 And I'm delighted to be able to introduce two of the main stalwarts of giant studies in the last few years, John Cort and then Uli Kvarnstrom. So John is gonna start us off with a paper whose title you can see on the board. As he falls off his seat. Reading Gorick Knapp through a giant lens, John. Thank you very much, Paul. And thank you, Peter, for the invitation and also all the other folks who are doing all the work behind the scenes to make all this happen. That's sort of the essential work that happens in these things. And as you can see, I somewhat changed my title here from what was there in the abstracts. Reading Gorick Knapp through a giant lens, giant perceptions of Knapp and Harta Yogis in pre-colonial India. So I'll be talking about the Harta Yogis, not just the Knapps here. And for those of you who are at the conference, where's Chris? Chris, Chris. When was the yoga conference? Oh, nine. Okay, so six years ago. Oh my gosh. You know, you'll say, wait a minute, doesn't this paper belong in that particular session rather than a workshop on Tantra? Which I think indicates ways in which some of these categories we use, and by we, it's both insiders and outsiders, are highly fluid and certainly the dividing lines between much of what we think of as Tantra and much of what we think of as yoga, historically, you know, over the centuries has not been as clearly defined as we might think. So, toward the end of the Banadasi Vilas, the collection of shorter works by Banadasi Das that was edited by his colleague Jagjivan Das in 1644, a year after the author's death in 1643, there's a curious seven-chalpai composition called Goraknaath Kevachan, or The Sains of Goraknaath. This text gives a favorable overview of Goraknaath's teachings. To the best of my knowledge, no scholarly attention has been focused on it. In my estimation, the Goraknaath Kevachan probably is not actually by Banadasi Das, but is a text incorporated into the Banadasi Vilas by Jagjivan Das, the editor, because it was a text enjoyed by Banadasi Das himself, studied by Banadasi Das and the Adyatma seminar that he led in Agra. This is only an informed opinion, informed by evidence that's at best very circumstantial there, but the fact that it's not the only text not by Banadasi Das in the Banadasi Vilas, so there's precedent for that. And texts that are associated with Goraknaath show up all over the place in various names, and so it would make, it wouldn't be surprising to find this text in there. I'm not arguing this by Goraknaath either, but the authorship is uncertain. As I say, nonetheless, it's inclusion in the Banadasi Vilas allows us to see how one group of Jains in Agra in the first half of the 17th century who were interested in spiritual pursuits perceived the teachings of Goraknaath. Now the Goraknaath Kevachan fits easily within the more or less contemporaneous vernacular compositions attributed to Goraknaath. As Hazari Prasad Devati and other scholars have observed, there are differences between the Sanskrit and vernacular texts attributed to Goraknaath. The Sanskrit texts tend to focus more on technical details of yogic practices, whereas the vernacular texts provide more insight into, quote, Devati, the religious beliefs, philosophical doctrines, and moral sayings of the Jogis. If the Sanskrit texts present a more bounded sectarian perspective, many of these vernacular texts fit easily into the broader Sunt tradition. And Devati notes that puds to which Goraknaath's name are attached are also found under the names of Dadu, Kabir, and Nanak. Now, while the precise meaning of the Goraknaath Kevachan in many places is ambiguous and even obscure, and I've counted on help from Imrabunga and Jim Mallinson to interpret some of the verses, as a whole, the seven verses focus on three basic Nath and Sunt teachings. First, the spiritual seeker must abandon all worldly definitions and concerns in favor of the supreme transcendent and innate truth, the sahaj. Second, the path to this understanding does not come through the performance of rituals, but instead comes from the cultivation of spiritual wisdom. And third, one enters into and follows this path by hearing the words of the true guru, drawing of Vanadasidas, okay, here's the text here. In the first verse, the poem says that whereas the people in the world are defined according to the three genders of male, female, and the third gender, the truth transcends such gendered distinctions, and so the seeker should abandon all of these gendered distinctions. In the second verse, the poem repeats the age-old indict distinction between the Jogi, the spiritual renouncer, and the Bogey, the foolish person who remains in the world and is ignorant that he is consuming the world. That's why he's a Bogey. And to understand the difference between these two ways of being or two ways of living is crucial for spiritual success. If you don't, you're a fool. In the third verse, the poem points to two positive spiritual paths of textual study and controlling the breath. These two will lead to the supreme truth, the Pada Marta, a person who does not seek the supreme truth is unrighteous, a dharmī. Now this is the only reference in the poem to breathing practices here called Pavan that are one of the hallmarks of yoga, especially hatha yoga. And remember, I'll come to the hatha yogis later. But this should not come as a surprise that there