The Yogic Studies Podcast

In this episode, we speak with Dr. Karen O’Brien-Kop (University of Roehampton) about her intertextual research on Pātañjala and Buddhist Yoga, rethinking the category of “Classical Yoga,” the yoga of Yogācāra Buddhism, Buddhist definitions of yoga, botanical metaphors for liberation, the mysterious Dharmamegha Samādhi ("the raincloud of Dharma”), her forthcoming co-edited volume, The Routledge Handbook of Yoga and Meditation Studies (2020), her upcoming online course YS 109, more.

Speaker Bio

Karen O’Brien-Kop is Lecturer in Asian Religions and Ethics in the Department of Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Roehampton, London, UK. She received her PhD from SOAS University of London, is a specialist in the historical study of meditation and yoga within Asian religious traditions, and analyses early Hindu and Buddhist meditation manuals in Sanskrit.

She has taught on the MA Traditions of Yoga and Meditation at SOAS University of London, and at the University of Roehampton she has designed a new BA module 'Yoga, Meditation and Health'. Since 2018, she has served on the committee for the SOAS Centre of Yoga Studies, an academic research and teaching centre focused on public engagement. In the American Academy of Religion, Karen is a committee member for the Yoga in Theory and Practice Unit and co-chair of the Indian and Chinese Religions Compared Unit. She has published peer-reviewed articles in Religions of South Asia and Journal of Indian Philosophy and is co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Yoga and Meditation Studies (2020), an interdisciplinary volume of 34 chapters from global contributors. Karen is currently working on a book project on rethinking classical yoga in relation to Buddhism.

Links

• YS 109 | Classical Yoga and Buddhism 
• "Classical Discourses of Liberation: Shared Botanical Metaphors in Sarvāstivāda Buddhism and the Yoga of Patañjali" (2017)
• "Dharmamegha in Yoga and Yogācāra: The Revision of a Superlative Metaphor" (2020)
• https://roehampton-online.academia.edu/KarenOBrienKop

In this episode, we speak with Dr. Ben Williams (Naropa University) about his story of growing up in spiritual community, the scholar-practitioner, the scriptures and world of non-dual Śaiva Tantra, the Kashmiri exegete Abhinavagupta and his concept of the guru, the view of Aṣṭāṅgayoga within tantra, the new MA program in Yoga Studies at Naropa University, and more.

Speaker Bio

Ben Williams is an intellectual historian focused on Indian religions and the history of Śaiva tantra. He has received extensive training in Indian philosophy, literature, and aesthetics in Sanskrit sources. Ben received a BA in Religious Studies from the University of Vermont, a Masters in Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School, and completed his PhD in the Department of South Asian Studies at Harvard University. He currently serves as an Assistant Professor of Hinduism at Naropa University, where he has recently co-created a low-residency MA program in Yoga Studies that will launch in fall 2020. Ben also serves on the academic advisory council of the Muktabodha Indological Research Institute, which is dedicated to the preservation of scriptural and philosophical texts of classical India.  

Ben’s doctoral thesis is on revelation and the figure of the tantric guru in the writings of Abhinavagupta, an eminent intellectual figure of medieval Kashmir. Building upon this study, one of his current research projects is charting the transmission of tantric traditions to South India that are indebted to non-dual Śaiva teachings and lineages that originally flourished in Kashmir.

Links

• YS 107 | Yoga and Śaiva Tantra: An Uncharted History
• "Abhinavagupta's Portrait of a Guru: Revelation and Religious Authority in Kashmir" (Williams 2017)
• Yoga Studies Master of Arts Program, Naropa University
• https://www.patreon.com/closereadings

In this episode, we speak with Dr. James Mallinson (SOAS, University of London) about his travels through India, meeting his guru, his journey to becoming an Indologist, his pioneering research on the history of yoga and yogīs, key findings from the Haṭha Yoga Project, and more.

