Yoga is War

All right, I'm going to start with a quote. This is from the Mahabharata. That's the oldest and greatest epic of India, if not the world, about 100,000 verses, dates from between the 4th century BC and the 2nd century AD. This quote probably is from the later part, and it says the following, Without a yoga, the highest path cannot be reached. Therefore mounting my yoga and abandoning my mortal shell, I will become the wind and enter into the sun of shining rays.

So what's this about a yoga? We don't ever think of using the term a yoga, we just talk about yoga. Well, it turns out that the word yoga in this sentence means chariot. So he's saying I'm going to mount a chariot called a yoga and enter into the sun. What you see on the screen is an image of Krishna in his universal form teaching to his warrior friend Arjuna, teaching known as the Bhagavad Gita.

This is included in the Mahabharata that I just read that other quote from. And it's one of the earliest extant texts that we have on yoga. It likely dates from around the same time as the Yoga Sutra which of course is considered to be the text that gives us the classical yoga, at least classical yoga philosophy. I've often wondered or I used to wonder why Krishna would have chosen to say so much about yoga of all things on a battlefield. First of all, what does Krishna say about yoga in the Mahabharata?

He says a lot of things and some of them may sound contradictory. So for example he says, the yogi ought to yoke himself at all times so that the workings of mind and senses are under control. Let him sit yoked, and the Sanskrit for that is yukta, with his thoughts on me, his intention focused on me. He is called yoked when his restrained mind has come to rest upon his self alone and he's without craving for any external object. When thought ceases, Krishna goes on, curbed by the practice of yoga.

When he looks upon himself and is contented with himself, then he knows that this is the separation, the Sanskrit word is the yoga, not yoga, of his bond with sorrow which is called yoga, which is the opposite of separation, union. Then Krishna says in another passage that the yogi who sees everything in him and him and everything becomes one with him, implying that yoga is or leads to union with God. And then he also says that ignorant people who are enveloped in the maya of my Krishna's yoga fail to recognize me, Krishna, as unborn and immortal. Here maya means something like artifice or wizardry and an artistic creation of something visible to the senses. You have to remember here that the architect of the anti-gods called the asuras in Sanskrit mythology is named maya.

So he builds great things like houses of cards or houses of illusion. So that's what Krishna is meaning here by maya. Yoga itself would come to mean artifice and stratagem in later literature as well. So Krishna is using yoga in a lot of different ways here in this set of passages from the mama-habhara which also leads us to believe that yoga didn't have a single fixed definition, that it had a broad semantic range back in the time of the Bhagavad Gita. But what he did most strikingly in the Gita that had not been done before is that he puts adjectives or qualifiers in front of this word yoga.

So yoga comes to mean something like path or practice or discipline. So he says karma yoga, the yoga of action, jnana yoga, the yoga of knowing, bhakti yoga, the yoga of devotion, these are the ones that most people remember. There are several others that he mentions in the Bhagavad Gita and I'll talk about two of them later. One is called aishvarya yoga which means something like the yoga of mastery and vibhuti yoga which means the yoga of multiplying your body into multiple forms of yourself. And later I'll talk about the importance of this adding qualifiers to the word yoga.

It kind of was the beginning of branding that we see so much of in the yoga world today. So prior to the yoga sutras, which again they date from around the second century AD, how did people understand this word yoga? Was there a single understanding of the word? What was the standard definition of the word yoga around the year zero? Well you have to remember here that like Arjuna, that's the warrior in the Mahabharata epic to whom Krishna is giving this teaching, Krishna is himself also a warrior and all of the earliest references to yoga from the Vedas, the most ancient of the Indian revealed scriptures dating from as early as 1500 BC down to the time of the Bhagavad Gita, all references to yoga related directly to warfare.

