Very rarely have scholars focussed their attention on the yoga practice of contemporary ascetics, which is surprising considering that yoga probably originated and developed in an ascetic context. Yoga, for ascetics who chose it as a religious path, has a specific 1 spiritual meaning and purpose ; it is a private discipline, and as such it should remain in the private sphere. Furthermore, being such an individual experience, sādhus claim it cannot be described by words, nor can be understood by someone who is not on the path. Yoga in effect, is a full-time commitment for the ascetics, while, as we will see, its physical aspect is just a temporary one. For this reason, the yoga practices that I am going to analyse in this paper are those that ascetics call "external", physical yoga, i.e. āsana s and prāṇāyāma s. Haṭha yoga is the usual term to describe this physical yoga. As Mallinson notes: 'The word hat ̣ ha (lit. force) denotes a system of physical techniques supplementary to yoga more broadly conceived ' (2011:770). The techniques peculiar to Haṭha Yoga are: ṣaṭ karma (purification), āsana (posture), prāṇāyāma (breath control), mudrā (physical techniques to "seal" the body), bandha (lock). They were slowly introduced in texts and then collected in the 15 th-century Haṭhapradīpikā. However, in interviews in India with ascetics belonging to 2 the main sampradāya s (religious orders) connected to yoga practice-namely Nāgā Daśanāmīs, Nāth Yogīs, Udāsīns, as well as Vairāgī s from the Rāmānandī and Rāmānujī 1 For what has been written on sādhus and their practices see the monographs

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract