{"id":3861,"date":"2014-05-26T13:35:29","date_gmt":"2014-05-26T18:35:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/?p=3861"},"modified":"2014-05-26T13:35:29","modified_gmt":"2014-05-26T18:35:29","slug":"the-yoga-sutras-and-the-red-violin-a-review-of-david-gordon-whites-new-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/the-yoga-sutras-and-the-red-violin-a-review-of-david-gordon-whites-new-book\/","title":{"rendered":"The Yoga Sutras and The Red Violin: a review of David Gordon White\u2019s New Book"},"content":{"rendered":"

Canadian director Fran\u00e7ois Girard\u2019s 1998 film \u201cThe Red Violin\u201d tells the fable of a miraculous instrument, crafted by one Nicolo Bussotti (a character modeled on Antonio Stradivari) that passes through the hands of several virtuosi over four centuries and three continents. Its rapturous tone beguiles generations of listeners. Several of its players die in ecstasy while playing it. Don McKellar\u2019s chronologically labyrinthine plot sweeps the violin towards a fateful auction in the present day, concealing to the very end the source of the violin\u2019s deadly mystique. Spoiler alert:\u00a0We learn in the final minutes that the blessing and curse of the instrument is apparently soaked into the very grain of its soundboard. Bussotti had been crafting the violin for his unborn child. As he\u2019s finishing the final sanding, he is summoned home to find that his wife has died in labour along with the baby. In abject grief, he bleeds her corpse to create a final vermillion varnish for the instrument, before going mad. The violin\u2019s power is rooted in this single terrible, revelatory night: so say these storytellers, who in uncovering the mystery play the taut strings of our yearning for an essence we dream we could rescue from the vrittis<\/em> of history.<\/p>\n

Now here\u2019s a true<\/em> story\u00a0about old things.\u00a0This past spring, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published the results<\/a> of double-blind test of old and new violins, performed at the Auditorium Coeur de Ville in Vincennes, Paris. Ten elite soloists compared the sound qualities of twelve instruments \u2013 six by 18th-century luthiers and six by contemporary makers. The soloists clearly preferred new instruments over old, and were unable to reliably distinguish their ages. These were the types of performers who might pursue a red violin to the ends of the earth. But the test proved that a violin\u2019s age or reputation does not create its tone. Playing it does.<\/p>\n

In a wildly entertaining tour-de-force of deconstructive research, David Gordon White\u2019s The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: A Biography<\/em><\/a> (Princeton University Press, released today), is an extended meditation on the red violin of modern Yoga, along with its most famous players. The Sutras have an uncertain beginning in the hands of a forgotten master. Countless pandits, commentators and dilettantes have played and brokered them, each according to their period and training. The Sutras have travelled the world on scrolls, folios, and now through pixels. They\u2019ve been copied, miscopied, translated, mistranslated, silenced and silent for generations, appropriated and stolen, dressed up for show and stripped down for parts. They have born silent witness to the passage of kings, religions, and philosophical and scientific paradigms. Everyone who touches them claims possession over their essence \u2013 the blood in the varnish. But no one can agree upon what that essence is. And like the ten soloists puzzling in their welder\u2019s goggles over equally beautiful instruments in a Paris concert hall, we are compelled to ask in the end: what do origins and authenticity mean, and why does it matter?<\/p>\n

I won\u2019t attempt to interrogate the breadth of White\u2019s scholarship in this review, because I\u2019m so not qualified \u2013 there are very few who are. But with notes<\/a> and a bibliography<\/a> so voluminous PUP opted to store them online, I\u2019ll assume that he\u2019s covered the available sources. Some may claim that an oral tradition for holding the essence and historical continuity of the Yoga Sutras<\/em> eludes White\u2019s reach, because it would only be accessible to initiated adepts, but I\u2019ll deal with that below. I\u2019ll focus in equal parts on the contours of his data, and what they may mean to the contemporary practitioner. I\u2019ll begin with a synopsis of the sutra \u201cbiography\u201d, give a list of idols that this history hollows out, wonder aloud what White actually feels about the \u201cblood in the varnish\u201d, and conclude with a few notions of what this deconstruction frees us up to do.<\/p>\n