And this is also important in the context of the Bhagavad Gita because Krishna is positioned close to Arjuna on the battlefield because he's his charioteer and the word for that is purohita in Sanskrit. Purohita means he who is placed in front and Krishna is placed in front of Arjuna because that's where the charioteer sat. He held the reins and the warrior sat behind him in the box with his bow and arrow and he was shooting his arrows behind the purohita. But what else did the purohita do besides steer the charioteer? He was also both the bard of the warrior, that is to say he would recite the great deeds of the warrior on the battlefield because he was right there when the battle took place.

And also he was a master of battlefield magic. He would throw magical weapons at the enemy and those weapons would neutralize the magical weapons being shot by the purohita of the enemy warrior so that when those sorts of magical weapons were neutralized then the warrior's real weapons, in quotes, bows and arrows, well arrows, would actually do their damage. So that's why Krishna is so well positioned to give Arjuna a teaching on a battlefield at this point because they're right next to each other. Well, so let's go back to the Vedas, the scriptures or revelations that were later committed to writing that are at least a thousand years earlier than the Bhagavad Gita. In the Vedas the word yoga meant wartime or warfare and nothing else.

And that was for the simple reason that the war was the time that warriors put on the yokes of their war chariots and charged off into war. Yoga is a Sanskrit word that literally means the yoke, what you put on a war horse to yoke your chariot to that horse. And the warrior's yoked chariot was the prime machine of war in that ancient world. It was the greatest war machine that people knew of at the time. So this is also why the Bhagavad Gita is introduced in the Mahabharata by the description of the preparations for this great war that will take place between two sets of cousins, Arjuna's brothers, the Pandavas, and their cousins, the evil Kauravas.

And so here's a quote from the opening, in fact the preceding the Gita itself, the prelude, the prequel to the Gita, when the night had made way for dawn there arose a great noise of kings shouting, the yokes lay on the yokes. At sunrise the entire vast force of the two armies stood yoked. But this wasn't all. The ancient Indian warrior aristocracy, India's warrior class, had its own doctrine of salvation. Unlike others, the warrior who died on the battlefield facing his enemies, not turning tail, would rise directly to heaven, to the heaven of the gods on a heavenly chariot.

And that chariot was called a yoga. So going back to that verse that I read at the beginning of this segment, this is the yoga that the speaker is referring to. So it's against this specific backdrop of the yoga of warfare and the bodily rise of the warrior, the apotheosis of the warrior, that Krishna presents his new spin, at least for the time of the Bhagavad Gita, on yoga. There was another ancient aspect of yoga that also predated the Bhagavad Gita. This is the beginning of the linkage between the word yoga and the practice of meditation, something that sounds a bit more familiar than warfare to us.

We see this, of course, in the yoga sutra, which, again, dates from about the same time as the Bhagavad Gita. But earlier than both of those works is an Upanishad, called the Kataka, that dates from the third century BCE, which uses the metaphor of a chariot and a charioteer to describe the relationship between the soul and the mind-body complex. In that metaphor, the self is the chariot warrior, the soul. The body is the chariot. The intellect is the charioteer.

The minds are the reins. The senses are the horses. And the man who has understanding is able to control the chariot. And he goes, according to this teaching, to the world of Vishnu, one of the high gods of Hinduism, from which he's never born again. Now it's interesting that in the same century, or thereabouts, there was a teaching on a chariot that was nearly identical, and that teaching came from ancient Greece.

And it was a teaching made by Plato in his dialogue called the Thymias. And it's always tantalizing to think that there may have been some sort of communication between ancient India and ancient Greece at that time. But we can't know that actually. Now in that passage from the Kataka Upanishad, we see the charioteer rising to heaven because of his understanding. It's quite different from the warrior who rises to heaven on his yoga, his chariot, because he has died facing his enemies.

There's quite a difference there. There's a Vedic precedent to this Upanishadic teaching on yoga as well, which is the most likely explanation for the association of yoga with meditation. And this precedent appears in the context of what we can call poetry jousts of the ancient Vedic priests. They had sort of poetry slams back in those days where in the context of a sacrifice, priests would be in two opposing teams or camps, and they would shout, not shout, but sing riddles back and forth to one another. And whoever could sort of keep the riddle going would win, and whoever couldn't lost.

