Yoga-sūtra IV, 2–3 and Vivekānanda's interpretation of evolution

Killingley, Dermot

doi:10.1007/bf00240477

Cited by 12 publications

(8 citation statements)

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“…This is an allusion to Patañjali's Yogas¨tra 4.2: "jåtyantarapari~åmaª prak®-tyåp¨råt." See Killingley (1990).…”

Section: The Term "Eugenics" Was Coined By Francismentioning

confidence: 98%

Yoga, Eugenics, and Spiritual Darwinism in the Early Twentieth Century

Singleton

2007

Hindu Studies

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Put briefly: perhaps the entire evolution of the spirit is a question of the body; it is the history of the development of a higher body that emerges into our sensibility. The organic is rising to yet higher levels. Our lust for knowledge of nature is a means through which the body desires to perfect itself. Or rather: hundreds of thousands of experiments are made to change the nourishment, the mode of living and of dwelling in the body; consciousness and evaluations in the body, all kinds of pleasure and displeasure, are signs of these changes and experiments. In the long run, it is not a question of man at all: he is to be overcome (Nietzsche 1967: 358). This paper is part of a project to map a diffuse, but clearly discernible, modern preoccupation with engineering a new and better kind of human being. 1 This impulse often finds expression through what Joseph Alter has described as "the political prose of physiology" (2004a: 19), a vast and ongoing modern genre concerned with the manipulation of the body to often nationalistic ends. My main focus here is a cluster of interlinked scientific, philosophical, and social ideologies which came into being in mid-nineteenth-century Europe and flourished worldwide over the succeeding hundred years: evolutionary theory in its various guises, Social Darwinism, Eugenics, and the Nietzsche cult. These highly malleable cultural ideologies were intertwined in popular thought and practice and called into the service of sharply divergent social and political enterprises, from Fabianism to (notoriously) Fascism. It is their transferability as ideological items, indeed, that interests me here and not questions of whether such populist expressions represent departures from or perversions of the original founding doctrines. Social Darwinism, evolutionism, and the eugenic fervor took an unprecedented grip on the Western psyche in the early twentieth century and quickly spread beyond the boundaries of Europe. As Carey Watt has noted, "The discourse of the period was in fact rife with references to race, eugenics and a type of international Darwinism which saw relentless competition between communities, nations or races" (1997: 340)-and India was no exception to

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“…This is an allusion to Patañjali's Yogas¨tra 4.2: "jåtyantarapari~åmaª prak®-tyåp¨råt." See Killingley (1990).…”

Section: The Term "Eugenics" Was Coined By Francismentioning

confidence: 98%

Yoga, Eugenics, and Spiritual Darwinism in the Early Twentieth Century

Singleton

2007

Hindu Studies

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“…Thereby, Darwinian evolution is identified with Patañjali's yoga and 'at the same time subordinated to it by claiming superiority for the "spiritual" Indian version'. 42 Prabhupada, the founder of ISKCON, elaborated this dialectic of provisionally affirming western 'materialistic' science, and negating it in the spiritual light of the higher Vedic science of Krishna Consciousness. His Easy Journey to Other Planets is a long meditation on certain discoveries of the Russians and the Americans, and their futility in providing human beings with true 'scientific' understanding of the inner self as a devotee of Krishna.…”

Section: The Two 'Sciences' (Vidyā) Of Vedāntic Hindu Thoughtmentioning

confidence: 99%

The science of the self (ātmavidyā): the reconfigurations of Vedāntic gnosis in Hindu modernities

Barua

2018

South Asian History and Culture

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A distinctive claim of some of the configurations of 'modern Hinduism' is that ancient Vedic wisdom foreshadows some contemporary scientific and technological advances, or provides a spiritual framework within which the current empirical sciences can be encompassed. I discuss some of the hermeneutic strategies employed by Swami Vivekananda, S. Radhakrishnan, Swami Prabhupada and others as part of their imaginations of Hinduism as a 'scientific religion' which is geared towards the spiritual perfection of humanity. Many of these figures appropriated a classical Vedāntic Hindu distinction between 'lower' and 'higher' knowledge, and mapped it onto the distinction, inflected by colonial power, between 'western science' and 'Vedic/yogic wisdom'. I examine three key aspects of this mapping: the semantic ranges of 'science' in some western and Hindu traditions, the Orientalist millieu of colonial India in which these translations were developed, and the conceptual instabilities of the hybrid trope of 'Hindu science'.

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“…The conflict between the non‐teleological character of neo‐Darwinian evolution, which operates through random genetic mutation and natural selection, and the teleological emphasis of Hindu notions of spiritual progress is removed by positing the former as a biological means which can partly assist the perfection of the latter. A crucial distinction between the two is that in Vedantic metaphysical systems, the spirit ( puruṣa / ātman ) is the transcendental origin and foundation of the spiritual evolution, and not the product, of the physical universe (Killingley , 165). Therefore, some of the pivotal figures of modern Hinduism, such as Keshub Chunder Sen, Swami Vivekananda, Aurobindo and others were able to accept the biological evolution of Darwinism at a lower level of truth, by placing it below the higher level of the spiritual manifestation (“evolution”) of humanity (C. Mackenzie Brown , 613).…”

Section: Science and Experiencementioning

confidence: 99%

Investigating the “Science” in “Eastern Religions”: A Methodological Inquiry

Barua¹

2017

Zygon

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This article explores some of the understandings of “science” that are often employed in the literature on “science and Eastern religions.” These understandings crucially shape the raging debates between the avid proponents and the keen detractors of the thesis that Eastern forms of spirituality are uniquely able to subsume the sciences into their metaphysical–axiological horizons. More specifically, the author discusses some of the proposed relations between “science” and “Eastern religions” by highlighting three themes: (a) the relation between science and metaphysics, (b) the relation between science and experience, and (c) the European origins of science. The analysis of these relations requires a methodological inquiry into some of the culturally freighted valences of “science,” “metaphysics,” and “experience.”

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Yoga-sūtra IV, 2–3 and Vivekānanda's interpretation of evolution

Cited by 12 publications

References 0 publications

Yoga, Eugenics, and Spiritual Darwinism in the Early Twentieth Century

Yoga, Eugenics, and Spiritual Darwinism in the Early Twentieth Century

The science of the self (ātmavidyā): the reconfigurations of Vedāntic gnosis in Hindu modernities

Investigating the “Science” in “Eastern Religions”: A Methodological Inquiry

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