhood—did so for entertainment and profit.

The dramatic success of the live burial astonished many people—and not just at the court of Ranjit Singh. Books describing the feat were published in Vienna, London, and New York. The educated world marveled at the accomplishment and wondered at its explanation. Claude M. Wade, the British liaison to the maharajah’s court and an eyewitness to the yogi’s exhumation, cautioned his peers that it would be “presumptuous to deny to the Hindoos the possible discovery or attainment of an art which has hitherto escaped the researches of European science.”

At the time of the burial, N. C. Paul was entering medical school in Calcutta (today known as Kolkata) and, as a new scientist, paid close attention. After all, the spectcenter1e appeared to defy the laws of nature. His curiosity led him to write a book—
A Treatise on the Yoga Philosophy.

It featured the live burial and, as it turned out, marked the birth of a new science.

Who was Paul? No scholar or book gave him more than a passing reference. I knew little until I went to Calcutta, a city crackling with energy despite the monsoon heat.

Blaring horns and bad traffic greeted my cab ride to his medical school—a place I expected to bear the tidy imprint of its British founders. Instead, it was bedlam. Stray dogs, sick people, and students roamed a warren of broken buildings and fallen trees. Walls bore faded posters. I grew apprehensive as I neared the library, increasingly uneasy but still eager to learn about the world’s first scientist who sought to free yoga from its mythic past.

I climbed a circular stairway past loose wires, cobwebs, and pieces of shattered concrete. The library had a high ceiling and dark wood that bespoke past elegance. But decay had set in. Cabinets with glass doors held row upon row
of old books—the dust inside so thick that it obscured the titles. With a start, I realized that the cases had become mausoleums. Overhead, gauzy spider webs hung down like props in a horror movie. The smiling librarian in her colorful sari seemed slightly embarrassed—but not too much. It turned out that she, like everyone else, knew nothing of Paul and little of the school’s early days. The Bengal Medical College had been founded in 1835 as the first school of European medicine in Asia, its red brick and white trim meant to symbolize a new era.

In a panic, I sped across town to the National Library, a colonial relic on a lush campus. For days I pored through old books and reports. Nothing. Not a trace. Some records were so fragile that they fell apart in my hands. Worms had eaten their way through many books, leaving trails of missing letters and words. I made little piles of debris at my desk. Book after book. Nothing.

Finally, in the last volume, there it was—a life sketch of Paul. He was included in a list of graduates from the Bengal school who had gone into the colonial medical service. Dates. His first job. What he earned. A break in my research after days of nervous sweat.

My luck increased when I met P. Thankappan Nair, a short man of seventy-four who looked like Gandhi. He had written dozens of books on Calcutta and proved to be a treasure trove of ideas, kindness, energy, and common sense. Nair made journalism seem respectable.

We visited historians, archives, literary societies, and more, traveling by bus, subway, bicycle rickshaw, and train (open doors, looking out over villages and smoky morning fires). He refused money. Nair explained that he did such things out of a sense of civic duty.

Paul was a native Bengali (his given name was Nobin Chunder Pal or, in some iterations, Navina Chandra Pala or Nobin Chundra Pal) who had climbed the social ladder by virtue of a good education. The British rulers of early nineteenth-century India exploited the nation ruthlessly. But they also established schools for native youth in which the curriculum was European and the language of instruction was English. The idea was to build a class of skilled underlings to aid the empire’s administration.