isn't much reference to breathing and breathing practices for the knots of long exhibited which Jim Mallinson has called an apathy toward the various bodily practices associated with hatha yoga that we'll come to later in my talk. My fourth verse, and this is one I'm deeply indebted to Jim for helping me sort out, introduces the concept of maya or illusion. It's quite likely that maya actually means money. Since yogis still today use maya as a kind of yogi slang to quote Jim for money. Now people in the world think that money is something real and important. But since economists and people who deal with Bitcoin all will say it's just an idea. It's a social construct that functions only as long as everyone participates in the shared illusion that it actually means something. Someone under the illusion that he has money thinks that he is a master. And when he loses all his money he thinks he is now a servant. Even someone who thinks that by becoming a big patron who engages in religious gifting or dana to allow him to overcome the power of illusion and to renounce the power of money to entangle him in the world is still ignorant of the truth. In the fifth verse the poem turns to the understandings of the body using the term pinned, the term most often used for the body and texts attributed to Gorak Nat. It distinguishes three forms of embodiment as a tender young student, as a hard middle-aged cart-puller, and as an old geezer. The poem concludes that people of all three ages who allow themselves to be defined by their bodies are in fact stupid. Mordah. In the penultimate verse the poem stresses the need to investigate matters, to employ the fire of meditation to become absorbed in knowledge. Without these you remain a childish simpleton. A balabola. Now Jim Mallinson, I'll stop quoting you at some point Jim, has said of the knots, rather than engaging in complicated spiritual practice, liberation is achieved through sahaj yoga, natural yoga, whose only real practice if any at all is the repetition of the name of the divine. We see this clearly in the last verse where the poet introduces the concept of the word, here bacha. While the grammar of the first foot is very unclear, it appears that the poem is saying that even birds can pierce through ignorance by hearing the word, and thereby reverse their path of worldly engagement. One learns the word and the true path to liberation only from the guru. In place of worldly matters, Gauraknath as the true guru, the sattguru, teaches the business of sahaj, the innate. While this reference to spiritual pursuit as a business is found widely in satt literature, I think it would be particularly poignant for the well-to-do merchants around Banadasi Das in his spiritual circle in Agra. And finally, the poem ends with the widespread Sunt Admonition that all people who engage in ideology and dispute, vad vivaad, therefore I don't want any arguments to this paper, are in fact merely blind Banadasi Das there. As with many of the puds attributed to Gauraknath, one could replace the signature of the Gaurak with that of any of a number of other Sunt poets in the Gauraknath Kevachan. Nonetheless, the poem presents an accurate pressy of the basic vernacular teachings of Gauraknath and the Nath Sumpradai. If the poem was composed by a Nath, it gives us some sense of how an insider would present the teachings of Gauraknath in the first half of the 17th century in North India. On the other hand, if it was composed by Banadasi Das, then it provides some interesting evidence of how an informed outsider understood these teachers. What we see in the poem is a Jane collection, what we see in this poem in a Jane collection is a very favorable response to the teachings of Gauraknath. The inclusion of it within the Banadasi Velas also gives us some insight into Banadasi Das himself. Go back here to him. He's neither Hindu nor Turk in this one. In large part because he left us the first autobiography written in South Asia, we know more about Banadasi Das than we do about most pre-modern Indians. It's clear from his autobiography that he was a restless soul. In his youth, he wanted to be a worldly poet and composed a long erotic poem which he then later threw into the Gomti River. Later in his youth, he came under the influence of a quote crooked Sanyasi who taught him a mantra, probably a tantric there. The recitation of this mantra for a year would supposedly result in the magical appearance of a gold dinar, after a year, no gold dinar. But he was fooled by a second Hindu renouncer, a Jogi who taught him to worship Shiva daily in the form of a conch shell. That didn't work either. For several years, as we know, he became an orthoprax Svetamburamurti Puja Jane, going to the temple daily to perform puja, going on pilgrimages, observing dietary and other ascetic restrictions, engaging in regular practice of Samayak and Pratikraman. In midlife, he was introduced to Kunda Kunda's two-truth teachings on Vyabhahara Nishchai, relative in absolute truth, which resulted in a severe crisis of faith. He abandoned the performance of all rituals, developed a yearning for renunciation. He and some friends even went so far as to mock all the forms of orthoprax Jainism, sort of reminiscent of Ellen's Pratishtacharyas. They got in an apartment room and took off all their clothes and danced and said, oh, we're now Digumbers. They're a little