This panel examines breathing practices as a lens for understanding the history of yoga and the body across South Asian religious traditions. Drawing on Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain sources spanning the Vedic period to the late twentieth century, five papers illuminate understudied episodes and debates in this history. Topics include the expiatory logic of breath-control rooted in Vedic ritual theory; prāṇāyāma's role in tantric Buddhist six-phased yoga; early Śaiva tantric breath observation and its connections to divination and svarodaya; Jain ambivalence toward and reinterpretation of prāṇāyāma; and Tibetan Buddhist engagement with neuroscience in the 1990s. Together, these papers demonstrate the importance of tracing historical and conceptual links in breath practice over more than two millennia, bringing new light to Indic ascetic, ritual, and yogic traditions for which theories of prāṇa and prāṇāyāma are central.
The idea that prāṇāyāma purifies moral faults appears both in several haṭhayoga texts and in earlier accounts of breath control in Dharmaśāstra literature. While prāṇāyāma has been extensively studied as both a physiological and contemplative technique within yoga’s ancillary disciplines, its role as a form of penance has received comparatively little interest. This paper investigates the rationale behind the expiatory role of prāṇāyāma. On what grounds do yoga texts claim that prāṇāyāma purifies sins? What is the mechanism through which prāṇāyāma purifies moral faults? I trace the rationale for the expiatory nature of breath control back to the description of the sacrifice to the fires in the prāyaścitta section of the Jaiminīya Brāhmaṇa. The “elemental” logic grounded in the ritual relations among air, fire, and water present in the Vedic agnihotra offers a useful explanation for the expiatory mechanism of prāṇāyāma in later traditions.
In the body of literature belonging to the Unexcelled Yoga Tantras, the contexts in which the six-phased yoga is practiced include the practices of sevā, the haṭha-yoga, and the stage of completion. In each of these practices, the prāṇāyāma takes different forms that have corresponding results—some being temporary and others ultimate—including the five types of meditative experience, a valid cognition, the purification of the six psychophysical aggregates, and other bodily constituents, praises by bodhisattvas, and the attainment of the deities, such as Amoghasiddhi and others. To speak of the role of prāṇāyāma in the six-phased yoga of the Unexcelled Yoga Tantras, one must uncover its relation to other phases of the six-phased yoga and to a broader, conceptual and practical framework of the given tantra. This presentation intends to do exactly this, and to disclosinge certain commonalities and differences among the practices of prāṇāyāma in the Kālacakratantra and the Guhyasamājatantra.
This presentation investigates the roots of a little-studied form of yoga: examination of the flow of breath within the body’s channels (nāḍī), typically for prognostication. Such practices are generally known today as svarodaya, “divination by the breath” or “breathing prognistication.” Despite its prominence in early-modern yoga as well as Indian Sufism, svarodaya remains a neglected area, perhaps because it sits uneasily within categories such as meditation, posture, and breath-control, and due to its surprising connections to medical and warfare divination. As this presentation examines, svarodaya has its roots in the early Śaiva tantra corpus (circa 6th-9th centuries), in practices for examining the circulation of breath and the soul or life-force in bodily channels for self-knowledge and ritual power.
Although breath-regulation (prāṇāyāma) occupies a central place in many yoga traditions, its role in Jain thought remains understudied. This paper examines Yaśovijaya’s treatment of prāṇāyāma in his Dvātriṃśaddvātriṃśikā (DD). Yaśovijaya, one of the most influential Jain intellectuals of the seventeenth century, engages Patañjali and Vyāsa, adopting their definitions of inhalation (pūraka), retention (kumbhaka), and exhalation (recaka), and acknowledges the benefits of the practice. He argues that prāṇāyāma is acceptable for those inclined toward breathing practices insofar as it reduces karmically binding activity. Ultimately, however, he redefines it not as a technique of physiological control or as related to prāṇa as vital capacity, but as inner transformation (bhāva) encompassing three main components: (1) the expulsion of attachment, (2) the cultivation of insight, and (3) the stabilization of knowledge. I show how his account strategically reinterprets authoritative yogic discourse to align it with specifically Jain soteriological and ethical commitments.
This paper introduces an eruption of publishing about the gross and subtle body known to classical Buddhist Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna tradition among Tibetan monastics during the so-called “Decade of the Brain” (1990s). Responding to the privileging of the neurosciences and its materialist modeling of mind as entirely reducible to brain, a handful of prominent Tibetan monastic scholars in the PRC and in the refugee diaspora sought to elaborately translate and refuse the neuroscience of the day. In these Tibetan refusals of the brain sciences, not only was classical South and Inner Asian Buddhist knowledge about the subtle body and subtle winds restaged for a new global audience. In the process, the epistemological status of the subtle body came to possess a metonymical power to stand in juxtaposition with the imaginary totalities of the West, science, the Indian secular nation-state, and the erasures and exile of Tibetan civilization.