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The body in early Hatha Yoga

by Ruth Westoby | 2024 | 112,229 words

This page relates ‘Rajas in later corpus� of study dealing with the body in Hatha Yoga Sanskrit texts.—This essay highlights how these texts describe physical practices for achieving liberation and bodily sovereignty with limited metaphysical understanding. Three bodily models are focused on: the ascetic model of ‘baking� in Yoga, conception and embryology, and Kundalini’s affective processes.

Go directly to: Footnotes.

Rajas in later corpus

ղDZī is treated in the later corpus as mentioned in the dzٲ on the Ჹṻī辱. In the seventeenth-century Ჹṻٲ屹ī the yogi should draw up only bindu (Ჹṻٲ屹ī 2.97) whereas for the women, the rajas that is defined as of the menstruating women (ṛtumatyā rajo), should be preserved by her along with bindu and rajas after sex in which the semen is ejaculated into the vagina (Ჹṻٲ屹ī 2.100-101). The eighteenth-century ᲹṻṅkٲԻ,[1] similar to the Āṛt, identifies ś as bindu in living beings and as twofold, male and female: rajas is of a woman and īᲹ of a man. The early nineteenthcentury Vajroliyoga notes that a woman may master DZī (Vajroliyoga 3) and specifies how she should extract semen and attain steadiness of body: having pulled ejaculated semen upwards neither semen nor rajas are lost and rajas together with bindu becomes in the ū of women (Vajroliyoga 24-26) (Mallinson 2018:215).[2] The Ჹṻ貹󲹳پ is an eighteenth-century manual written, according to the opening, for those obsessed by, inter alia, women (Birch and Singleton 2019:16). Its final section on DZīmudrā is ‘the most extraordinary of its kind in any premodern yoga text� (Birch and Singleton 2019:27). In the Ჹṻ貹󲹳پ, DZīmudrā is an ascetic practice to develop non-attachment (岵ⲹ) and the retention of semen, though not celibacy. Sexual intercourse is enjoined, and while the majority of the instruction is to draw up bindu, men are also instructed to draw up rajas. Thus, DZī continues to be instructed in the written record, and women continue to be a marginal but nevertheless continuous presence.

Footnotes and references:

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[1]:

ᲹṻṅkٲԻ yas sarvatattvādhipa eṣa devo bhavo vyayo bindumayo ’]sti janteṣu ǁ sa pauruṣastraiṇa iti dvidhokto rajas [s]triya� pauruṣam eva īᲹm ǁ Thanks to Birch for this reference, personal communication, 26 November 2016.

[2]:

See also īᲹdzٳٲٲԳٰ 17.15a and 17.32b (Vasudeva 2004:134, 139).

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