Yoga: Immortality and Freedom

Front Cover
Princeton University Press, Jul 26, 2009 - Health & Fitness - 536 pages

In this landmark book, first published in English in 1958, renowned scholar of religion Mircea Eliade lays the groundwork for a Western understanding of Yoga. Drawing on years of study and experience in India, Eliade provides a comprehensive survey of Yoga in theory and practice from its earliest antecedents in the Vedas through the twentieth century.

A new introduction by David Gordon White provides invaluable insight into Eliade's life and work, highlighting the key moments in Eliade's academic and spiritual education, as well as the personal experiences that shaped his worldview. Yoga is not only one of Eliade's most important books, it is also his most personal--the only one to analyze a religious tradition that he had truly lived.

 

Contents

The Doctrines of Yoga
3
Techniques for Autonomy
47
Yoga and Brāhmanism
101
127The Yogic Upanisads 128Brāhmanized Magic
127
IX
136
The Triumph of Yoga
143
in the Mahābhārata 149Yogic Folklore in the Mahābhārata
152
the Bhagavad Gitā
159
Conclusions
359
TO CHAPTER
367
TO CHAPTER
381
TO CHAPTER
392
TO CHAPTER
395
On Tantrism and Iconography
403
On the Literature of Hatha Yoga
409
Nāgārjuna as Alchemist
415

physicians 173The Miraculous Powers 177Knowledge
191
Yoga and Tantrism
200
Dhikr
227
Yoga and Alchemy
274
and Alchemy 278Chinese Alchemy 284Alchemy as a Spirit
290
and Shamanism 318Ascent to Heaven Mystical Flight
326
Gorakhnath Matsyendranath and the Eightyfour Siddhas
421
TO CHAPTER
431
New Translations
480
Index to the Addenda
536
Copyright

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About the author (2009)

Born in Bucharest, Rumania, Mircea Eliade studied at the University of Bucharest and, from 1928 to 1932, at the University of Calcutta with Surendranath Dasgupta. After taking his doctorate in 1933 with a dissertation on yoga, he taught at the University of Bucharest and, after the war, at the Sorbonne in Paris. From 1957, Eliade was a professor of the history of religions at the University of Chicago. He was at the same time a writer of fiction, known and appreciated especially in Western Europe, where several of his novels and volumes of short stories appeared in French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese. Two Tales of the Occult "to relate some yogic techniques, and particularly yogic folklore, to a series of events narrated in the genre of a mystery story." Both Nights of Serampore and The Secret of Dr. Honigberger evoke the mythical geography and time of India. Mythology, fantasy, and autobiography are skillfully combined in Eliade's tales.

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