This paper features Jain contemplative practices in the “Arhum Yoga” tradition of Acharya Sushil Kumar (1926–1994), a Jain guru who left India to establish a community in North America in the 1970s. While Kumar described his contemplative system as “Jain Yoga” in his book, Song of the Soul (SOtS), a study of the contemplative practices contained therein reveals that Kumar was drawing from manifold non-Jain pan-South Asian influences to create his yoga system. He was therefore carrying forward a medieval tradition found in Jain yoga texts such as Hemacandra’s Yogaśāstra and the later Yogapradīpa, both of which drew contemplative practices from non-Jain traditions though without losing their commitment to Jain soteriology. What is most striking, however, is how Kumar draws from non-Jain Vedic, haṭha-yogic, and tantric traditions, and in doing so appears at times to present a non-Jain ontological and soteriological system – features of SOtS this paper will carefully untangle.
Acharya Sushil Kumar was a Śvetāmbara Jain monk who broke the traditional monastic code to not travel by any means other than foot. In doing so, he made the long journey to the United States of America where he taught, among other things, haṭha-yoga contemplative practices overlaid by Jain doctrine, beginning in the 1970s. Central to Kumar's haṭha-yoga teachings was a detailed theory of sacred sound which drew from a number of Jain and non-Jain sources of contemplative practice, including the Yogaśāstra and Haṭhayogapradīpikā, and resulted in his famous book Song of the Soul: An Introduction to the Namokar Mantra and the Science of Sound.
Drawing from Song of the Soul, this presentation unpacks Acharya Sushil Kumar's theory and contemplative practice of listening to the unstruck sound (anāhata-nāda) within. We will observe how Kumar clearly drew his practices from well-known haṭha-yoga texts which were already democratizing haṭha-yoga beyond sectarian lines in medieval South Asia. In doing so, it will become clear that Kumar was repeating a practice of medieval textual compilation of contemplative practices which scholar of haṭha-yoga James Mallinson (2012) has characterized as a “blanket agglomeration of the various techniques of haṭhayoga and layayoga” which results in “a somewhat incoherent whole.” We will further observe how Kumar overlays his own Jain tradition's mantras and theories onto these well-known haṭha-yoga practices.
While Song of the Soul maintains a commitment to Jain ethics and karma doctrine broadly speaking, these commitments become intermixed with haṭha-yoga's quite different practices and soteriological commitments, and yet Kumar maintains that he is teaching "Jain yoga." What we observe, then, is a form of what I call "engaged Jain yoga," or a yoga that results when Jains engage with other non-Jain yoga systems as they build their own yoga systems in contemporary times.
Kumar's "engaged Jain yoga" draws from historical precedent set by medieval Jain authors who drew from non-Jain yoga systems of contemplative practice to create their own unique systems of yoga. I will disentangle Kumar's yoga to show how Jain and non-Jain elements combine to create his contemporary yoga system and theory of sound, thereby observing both continuities and discontinuities in Jain yoga as well as how the past continues to inform the present.
This paper features Jain contemplative practices in the “Arhum Yoga” tradition of Acharya Sushil Kumar (1926–1994), a Jain guru who left India to establish a community in North America in the 1970s. While Kumar described his contemplative system as “Jain Yoga” in his book, Song of the Soul (SOtS), a study of the contemplative practices contained therein reveals that Kumar was drawing from manifold non-Jain pan-South Asian influences to create his yoga system. He was therefore carrying forward a medieval tradition found in Jain yoga texts such as Hemacandra’s Yogaśāstra and the later Yogapradīpa, both of which drew contemplative practices from non-Jain traditions though without losing their commitment to Jain soteriology. What is most striking, however, is how Kumar draws from non-Jain Vedic, haṭha-yogic, and tantric traditions, and in doing so appears at times to present a non-Jain ontological and soteriological system – features of SOtS this paper will carefully untangle.