body and health in yoga, Ayurveda, and Tantra

ody and philosophies of healing 29
by recognizing the mutual influence of physical and mental factors in
health and illness. Apart from the metaphysical problems inherent in
Yoga’s dualism, Yoga’s distinguishing mind/body from consciousness
also yields an important understanding of the relation of health and religiousness:
Similar to the way that mental factors have physiological consequences,
and physical factors have mental consequences for health,
Yoga shows that the wellness of the mind/body can assist the attainment
of spiritual well-being. Conversely, the recovery of spiritual Self-nature
and well-being helps to heal and vitalize the body/mind.
Because Yoga practices have health benefits, there is a misconception,
particularly in the West, that health is Yoga’s goal. Indian views of
Yoga on the other hand, in recognizing Yoga as a religious system emphasizing
the cultivation of Self-nature as consciousness, sometimes
minimize the importance of body and health in Yoga. In chapter 3, I locate
the soteriological role of human physicality within the context of
Yoga’s ultimate aim: attainment of liberation from the nature and constraints
of prakÓrti, and transcendence of the ignorance and suffering
that attend material existence. Both psychophysical and spiritual meanings
of health are instrumental in classical Yoga. As regards psychophysical
health, the refined awareness, discipline, and cultivation of the
body/mind are integral to yogic religious life, and prepare one for the
higher stages of cultivation of consciousness leading to liberation.
Chapter 3 presents classical Yoga as a paradigm of religious therapeutics,
addressing both somatic and spiritual experience, and revealing
two main principles:
1. Although body and psychophysical health are of instrumental and
not ultimate value in classical Yoga, body and health have significant
soteriological functions.
2. Liberation in Yoga is healing in an ultimate sense. It concerns attainment
of well-being with respect to the human being’s most fundamental
nature and highest soteriological potential.
Tantra’s Enlightenable Body
The Vedic tradition and the T¯antric tradition are distinct but interrelated
currents of Indian religious culture, and they share as well as diverge
in their constitutions of religious meaning. A major feature of Tantra
is its ontological presupposition that the universe, and everything in
it, is a manifestation of the one Brahman. Emergent from this principle is