The Science of Yoga

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. He did so with spirits high, eloping to the mountains with a young married woman.
    Over the centuries, Tantra underwent various degradations that reached their nadir with the Aghori—a cannibal sect that ate the flesh of human corpses, drank urine and liquor from human skulls, lived in cremation grounds and dunghills, and reviled all social convention, supposedly to court public disapproval as tests of humility. The primal ascetics also practiced ritual crueltyand seasonal orgies. Scholars of religion tend to avoid the gory details but do mention such things as an Aghori predilection for incest. In any event, the worst behaviors associated with Tantra were so extreme that the overall practice came to be condemned as a threat to society.
    Another way that old yoga differed from our own was its formulation of Hatha—or postural yoga. The principles were laid out in the Hatha Yoga Pradipika . The holy book of the fifteenth century represents the discipline’s earliest extant text.
    The book lavished attention on body parts that have nothing in common with the modern focus, including the penis, vagina, scrotum, and anus. Over and over, it recommended sitting postures meant to exert pressure on the perineum—the area between the anus and genitals that is sensitive to erotic stimulation. “Press the perineum with the heel of the foot,” the text advised. “It opens the doors of liberation.”
    Today, the term of art for a yoga posture is asana . But the word in Sanskrit actually means “seat”—harkening back more than a millennium to the days when postural yoga referred to nothing more complicated than sitting in a relaxed position for meditation. The Hatha Yoga Pradipika put bold new emphasis on sitting postures and stimulating acts. It said nothing of standing poses or the kinds of fluid movements so popular in contemporary yoga classes.
    The book also told how to extend the duration of lovemaking—and focused its advice on males, reflecting yoga’s ancient bias. It called for “a female partner” but conceded that a willing consort was something “not everyone can obtain.”
    One instruction claimed that a particular technique would produce such steely control in sexual relations that the yogi would release no semen even if “embraced by a passionate woman.” The goal was to slowly raise the levels of excitement, the couple approaching but never quite reaching orgasm, their ecstasy going on and on, the two becoming one, transcending all opposites.
    If such depictions of Hatha yoga strike the modern reader as bizarre, it is because contemporary books and teachers seldom refer to the origins of the practice. But in truth, Hatha is a branch of Tantra . It was developed as a way to speed the Tantric agenda, to make enlightenment happen by the precise application of willpower and the redirection of libidinal energy rather thanby some nebulous mix of piety and contemplation. The Sanskrit root of Hatha is hath —“to treat with violence,” as in binding someone to a post, according to the Monier-Williams Sanskrit dictionary, by an Oxford professor. So, too, Hatha means violence or force. The discipline arose in a carefully structured campaign of vigorous activity meant to promote the quick attainment of enlightenment through ecstasy.
    So it is that a number of scholars translate Hatha yoga as “violent union.” Other specialists