W<\/span>\nhat are the Yoga Sutras<\/em>, and how did they get here, according to White?\u00a0Titled either as we know them, or as a part of a larger work called the Yoga Shastra <\/em>(228),<\/em>\u00a0the 195 aphorisms\u00a0are compiled in \u201cBuddhist Hybrid Sanskrit\u201d (10, 230) from as many as six sources (35) within a several century range straddling the Common Era by an editor who may or may not be a commentator on Panini\u2019s grammar or<\/em>\u00a0the serpent-boy lauded in the Shiva temple of Chidambram (37). Whether he was a scholar or a god impacts the reception of the Sutras as smriti<\/em> or sruti<\/em> (written or “heard”), which in turn would shed light on whether they were ever chanted or not. (40) The text has\u00a0often been thought to utilize the \u201colder\u201d vocabulary of Samkhya metaphysics, but it\u2019s becoming clearer that the two systems are chicken-and-egged (23), with the further complication that the sutra\u2019s first commentator, Vyasa \u2013 who may have been a) Patanjali himself (226-234), b) a contemporary of\u00a0the composition or c) could have written several centuries later to subvert the supposedly \u201cmore original\u201d Buddhist message of the text (41) \u2013 unduly emphasized Samkhya terms such as \u201cprakriti\u201d and \u201cpurusha\u201d (11), perhaps to the neglect of the more repeated Buddhist terms like \u201cshunya\u201d. Of course, “Vyasa” is a recurrent nom de plume<\/em> throughout Indian literature, so there’s also that.<\/p>\n

Spoiler alert 2: White wryly concludes the sleuthwork of the “origins” question this way:<\/p>\n

“[W]e can be certain of a number of things: that the book you have been reading is the reception history of a work that may or may not be titled the Yoga Sutra<\/em>; that the author of that work may or may not have been named Patanjali; and that that work may or may not have been the subject of an original and separate commentary by a person probably not named Vyasa.” (234)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So the first readings that survive for us are\u00a0riddled with mystery and misreading. We\u2019re off to the races, though the course is unmarked.<\/p>\n

The text is then commented upon by everyone, it seems, except practicing yogis. (5) A certain Shankara, who may be the precocious 9th-century theologian or<\/em> a post 14th<\/span>-century writer (41), Hinduizes the arguably atheistic aphorisms by\u00a0positioning the text\u2019s \u201cIshvara\u201d as the cosmic creator. Vacaspati (\u201cTalk-Meister\u201d) Mishra, 950CE, the despot Bhoja in the 11th\u00a0century, and finally the Qualified Nondualist Vijnanabhikshu in the 16th\u00a0<\/span>century each throw down strong\u00a0commentarial tracks. (42-45)<\/p>\n

But the text\u2019s shine is starting to dull. In the parallel literature of the Puranas through to the 14th\u00a0century, Yoga is mentioned, but the Sutras are largely ignored, and Patanjali is absent from the lineage lists (46), signifying his gradual isolation from a practice and literary culture increasingly concerned with \u201cVedic\u201d authenticity. White relates: \u201cwe can see that by the twelfth century, Patanjali\u2019s system had been caught in a pincer movement\u2026 rejected by orthodox Brahmins for being beyond the pale of the Vedas and by the burgeoning ranks of Hindu devotees of gods like Krishna, Vishnu and Shiva for being non-devotional.\u201d (52) Vijnanabhikshu\u2019s commentary would constitute the last interest paid to the book until the period of the British Raj.<\/p>\n