And there were great prizes to be won by these priests in those contexts too. The winner could win, well, usually cows were the prize because cows were wealth in those days. The loser could have his head cut off, so it was a pretty high stakes game. So the poets, given that those stakes were so high, they would describe their search for poetic inspiration as a yoking of their mind to the occasion. So the language of yoga comes into play here.

So for example, in Rig Veda 5, the inspired poets yoked their minds and their poetic thoughts. Another verse from the same book of the Rig Veda, like a horse I who know have yoked myself to the chariot shaft with my own will. I pull on that shaft, which moves powerfully forward, ensuring the favors of the gods. I do not wish for it to be loosened, nor for it to go backward. May it, which knows the path and which goes ahead, guide me in a straight line.

That's important when you're a chariot warrior too, because if your chariot goes off course or backs up, it usually means you're going to die very shortly thereafter because you've gotten bogged down and it's really hard to turn those things around and so forth. A later Rig Veda, Kim, this is from the 10th book, describes poets who are yoked, again that verb yoga comes from, standing on their chariot shafts and undertaking a reconnaissance journey to the ends of the earth. This they did to link the world to the word of their poetry joust. So they see their mind journeying far out from where they're sitting in that sacrificial context and they're finding ways to talk about everything in the world and link it somehow to the immediate occasion of their poetry joust. But that being said, the principal reference of the word yoga in ancient India was chariot warfare.

We've already seen the body compared to a war chariot from the Kataka Upanishad. What were other ways in which warfare finds its way into the embodied history of yoga? This is an image of a chariot wheel from a temple in Thailand. It's a fairly standard representation of a chariot wheel. What's important about the wheel is that it has a hole in the center of it, where the axle would fit into.

So it's the axle hole and the word for that hole is cum, K-H-A-M. Well, this relates directly to the first noble truth as taught by the Buddha. Of course, Buddhism is grounded in the four noble truths and the first noble truth is there is suffering, which in Sanskrit is sarvam dukkam. So you can translate sarvam dukkam as all is suffering or you could say because dukkam means bad axle hole. You could say the whole thing is a bad axle hole.

This is like a way of saying life sucks and then you die. That's the first noble truth and he's relating it directly to warfare using chariots. The Buddha himself was born a warrior. He was a prince and he renounced his princely vocation to become enlightened. So it makes sense that his references to suffering would be related to warfare.

So that is the case and so too with other words that we tend to associate with yoga such as chakra because that is what a wheel is, yogi, the one who practices yoga, yoga as I've already begun to develop and yogini, female yogi, but we'll see that that means something quite different from what one might expect. So we have representations of goddesses for example. This one is named Chakreshvari, our lady of the wheels and the wheels she's holding are chariot wheels. They are not chakras of the human body. They are chakras and that's why her name is Chakra Eshvari, our lady Eshvari of the chakras, the wheels.

She's holding those wheels because they're the wheels of chariot warriors not the wheels inside the subtle body because for one thing this sculpture which dates from about 800 degree, free dates or appears at about the same time as the earliest references to chakras as being subtle centers in the yogic body. In the same vein, one of the great temples of eastern India is the sun temple of Konarak, temple to the sun god and you can see that the entire temple is represented as a great chariot with wheels along the side. Because of course people tend to represent their gods in their own image and not the other way around, gods also had their chariots and the most illustrious of the gods who had chariots was the sun god because the sun would make its way across the heavens every day on a chariot being pulled by horses much like Helios and Apollo in Roman and Greek mythology. So the sun had a chariot of his own. Not only did the sun god have the best chariot among all the gods but he had a chariot whose reigns were his rays.

So the rays of the sun were his reigns and actually the word in Sanskrit for rain, r-e-i-n, is the same as the word for ray and it's probably because the original chariot was that of the sun. But there's also an important linkage between the rays of the sun and the yoga of warriors that I'll come back to. It was essential to the understanding of yoga by the warrior class. So here you have an image of chariot fighting from Angkor Wat in Cambodia. This is a scene from the Ramayana, the other great ancient epic of India.

