The body in early Hatha Yoga
by Ruth Westoby | 2024 | 112,229 words
This page relates ‘Genealogy of Kundalini: eightfold in Samkhya’ of study dealing with the body in Hatha Yoga Sanskrit texts.—This essay highlights how these texts describe physical practices for achieving liberation and bodily sovereignty with limited metaphysical understanding. Three bodily models are focused on: the ascetic model of ‘baking’ in Yoga, conception and embryology, and Kundalini’s affective processes.
Go directly to: Footnotes.
Genealogy of Kuṇḍalinī: eightfold in Sāṃkhya
As in previous chapters I explore antecedent literatures to explicate the metaphysically taciturn haṭha corpus. In this chapter that work is a genealogy of kuṇḍalinī as pralayatrix in śaiva literature. Before turning to the śaiva sources, we find referents for haṭha’s eightfold kuṇḍalinī in sāṃkhya. Sāṃkhya is an obvious place to look: literally meaning ‘relating to number’ it develops prakṛti as a core metaphysical concept. Through reference to sāṃkhya we see that kuṇḍalinī’s eightfold nature relates to material and cognitive elements (tattvas). The early first millennium proto-sāṃkhya Bhagavadgītā identifies Kṛṣṇa’s eightfold nature as the five elements or bhūtas plus manas, ahaṃkāra and buddhi.[1] The extant orthodoxy on sāṃkhya, the mid-fourth century Sāṃkhyakārikā has a seven plus one schema which may be the dispositions (bhāvas) or modes (rūpas) of prakṛti (karikā 63).[2] There are references to eight in the commentaries on the fourth-or fifth-century Pātañjalayogaśāstra, the ‘explanation’ (pravacana) of sāṃkhya according to its own colophons, with a discussion on embodied and disembodied stages of bodily dissolution—but no discussion of kuṇḍalinī. The Pātañjalayogaśāstra has a discussion of beings without bodies or merged in prakṛti and the Pātañjalayogaśāstra commentator Gauḍapāda gives the eight as pradhāna, buddhi, ahaṃkara and five tanmātras.[3] This evidence neither gives us a definitive list of eight nor of course links these directly to kuṇḍalinī, yet importantly these sets of eight encompass a cognitive and material range from the sense of self to the five elements.
Somewhat tenuously including the Yogavāsiṣṭḥa in this treatment of sāṃkhya sources, it defines the ‘city of eight’ (puryaṣṭaka) as eightfold—which may be the same eight as identified by Gauḍapāda. The Yogavāsiṣṭha is a reworking of the tenth-century Mokṣopaya and tells the story of Cūḍālā and Śikhidhvaja in which kuṇḍalinī plays a role in the enlightenment experience of Cūḍālā, studied at length in Funes (2017) and Cohen (2020, 2023). Kuṇḍalinī is named as the ‘city of eight’ (puryaṣṭaka) and is the supreme power of life (jīvaśakti anuttama) (Yogavāsiṣṭḥa 81.4)[4], an epithet used for kuṇḍalinī in the haṭha corpus. Funes notes that the ‘citadel of eight’ refers to the eight elements that compose the subtle body: five subtle elements (tanmātras), ego (ahaṃkāra), capacity for thought (manas) and intellect (buddhi) (2017:8n23).
Thus, the three categories of mind, intelligence and ego are generally stable across these sources, though Larson has an alternative series of eight in relation to the Sāṃkhyakārikā and Gauḍapāda iterates pradhāna alongside intelligence and ego in relation to the Pātañjalayogaśāstra. There is wider variance on the referents of the remaining five categories: the Bhagavadgītā lists the five elements, the Sāṃkhyakārikā lists the five groups of five according to Burley yet only the ‘subtle’ elements (tanmātras) according to Gauḍapāda on the Pātañjalayogaśāstra and Funes on the Yogavāsiṣṭha.