Did the Sutras go underground at that point? Were they kept alive in Himalayan caves, chanted from chest to chest? In response to the Desikachar family\u2019s shifting hagiographical claims (more below)\u00a0that T. M. Krishnamacharya inherited an ancient chanting practice for the Sutras (208), White has this to offer:<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is no explicit record, in either the commentarial tradition itself or in the sacred or secular literature of the past two thousand years, of adherents of the Yoga school memorizing, chanting, or claiming an oral transmission for their traditions.\u201d (80)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Full disclosure:<\/em> this stings me personally a bit, as I spent some time in my own exploration of the Sutras<\/a> riffing on the implications of what I assumed to be its oral culture milieu. My intention was to accentuate the intimacy and indeterminacy of the Sutras-as-conversation. But I didn\u2019t need to rely on this particular fiction, which I\u2019d inherited by osmosis from the Desikachar literature and also from sitting occasionally with a Toronto-based pandit who taught Patanjali as if he were echoing the ages. It turns out that Derrida was write: text can be just as indeterminate as speech, especially as far as the Sutras go.<\/p>\n

I<\/span>\nt\u2019s worth pausing to reflect on this historical lacuna for a moment and what it might mean to practitioners today. An essential (and essentialist) story in the marketing of Modern Postural Yoga (MPY) holds that Patanjali\u2019s text is carried by\u00a0a continuous flame through the ages, never snuffed out, but often hidden in such ways as to increase its radiance \u2013 as in the \u201cShangri-La\u201d of the Himalayas, \u201cthe pristine haunt of authentic sages in whose entranced minds all of India\u2019s ancient wisdom had survived intact.\u201d (99) White points out that this particular construction of authenticity, perennial to Indian lore, was shrewdly plucked and packaged for modern broadcast and consumption by the certifiable fraudulence of Madame Blavatsky and her gaggle of \u201cpolyglot clackers\u201d who claimed direct contact with \u201cHimalayan Masters\u201d over the \u201cmagnetosphere\u201d of Tibet, and through them channeled and churned out several very odd distortions of the Sutras as ignominy chased them all the way to India itself. (103-115)<\/p>\n

It’s worth\u00a0remembering that several prominent MPY lineages — one is tempted to say “brands” —\u00a0continue to be rooted in this story, on exquisite display\u00a0here<\/a>\u00a0as Pandit Rajmani Tiganuit leads the camera through a tour of the Himalayan Institute\u2019s new Sri Vidya shrine in Khajuraho.<\/p>\n

The temple, which is actually far south of the snowy peaks for which the Institute is named, is sparsely decorated. A\u00a0lonely portrait of Tiganuit\u2019s teacher, Swami Rama hangs in a room above an artificial cave containing a rock \u201cthat once existed in Tibet\u201d that Rama\u2019s teachers going back \u201cthousands of years\u201d have sat upon to meditate, according to Tiganuit. Front and centre in what appears to be the shrine\u2019s atrium are the Sutras, printed in bold Devanagri, mounted in four large picture frames, one for each pada I imagine. They are tablets worthy of Cecil B. DeMille.<\/p>\n

As the camera pans over the tablets, Tiganuit\u00a0weaves a now-common pastiche of sentiments inspired by the Sutras, yet seeming to have nothing to do with them:<\/p>\n

The shrine is unique in the sense that we don’t have a statue of a particular God or Goddess, but… the body of knowledge that continues to provide guidance and direction to mankind. That body of knowledge itself is at the core of the shrine. This is the epitome of what we teach, what we believe in. The shrine is a living example of the message of the sages, that we must create a bridge between ancient wisdom and modern science, between East and West, and we must remove the gap that exists between different cultures and civilizations, and we must learn to build a bridge between our worldly lives and our spiritual lives. And that is why here, we have Yoga Sutra of Patanjali…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It appears that the tablets\u00a0have full view of the newly constructed yajna pit that anchors the courtyard in polished concrete and tile. Lest we think that picking apart the knots of cultural exchange and appropriation in MPY will\u00a0be in any way easy, here we see a reconstructed Patanjali meet a revisioned\u00a0Vedism in a temple built by a transnational Yoga corporation, dedicated to an evangelizing Swami specializing in Hatha siddhis who was chased back to India by an impending State of Pennsylvania\u00a0lawsuit<\/a>\u00a0involving allegations of sexual predation.<\/p>\n

