Search Results

This chapter begins by asking: How have contemporary traditional siddha medical practitioners in south India continued to win patronage for their practices? The answer lies not only in the physical efficacy of specific siddha medical practices, but just as importantly in the imaginative resources practitioners employ to appeal to the hopes and aspirations of Tamils. The chapter pays particular attention to siddha medicine as a traditional medical system. That is, it focuses on the aspects of siddha discourse that link medical knowledge and practice to an ancient community, and it puts forth a theoretical framework in which to examine the impact of this medical discourse on local Tamil identity and community.

This chapter looks at the utopian character that siddha practitioners ascribe to siddha medicine. The features attributed to siddha medicine—egalitarianism, rationality, science, accordance with nature, and global applicability—qualify siddha to be the medicine of our global future. The details of this formulation took shape within the context of Tamil revivalism, and siddha practitioners have given rational and global qualities to even the more religious features of siddha medical discourse, such as its connection to Shaivism. These formulations of an effective, original, and natural medicine glorify Tamil civilization and give rise to a variety of desires and motivations among their authors and intended audiences, and they contribute to assertions of the contemporary relevance of Tamil civilization and tradition.

This final chapter gives recipes for two siddha medicines, one that is said to have the potential to restore youth and cure all diseases. It then discusses two general features of siddha medical discourse. The first is the ambiguous and often ambivalent relationship between science and religion in siddha medical rhetoric. In promoting their medicine, siddha practitioners often join physics and metaphysics, the banal and the extraordinary, in order to ascribe authority to the manifest world of Tamil society and material culture. The chapter then discusses the globalizing aspirations of siddha medicine, arguing that for the time being, siddha vaidyas continue to focus their commercial efforts on local, Tamil audiences.

Gurumayi (Swami Chidvilasananda) is the current guru of the worldwide Siddha Yoga organization that promotes the uplift of humanity through a collective “revolution” in spiritual consciousness, specifically through the bestowal of shakti. The chapter describes in detail her performance as a religious leader. This chapter also deals with the analysis of “feminine” ways of leadership through reference to positing a feminine “essence,” drawing on Judith Butler's analysis of gender. It seeks to clarify that a guru can be viewed as a “third gender,” citing Monique Wittig on lesbian identity.

This chapter describes the tenets of four indigenous systems of healing in India, as its practitioners use it and as they appear in the texts. The four systems are as follows. Firstly, Ayurveda, a classical Sanskrit system of medicine based on texts composed in North India between the time of Christ and ad 1000. Secondly, Tamil Saiva bhakti, a devotional worship of Siva in Tamil Nadu, which is inspired by the poetry of the Tamil Saiva saints. Modern Saiva gurus are often approached for solutions to life problems, including illness. Solving such problems through both mystical and rational means is their service to the world. Thirdly, Siddha medicine, a system of medicine in Tamil Nadu based on the writings of certain yogis. Finally, Trance healing by mediums of the smallpox goddess Mariamman, which is a tradition that claims no written texts as its own, priding itself instead on its grass-roots character.

This chapter provides an overview of Tantra in contemporary West. The presence of Tantra in the West is interesting because it is one of the aspects of the relationship between the West and a largely imaginary, “fabricated” India. It is also the insertion of Tantra in the globalized, merchandized, and hedonistic world we live in today. Sir John Woodroffe/Arthur Avalon (1865–1936), the pioneer of Tantric studies, was the first to say that Tantra was a basic aspect of Hinduism. This chapter considers the work of three Orientalist philosophers who have contributed to make known Tantric doctrines and practices in the Western world: Heinrich Zimmer, Julius Evola, and Mircea Eliade. It also looks at American neo-Tantric organizations such as the Tantric Order of America and the Siddha Yoga Dham of America before concluding with an analysis of how Buddhism and its various “Tantric” forms have flourished in the West.