bit different than Ellen's there, I think, in that way. It may well have been in this time, sort of when he was in the spiritual crisis, that he encountered the teachings of Gordaknath. It would make sense. He eventually settled into the Digumbar form of spirituality known as Adyatma, with which his name has been associated ever since. In Adyatma, the person understands that while he should follow all the Jain rituals out of respect for the relative truth of the material world, he should also cultivate a deeper understanding that in truth nothing other than soul or self, Adyatma, for problematic translations, has any ultimate reality. So it's not surprising, therefore, we find a short text on the teachings of Gordaknath within the collected works of Banadasi Das. Let me jump forward a century now. For while Banadasi Das' reception of the Nath teachings was positive, this was not the only way Jains perceived the Naths and other Sunts and Jogis. A century after Banadasi Das, the Jaipur-based Tirupant ideologue Todermal, who lived from 171920 until 1766 or 67, included a discussion of yogic practices in his magnum opus, the Moksha Mark Prakashak, a text and prose that he left unfinished at his death. More than anyone else, Todermal was responsible for laying the intellectual foundations of the Degumber Tettapunth. To do this in the Moksha Mark Prakashak, he both presented the Tettapunth perspective on what religion really was and also engaged in lengthy refutations of all other spiritual paths. Much of his criticism was aimed at the long-standing mainstream of North Indian Degumber Jainism, what eventually became known as the Beastpunth. But he also devoted the fifth chapter of this text to a case-by-case refutation of a wide array of non-Degumber forms of religion. He detailed the ritual, intellectual, and cosmological faults of the Vaishnavas, the Shaivas, the Vedakas, the Mamamsikas, Islam, Sankhya, Nyaya, Vaisheshika, Buddhism, Charvaka, and both Murti Pujak and Dundak branches of Shvetambar Jainism. In this wide-ranging attack on all other forms of religion, he turned his attention to the practice of yoga. Now, in his description of the practitioner, there's another picture of him. These all obviously derive from a same 20th century drawing. There we go. In his description of the practitioners of yoga, Todermal did not cite any texts, but rather appears to have based his discussion on both what we might call common knowledge and what he encountered in Jaipur. He does not mention any specific yogic tradition or community, and the distinctions amongst them probably would have escaped his notice anyways. In many ways, he described the stereotypical yogis of the early 18th century. In his brief depiction of these practices, he does, though, show evident knowledge of the practices and principles of Hatha yoga. Given that he was writing in mid-18th century Jaipur, it's quite possible that most of the yogis he encountered were in fact Ramanundis, since there was an especially close relation between the Ramanundi order and the Kachua rulers of the state. My discussion, therefore, is not an analysis of two receptions of the same Hindu order or practices, but Nadasi Das and Todermal addressed very different Hindu yogic traditions. Nonetheless, I think bringing Todermal into the picture enhances our understanding of the reception of these groups by urban pre-colonial Jane intellectuals. It's not surprising, given his agenda, that Todermal was very critical in his treatment of the practitioners of Hatha yoga, whom he termed practitioners of the breath and related practices. Again, Pavan is the term he uses here. He acknowledged that the practice of breathing exercises through the subtle veins or Nadas generates seemingly supernormal powers of prognostication. These powers, however, are merely worldly activities because they stimulate the two great passions, poisons of passion and aversion, rag and dvesh. They merely increase pride or man and greed and lobe rather than leading to liberation. The practice of pranayama, breath control does not lead to samadhi as it's claimed. He compared the feats of stopping the breath, second section here, he compared the feats of stopping the breath to those of acrobats. It may be an impressive performance, but it has no spiritual benefit. And the trope of comparing your opponents to mere acrobats nuts is fairly widespread in Indian diatribes against other groups. Todermann dismissed the claims of stopping the fluctuations of the mind, which we also heard quoted from the Yoga Sutra this morning, as being no different than just being asleep. It does not lead to the cessation of desire. He also dismissed claims of attaining immortality, saying that the body of someone who claims to have attained immortality burns just like any other body so clearly is not immortal. One depiction of the attainment of a transcendent state found in the writings of many saints is that one attains the ability to hear the unstruck sound, the huna hud nod or huna hud shoved. These claims also left Todermann very unimpressed. He compared them to the pleasures of listening to a musical instrument. While one gets great joy from this, this is just a sensory experience. It has nothing to do with spiritual liberation. Another sunt practice, which actually we also ran into this morning in a positive sense in the Gyanarnava, is that of silent