We find this doctrine of the warrior and his relationship to the rays of the sun mythologized in the Mahabharata itself. So the same text that contains the Bhagavad Gita. There are four battle accounts in the epic that portray warriors who are about to die and they know they're about to die and they get off their chariots and they sit down on the ground and then the true yoga happens at this point. When the warrior has seated himself on the ground knowing he's about to die, a heavenly chariot comes down from heaven, that chariot's called a yoga, and takes the dying warrior on it and raises him along a ray of sunlight up to the sun and heaven. Now what's special about this, well for one thing, have you ever seen this happen before?

No. But not only does the yogi, sorry, not only does the chariot warrior go to the sun but he goes through the sun and that is important for the ancient Indian world because that's where the gods live. Everyone who dies goes to the sun and gets recycled back into the world of rebirth. If you get through the orb of the sun then you're back where the gods live and that's where you stay forever. So that's what's called apotheosis, bodily rising up to heaven and staying there, remaining in the world of the gods.

And so you have this in four different episodes from the Mahabharata and these are the only instances outside of the teachings of the Bhagavad Gita where you have repeated references to the word yoga. Now there'll be references to the word yogi that appear in a different context in the Mahabharata and I will get to that. So here this is a slide that is not of a chariot warrior rising to the sun on a ray of sunlight. It's rather a depiction of another sort of heroic person, a heroine and that's a sati. Perhaps you've heard of faithful Indian wives who would throw themselves on their dead husband's funeral pyre rather than out survive their husbands, they were called satis.

And this is an image from a popular work of poster art from the 1970s of a woman who became a sati and you can see in the image a ray of sunlight coming down to the very fire that she is about to burn herself on. So the dynamic of a heroic rise to heaven is being portrayed here in this poster. Now this poster is only about 40 years old but here's not a poster but a sculpture from the 1400s, yes the 1400s from South India and it's actually a kind of a comic strip portraying the same thing. What you see on the lower of the three registers is a hero dying not this time in battle but fighting off cattle rustlers but he dies in the process and the middle register is him mounting onto a chariot and that chariot is called a yoga and that chariot takes off to the third register on the image and that's heaven where you see him worshipping Shiva, the God to whom he was devoted in the presence of the God which means he's made it, he's gone through the sun and he's there for all time. So that's the dynamic of yoga as described in the Mahabharata that carries on for many centuries after the time of the Bhagavad Gita.

This connection between yoga and warfare has a really interesting later history because we can learn from sculptures and from word descriptions that people would go into battle dressed up like yogis in the medieval period which means that they would be fairly naked carrying weapons and nothing but a loin cloth and weapons of which a chakra, because a chakra is not just a chariot wheel or an energy center inside the body, it's also a discus, it's a weapon that's thrown and you can see a chakra in the hands of one of these yogis. So this is from Kajuraho, a famous temple complex in central India, dates from about the year 1000, one of the most ancient and graphic representations of yogis as warriors. This is not the only one, so this is from a much later source. This actually is chronicled in the history of the reign of Akbar, the great Mughal emperor who ruled over India in the early 1600s and according to that chronicle he actually witnessed a battle between yogis, yogis from different sects who were just killing each other en masse and that's what you see on this miniature painting, you can see people that look very much like holy men but instead of just meditating under trees in sort of a blissed out state they're killing each other with weapons. So what does this tell us about what yogis were?

