Abstrakt
In the past decade, yoga studies has undergone tremendous development, most notably in Modern Yoga research and, thanks to the ERC Hatha Yoga Project, in the field of Hatha Yoga. Despite this astonishing progress, many fundamental questions about the history of yoga remain unanswered.
Especially unexplored is the social history of yoga. We do not know the answers to questions such as who the yogis were, in what milieu the yoga texts were produced or who were the authors of yoga works.
In my presentation, I will suggest that a study of vernacular yoga texts will help us to better understand the social history of yoga. For Sanskrit yoga texts suffer from the same deficiency as the vast majority of Indian religious literature: they are normative, prescriptive works that do not reflect the actual state of affairs.
In contrast, vernacular texts tend to be more descriptive and closer to actual reality. Using the example of tantric yoga works in Bengali, I will demonstrate what challenges the study of vernacular texts poses compared to the study of Sanskrit texts, and what kind of information we can gain from their study.