repetition, a japa japa, in which the practitioner comes to realize the unity of his own soul with the entire universe, as he silently recites the phrase so hum, I am that as he inhales and exhales. Todermann said mere word play. A partridge makes the sound to he, to he, that is you, that is you, which one might mistakenly hear as words meaning the equally mystical phrase you are that, but in fact, it is just meaningless. The next yogic practice he discusses is rolling the eyes to meditate upon the trikuti, the chakra that lies between the eyebrows and the nose, and focusing the eyes on the tip of the nose. Yes, one can see all sorts of things through such distortion of the eyes, but what does that prove? Asks Todermann. He returns again to the claims of supernatural powers, such as telling of the past and the future, using words for magical effect, flying through the air and healing disease. The unliberated gods have such powers as well, but they are of no use to the soul. They merely stir up the passions and so lead to suffering. Finally, Todermann accused the yogic and bhakti practitioners of being inconsistent in their claims, as he investigated the hagiographical claims of liberation. On the one hand, we have the stories of the great feats of asceticism undertaken by some yogis in order to attain liberation, at the same moment, one hears that attaining liberation through the repetition of the name is so easy that even prostitutes can do it. This is another common trope that in fact your opponents hang out with prostitutes. Todermann concluded that one cannot have any faith that such contradictory and inconsistent people as these ideologues of yoga can be relied upon to explain the path to liberation correctly. So, Bernadocie Dawson and Todermann describe very different groups of practitioners within the broader Sunt yogi stream of early modern North Indian religiosity. Bernadocie described the tradition of Gauraknath and the subsequent Naths, Todermann, an unnamed group or group who practice hakti yoga. Both cases, though, I think they're reasonably accurate in their depictions, although neither of this text provides us with anything resembling a thorough ethnographic description that Peter would ask for. Bernadocie Dawson presented the perspective of the avidut, one who rejects the world and goes so far that in the words for the last time, to quote Jim, he quote, pours scorn on all worldly activity, including religious practice. In one verse, Bernadocie Dawson did praise scriptural study and breath control, but in the main, his short text stresses the need to reject worldly distinctions and practices. He concludes that the path to liberation involves hearing the word of the true guru, whereby one can reverse the human tendency to be defined by the material world. Todermann, on the other hand, describing the practitioners of hakti yoga, who engaged in practices of breath control and meditation to activate the subtle spiritual energies of the body and thereby generate an inner spiritual awakening. He showed good familiarity with many of the technical terms of hakti yoga and related Sunt traditions. He refers to the Nathis and the Chakras to the practice of harmonizing the breath through silent repetition, repetition of the mystical phrase Soham. He certainly talks about the ila and the pengala and the sushumna, and also talks about the unstruck sound. Where our two authors differ most strikingly is in their evaluation. As I said before, the inclusion of the Gauriknath Kibachan within Bernadocie Dawson's collected short works show a very positive reception of this text. Todermann, however, had nothing good to say about practitioners of hakti yoga. Compared them to acrobats, stating that even prostitutes can attain similar spiritual results. He did not deny the existence of these powers, but said there is no difference between yogic powers and those of acrobats or unliberated deities. And these are not what a true spiritual practitioner should be following. These two texts, therefore, perhaps tell us more about their authors than they do about the Nath and yogic subjects which they describe. Todermann's criticism of hakti yogis came in a chapter in which he engaged in sweeping criticisms of all other spiritual disciplines. He events the correctness of his own position, argued that to think otherwise is to be a fool. In the terms of Diana Eck, he was a classic example of an exclusivist, someone who believes that there's only one way to attain spiritual perfection and all other religious traditions need to be excluded as inherently wrong. Bernadisi Das, however, go back there, didn't it? Was certainly capable, I should say, Bernadisi Das was certainly capable of passing judgment on other religious traditions as well. In fact, there's a long text right after the Goraknath Kevachin where he basically critiques a large number of materialist and spiritual traditions in the Vedya Adike, I forget what it's called. Anyway, I forget the title, but he goes in a whole bunch of groups and explains why they're wrong. Bernadisi Das, however, was no exclusivist ideologue. Yes, he saw Jainism as the best of all spiritual paths, but Bernadisi Das was open to learning from other spiritual traditions as well, and even concluded in the end that there really is no significant difference between the teachings of the Jinnah and the teachings of Goraknath, so thank you.