\"Rajmani<\/a>

Rajmani Tiganuit bowing before the Yoga Sutras in Khajuraho.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

The tour of\u00a0the Khajuraho shrine is a perfect figure for White\u2019s background summation the MPY melting pot:<\/p>\n

\u201cOver the past century, [Swami] Vivekananda\u2019s legacy [of creative bricolage] has prevailed in the yoga subculture, where teachers continue to confuse Yoga philosophy with Puranic, Hatha, and Tantric doctrines; to present western metaphysical and scientistic concepts in Indian trappings; to identify Yoga as a healing tradition; to assert the scientific foundations of Yoga; and to present Raja as the highest form of Yoga.\u201d (142)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I digress here because\u00a0whatever \u201csatya\u201d meant to Patanjali, for us it must in part mean this: history is complex, and we can stunt\u00a0each other psychically by pretending otherwise. Confabulation erects the hollowest authority, inevitably\u00a0eroding what it seeks to bolster. Truthfulness requires confessing that no one possesses the truth, or special access to it,\u00a0and that we must take responsibility for our creative additions\u00a0to the river of discourse, without passing them off as the blessings of perfected souls no one can see.\u00a0Myths can encourage and console, but we can pay dearly for them with our integrity.<\/p>\n

As a further aside, I’d say that satya in the practice of MPY additionally\u00a0requires a careful study of the facts of colonialism (and as Richard Freeman reportedly said of Pattabhi Jois\u2019 attitude \u2013 \u201creverse colonialism\u201d), the drives of orientalism both romantic and appropriative, reductionist mystification, reductionist commodification, and plain old human folly.<\/p>\n

F<\/span>\nollowing the three-century \u201cYoga desert\u201d (52) that White sifts through for\u00a0a thread that might connect Vijnanabhikshu to the present era, his story rolls into\u00a0the oak paneled studies of the early Orientalists — they used the named without shame — who were on contract to the British and French East India Companies to learn enough Sanskrit to construct a colonial law that didn\u2019t seem too foreign. Henry Thomas Colebrooke (1765-1837) collected thousands of shastras, of which only a tiny portion concern Yoga proper, and which seem to have been neglected by the traditional brahminical colleges of at least Benares at the time. This is reported by Colebrooke\u2019s colleague William Ward, who estimated that only five or six students out of one hundred thousand were actively studying the shad darshanas<\/em>. (72-3) This left Colebrooke in the dark when it came to getting educated help on his 1823 essay \u201cOn the Philosophy of the Hindus\u201d, which nonetheless produced a passable rendering of Samkhya and Yoga metaphysics. By and large,\u00a0he\u00a0was quite sympathetic to Indian philosophy, although he was highly critical of the magical-ascetic \u201cfanaticism\u201d he detected in Patanjali. (65)<\/p>\n

Early Indologists from abroad and India itself who were interested in Yoga would continue to be stymied by this lack of qualified support for their translation and commentarial efforts, so much so that every early aspiring translator, from James Ballantyne to Rajendral Mitra\u00a0to the Arya Samaj<\/a> founder Dayananda Saraswati \u2013 who wandered in search of Yogic help for nine years<\/em> \u2013 complained that no one in India knew Yoga anymore. (73,112) White summarizes the mood:<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2026[W]e may conclude that Colebrookes\u2019 laconic, if not hostile, treatment of the Yoga Sutra undoubtedly stemmed from the fact that by his time, Patanjali\u2019s system had become an empty signifier, with no formal or informal outlets of instruction in its teachings. It had become a moribund tradition, an object of universal indifference.\u201d (80)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

White had me at \u201cempty signifier<\/a>\u201d, for to me satya these days also means reading the heritage of Yoga with all of the post-structuralist rigour we can muster. I only wondered once at White\u2019s commitment here \u2013 in his discussion of the wonderful find of Bengali scholar Rajendral Mitra\u2019s 1883 translation of the Sutras. Long out of print, with only a few extant copies available, White finds reading the microfilm a \u201crevelation\u201d(93), and offers Mitra’s\u00a0elegant synopsis of the Sutras\u2019 arguments in seventeen bullet points, introducing them with \u201cOne only wishes that Patanajali had presented his system in the same way, since it would have made the Yoga Sutra<\/em> far more accessible.\u201d (95)<\/p>\n