Here's another example of the same, this one is a bit more cryptic, no one quite knows exactly apart from the fact that there are people who look like holy men but again, bearing all sorts of weapons, no one quite knows what that woman there in the center of the image with the baby is doing but in any case it dates from about the 1750 or so and clearly it's a war among yogis once again. So in this early modern period, meaning starting in the 16th century down into the period of the British colonial rule in India in the middle of the 19th century, the military labor market was basically a mercenary setup where people would enlist and when they went off to war they would dress up like yogis meaning they would wear basically nothing but ashes smeared on their body and some face paint so you can also think of Native Americans going off to war and then they carry their weapons and they kill each other but they look for all the world like yogis and you have descriptions of generals in these wars and they are yogis, they're even called yogi kings yet they are military generals and there's a rich literature on this. You find it in poetry from the period and you find it in history writing and you also find it in artwork. This would carry over into religious festivals because there's a very important festival that many people here in the West are familiar with now, it's called the Kumba Mela. It's a gathering of holy men that happens on the Ganges River at different places at once every four, eight, twelve years and at the greatest of these you have the members of the different militarized yogi orders all converging and there's kind of a pecking order there and whoever can get into the water first because that's the main reason for this festival.

It's a bathing festival in the Ganges in some way has, you know, dibs on sort of the highest status among the various religious orders and in the time of the British at one of these bathing festivals a pitch battle just broke out because they were again they were fighting over sort of creds and turf and it was a battle of yogis. Now this illustration is of a group of holy men, they're called nagas which means naked, sannyasis renouncers, that's also a name for one of the militarized orders of yogis that exist down to the present day, they just don't fight anymore. This linking of yoga and warfare turns up in the writings of a theosophist named Subhabati Swami who was from Bengal and who wrote in the first decade or so of the 20th century and he is the first to talk about rising up through the chakras, now these are the chakras that we are familiar with, the subtle energy centers in the body but he describes it as a kind of spiritual warfare, a conquest of a series of fortresses that the practitioner is actually rising through and conquering and I'll say more about him when I talk about the chakras at a later point, well this notion of the chakras as fortifications or fortresses is one that has a number of references and I'm going to read a few of these, this is from a very early source, the Atharvaveda, about 1000 BCE which says the body is the fortress of the Brahman, Brahman is a word that we can read as soul here, the body is the fortress of the soul, the word for fortress here is Pur, P-U-R, for which reason man is called Purusha and Purusha is one of the standard words for just human being, so the body is the fortress, poor of the soul and that is why a person is called Purusha. About 500 years later a work called the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad says he, referring to God, made fortresses with two feet, the person, Purusha, is lying in the fortress and this is a play on words because fortress, lying in the fortress in Sanskrit is Puri Shaya and that's something quite close to Purusha, so they're saying that we are just fortresses with two feet, and bodies and the fortress is protecting the soul and finally slightly later Upanishad, the one that also referred to the body as a chariot, guarded by the charioteer, the kataka speaks of the body as a fortress with 11 gates and then finally quite a bit later a text that I'm going to refer to at great length later in my talks, the Naitratantra which dates from about 850 CE, says that the yogi should enter into his victim's body, assaulting that body fortress from every side, so these are all references to the human body as a fortress, so we have these multiple textual references to the body as a fortress going back to 1000 BCE or so. Here's one of the few but quite significant artistic representations of the same where you see in the place where you'd expect to see chakras, you see fortresses instead.

Now this is a painting that was made in Jodhpur, an important royal city in western India in the state of Rajasthan, I'll say more about later, it's certain that this was painted by a Nazi yogi and we know that for a number of reasons, primarily among those that the Nazi yogis were incredibly powerful and received great patronage in this kingdom of Jodhpur in this early part of the 19th century. They had actually placed the king who was their patron on the throne earlier that century by defeating his rival and for that reason he gave them many monasteries and temples and cash and he patronized the writing of their mythology, their stories and the representation in art of their teachings on the yogic body and you're going to see a lot of images from this particular artist in this particular period because they're such great examples. In about the same decade as this painting was executed in Jodhpur in western India, there was a laboring class group called the Kartabhajas that were in eastern India in Bengal who's own mystic poetry also identified a part of the yogic body as a fortress and here they were referring to the heart lotus in the center of the subtle body but this was a heart with a hundred petals on it, not just six or eight or twelve but they called that heart chakra the company fort and that's really interesting because what company were they talking about? They were talking about the British East India Company. So somehow this trading cartel from the 18th and 19th century actually found its way into the subtle body of yoga in this part of India which was where the British East India Company had its headquarters and so these Kartabhajas were low class, they were actually Muslims for the most part unloading the ships on the docks of the British East India Company and they had their own mystic poetry about the yogic body and this is what they did with the fort of their British colonial masters in their mapping of the yogic body.

