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Most Indian and western commentators and scholars, following the Yoga Sutras of Patafijali (c. third century CE), have assumed the Hindu yogic body to be a closed, self-contained system.' However, a significant volume of data from a variety of sources-ranging from the classical Upani~ads down through the Tantras (and including passages from the Yoga Sutras themselves)-indicate that an 'open' model of the yogic body has also been operative in Hindu philosophical, medical, and mythological traditions. In these open models, the mind-body complex is linked, often via 'solar rays', to the sun and moon of the macrocosm, as well as to other mind-body complexes, which yogins are capable of entering through their practice.
Over the past two decades, a certain Indian tradition of yoga has become part of the Zeitgeist of affluent western societies, drawing house-wives and hipsters, New Agers and the old-aged, and body culture and corporate culture into a billion dollar synergy. Like every Indian cultural artifact that it has embraced, the west views Indian yoga as an ancient (the figures of five-and twenty-thousand years-old are frequently bandied about) unchanging tradition, based on revelations received by the Vedic sages who, seated in the lotus pose, were the Indian forerunners of the flat-tummied yoga babes who grace the covers of such glossy periodicals as the Yoga Journal and Yoga lnf£mafional.
In fact, much of what comprises 'yoga' as it is known in the west-with its emphasis on self-realisation, mind-expansion, and bodily attunement to the cosmos-has its origins in nineteenth-century European (as opposed to Indian) occultism and esotericism. As Elizabeth de Michelis has recently demonstrated, 'modem yoga' is the product of a late-nineteenth-century conversation between such western dilettantes as the Theosophists Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky and W. Q Judge on the one hand, and their mainly Bengali counterparts, Keshubchandra Sen and Swami Vivekananda, on the other. In spite of its claims to Vedic antiquity, the roots of modem yoga are to be found more among Calcutta-based Unitarian missionaries and Freemasons, British Orientalists, and American Transcendentalists than in the teachings of the nineteenth-century Bengali mystic Ramakrishna or the ancient 'Aphorisms on Yoga,' the Yoga Sutras of Patafijali. 3 While Indian commentarial traditions have, since the time of Patafi.jali and the Bhagavad Gita, carried for-ward a mainly philosophical understanding of 'classical yoga', those discussions were generally disregarded or misunderstood by the founders of 'modem yoga'.
The great watershed in the history of modem yoga is the series of lectures, later published in his Collected Writings, which Swami Vivekananda offered to eager American audiences at the tum of the twentieth century. The cornerstone of the Swami's presentation of yoga is his identification of the 'essence' of the Yoga Sutras (c. third century CE) with what he termed raja yoga, the 'royal path' to self-realisation and God-realisation.4 Nearly no element of Vivekananda's epoch-making synthesis stands up to historical scrutiny. The term raja yoga is nowhere to be found in the Yoga Sutras, nor is it found in any work prior to the tenth century CE. Furthermore, Vivekananda's forced and erroneous identification of nirvika,lpa samadhi-which he took to be the spiritual goal of Vedanta-with Patafijali's definition of yoga in Yoga Sutra 1.2, reduced yoga to a meditative practice through which the absolute was to be found by turning the mind and senses inward, away from the outside world.5 Vivekananda's syn-thesis has oriented virtually all subsequent interpretations and appro-priations of yoga of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, for which the self-contained nature of the yogic ( or subtle or medical) body has remained a basic assumption. It has also impacted the eclectic appropriations of Indian ayurveda by Indian and western entrepre-neurs of holistic New Age medicine. This study will present data from a wide range of sources-ayurvedic, philosophical and mytho-logical-that were earlier than or coeval with the Yoga Sutras, in sup-port of an argument that there were significant alternatives to such a 'closed' model of the mind-body complex. <...>
However, as Peter Schreiner has argued, and as I have attempted to demonstrate here, the earliest and most concrete conceptualisations of yoga cast it as a state of union out-side of the bodily envelope, following a death understood as a release from the human condition. Only later, but still at a relatively early point in the history of yoga as evidenced in the bulk of the Yoga Sutras and its commentaries, the term becomes psychologised and abstracted into a corpus of meditative techniques that are identified as 'classical yoga' today.
Having said this, the earlier 'open' model has not disappeared altogether: far from it. On the one hand, the great majority of descriptions of the subtle yogic body depict that body as extending beyond the contours of the gross flesh-and-blood body of the prac-titioner. In Hindu traditions, this extension is most commonly referred to as the dvadafanta, the 'end of the twelve', a point generally located twelve finger-breadths above the fontanel, the semi-permeable mem-brane that separates the cranial vault from the outside world.48 In many Hindu yogic and Tantric traditions, it is via the end of the twelve that the divine enters into the human body, and through which a yogin's exit from the body is effected.49 This is but an expan-sion on the insight of those early Upani~ads that linked the chan-nels of the yogic body to the rays of the sun, an expansion whose history begins, if we are to follow Paul Mus, with the celebrated Rigvedic 'Hymn of the Man' (10.90) and early Buddhist considera-tions of the Buddha's luminous cranial protuberance (~!lfsa).
The open body model, in addition to its instantiations in ayurvedic traditions, also undergirds the dynamics of initiation, in which the mind-stuff (citta) of the guru leaves his body to enter into and trans-form that of his disciple, before returning to the guru's own bodily envelope. It is also operative in the many, many Tantric accounts of the technique of parakayapravesa involving the 'hostile takeover' of another person's body by a tantric yogin. This, I would argue is the most perennial and pervasive understanding of yoga in South Asia: not the identification of the individual self with the universal Self in meditative isolation (kaiva[yam), but rather the yoking of the mind-body complex to an absolute located outside of the self-often behind the sun-or to that of other bodies, other selves, through networks of interlinked cosms.
Даже в его биографии в Вики приведена критика его работ другими, возможно, даже более уважаемыми в их среде, индологами:
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