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I have suggested that Frauwallner and Colebrooke鈥檚 separation of philosophy as 蝉腻峁僰丑测补 and practice as 辫腻迟补帽箩补濒补测辞驳补 lives on in a division between philosophy or metaphysics or context and technique or practice in the scholarship on yoga. There is a second point, pertaining to philology and ideas of progress and decline, that I wish to use Frauwallner鈥檚 work to illustrate. Frauwallner adheres to a stance of textual decline. I use this example to make two related points. First, there is a general trend within philology to seek to identify or recreate an urtext. Second, and connected, is a historiographical endeavour to create an ur-body.

Collins identifies Frauwallner鈥檚 historical progressivism as characterised by degeneration:

Unfortunately, in my view, the main accomplishment of this work is to exemplify clearly an outmoded and discredited form of Orientalism (in the pejorative sense). The method is: Herr Professor sits at a desk in Vienna with various texts, in various editions, before him (note that tucked away in a footnote is the remark 鈥業 have only had limited access to the 笔腻濒颈 literature鈥� [1995, p. 215, n.7]). He then excogitates an historical progression from simple to more complex (to which the judgment 鈥榙egenerate鈥� is frequently applied)鈥� The assumption that simple must precede complex has only to be articulated to be shown to be as absurd as it is common in previous generations of Indological scholarship. Do not people sometimes summarize and simplify in exegesis of earlier material? (Collins 2009:504n22)

This passage, itself a footnote in Collins鈥� article, is used here to historicize philology鈥檚 tendency to reach for an urtext rather than malign Frauwallner鈥檚 Nazi affiliation or denigrate Orientalism per se. The tendency to see a progressive historical degeneration matters for the body. Textual analysis of the body inherits diachronic analysis鈥檚 preoccupation with an urtext, or indeed an ur-body as Cox initially hoped for in his research. The attempt is to identify a complete system as a comprehensive and systematic unit of meaning, with preference attributed to single-authored sources as more internally consistent than multivocal compilation. Once this urtext and ur-body is identified, establishing the genealogy of ideas tends towards seeing 鈥榯races鈥� leading up to apogee, and degeneration and corruption following thereafter.

But what is the alternative? I am not advocating a collapse into despairing relativism where comparison is pointless, nor even such positive relativism as Cox鈥檚 鈥榓 thousand flowers blooming鈥�. I am not advocating the rejection of philology at all. Textual comparison and multivocality accompany the historical development of oral and textual corpora. The theoretical critique of philology has developed in post-colonial and feminist literature (Mandair 2009) which demands a 鈥榮elf-reflexive examination of the cultural context and prejudices of the interpreter鈥� (King 1999:80). The epistemological context of philology must be born in mind when applying it in a pre-colonial context: does a philological interaction with textual sources enact a subjugation of these sources? Cohn鈥檚 argument that the 鈥榳estern鈥� academic discipline of philology is enacting epistemological subjugation (Cohn 1996:20-21) when applied to the already denigrated body has the potential for double subjugation.^[1] These critical warnings inject caution into this study of bodies of flesh via bodies of text and point to the subjugations in the epigraph to the introduction, where texts and practices are compared to women defined by their sexual availability: the Vedas, 艢腻蝉迟谤补蝉 and 笔耻谤腻峁嘺蝉 are like prostitutes and only 艣膩mbhav墨 mudr膩 is kept private like the wife of a good family (贬补峁环补辫谤补诲墨辫颈办腻 4.5).

This methodology section has traced the historiography of philology to articulate the fault line in scholarship severing bodies from contexts, and problematised philology鈥檚 urge for urtext and extended this to an urge for an ur-body. The challenge in what follows is to resist the urge to ur-body, to resist positing a metanarrative that flattens the heterogeneity of the sources to reify instead a homogenized ur-body. Before setting out how the sources describe the body in chapter one I introduce the corpus.

Footnotes and references:

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[1]:

Datoo critiques Menon鈥檚 use of philology as conflating, 鈥榓 discourse that co-constituted British contol over South Asia with an ostensibly politically neutral method by which to explain it鈥� (Datoo 2023:R14).