So I've talked about not yogis. The not yogis generally take this figure, Machendranath, as their founder. Machendranath probably lived in Eastern India in around the 9th century. There's not a lot known about the historical figure but he has a great career let's say in not legend and myth and this is a piece of poster art from Western India from the 1990s which shows him in the foreground with eight of his disciples but if you look at them they're all just clones of Machendranath and that's kind of interesting because this speaks directly to one of the other uses of the term yoga that I actually already began to allude to and that is taking over other people's bodies. This is something that tantric yogis could do at least in theory and you find rich descriptions of how that is done and the richest of those descriptions is found in this work the Naitra Tantra from the 9th century which describes the practice of what it called subtle yoga where a yogi takes over another person's body and that takeover is described in terms of a military assault where the yogi storms the walls of the fortress of that other body and penetrates its innermost recesses to destroy and discard the original owner's heart and soul and energy and thought and replace it with his own.

So this is how someone like Machendranath could have eight replicas of himself but then why not 800, 8000 and this was kind of the implications of this notion of the yogi as someone who takes over other people's bodies. They could create armies of themselves either by hostile takeover or just by kind of cloning themselves sometimes they didn't even need other bodies to use as supports but in either case this was a way to describe how yogis could gain power over entire kingdoms such as the Nath yogis did for Mansing of Jodhpur in the early 19th century. So this is an image of Machendranath a legendary human yogi but you find similar representations of the yogi god because Shiva is the god of yogis with clones of himself very much the same sort of cloning imagery here and those are warrior yogis such as the Nath yogis would have been in that early 19th century period which is of course the period of this painting as well and another example of the same is this one here all from the same Jodhpur probably painted by the same Nath yogi representing the same concept. So this was how a yogi could eventually become the general of an army of clones of himself controlled by the original self who kind of had mind control over all the other selves that were in his army. So with this we can turn to another aspect of the fortress as an element of the yogic body and how warfare found its way into the body of the subtle body of yoga.