This is as close as White comes, I think, to romancing the blood in the varnish. His praise of Mitra\u2019s work almost<\/em> seems to transcend an appreciation for sharp scholarship into an implicit belief that the Sutras do<\/em> have a clear message that can be recovered by the sincere specialist. I can understand the impulse\u00a0arising in someone sifting through as much bunk as White has had to, and feeling he has\u00a0found a rare comrade-in-clarity in a figure like Mitra. But it raises the question, not so much for White as for the entire discipline: does the identification of something as \u201cPatanjali Yoga\u201d as a category of study, and the seeking out of the best and rarest<\/em> sources for that category, naturally beguile a\u00a0scholar into imagining implied<\/em> essences, even as he or she is describing the thing-in-itself as a herd of cats? The Sutras are an unstable collection of verses compiled over centuries by nameless people in forgotten places and frozen into folios by the accidents of text production. Can we resist the desire to hunt\u00a0the blood in the varnish?<\/em><\/p>\n

L<\/span>\nooping back to White\u2019s introduction is a good way of introducing the truly modern era of Sutra-brokerage that accompanies the rise of MPY, beginning with the reconstructions of Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902):<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the wake of this long hiatus, the \u201crecovery\u201d that followed the text\u2019s rediscovery was a tortured process, generating much sound and fury, often signifying nothing, as its many modern interpreters projected their fantasies, preconceptions, hopes, dreams, and personal agendas onto Pantanjali\u2019s work in unprecendented ways. As a result, the Yoga Sutra<\/em> has been something of a battered orphan for the better part of the last two centuries, often abused by well-meaning or not-so-well-meaning experts and dilettantes, mystics and pragmatists, reformers and reactionaries who have seized upon it as a source of political, intellectual, or symbolic capital.\u201d (16-17)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Whatever category of expertise\u00a0we assign to Vivekananda, he clearly seized the Sutras with one well-meaning and one opportunistic hand. Let it be known that the Swami\u00a0hammered out his translation and commentary on the text, to be published in 1896 under the title of Raja Yoga<\/em>, in less than six months<\/em>, while living in New York, with no support from scholarly peers or practitioners. White has even combed through Vivekananda\u2019s book-order receipts to discern whether he\u2019d acquired any extant sutra commentaries, and found none. \u201c[I]t appears that he did a great deal of free associating in his work, relying on his own extensive background knowledge of the Puranas, Indian philosophy…\u201d to produce not a translation, but a \u201cparaphrase\u201d. (127) But the Swami didn\u2019t stop there with his creativity. He freely injected his influences: Neo-Vedanta, the mesmeric backwash from his arm\u2019s-length relationship to the Theosophists, Western scientism and the pseudo-scientific language of Western spiritualism. White:<\/p>\n

\u201c…[Raja Yoga<\/em>] was, at bottom, a self-help book grounded in Western<\/em> esotericism, but because it was the work of an Indian, its Western readership read it as an authentic work of Eastern<\/em> philosophy, on the \u2018Science of Yoga\u2019\u2026 (125)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As an aside, MPY practitioners should know that positioning Yoga as \u201cscience\u201d, as a focal point of Vivekananda\u2019s presentation, carried with it the anti-colonialist goals of Indian-renaissance movements like the Brahmo Samaj<\/a>, of which he was a central figure prior to meeting with Ramakrishna in 1884. Claiming Yoga as a science that can challenge Eurocentric “secularist” epistemology is now a more than a pro-Indian theme of cultural unification: it is a dominant note of contemporary Hindutva worldview, and global practitioners who sing it may be unconsciously allying themselves with a politics they would otherwise reject.<\/p>\n