Speaker Bio

Dr. James Mallinson is Reader in Indology and Yoga Studies at SOAS University of London. His research focuses on the history and current traditional practice of yoga through the methods philology, ethnography and art history. He is currently in the final year of the Haṭha Yoga Project, a five-year six-person research project on the history of physical yoga funded by the European Research Council. The project’s core outputs will be ten critical editions of Sanskrit texts on physical yoga and four monographs on its history and current practice. 

In addition to numerous articles and chapters, Dr. Mallinson’s publications include Roots of Yoga (Penguin Classics, 2017, co-authored with Mark Singleton) and The Khecarīvidyā of Ādinātha, a Critical Edition and Annotated Translation of an Early Text on Haṭhayoga (Routledge, 2007). The latter is a revision of his doctoral thesis, which was supervised by Professor Alexis Sanderson at the University of Oxford, where Dr. Mallinson also read Sanskrit as an undergraduate. 

Dr. Mallinson has spent more than ten years living in India with traditional ascetics and practitioners of yoga, and at the 2013 Kumbh Mela was awarded the title of Mahant by the Rāmānandī Saṃpradāya, which was documented in a BBC film entitled West Meets East, featuring his childhood friend and actor Dominic West. 

Links

• YS 108 | Roots of Haṭha Yoga
• The Haṭha Yoga Project
• https://soas.academia.edu/JamesMallinson 
• West Meets East BBC Documentary

In this episode, we speak with Philip Deslippe (UC Santa Barbara) about his research on the modern history and construction of Kundalini Yoga, the controversies surrounding the late guru Yogi Bhajan, as well as the role and positionality of the scholar and historian of yoga.

Speaker Bio

Philip Deslippe is a historian of American religion with a background in American Studies and literature. He is currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara where he is writing a dissertation on the early history of yoga in the United States from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. Philip has published articles on the history of modern yoga in academic journals such as the Journal of Yoga Studies, Amerasia, and Sikh Formations, and in popular venues including Yoga Journal, Air and Space Smithsonian, and the Indian news site Scroll.

Links

• YS 102 | Modern Yoga in the West
• Premka: White Bird in a Golden Cage (Dyson 2020)
• "From Maharaj to Mahan Tantric: The Construction of Yogi Bhajan's Kundalini Yoga" (Deslippe 2012)
• www.philipdeslippe.com
• https://ucsb.academia.edu/PhilipDeslippe

In this episode, we speak with Dr. Antonia Ruppel (LMU, Munich) about her study and teaching of the Sanskrit language, from elite universities to the St. James Senior Boys' School, the richness and diversity of Sanskrit literature, her recent Sanskrit textbook, and her upcoming series of online Sanskrit courses.

Speaker Bio

Antonia Ruppel is a Classicist by training who came to Sanskrit through a series of fortunate accidents. She learnt the language as an autodidact, and one of her reasons for writing her textbook, The Cambridge Introduction to Sanskrit (2017), was to make the experience of studying Sanskrit easier and more pleasant for others.  She has been teaching Sanskrit for 15 years at universities such as Cornell, Oxford and now the LMU in Munich, Germany, as well as offering courses in variety of formats online.

Language pedagogy is at the heart of her life, and she is currently working on an Intermediate Sanskrit Reader. It is designed to help students gain reading fluency in an enjoyable and straightforward way, and will come out in late 2021.

Links

• SKT 101 | Elementary Sanskrit I (June 1 - Aug 21, 2020)
• The Cambridge Introduction to Sanskrit (2017)
• https://oxford.academia.edu/AntoniaRuppel 

In this episode, we speak with Dr. Daniela Bevilacqua (Post-Doc Research Fellow, SOAS) about her background in History and Anthropology, her doctoral work on the Rāmānandī Sampradāya, her ethnographic fieldwork for the Haṭha Yoga Project, and the role of yoga among sādhus today in contemporary India.

