First of all, let us clear the misunderstanding that what goes on in the name of yoga is not yoga. What is being sold as yoga are Asanas: the bodily postures and it is just one wing of many wings of yoga. Yoga as a total system is a path to the realisation of the secrets of body and mind, and also the speech: the aspect that is often neglected. It is the training of body, speech, and mind to cultivate them to the highest level. Reducing yoga to bodily postures only is a myopic view and a narrow attitude.

While writing the roots of yoga, Mallinson showed how the word yoga was interpreted by different schools of thoughts. He draws from the various sources, both Brahminical, Buddhist, and Jain sources. Yoga as a word has a very mundane meaning in the Vedic literature. He categorises the sources into various schools of thoughts in the Roots of Yoga. In this book, he cited one ancient book ” AmrutSiddhi” as a Hindu source. This is perhaps the first book available that details the practices of Hath Yoga and this book is the source of many manuals and books on Yogic practices and exercises.

Recently, when the manuscript of the Amrtsiddhi was discovered in the bilingual Tibetan- Buddhist Sanskrit, Professor Mallinson attributed it as the Buddhist book written in the Buddhist language by the Siddha Buddhists of the 10th century in a place where it was practised is none other than Manjunath Temple in Kadri, near Mangalore, Karnataka.

Interested readers can read his stormy paper titled as Kalavanchana in Konkan: How a Vajrayana Hathayoga Tradition Cheated Buddhism’s Death in India.

Hatha yoga has a definite origin in tantric Buddhism. The paper also details how the erstwhile Buddhist establishment at Kadri was taken over by the Shaivites. There is so much to exhumed from the Indian soil which was fertilized by the Great Buddha.

Author – Mangesh Dahiwale, Human Rights Activist