One of the great goddesses and actually the earliest of the great goddesses of Hinduism was named Durga is named Durga her name comes from one of the Sanskrit words for fortress. Fortresses can be called Durga's Durga means door hard difficult to go to hard to get to you can't get into a fortress very easily her name is Durga because she's a feminine being so she's a female fortress and she was in fact the walls of the fortress that protected the people inside she was the divinized fortress. Now in her classical mythology she's identified as the slayer of a demon called the buffalo demon is what you see on the screen here on the slide but at the same time and even actually before that mythology she was analogized as the walls of a fortress and that notion of the fortress walls as being in some sense the body of a goddess or a group of goddesses also finds its place in again this city of Jodhpur where Mansing the king was placed on the throne by the nadiyogis and then patronize them here you see a photograph of his fort which was built before his time but the legend about the fort is quite interesting you see it's on this plateau overlooking the rest of the city of Jodhpur at the time it was built the story goes that there was an irascible yogi named the lord of the birds who had to be placated who had to be satisfied before the fort could be built they kept trying to build the fort and its walls kept falling down and they learned that there was this yogi named the lord of the birds that was causing the fort to fall down now that yogi's name was Chiryanath which means the lord of the birds here's a painting of him from Jodhpur well who were the birds and what did they have to do with this fort the fort at Jodhpur even today is one where there are thermals there are natural hot winds that blow up from the surface of the desert and rise directly up along the sides of this plateau and there are birds called kites chila you can see them here who ride the thermals and they fly around this fort well these were the birds of which Chiryanath the yogi lord of the birds was the lord and this goes to the concept that's a very important one that will dwell on for a while here of yogini's as female divine warriors who protect those who worship them and destroy those who don't worship them and they classically take the form of bird or animal headed women or just birds or animals they are shape changers they can appear as beautiful live naked women or the same with heads of birds or animals or just as plain old birds such as you see in this photograph or animals and the animals tend to be scary animals like jackals that feed on the dead on battlegrounds these kind of birds too they're scavenger birds they feed on the dead in battlegrounds or just any old dead so what these yogini's who circle the fort of Jodhpur were and are doing at the command of the lord of the birds that yogi who's also himself analogized to the mountain upon which the fort itself sits are they're protecting the ramparts they like Durga who's a goddess of the fortress itself are the goddesses of the fortress so they're protecting that physical fortress in the world in the same way as we'll see that yogini's find their way into the subtle body and protect it in different ways this is an illustration from Tibet 14th century of the chakra sambra mandala it's particularly apropos from the point I want to make here because as one of my colleagues Ronald Davidson who has been teaching at Fairfield College for years he's one of the great scholars of Buddhism in India and Tibet as he's convincingly argued mandalas and that's what this is are basically two-dimensional paintings of fortresses and you see that particularly in the blow up on the right side of this image where you see the fortresses entry gate with all sorts of fortifications and powerful beings guarding that entrance so these mandalas were actually representations of a fortified city with the king and queen at the center of that city of course they become represented as the god and goddess at the center of a mandala but the original use of the term mandala was a fortified city and this is a representation of such here once again we see a kind of transposition of the world of warfare onto the worlds of meditation and yoga practice this also carries over into another sort of chariot this is a processional chariot from the city of Bhakta poor in Nepal that was gravely damaged by the earthquake of last year in Bhakta poor one of the primary gods a tantric god is named Bhairava and his temples are found everywhere but he is also represented on chariot wheels as those eyes that you see because he is looking out protecting that chariot with his eyes well I don't have a slide because I haven't been able to find a representation of it but you also read word descriptions of yoginis as sitting on wheels of chariots and the circular rim of a fortress and so forth protecting it so it's that image that this particular slide here is meant to convey yoginis too are said to enter into stand upon or dance on weapons to protect them and the warriors who are bearing them and you have to also bear in mind here the definition of an emperor in South Asia going back to early Buddhism he was called a chakra vartan a wheel turner which meant that the wheels of his war chariot had encircled the boundaries of his kingdom so you you again have this warfare imagery relating to chakras relating to protection and relating to yoginis who stand on the rims of those chakras in various ways we can see that that's referred to in an 11th century royal encyclopedia that contains a chapter entitled the circle of yoginis it's actually a discussion of military strategies combined with descriptions of astrological diagrams for determining where and when to attack and the last of these diagrams which places a goddess at each of the eight cardinal directions and secondary directions is called a yogini chakra and here is a chronicle of a king from the 12th century from Western India which tells how the king would encounter the yoginis in his nocturnal ramblings even after nightfall the duties of the king are by no means finished he goes forth sword in hand alone extending his rambles beyond the walls of the fortress to some spot frequented only by the filthy birds of the night the yoginis