The Science of Yoga

render it as “union from violence or force” to put the emphasis on the illumination rather than its means of attainment. In either case, such definitions seldom—if ever—show up in the popular literature. The New Age approach is to embrace the poetry of Sanskrit and divide Hatha into ha and tha, for sun and moon. That interpretation casts the word itself as an esoteric uniting of opposites and typically omits any reference to force or violence.
    A final way that old yoga differed from our own was its emphasis on the miraculous. For ages, the sacred literature of India had portrayed yogis as able to fly, levitate, stop their hearts, suspend their breathing, vanish, walk through walls, project themselves into other bodies, touch the moon, survive live burial, make themselves invisible, die at will, walk on water, and—like Jesus of Nazareth—bring the dead back to life. They were hailed as miracle workers. Their unusual abilities had a name— siddhis . The Sanskrit word means success or perfection and is a yogic term of art for the otherworldly powers. Patanjali, the Indian sage who laid out the fundamentals of mystic yoga some sixteen centuries ago, devoted an entire chapter of his aphorisms to the otherworldly feats, including such talents as reading minds and predicting the future.
    Astonishing claims filled the pages of Hatha Yoga Pradipika. It said practitioners could neutralize poisons, destroy all diseases, annihilate old age, obviate evil, and achieve immortality—not to mention doing away with constipation, wrinkles, and gray hair.
    Yogi warriors made miraculous claims to enhance their battlefield image, according to William Pinch, a scholar at Wesleyan University. Yoga, he said, conferred a reputation of invincible power. “There was a clear tactical advantage of believing, and having your enemy believe, that you were immortal.”
    The basic accomplishment that bestowed the gift of the miraculous on the lowly practitionerwas the attainment of samadhi—the state of transcendent bliss in which the yogi became one with the universe. The adept did so after learning how to move all the currents of prana, the body’s energy, up the spine into the head. At that point, according to Hatha Yoga Pradipika , the yogi became “as if dead.”
    Some yogis entered the euphoric state for the purposes of spiritual enlightenment. Others—like the Punjab yogi, true to the diversity of the Tantric brotherhood—did so for entertainment and profit.
    The dramatic success of the live burial astonished many people—and not just at the court of Ranjit Singh. Books describing the feat were published in Vienna, London, and New York. The educated world marveled at the accomplishment and wondered at its explanation. Claude M. Wade, the British liaison to the maharajah’s court and an eyewitness to the yogi’s exhumation, cautioned his peers that it would be “presumptuous to deny to the Hindoos the possible discovery or attainment of an art which has hitherto escaped the researches of European science.”
    At the time of the burial, N. C. Paul was entering medical school in Calcutta (today known as Kolkata) and, as a new scientist, paid close attention. After all, the spectacle appeared to defy the laws of nature. His curiosity led him to write a book— A Treatise on the Yoga Philosophy.
    It featured the live burial and, as it turned out, marked the birth of a new science.
    Who was Paul? No scholar or book gave him more than a passing reference. I knew little until I went to Calcutta, a city crackling with energy despite the monsoon heat.
    Blaring horns and bad traffic greeted my cab ride to his medical school—a place I expected to bear the tidy imprint of its British founders. Instead, it was bedlam. Stray dogs, sick people, and students roamed a warren of broken buildings and fallen trees. Walls bore faded posters. I grew apprehensive as I neared the library, increasingly uneasy but still eager to learn about the world’s first scientist who sought to free yoga from its mythic past.
    I climbed a circular stairway past loose wires, cobwebs, and pieces of shattered concrete. The library had a high ceiling and dark wood that bespoke past elegance. But decay had set in. Cabinets with glass doors held row upon rowof old books—the dust inside so thick that it obscured the titles. With a start, I realized that the cases had become mausoleums. Overhead, gauzy spider webs hung down like props in a horror movie. The