The Light consisting of OM: James Mallinson Ph.D. Sanskrit scholar yogi

I'm watching the JourneyMan Doc on netflix: Naga: The Eternal Yogi: 2016 - on the Nath tradition.

James Mallinson did his Ph.D. thesis on Kechari Mudra

Mallinson demonstrating Kechari mudra

 he's written a detailed expose on how the Nath tradition was not an official order until after it had incorporated the Vedic influences - and then not until the early 20th century. Mallinson first went to India at age 17 and focused on the Sadhus, and returned back to India every year since then; and initiated with a guru who became a celibate sadhu from age 10. His guru was claimed to have been 250 years old.

Mallinson has discovered that the first texts on yoga meditation are Buddhist and not Hindu-tantric. It's not that Hatha Yoga is from Tibetan Buddhism just that Tibetan Buddhists were the first to write texts on the subject. In Hatha Yoga, the goal is Yoga and the method is Hatha. It's first incarnation was as visualization meditation of the chakras. Hatha is actually Ha (Sun) tha (moon) Yoga (union) i.e. alchemy (traced to a 14th Century Naga yoga text (56 mns). And only later did it become physically oriented. Mallinson on Dharana, chakra, elements, Dhyana samadhi

Earth element is the heart - this is also true of the oldest Daoist alchemy tradition (instead of fire - just as the heart is dragon and the lower tan t'ien is dragon). the Throat is water as the half moon - and fire is the pallet of the mouth, and air is between the eye brows, space (ether) is the top of the skull as Brahma. Meditate on Brahma as made of light - a light consisting of OM, that is the luminous Jnana. When the kundalini joins the SELF she exits through the sockets of the eyes. This subtle jnana of the bindu (OM) is to be kept secret.

James Mallinson - only Westerner initiated as a Mahant of the Sadhus - the first westerner to receive the honour

  a cross between an abbot and a brigadier - the first time a westerner has received this honour in this ancient order of master yogis. The position is permanent and requires James to attend every Mela to give a feast

BBC 4 doc youtube - West meets East on James Mallinson - at largest gathering of humans as festival on Earth - 100 million people

Curiously we have this normative Brahmin text and they put this stages of life thing, the 4 stages with sannaysa at the end, you live your life and then ...that's seen as being the wrong thing to do by these sadhus. They respect much more highly someone who has become a sadhu as a child and then particularly boys, if they've never had sex before that's a great thing and putting them on a higher level. So it's kind of a reverse. If someone were to walk out on a family and become a sadhu, that seen as really bad and not seen as a higher calling.

Mallinson on the Nath tradition

Mallinson lectures at Oxford on yoga

Roots of Yoga - Mallinson on youtube

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/254332/roots-of-yoga/ His 2017 book.

More of his publications

I had one of my sisters tell me she was about to go to a yoga class and then realized it was so easy she could just do it as home. But this just referred to some basic stretching exercises. Not real yoga that is based on meditation - as this research on yoga emphasizes (BBC interview).

So "Downward Dog" is actually from an 18th Century pose of an Elephant!!

haha. Hilarious.

And so Mallinson reveals in this BBC interview how modern yoga classes are actually based on the eugenics movement of the 1920s - from Scandinavian gymnastics - and so many of the "hatha" yoga moves are from - directly a training manual of the West.

Mallinson again - on youtube lecture on hatha yoga.

Here Dr. Mallinson comments on Professor David Gordon White's analysis of Patanjali Yoga Sutra

I haven’t read David’s book but I’d be very surprised if he says that. I think there is an ancient, predominantly oral yoga practice tradition that it is quite separate from Patañjali (which has always been the intellectuals’ yoga, not the yogis’ yoga). And I disagree with David’s claim (which I heard him make at last year’s Vienna conference) that Patañjali falls into obscurity in medieval and early modern India. I would argue quite the opposite. Yoga (by which here I mean the intellectual tradition that sees Patañjali as its source) only becomes orthodox in India in the 13th century, when it is first included in the six darśanas. The PYŚ is there in the background in most of the early (11th-15th century) haṭha texts and over the course of the 16th-19th centuries there is a succession of texts in which haṭha and pātañjala yogas are integrated (Jason Birch has done a fair bit of work on these).

And Professor White responds:

I have known Jim for over twenty years, going back to his grad student days when I helped him locate and reproduce manuscripts of the Khecari Vidya for his PhD dissertation. More recently, I invited him to contribute to the collective volume, Yoga in Practice, which I edited for Princeton University Press in 2011. Some of the Sanskrit in the piece he contributed, the Goraksa Sataka, was problematic, and I gave him some suggestions on how to translate some of its passages.
Jim’s posting on this and other websites concerning my scholarship has been unprofessional and uncollegial. It is inappropriate to state that one disagrees with the thesis of a book one has not yet read. It is also inappropriate to invoke the philological aptitude of a colleague when the book one is commenting on has no discussions of Sanskrit philology, and to then direct readers of one’s posting to a review of another book on a different topic.
I skyped Jim a few days back, and we had a good conversation. He agreed with me that this posting was inappropriate, and apologized for having done so. I accepted his apology and I am certain we will remain close.

James Mallinson on academia with a review of White's earlier book: Sinister Yogis

 Mallinson basically states White has mischaracterized yoga although in the tantric tradition the powers or siddhis of spiritual ego are the main goal, in contrast to liberation achieved through meditation.

And so Mallinson points out that the Nath Order got conflated with the Nagas of the Vedic tradition - even though the Nath Order was never militarized initially.

Another anthropology book says their commonality is the most important tenet to maintain constant sacred fire (tapas or tummo).

Mallinson on international yoga day youtube

School of Oriental and African Studies - University of London -

https://www.soas.ac.uk/southasia/research/hatha-yoga-project/

Hatha Yoga project has a team of some 20 experts on Indian yoga ancient texts - youtube

https://www.soas.ac.uk/blogs/study/yoga-james-mallinson-research/

From Tapas to Hard Yoga - History of Asanas youtube

So the fixedness of the austerities in Puren-Puri's list is illustrative of the key difference between Pre-Modern and modern Yoga. In pre-modern yoga, Motionlessness is key to postural practice. Where as can been seen in yoga studios throughout the world, modern yoga often involves flowing sequences. Flying in the face of the implications of sedentariness of the word Asana - indeed one of the first Sanskrit texts to teach repetitiveness motions calls such practices Chadanas as opposed of Asanas.

 https://www.yooying.com/hathayogaproject