so this description positions the yogis not yoginis not only around the ramparts of the city but also as filthy birds of the night that is to say they have this bird like form now what is a filthy bird of the night as opposed to just a filthy bird or a bird of the night I'll come back to that later so you see that what I'm moving towards that is that in all these examples these these fortifications these cities these mandalas these chakras they're all protected on their outer rims by yoginis and that feeds directly into the structure and the layout of yogini temples temples of yoginis are scattered across North India there's about 15 ruins such as this one they all date from early part of the late part of the first millennium early part of the second millennium ad and they all have this circular layout without a roof so these are your yoginis protecting a temple that is itself a kind of a fortress and where would these yoginis temples located generally on the boundary of a kingdom so there they are perched on a strategic hilltop protecting once again the periphery from which the king ruled at the center and that's why in many of these yogini temples you have a solitary male figure at the center whereas in all the niches on the periphery on the circumference of the temple you have yoginis inscribed so this is where they would protect the kingdom from its human and superhuman enemies each of these yogini temples had usually 64 niches in the walls and each niche housed a yogini 64 is an important number because the yoginis usually go in groups of eight and eight times eight make 64 so there's lots of examples of these yogini temples which are also called yogini chakras because chakra it means wheel it means discus and it also means just a circle so a circle of yoginis is a yogini chakra and that's what these temples were often referred to as here's another example of a yogini chakra but in this case it's just a line drawing on a marble plaque from Benares the holy city of the Hindus on the Ganges River and here the yoginis are just represented by their names and then finally you have a paper representation of the circle of yoginis that contains names and all sorts of mantras and formulas that would be used for magical purposes all of these being the embodiments of the energy the Shakti of the great goddess Durga which constellates into the multiple yoginis of these chakras and then here's another final example where you see the relationship of the many to the one so here's the great warrior goddess Durga once again but inside of her body is a circle of yoginis because she contains in herself all of those energies but they constellate into the multiple yoginis that become the guardians of the circles that are called yogini chakras that are the yogini temples serving that purpose of defending the fortified defending the kingdom at about the same time as the stone yogini temples of north India were being abandoned and this was mainly due to the invasions of various Muslim conquerors beginning in the 11th century the yoginis were being internalized into wheels chakras or lotuses padmas of the yogic body and it's this in this way that the weapons of war chariot wheels and the goddesses of war yoginis and military fortresses called puras or Durga's were all simultaneously embedded in the yogic body and I'll come back to that in a later talk so an important tantric source for the history of the chakras as internal energy centers is a 12th century work called the kubjika mata in it we find the names of six yoginis identical to those that you see on this chart made by yogi gherwal in the 1920s who actually had this land upon which the white lotus yoga center is now located it was his center before Ganga white and Tracy rich took it over you see on this the names of the same names of six yoginis as is found in that 12th century work the kubjika tantra what's significant in the kubjika tantra is that they're called the regions or the protectresses or the rulers of the six fortresses not the chakras but the fortresses so another way in which these elements of warfare were internalized into the yogic body was through the identification of the chakras with the cremation grounds or charnel grounds shmashanas on which bodies were burned and this is stated explicitly in one of the great classics of Hatha yoga the Hatha yoga Pradipika from the 15th century which says that the kundalini is a cremation ground the battlefield itself is also often depicted as a charnel ground because there's all sorts of dead bodies and body parts lying all over the place and when you have descriptions of these cremation and charnel grounds and battlefields particularly by night they are haunted by yoginis and all sorts of imps and ghouls that dance on the corpses while they're eating them and the sole humans who would dare to go to such a place and confront the yoginis in these dread deathscapes by night would be heroic kings and warriors like the Siddhartha Raja the king about whom I read you a quote a short time earlier going out beyond the walls of his fortress to confront those filthy birds of the night but quite often those heroic figures those male figures are also called yogis or Siddhas perfected beings or viriles viras virile heroes referring to the battlefield heroes of yore so this association of jackals and other carrion feeding creatures with battlefields goes back to the Bhagavad Gita which we started with here which says that when the sun rose on the battlefield on what would be the first day of the fateful battle jackals and crows made foreboding noises on the burning horizons hoping for corpses in order to feast on their flesh and their blood the Buddhist mandalas such as the one I showed you a short time ago often have figured on their periphery a set of eight cremation grounds which double as the eight entrances to those mandalas and on each cremation ground in those mandalas you will have a number of stock in figures one is a Siddha a yogi one is a yogini one is a stupa a reliquary for Buddhist holy man's remains carrion feeding animal dancing imps of the cremation ground so all of these refer then to the chakras of the subtle body as both fortresses and in this case cremation grounds places where bodies are burned and that will be the topic of the talk that I'll give next.