A few weeks ago, I sent a Portable Document Format file of my book about yoga to David Gordon White from the University of California in Santa Barbara. The electronic-mail message that went with it was rather terse: “I very much enjoyed your biography of Patanjali’s yoga sutra.[1] You will find it cited in several places in the attached book about yoga, which I completed a month ago.” I added only a few words about my book: “It does not follow the beaten path, but it offers an honest account of my quest for liberation. As such, it may be of interest to scholars of mystical traditions.” A scholar of yoga of great renown, White struck me as someone who could be interested in my personal account. And it is unabashedly personal, to be sure.

To my joy, I got his reply the very next day. “You write very well,” he noted after his cordial thanks. But then he turned to one of my pieces concerning shamanism and yoga: “You seem to think that I ‘missed the point’ because I didn’t bring shamanism into my discussion of the origins of yoga. I can assure you that shamanism has no place in the history of yoga in India.” Indeed, one of my conclusions upon finishing his book was that he had unfortunately missed the connection (“In Praise of Amazon,” March 4, 2015). And then he suggested that I might look into an earlier book of his in which he traced the many threads that led to yoga as it is known today.[2] I immediately ordered the book from Amazon, and let him know about it in my rejoinder. I also drew his attention to one of the pieces from my book in which I cited the Buddha’s disparaging remarks of what I took to be shamanistic practices of his day (“On Childish Arts,” October 14, 2014).

The Amazon package with White’s book about the origins of yoga arrived in today’s mail. I pored through it in search of any mention of shamanism. The only mention of it that I managed to find was in a note that concerns Mircea Eliade’ seminal book about yoga.[3] By the way, White was Eliade’s research assistant at the University of Chicago in the early Eighties, which he mentioned in his reply to my original missive. The note in question mentions shamanism only in passing, though. At any rate, White’s treatment of the origins of yoga does not go beyond the written sources available today, which reach only a few thousand years into the past. And shamanism goes back to the stone age more than ten-thousand years ago. It is squarely prehistoric. Thus, there are no written sources about its origins, development, and gradual adaptation to historic forms of religious thought.

Happy as I am to read White’s book about the origins of yoga, which I find quite exciting, I can see that we are not on the same page. Apparently, we are talking about entirely different things. To the best of my understanding, all forms of sorcery, witchcraft, magic, enchantment, conjuring, divination, spells, or wizardry go back to the stone age. They have survived to this day across the globe. And one tradition in which they can be found is that of yoga. Even Patanjali dedicates an entire book to so-called accomplishments and powers that smack of shamanism (“Screw Accomplishments or Powers,” April 5, 2014). And they all amount to the Buddha’s childish arts of yesteryear. Much of what can be found in White’s book about so-called sinister yogis falls into this category, as well. Which is why I am quite surprised that we are not on the same page about shamanism and yoga. In fact, I have a feeling that we agree on almost everything except the very notion of shamanism.

Addendum (April 10, 2016)

As soon as White’s book arrived by mail, I started reading it in earnest. Given my strong interest in the subject, I went through it at great speed. Once I wrote this piece and posted it on my Residua website, I sent the link to White. “I am still surprised by our differences regarding shamanism and yoga,” I added in my electronic-mail message. “Of course, I might understand our differences better by the time I finish your book, but I must admit that I doubt such a lucky turn at present.” He responded a couple of days later. Here is what he had to say about this piece:

My problem with “shamanism” is that it’s an invented category. As far as I know, outside of the Turko-Mongol speakers of inner Asia, no one has ever referred to themselves as shamans. What Eliade did, and what you have done still further, has been to transform a local term into a universal one such that everything that predates the coming of the “great religions” becomes shamanism.

As you will see as you read through Sinister Yogis, the powers these yogis had/have are grounded in specifically Indic categories, most especially esthetics (how vision works) and epistemology (what constitutes valid cognition). They never used the term shamanism—there is no cognate term in ancient or medieval Indic languages—so it would have been abusive on my part to impose it upon them. Historians must respect the worldview of the people whose histories they are writing.

I responded the following day, when I received White’s message. And here is what I had to say about this particular issue:

I understand your position regarding shamanism. It can easily be stretched to one’s own needs, whatever they may be. Sticking to what one actually finds in a particular environment makes sense, and especially for a historian. But there is a tradition much closer to India than that of the Turko-Mongol speakers that fits the bill: the Bon or Bön tradition that underpins Tibetan Buddhism. As far as I can gather from the literature, it is shamanistic in origin. To the best of my understanding, historians do not dispute this point, either.

Of course, one can add here a vast array of anthropological research into medicine men and the like across much of the world. In some “primitive” peoples that remain isolated to this day, shamanism in this sense is still alive. And this includes parts of Africa, Asia, Australia, South America, as well as what we know about our ancestors in Europe and, well, North America. As I already agreed, stretching the notion of shamanism too much may lead to all sorts of abuse, but we do need a name for prehistoric phenomena that are out of reach of history proper. And this goes all the way to stone age.

I expected to hear from White soon afterwards, but he remained silent. As five days have passed since this exchange, I assume that it is finished, as it were. In the meanwhile, I have finished reading his book, and I am none the wiser about our differences concerning shamanism and yoga. Although I do understand his position, it still strikes me as rather narrow. In my mind, shamanism cannot possibly be limited to the Turko-Mongol speakers even though they spread across much of Asia and into Europe. We need a category for traditions of this ilk in other environments, and I do not see why “shamanism” is inappropriate in this context. Given all the necessary precautions across cultural boundaries, it is actually quite useful. Anyhow, I can only hope to hear from White sooner or later.

Footnotes

1. The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali: A Biography, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014.

2. Sinister Yogis, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009.

3. Yoga: Immortality and Freedom, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009 (first published in 1954).