Attached Paper

Arhum “Jain” Yoga: Acharya Sushil Kumar's Assemblage of Pan-South Asian Contemplative Practices in Song of the Soul

Abstract for Online Program Book (maximum 150 words)

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.