What is the Purpose of Yoga: Transcendence or Transformation?
- Date & time
- Speaker
- Professor Sir Jim MallinsonBoden Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Oxford, Professorial Fellow at Balliol College
- Location
- Barnard's Inn Hall
- Organisation
- Gresham College
Topics
More information & booking (opens in new tab)Free to attend
About this talk
In this lecture, Jim Mallinson draws on texts, art history and fieldwork to trace the history of the role of the body in yoga over its 2,500-year history. For its first 1,500 years the body is to be transcended; yoga's aim is an almost death-like mental stillness equated with liberation. Then the body starts to be cultivated to attain power and immortality. While charting this transformation, Prof. Mallinson highlights parallels between yoga's premodern goals and modern pursuits of longevity, perfection, and transcendence.
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