The Amrtasiddhi and Amrtasiddhimula- The Earliest Texts of the Hathayoga Tradition

About the Book This book introduces, edits, and translates the two earliest texts of the hathayoga tradition, the Amrtasiddhi and the Amrtasiddhimala (which survives only in Tibetan translation). Basing their study on a bilingual manuscript, an extremely rare phenomenon, the authors argue that the origins of hathayoga are found in an eclectic tantric Buddhist milieu, probably active in the second half of the 11th century CE. The texts provide fundamental and later very influential teachings on the nature of the yogic body, psycho-physical practices centered on manipulating bindu, the types of practitioners, and much more. The book is addressed primarily to scholars, but will also be of interest to students and practitioners of yoga.

About the Authors James Mallinson studied Sanskrit at Oxford and is Reader in Indology and Yoga Studies at SOAS University of London and chair of the SOAS Centre of Yoga Studies. From 2015 to 2020 he was Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded Hatha Yoga Project and from 2021 to 2024 he will be Principal Investigator of the AHRC/ DFG-funded Light on Hatha project, which will produce a critical edition of the Hathapradipika.

Peter-Daniel Szanto started his studies in Tibetology and Indology at Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest. He defended his doctorate in Oxford, prepared under the supervision of Alexis Sanderson, and then held several post-doctoral positions (Merton College, University Hamburg, and All Souls College). He is currently working at the University of Leiden. His research focuses mainly on the history and literature of tantric Buddhism in South Asia.

Introduction The Amrtasiddhi The Amrtasiddhi is a Sanskrit manual of yoga teachings which was composed by Madhavacandra' probably no later than the second half of the nth century CE, 2 most likely in the Deccan region of India.3 It is the first text to teach a system of yoga whose primary method is physical and it introduces many practices and principles fundamental to the yoga method often categorized in subsequent Sanskrit texts as hatha. The Amrtasiddhi opens and closes with invocations to the Vajrayana Siddha Virjapa. This and other features of the text indicate that it was composed within a Vajrayana milieu4 but it is unorthodox insofar as its yoga method is for in-dividable celibate maleyogins and is deemed to be superior to the practices of ritual sex taught in mainstream Vajrayana traditions. Its teachings were drawn upon by commentators and composers of texts on yoga across India up to the modern era. The Amrtasiddhi also flourished in Tibet, where it formed the basis of a textual cycle known as 'Chi med grub pa (*Amarasiddhi in some back translations into Sanskrit).

The text is edited here from twelve manuscripts and a variety of testimonial including citations and unacknowledged recycling. The Amrtasiddhi was first brought to modern scholarly attention by Kurtis Schaeffer in an article published in 2002, whose observations were based upon the bilingual (Sanskrit and Tibetan) manu-script we identify with the signup C, which in the 199os was in the Library of the Cultural Palace of Nationalities in Beijing.

In zoo8 James Mallinson read the text of the Amrtasiddhi for the first time in one of its two c. 19th-century manuscripts in the collection of the Man Singh Pustak Prakash library in Jodhpur. The originality and coherence of its teachings in comparison with those of other texts on hathayoga alerted him to its importance for understanding hath yoga’s history and he decided to collate all available manuscripts of the text in order to edit it critically. A preliminary edition, based on the Jodhpur manuscript together with one of four manuscripts digitized by the Nepal-German Manuscript Preservation Project, was read in Oxford in zone with Alexis Sanderson, Peter-Daniel Szanto, Jason Birch and Paul Gerstmayi.

Book's Contents and Sample Pages