None of Vivekananda\u2019s creative excesses trouble me. White makes clear that the remixing of Patanjali dates back to Vyasa (or Patanjali-as-Vyasa), and that the red violin has patiently borne everyone\u2019s music and playing style. What is now intolerable, however, is the lack of transparency<\/em>\u00a0in the interpretive community. Almost nobody is transparent in the commentarial history. Shankara never explicitly mentions his Advaita agenda, Vijnanabhikshu does not confess his devotionalism. Colebrooke and the Orientalists were painfully unaware of their reductions. Hegel is out to Romantic lunch: \u201c\u2026the first,\u201d writes White, \u201cin a long line of dilettantes, both Western and Indian, who have interpreted the Yoga Sutra<\/em> on the basis of little or no understanding as means to furthering their own agendas.\u201d (91) In the present day, I\u2019m only aware of Chip Hartranft and Edwin Bryant making their positions transparent as Buddhist and Vaisnava, respectively. \u201cGeshe\u201d Michael Roach, by contrast, doesn\u2019t bother to reveal that his entire \u201ctranslation\u201d effort is a front for his New Age Neo-Buddhist ideology.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not surprising: the notion of engaging transparently from one\u2019s positionality<\/a> is the\u00a0contemporary innovation of feminism and cultural anthropology. But at this point I\u2019d say Yoga interpreters are compelled to take it on as a new standard for engagement. Never again in either the soft or hard sciences (even labworkers must make full disclosure of their funding today) will any argument about anything be taken seriously if it is unaware of its positionality: its biases and limitations, its in-group or out-group status, its privilege. This self-reflexivity is not a postmodern fad. It is the very heart of intellectual honesty today.<\/p>\n

Had these thoughts been clearer to me when working on my own remix of the Sutras, I would have incorporated them into my growing list of revisionist meanings for satya as well. Satya today can\u2019t just mean telling the \u201ctruth\u201d as you see it, but must include telling the deeper truth about what is at stake for you in speaking at all<\/em>. No one can be fully transparent, meaning: we have an unconscious. And we must even be transparent about that. How can we hope to\u00a0practice meditation if we ignore this?<\/p>\n

L<\/span>\neaving\u00a0Vivekananda, White strolls through the fascinating territory of Islamic commentaries on Patanjali (143-158), and a mini-history of the term \u201cIshvara\u201d as a site of sectarian scuffles that will never be resolved (172-181). I\u2019ll let you all dive into those sections of this required-reading book, and head into the home stretch with a list of the wrecked myths bobbing in the wake of White\u2019s cutter:<\/p>\n

The Yoga Sutras<\/em> has no stable textual tradition and no stable oral tradition. There is no lineage of continuous respect for the document itself within Indian philosophical and religious discourse. It’s highly unlikely that the Himalayan preserve harbors a cabal of Patanjalian rishis. Vivekananda had no more access to the Sutras than the non-Indian Orientalists did, and far less than we do. But it\u2019s with White\u2019s penultimate chapter, \u201cThe Strange Case of T. M. Krishnamacharya\u201d that the grit\u00a0of human desire and grandiosity starts to really\u00a0scratch\u00a0the patina of the modern Yoga myth.<\/p>\n

White’s choice to round up the biography of a text with the biography of a man is both a formal delight and an existential hint. We get to see how the life of the MPY founder is cloaked in as much indeterminacy as his allegedly favourite book is. We get to see\u00a0that the confabulations we foist onto texts are the mirrors of what we foist onto people.\u00a0He begins with a generalized collation of the five authorized\u00a0biographies — “one is tempted to say hagiographies” — White\u00a0politely interjects (197), four of which are written by his son T.K.V. Desikachar and grandson Kausthub, with the other penned by another long-term student, A.G. Mohan. Then,\u00a0with the same dharana he applied to his initial assumptions about the\u00a0Yoga Sutras (<\/em>in the Preface,\u00a0White\u00a0confesses that he expected the text to be supported by an unbroken line of gurus [xv]), he meticulously shreds\u00a0the Desikachar stories to bits. Chronological and thematic inaccuracies between the four family bios, written between 1982 and 2005, reveal Krishnamacharya as the inscrutable hero\u00a0of a family creating its own Purana. They are certainly not to blame, for in addition to\u00a0the grandfather’s shifting oral remembrances\u00a0through the years, he left his family with only eleven written pages (198) of autobiographical notes for them to weave the best story they could, and perhaps, unconsciously, the best story they imagined the world needed to hear about the genesis of MPY.<\/p>\n