Speaker Bio

Daniela Bevilacqua is a South-Asianist who received her PhD in Civilizations of Africa and Asia from Sapienza University of Rome and in Anthropology from the University of Paris Nanterre. Her PhD research was published by Routledge under the title, Modern Hindu Traditionalism in Contemporary India: The Śrī Maṭh and the Jagadguru Rāmānandācārya in the Evolution of the Rāmānandī Sampradāya. She is now a Post-Doc Research Fellow at SOAS, working for the ERC-funded Hatha Yoga Project (2015-2020).

Through her groundbreaking fieldwork in India, Daniela looks at the present practices of Haṭha Yoga among sādhus belonging to “traditional” samprādayas connected with the physical practice of yoga and austerities. The purpose of this research is to confront ethnographic material with textual and historical evidences to reconstruct the development of these practices.

Links

• YS 103 | Yoga and Hindu Asceticsm, Past and Present
• "Let the Sādhus Talk. Ascetic understanding of Haṭha Yoga and yogāsanas"
• Modern Hindu Traditionalism in Contemporary India (Routledge, 2019)
• Yogasana | Embodied Liberation II | Brunei Gallery | SOAS University of London (YouTube video)
• https://www.instagram.com/dhanya_83

In this first-ever Yogic Studies Podcast episode, we speak with Dr. Finnian Gerety (Brown University) about his background as a musician, his journey to Indology and Sanskrit studies at Harvard University, his fieldwork among Nambudiri Brahmins in the south-Indian state of Kerala, the Sāma Veda performative tradition, his short film "Mantras 2 the Max", the origins of sacred sound and the syllable OṂ, the practice of OṂ at the time of death, OṂ in the Yogasūtras of Patañjali, and the practice of "Embodied Philology."

Speaker Bio

Dr. Finnian M.M. Gerety is a historian of Indian religions focusing on sound and mantra. After earning a PhD. in South Asian Studies from Harvard University, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Yale University Institute of Sacred Music. Finn is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, the Contemplative Studies Program, and the Center for Contemporary South Asia at Brown University, where he teaches courses on mantra, yoga, ritual, and the senses.

Integrating the study of premodern texts with insights from fieldwork in contemporary south India, Finn’s research explores how sound has shaped religious doctrines and practices on the subcontinent from the late Bronze Age up through today. His current book project for Oxford University Press, This Whole World is OM: A History of the Sacred Syllable in India, is the first-ever monograph on OM, the preeminent mantra and ubiquitous sacred syllable of Indian religions.

Links

• YS 104 | The Story of OṂ: Sacred Sound and the Vedic Roots of Yoga 
• "Mantras 2 the Max" 
• https://brown.academia.edu/FinnianGerety
• https://www.instagram.com/thiswholeworld_is_om

In this brief introduction, Seth introduces listeners to the Yogic Studies Podcast. He shares his story of how yoga led him to academia, to the PhD at Harvard University, the study of Sanskrit, the world of yoga research, and the birth of Yogic Studies.

Bio

Seth Powell is a longtime practitioner of yoga and a scholar of Indian religions, Sanskrit, and yoga traditions. He is currently a PhD Candidate in South Asian Religions at Harvard University. His research focuses on the history, theory, and practice of medieval and early modern Sanskrit yoga texts and traditions, as well as their intersections with the culture and practice of modern transnational yoga. Seth also holds degrees in the study of religion from the University of Washington (MA) and Humboldt State University (BA).

His doctoral dissertation at Harvard consists of a critical edition and study of a 15th-century Sanskrit yoga text from south India, known as the Śivayogapradīpikā (Lamp on Śiva's Yoga). 

Seth founded Yogic Studies in 2018 to provide continued educational services for the broader yoga community. Yogic Studies aims to bridge the gap between the yoga studio and the academy—seeking to make accessible the highest quality and most cutting-edge research on yoga for teachers and students. We offer a comprehensive online curriculum in yoga history, philosophy, and Sanskrit studies.

Links

• https://www.yogicstudies.com
• https://harvard.academia.edu/SethPowell