Sinister Yogis
David Gordon White
University of Chicago Press
What is a yogi? This is the question behind David Gordon White’s new book, the last in a series which began with The Alchemical Body and continued with Kiss of the Yogini. Unlike most academic studies in this area, the book’s main object of inquiry is not what Yoga is, but who the practitioners are who claim it as their own. The results of this shift in focus are surprising. White shows that the yogi has been many things to many people, and through many ages: warrior, magician, cannibal, bogeyman, saint.
His well-informed narrative challenges many current notions of what Yoga ought to be, and what a practitioner ought to be doing. Such a perspective, he argues, restores Yoga’s full and original meaning, and redresses the undue and misleading emphasis laid by modern scholars on the so-called “Classical Yoga” of Patañjali, which is less about “Yoga” in any real, historically embodied sense than about meditation.
Indeed, the range of beliefs and practices that have defined the yogi across the centuries is extremely varied. White’s account begins with popular folk tales concerning the “sinister yogis” of the title, before moving back in time to study the earliest Vedic and epic accounts of Yoga and the yogi, as well as much material from the Buddhist and Hindu Tantras. Major themes include the yogi’s ability to forcefully leave his body in a moment of “yogic suicide”; yogic possession of another’s body in order to further the other’s spiritual development, or for more hostile, self-serving motives; and the practical merger of the yogin with god. Also treated are representations of yogis by Mughal and British writers of the early modern period, plus a consideration of the “modern and postmodern” yogis of today.
White’s story of the metamorphoses of the yogi through history is at once panoramic and meticulous. It is not always an easy read, and calls for some sustained concentration and effort. But the net gain could well be a complete revolution in the way one thinks about Yoga in the Indian tradition.
Reviewed by Dr. Mark Singleton, author of Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Postural Practice, published by Oxford University Press, January, 2010.
When Jesus Lived In India
Alan Jacobs
Watkins Publishing
When Jesus Lived: In India Alan Jacobs
Where was Jesus Christ between the ages of twelve and thirty when the Bible doesn’t account for his actions or whereabouts? We may wonder if he spent his time in Jerusalem, simply working in his father’s carpentry workshop. Or could it be possible that he joined the Essenes or Theraputae communities where he spent time studying before returning to commence his life work?
In Alan Jacobs’ work, When Jesus Lived in India, The Quest for the Aquarian Gospel: The Mystery of the Missing Years, the author strives to answer this historic and biblical question. Jacobs examines the evidence for and against these possibilities as well as the supposition accepted in some parts of the world that Jesus actually spent that time in India, Tibet and Nepal. The manner by which Jacobs’ poses this question creates the intention whereby “the reader can form his own reasoned judgment on this tantalizing theory which has stimulated filmmakers, authors and biblical scholars, both in the East and West, for over a century.”
When Jesus Lived in India is written as a comparative study of The Aquarian Gospel as written by Dr. Levi Dowling, The Gospel of Isa found in Tibet and translated by Russian explorer Nocolai Notovich, several Hindu scriptures as well as Islamic views written in the Koran. Jacobs aims to show the relationship and similarities in each text not only in the quest for answers to Jesus’ actual whereabouts during his formative years, but also to illustrate that no matter where he may have been, his teachings share similarities with precepts found in ancient Eastern scriptures.
Whether or not you come to a satisfying conclusion regarding Jesus’ whereabouts during the “missing years,” this book is worth the read for those who appreciate historic and textual investigation. Readers can find themselves easily lost in the poetic words and profound teachings of Jesus Christ along with the adventures through Jerusalem, Israel, India, Tibet and Nepal via the the gospels and texts examined here. –– Reviewed by Angela Orecchio
By Mark Singleton & Angela Orecchio