Amidst the chaos of disagreeing dates, impossible meetings with pandits, and surprisingly\u00a0scant\u00a0evidence that Krishnamacharya was very knowledgable or enamoured of the Sutras at all (201-202),\u00a0a pattern begins to emerge as the dates of the biographies progress. As the details of the grandfather’s knowledge and exploits are enriched, so is the centrality of the Yoga Sutras\u00a0<\/em>to his story and teaching. The importance of the book blossoms alongside the grandeur of the man.<\/p>\n

Why is this so? White alludes to\u00a0(211-212) something that I can confirm\u00a0from my own\u00a0contact with people who were committed to learning with the Desikachar family.\u00a0I know that through the 1990s, chanting the Sutras was becoming a curricular mainstay of their growing international school, proving effective for group adhesion and for projecting the image of distinguished study, a living link to the past, and a mythical echo of Vedic orality. I remember buying lifelong Desikachar student Sonia Nelson’s beautiful tutorial<\/a> on CD in about 2005 — it had been published in 2002 — and I spent many happy hours chanting along, contemplating the verses, and attuning myself to the\u00a0fiction that I was doing some very ancient and authentic thing.<\/p>\n

I imagine I was feeling only the faintest shadow\u00a0that T.K.V. and Kausthub felt as they listened to the old man. White quotes the elder Desikachar, from 1998:<\/p>\n

When I chanted with my father, I was bound to him and his teachings in a unique fashion, just as in his chanting he was once again linked to his own teacher — and so it stretches back through many centuries of teachers… In our tradition, when we chant, we unite with God, who gave us the language, the practice of Yoga, and the wisdom of the Vedas. (214)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

How couldn’t the son and grandson write a myth coherent with the old man’s vision? They are writing about listening to their father sing to them.<\/em> This means that there are much more important things than facts being exchanged. In his\u00a0endnotes to\u00a0Coming Through Slaughter<\/em>, a 1976 novel about the virtuoso jazz saxophonist Buddy Bolden, Michael Ondaatje writes:<\/p>\n

There have been some date changes, some characters brought together, and some facts have been expanded or polished to suit the truth of fiction.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

White\u00a0winds down the myth-busting\u00a0by trying fruitlessly to reconcile the various bits of lore\u00a0regarding Krishnamacharya’s relationship to his “trans-Himalayan Yoga master” (198) Ramamohana Brahmacari. To start, the biographers\u00a0say Brahmacari was in Tibet, but the grandfather himself puts him in Nepal. White\u00a0then shows that in order for\u00a0biographers to allow for this student-teacher relationship to flourish within any workable timeline, they had to propose a non-sensical walking-route for the grandfather that would have forced him to cover hundreds of miles over the “most rugged terrain in the world” (220) in order to squeeze out a few months\u00a0of contact with the teacher over the claimed seven-year apprenticeship (221) in which he was instructed in 700 asanas. (208) And there are other unlikelihoods. In about four and a half pages, White calls into grave question the central prop of\u00a0Krishnamacharya’s authority: the story of his access to “the last authentic yogi on the planet.” (212)<\/p>\n

Throughout his analysis, White manages to avoid disparaging the integrity of the family biographers or\u00a0diminishing Krishnamacharya’s profound contributions to MPY. But he does end his chapter, curiously, with a paragraph that begins: “Here it is useful to compare these reconstructions of Krishnmacharya’s life with that of Hariharananda Aranya, his elder by twenty years.” (223) White relates Aranya’s\u00a0seemingly more stable biography, along with\u00a0his\u00a0publishing record, which shows\u00a0granular familiarity with the Sutras. White\u00a0ends his chapter on Krishnamacharya by praising Aranya for being an “authentic scholar-practitioner.” (224) This seems to be\u00a0about the classiest way of calling bullshit a generous scholar could possibly\u00a0manage.<\/p>\n

