Yoga : Immortality and Freedom

Rating:
Summary: Yoga philosopy, the details
Review: Eliade researched for this book, while staying with Surendranath Dasgupta in India, who was the formost scholar of indian philosophy and thelogy at his time. Eliade meticulously analyzed the indian scriptures and commentaries on sankhya and yoga and presents yoga as a huge, complex and precise system of practice and philosphy with the goal of kaivalyam (libration). This book is a lighthouse in the present time of publishing as much as the printing press can print.

Rating:
Summary: All serious yoga scholars have this book or want it
Review: I have the Bollingen paperback third printing of the Second Edition of 1969. I have little doubt that they used the plates from that hardcover edition, so the text is identical. The edition of 1970 currently available is the same as the one I have except for a new cover. The original was in French, published in Paris in 1954. This edition is professionally translated by William R. Trask.

Eliade was a nearly legendary scholar of indefatigable energy, and so it is not surprising that this is the definitive single volume academic work on yoga in English (that I am aware of). George Feuerstein's coffee table sized The Yoga Tradition: Its History, Literature, Philosophy and Practice (1998) is a different sort of book, covering yoga from a more practical point of view, and is accessible to a general public. Eliade's book is aimed directly and just about exclusively at academicians. Furthermore, while Feuerstein is a practitioner as well as a scholar, Eliade makes no pretense of first hand experience. As he relates in the Forward, he is interested in the discovery and interpretation of yoga by the West. He wants to explain that in detail. His is a "comparatively full exposition of the theory and practices of yoga...[a] history of its forms, and...its place in Indian spirituality..." (p. xx) The qualifying "comparatively" is a bit of modesty on the part of Eliade. This book really is a "full exposition" (insofar as that is possible) including the ideas, symbolism and methods of yoga "as they are expressed in tantrism, in alchemy, in folklore, in the aboriginal devotion of India." (p. xxii)

The text, which includes lengthy chapters such as, "Yoga and Brahmanism," "Yoga Techniques in Buddhism," "Yoga and Tantrism," "Yoga and Alchemy," etc. runs for 362 dense pages. Sixty-six pages of notes follow, and then a most extensive and valuable bibliography. The Index itself is 47 pages long and concludes with a by-line(!), "Index by Bart Winer," which is only right considering the text was written and set before the age of computers.

This is not a book for practitioners of yoga but a book for students and scholars of the literature of yoga. It is a challenge to read and appreciate and only really accessible to those with some experience with the literature. There is probably no serious yoga book written in the past quarter century that fails to cite it.

Rating:
Summary: All serious yoga scholars have this book or want it
Review: I have the Bollingen paperback third printing of the Second Edition of 1969. I have little doubt that they used the plates from that hardcover edition, so the text is identical. The edition of 1970 currently available is the same as the one I have except for a new cover. The original was in French, published in Paris in 1954. This edition is professionally translated by William R. Trask.

Eliade was a nearly legendary scholar of indefatigable energy, and so it is not surprising that this is the definitive single volume academic work on yoga in English (that I am aware of). George Feuerstein's coffee table sized The Yoga Tradition: Its History, Literature, Philosophy and Practice (1998) is a different sort of book, covering yoga from a more practical point of view, and is accessible to a general public. Eliade's book is aimed directly and just about exclusively at academicians. Furthermore, while Feuerstein is a practitioner as well as a scholar, Eliade makes no pretense of first hand experience. As he relates in the Forward, he is interested in the discovery and interpretation of yoga by the West. He wants to explain that in detail. His is a "comparatively full exposition of the theory and practices of yoga...[a] history of its forms, and...its place in Indian spirituality..." (p. xx) The qualifying "comparatively" is a bit of modesty on the part of Eliade. This book really is a "full exposition" (insofar as that is possible) including the ideas, symbolism and methods of yoga "as they are expressed in tantrism, in alchemy, in folklore, in the aboriginal devotion of India." (p. xxii)

The text, which includes lengthy chapters such as, "Yoga and Brahmanism," "Yoga Techniques in Buddhism," "Yoga and Tantrism," "Yoga and Alchemy," etc. runs for 362 dense pages. Sixty-six pages of notes follow, and then a most extensive and valuable bibliography. The Index itself is 47 pages long and concludes with a by-line(!), "Index by Bart Winer," which is only right considering the text was written and set before the age of computers.

This is not a book for practitioners of yoga but a book for students and scholars of the literature of yoga. It is a challenge to read and appreciate and only really accessible to those with some experience with the literature. There is probably no serious yoga book written in the past quarter century that fails to cite it.

Rating:
Summary: Necessary foundation for further study in Yoga
Review: This book is required reading for anyone determined to arrive at a realistic understanding of yoga and Hinduism. It illuminates the central doctrines and history of the thought, as well as providing the understanding for a multitude of sanscrit words which anyone committed to further study will find invaluable. For most, this book may be the pinnacle of their yogic study; for others, a great stepping stone.