Contextualising kuṇḍalinī’s eightfold nature in relation to sāṃkhya demonstrates her ontological range, part of which are the material five elements. This disrupts an understanding of kuṇḍalinī as an aspect of the ‘yogic body’ as mesocosmic or cartographic device mediating between the mind and body, each posited in dualistic separation. Further this disrupts reading kuṇḍalinī and the ‘yogic body’ as immaterial subtle body. Instead, because kuṇḍalinī and the body are both characterised as composed of the elements they share this bodily materiality. In turn, now there is a logic to the body and kuṇḍalinī being affected by bodily practices. My heretofore implicit rationale is that the body must be grounded in materiality to be affected by physical practices. Ascribing this material domain also to kuṇḍalinī brings her into the logic of material practice.
I now turn to the śaiva sources to continue the exploration of the number eight and look more comprehensively at tantric precursors for the pralayatrix concept.
Footnotes and references:
[1]:
[2]:
Sāṃkhyakārikā 63 rūpaiḥ saptabhir eva tu badhnāty ātmānam ātmanā prakṛtiḥ sai’va ca puruśārthaṃ prati vimocayaty ekarūpeṇa | (Larson 2001:274). Here prakṛti binds herself by herself with the use of seven forms and liberates herself by one form for the sake of each puruṣa. The text itself does not clarify what these forms are, and there is a divergence of opinion as to what they refer. Burley notes that the eight forms (rūpas) are usually assumed to be ‘dispositions’ (bhāvas) that have a role in determining the process of rebirth and one’s present life (Burley 2007:177, 204n25). The Sāṃkhyakārikā however uses the term rūpa not bhāva. Burley argues that they are equally likely to be modes of prakṛti divided into the categories of avyakta (the unmanifest), buddhi, ahaṃkāra, manas, buddhīndriyas, karmendriyas, tanmātras, and the bhūtas (2007:204n25). Larson gives the eight bhāvas as dharma, adharma, jñāna, ajñāna, virāga, rāga, aiśvarya and anaiśvarya. He explains that they determine the process of rebirth and the quality of the current life and relate to the fifty components called the pratyayasarga or ‘intellectual creation’ (2001:239). This is likely to be associated with the fifty phonemes of the alphabet linked with kuṇḍalinī in the śaiva material discussed below. Thanks to Burley for providing me with these references, personal communication, 26 May 2021.
[3]:
According to the Pātañjalayogaśāstra, for those who are unembodied and those who are merged in matter, the state of samprajñāta is characterised by absorption in states of prakṛti (YS 1.19) (Bryant 2015:73). The subtle states of prakṛti, the bhāvas, are taken by Vācaspati Miśra to be ignorance (avidyā), by Vijñānabhikṣu as birth and by Bhoja Rāja as saṃsāra. Rāmānanda Sarasvatī considers these individuals to be those who, after the dissolution of their gross bodies, remain in a state of existence devoid of the traditional bodily sheaths (Bryant 2015:75). The commentators hold that beings who are unembodied (videhas) or merged in matter (prakṛtilaya) are ‘two types of quasi-perfected yogīs who do not have gross physical bodies but exist on some other level within prakṛti’ (Bryant 2015:73). Vyāsa and Vācaspati Miśra identify the videhas as celestial beings. The prakṛtilayas are considered by the commentators, ‘to refer to entities who consider themselves to be either unmanifest, primordial prakṛti herself, or buddhi, the first evolute from prakṛti, or the second evolute ahaṅkāra, or even the tanmātras, five subtle elements’ following Sāṃkhya Kārikā 45, ‘where the state of prakṛti-laya in question is held to come from vairāgya, nonattachment (I.15)’ (Bryant 2015:74). Gauḍapāda’s commentary on this verse states: ‘One might have vairāgya but without knowing the 24 evolutes of prakṛti. This state, which is founded on ignorance, is… prakṛti-layānām. At death, such a person is not liberated, but is merged into the eight evolutes of prakṛti—pradhāna, intelligence, ego and the five subtle elements. From there, he returns again to saṃsāra’ (Bryant 2015:74-75). Gauḍapāda here refers to the ‘subtle elements’ (tanmātras) of sound (śabda), touch (sparśa), form (rūpa), taste (rasa) and smell (gandha) rather than the ‘gross elements’ (mahābhūtas) of earth, water, wind, fire and space.