The Science of Yoga

erected a mud wall to seal off the improvised cell from the outside world.
    The building was judged to have no hole that could admit air, and no passageway through which food could pass. Sentries kept watch day and night. A senior officerof the court came by periodically to check on security and report back to the maharajah.
    The interment lasted forty days and forty nights—a period that, from biblical times, has stood for completeness and unbroken cycles. Then the king rode up on an elephant, dismounted before his assembled court, and surveyed the results.
    The linen bag looked mildewed, as if it had lain undisturbed for a long time. The yogi’s legs and arms proved to be cold, stiff, and shriveled, his skin pale. No pulse could be detected.
    Then his eyes opened.
    The yogi’s body convulsed violently. His nostrils flared. A faint heartbeat could now be heard. After a few minutes, his eyes dilated. His color returned.
    Seeing the king nearby, the yogi asked in a low, barely audible voice, “Do you believe me now?”
    Yoga in centuries past was a mystic wonderland in which the practices differed from our own in ways that ranged from the mundane to the almost unimaginable. Take instruction. It was done in private rather than in classes. More important, relatively few women did yoga. That was understandable given the chauvinistic leanings of old societies. The most radical difference centered on the lifestyles of the men.
    Yogis were often vagabonds who engaged in ritual sex or showmen who contorted their bodies to win alms—even while dedicating their lives to high spirituality. The Punjab yogi was no exception. Chroniclers report that he always did his burial feats “for good compensation,” as one put it. After surviving his forty-day interment, he was presented with a pearl necklace, gold bracelets, pieces of silk, and shawls of a kind “usually conferred by the Princes of India on persons of distinction.”
    Yogis were as much gypsies as circus performers. They read palms, interpreted dreams, and sold charms. The more pious often sat naked—their beards uncut and hair matted—and smeared themselves with ashes from funeral pyres to emphasize the body’s temporality.
    The Kanphata yogis, a large sect, had reputations as child snatchers. To obtain new members, they would adopt orphans and, when the opportunity arose, buy or steal children. Understandably, good families dreaded their presence. At times, bands of yogis would prey on trade caravans and descend onmerchants to extort food and money. When hired as guards, violent orders formed what we would now call protection rackets.
    Some yogis smoked ganja and ate opium. Some carried begging bowls. A few were surely saints. But British officialdom as well as educated Indians came to resent the holy men as not only potentially dangerous but as economic drains on society. A British census summed up the condescension tartly by putting yogis under the heading “miscellaneous and disreputable vagrants.”
    No small part of the disrepute centered on sex. Spiritually, the objective of the yogi was to achieve a blissful state of consciousness in which the male and female aspects of the universe merged into a realization of oneness. That union (the word “yoga” means union) resulted in enlightenment. But a main path was sexual ecstasy—a veiled part of the agenda that modern research has recently uncovered. David Gordon White, one of the field’s preeminent scholars, who teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara, noted in a 2006 book that the ancient yogis sought a divine state of consciousness “homologous to the bliss experienced in sexual orgasm.”
    The path to the ecstatic union was known as Tantra. Hugely popular, it rejected the caste system, pulled in converts by the cartload, and gave rise to religious authorities who wrote thousands of texts and commentaries. It reveled in magic, sorcery, divination, ritual worship (especially of goddesses), cultic rites of passage, and sacred sexuality.
    In the West, Tantra is best known as an originator of sexual rites. And rites there were—enough to raise protests from the Hindu and Buddhist orthodoxy of the day. The main charge was that Tantrics indulged in sexual debauchery under the pretext of spirituality.
    So too the Punjab yogi, a good Tantric. As his reputation rose, his behavior became so bad that the maharajah considered throwing him out of the kingdom. But the yogi left of his own accord.