Aryana Libris

Author : Rosen Richard
Title : Original Yoga Rediscovering traditional practices of Hatha Yoga
Year : 2012

Link download : Rosen_Richard_-_Original_Yoga.zip

Introduction. The Time Has Come to Talk of Many Things LET ME BEGIN by saying something about what I mean by “original yoga.” Your immediate thought might be that what I’m presenting is a brand-new style of yoga, something original I’ve dreamed up that will join the ever-lengthening lineup of modern schools. But no, what’s going on here is just the opposite. The original yoga I’ll be talking about first is, as the book’s subtitle suggests, traditional Hatha Yoga, which emerged around 900 C.E., give or take a couple of centuries in either direction. Of course, Hatha Yoga isn’t the original yoga, the yoga school that preceded all others. That distinction formally belongs to the system outlined in Patanjali’s Yoga-Sutra, compiled sometime between 200 B.C.E. and 200 C.E. But traditional Hatha Yoga does precede and is the “original” version of what we’ll call modern Hatha Yoga, which began taking shape in the early decades of the twentieth century. You may wonder why I’m making a distinction between traditional and modern Hatha Yoga. Isn’t it all the same? Surprisingly, the answer is a resounding no. First of all, traditional Hatha Yoga, as it was practiced in India between the tenth and nineteenth centuries, certainly didn’t stay the same all that time. If we compare the practice outlined in one of the school’s granddaddy instruction manuals - the mid-fourteenth-century Hatha-Yoga-Pradipika (Light on Hatha Yoga) - with that of one of its distant relatives - the late seventeenth-century Gheranda-Samhita (Gheranda’s Compendium) - we find quite a few significant differences, not the least being that asana plays a much more important role in the latter book. But if we put the Gheranda-Samhita alongside one of its contemporaries, the Shiva-Samhita (Shiva’s Compendium), we again find differences galore, such as the fact that asana is hardly mentioned at all in the latter. So first we need to recognize that the Hatha tradition isn’t carved in stone; over its thousand-year run, it went through any number of changes, just as all of us do as we grow older. Our first order of business will be to look at this tradition as it’s reflected in the three aforementioned books, taking the Gheranda-Samhita as our primary source backed up by the other two. I’ve chosen these three books because generally they’re the easiest to come by in English translation. But be sure you understand that there are plenty of other books in the Hatha tradition, some a lot older than the Hatha-Yoga-Pradipika, some a bit younger than the Gheranda-Samhita and Shiva-Samhita. Why do this at all, though? For the same reason many people look into their family’s history : to better understand our present by delineating our past. But what about the present? The changes the traditional practice went through over the centuries might be considered organic, common to any living organism’s natural evolution. What happened to Hatha Yoga in the early years of the twentieth century, by contrast, happened virtually overnight and was totally “person-made,” or artificial. The full story is too long to tell here and has already been masterfully recounted from slightly different perspectives by British researchers Elizabeth de Michelis in A History of Modern Yoga (Continuum, 2004) and Mark Singleton in Yoga Body (Oxford University Press, 2010; not to be confused with Judith Lasater’s book Yogabody). ...