The Science of Yoga

Bagchi and his colleagues published their findings in Circulation , the prestigious journal of the American Heart Association.
    “It was often reported that some yogis could stop the heart,” he later recalled. “Everybody including physicians thought that it was so. We discovered the truth.”
    Another insider joined in. He was no defector but rather a central authority in the world of yoga and one of its most respected elders.
    Gune at that point was approaching his eightieth birthday, white hair spilling down his neckin curls. The cardiac studies caught his attention. After all, some of his colleagues had participated. Bagchi had stayed at the ashram much longer than anywhere else in India—more than five weeks. What the foreign scientists had come to examine and—as it turned out, to rebut—was not some trifle but a central tenet of yoga and its legacy of superhuman achievement. It put the ashram in an awkward position.
    A lesser man might have denied the heart findings or disparaged them as flawed. Not Gune. Not the nationalist rebel who vowed to make no statement “without having scientific evidence to support it.” So he rallied his ashram. And—to his immense credit—he did so not with reluctance or diffidence, but boldly. It was as if he, late in life, became determined to enhance the reputation of his institution and mission. Bagchi and his team had focused on the heart. Gune would take on an even bigger challenge.
    Live burial was the most spectacular way that gurus and adepts had worked in public to reveal their otherworldly powers, as the Punjab yogi had demonstrated for the king.
    Gune put his team into creating a samadhi pit meant to mimic the earthen dens of the miracle workers. But it was designed to minimize the chance of extraneous variables—not to mention cheating. It was dug not in a field or in sand, as yogic supermen often did, but in the foundations of a laboratory, where gas flows would be easier to monitor and eliminate. It measured six feet long, four feet wide, and four feet deep, its floor plaster, its walls brick, and everything coated in thick paint. The team installed a seal around the door to make it airtight. The precautions produced a samadhi pit that was completely sealed off from the outside world—the first of its kind. No air could enter or exhalations leave.
    The ashram took volunteers from its own ranks and beyond. The most gifted turned out to be an itinerant showman of athletic build who had performed yogic feats at country fairs. He boasted of having endured live burials for up to a month. The showman, Ramandana Yogi, wore bangles on his wrists and trunks of tiger skin.
    Twice in 1962 he braved the pit. The first time he managed to withstand the chamber not for anything approaching forty days and forty nights—not even for a month or a week. He went eleven hours. His second try was better. He went eighteen hours before demanding to be let out, gasping for breath.
    In all, the scientistslocked volunteers into the samadhi pit eleven times. Nothing like it had ever been done before. The results tore a hole in yoga’s legacy of miraculous claims.
    Today the ashram has a slightly dilapidated air, walls crumbling here and there amid dense foliage. But the pit is frozen in time, bright and spotless and ready for any new volunteer who might appear. It is part museum, part open challenge.
    “We’re still ready to do this,” said Makrand Gore, a senior researcher at the ashram. He opened the pit’s door while describing its past. The tidy den, well lit and brightly painted, did in fact seem ready to admit a new volunteer. A bundle of wires hung down from its ceiling, awaiting a miracle worker.
    Gore’s boss, T. K. Bera, a small man with a muscular presence, joined the tour. He said the ashram had looked hard for siddhis over the decades but had found no miracles—none, try as it might.
    “People say yoga is black magic,” Bera remarked. “But what we’ve found is that it gives the power to live on a reduced metabolism. That’s all. It’s not magic.”
    Popular yoga made no explicit acknowledgment of the pit demythologizing but continued to shed the old emphasis on magic and eroticism. The trend culminated with Iyengar.
    His 1965 book, Light on Yoga , quickly became the how-to bible of Hatha yoga. Around the globe, it sold more than a million copies, confirming the field’s export potential. In his preface, Iyengar poked fun at credulous people who asked if