A<\/span>\nfter this whole journey — textual, literal, and imagined — what is left of the Yoga Sutras <\/em>and the men who have brokered them? I\u2019m reminded of the opening to Lynn Hejinian\u2019s book of poetry called My Life<\/em>: \u201cA pause, a rose, something on paper.\u201d I\u2019m reminded of the end of the Diamond Sutra<\/em>. The Buddha says: \u201ca star at dawn, a bubble in a stream, a flash of lightning in a summer cloud, a flickering lamp, a phantom and a dream.\u201d In our homes we have\u00a0dried flowers\u00a0and old photographs. We have notes from lectures taken years ago about books written millennia ago. We have\u00a0paperbacks on dusty shelves that may never be read again. We have impulses, intuitions, sparks of insight — all of them hurtling into the past — and we work with these.<\/p>\n

Despite the politics, posturing, and showmanship, these dried leaves are all we have ever had, and working with them in the humility of uncertainty offers a peculiar grace.\u00a0White\u2019s account, for all of its swashbuckling, is also a quiet\u00a0work of\u00a0second-order religiosity<\/a>. There is a certain austere nobility in\u00a0pursuing the\u00a0trace<\/a>, in suspecting that something has gone missing forever, or that an ideal perhaps never existed. Creativity arises as the best response to\u00a0the\u00a0metaphysics of disenchantment.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s good to be relieved of the burden of thinking there’s something we’re not\u00a0living up to. Amidst\u00a0the Yoga scholarship of David White, Mark Singleton, Norman Sjoman, Elizabeth De Michelis, and so many others, there are no Yoga metanarratives left standing. Ultimately this means we also cannot\u00a0doubt the value of our own participation in the ongoing creation of whatever Yoga is or will be. We might even\u00a0use White’s work to reclaim<\/em> the un-self-reflexive patterns of past commentators as permission to transparently create<\/em>. This\u00a0might free us\u00a0to read Hatha literature through psychoanalysis and neuroscience, and the Gita through Marxist theory. Would\u00a0these readings be substantially\u00a0different from earlier\u00a0misreadings or politicizations of the Sutras?<\/p>\n

What\u00a0is Yoga now? Not a single unified tradition that the contemporary global practitioner\u00a0can point to, unless we want to continue to glorify fictions or prop up charismatics. Yoga is more like an approach or attitude, a periodic response to cultural and psychic stress. It\u2019s an interdisciplinary,\u00a0open-eyed\u00a0response to whatever is given. Yoga\u00a0takes the categories of ethics, breath, movement and contemplation and breaks down the barriers between them. It generalizes an efficient approach to creative and resilient living. \u201cYoga shows up\u201d as my friend Michael Stone likes to say, \u201cwherever the dominant paradigm is failing.\u201d<\/p>\n

How does it show up? Maybe like a red violin at a high-priced auction, a university rummage sale, or abandoned on the luggage carousel at the airport. You can tell any story you want about it, but it will remain silent until you play, cultivating sincerity and detachment as you\u00a0practice for a long time, using whatever skill you bring. A sign that you\u2019re really playing it might be that you don\u2019t care who made it, or how old it is, but you’re aware of and grateful for the countless actions, random and purposeful, that brought it your way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a wildly entertaining tour-de-force of deconstructive research, David Gordon White\u2019s The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: A Biography (Princeton University Press, released today), is an extended meditation on the red violin of modern Yoga. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3881,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"slim_seo":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,23,24,1,19,28],"tags":[329,330,141,331,50,193],"class_list":["post-3861","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles","category-blog","category-featured","category-uncategorized","category-yoga","category-yoga-philosophy","tag-biography","tag-david-gordon-white","tag-patanjali","tag-swami-vivekananda","tag-yoga","tag-yoga-sutras"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3861","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3861"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3861\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3881"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3861"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3861"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3861"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}