In the late twentieth century, modern yoga entered a new phase of development in the context of consumer culture that enabled it to move from counterculture to popular culture. The chapter discusses this phase as a consequence of “cultural encounters” but problematizes the conventional vision of the popularization of yoga as a consequence of the encounter between South Asia and the Western world. Instead, we should think about yoga’s popularization as a result of its encounter with contemporary consumer culture, a transnational phenomenon. The chapter discusses the role of yoga in the 1960s British-American counterculture, which called for a religiosity radically distinct from what was perceived as the oppressive, puritanical orthodoxies of the previous generation, and evaluates how yoga underwent popularization in the late 1960s and 1970s by appropriating dominant fitness and biomedical discourses in an attempt to explain yoga and thus validate it as a therapeutic practice that could be combined with other products in the self-development marketplace. The chapter investigates the prescription of yoga as fitness as well as its reputation for decreasing stress, which, according to the contemporary biomedical paradigm, causes and perpetuates disease.

This chapter argues that, in the late twentieth century, yoga proponents attracted large audiences to yoga and established and acknowledged authority by branding yoga, a process that reflects dominant trends in consumer culture. The business of teacher training in particular brands of yoga is one way in which authority is established and marketed. Branding products and services, from yoga styles to yoga mats, is another. Yoga practitioners also attribute authority to individual preference and thus support pluralism in the yoga market. Through special attention to Siddha Yoga, Iyengar Yoga, and Anusara Yoga, the chapter evaluates how yoga entrepreneurial gurus and proponents actively market their products and services to potential consumers.

The model of brand management is effective for understanding Muktananda and Siddha Yoga, and its products and services. Muktananda pursued the global dissemination of Siddha Yoga, a tantric variety of modern yoga and meditation, as the demand for yoga exploded in the increasingly competitive global market. To attract and keep customers, yoga proponents had to brand products and services and manage their brand images in ways that made them attractive to a large-scale audience. Initially, Muktananda succeeded. Yet this guru’s relationship to the brand was similar to the relationship of other popular persons to particular brands, which often represent persons as well as styles or products. Customers’ vision of Muktananda was key to their uncompromising commitment to the brand. Thus, when he faced accusations of improprieties, brand success declined. Since then, changes to brand management have resulted in the rebranding of Siddha Yoga for the sake of saving its image.

Following the typology developed by Elizabeth De Michelis, this chapter locates Anusara Yoga within the context of Modern Yoga, primarily as a form of Postural Yoga. John Friend, founder of Anusara Yoga, has established a spiritual system based on rituals of the body that creates a sense of community and provides meaning to individuals who have abandoned traditional religion. Since Friend holds the community together, consideration is given to his role as a modern guru, or, as he refers to himself, an ācārya. Anusara Yoga links students to ideas and practices that go beyond Postural Yoga through its network of teachers, both of Postural and Meditational Yoga. The chapter explains how Friend’s encouragement of these networks is helping to establish a Tantra-based philosophy and practice in America, as well as in other countries as Anusara expands.

This chapter provides an overview of vital spot traditions and related theories of the body, which pervade numerous aspects of Indian and South Asian culture. Vital spots called marman were expounded in classical Indian literature from the Vedas to the Purāṇas. Ayurvedic texts describe loci of the same name, marman, a concept apparently developed on ancient India’s battlefields, and of primary surgical importance but void of therapeutic application. Strikingly similar vital loci are crucial for meditative exercises in some esoteric traditions. Marmmam spots are fundamental both in the martial art kaḷarippayaṭṭu and in marmma cikitsā therapies in Kerala. Vital spot traditions can be understood as manifestations of culturally shared concepts of the body, health, and well-being. This helps in understanding the relationship of varmam vital spots with siddha medicine and ayurveda, and shows that the lines separating siddha and ayurveda are recent constructs.

This chapter explores the theoretical underpinnings of vital spots, which have a bearing on both therapeutic and martial practices and which are thus at the core of what hereditary exponents of vital spots in South India do. Drawing on diverse data and material including original manuscript texts, more recent publications, and informants’ explications, the chapter depicts intricacies of vital spots and presents heterogeneous interpretations of the subject. Informants, manuscripts, and more recent studies constitute, to some extent, astonishingly varying explanations. Practitioners exhibit notions that contrast with those of others, and utilize vastly varying understandings, techniques, and even loci compared to other practitioners. The author depicts the range of differing and conflicting notions. This underscores the theoretical and practical heterogeneity of vital spots in contemporary Kanyakumari, revealing not so much a “medical system” or a “martial system,” but the proponents’ highly individualistic approaches to the body and health.

This chapter analyzes the intricacies of vital spot medicine and the agency and interaction of patients and practitioners. Treatments include stimulations of particular loci to retrieve patients from unconscious states, treatments for chronic health problems, setting of fractures, and massage therapies, all largely conducted manually. Patients of indigenous Indian medicines, it has been argued, are emancipated and actively involved in therapeutic proceedings, unlike a popular view of biomedicine. Yet discourse on therapies, diagnosis, and treatments in vital spots medicine is secretive, the visual participation of patients and witnesses is discouraged, and practitioners’ diagnostic insights are not normally communicated to patients. Practitioners claim to “heal the hidden,” which cannot and should not be disclosed. Through tactile attending to their patients’ bodies in diagnosis and therapy, practitioners address ailments without devices such as radiographic images, but also without dispensing advice. Therapies catering to the hidden are not capable of verbalization.

This epilogue provides a striking counterpoint to the book’s overall narrative by taking a look beyond Kanyakumari district and Tamil Nadu at emerging ways of vital spot instruction and at the various adaptations and alterations they undergo. These include attempts to institutionalize an imagined vital spot system alongside siddha medicine and integrate it into a comprehensive siddha medical curriculum. They also include efforts by private individuals to offer vital spot education to students abroad by means of correspondence courses. All these bring about alterations in the nature of instruction and, presumably, its practice, such as the ubiquitous splitting off of martial exercises from aspects of the vital spots alleged to be more therapeutically relevant. Furthermore, vital spot terms and concepts need to be translated into different languages, but its instruction requires translations from the somatic to the verbal and textual spheres. This describes a movement from tactility to textuality.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the nature of religious biographies or hagiographies: how they function in their documentary and work-like aspects; what they do and do not tell us; and how they can be used for historical research. This is followed by a summary of the biography of the Madman of Ü, which was written in two parts, in 1494 and 1537; and a summary of a biography of the Madman of Tsang, written early in the sixteenth century. Each tells of the future madman’s birth, childhood, entry into the religious life, assumption of an alternative ascetic lifestyle, rise to prominence, and death.

This chapter explores the effects the Madmen of Ü and Tsang’s adoption of their distinctive lifestyle had on their standing in the eyes of the broader Tibetan public of their day, with special attention being paid to the means through which information about the madmen circulated. While many were won over to seeing the Madmen of Ü and Tsang as enlightened saints, many were not. In taking on this lifestyle, the two men were drawing from the repertoire of behaviors for which the famous Buddhist siddhas of India were known, in effect suggesting that they too should be regarded as siddhas. The chapter closes by considering how their assuming this specific tantric lifestyle positioned the two men in relationship to more monastic and rationalist forms of Buddhism.

This chapter charts a shift in Indian Buddhist paradigms of ideal masculinity from the Buddha—conceived as both the ideal scholar-priest and also as the paragon of warriors and rulers—to the figure of the tantric siddha. Siddhas, unlike earlier paradigms, are often physically ordinary. They are distinguished not by their physical appearance, but by their possession of magical powers. This shift is a core element of the tantras, which emphasize ritual and meditative practices that lead to the development of supernatural abilities, which are used to advance their religious careers and benefit others. This represents a significant new development in Indian Buddhism, one that was part of the transgressive aspect of the tantric corpus.