This was a live recording of an online lecture via Zoom given by Dr Daniela Bevilacqua on the 10th June 2020 for the SOAS Centre of Yoga Studies. See below for details.
How is yoga, in particular āsana and tapasyā, practiced amongst ascetics in India?
In this talk Dr Daniela Bevilacqua will introduce the yogic practices of Indian sādhus, including the religious contexts in which they are performed.
It will introduce the practice of tapasyā and discuss why ascetics perform them. This will lead towards a description of the yoga sādhanā, in particular the practice of āsanas. She will present the way sādhus learn the different practices, the importance of pilgrimages and religious festivals and the relationship to scriptures.
This talk aims to show that sādhus belonging to different sampradāyas follow more or less the same practices, demonstrating how fluid was and still is the South Asian religious context and how practical yoga is as a method.
*Speaker Biography*
Daniela Bevilacqua is a South-Asianist and received her PhD from Sapienza University of Rome and the University of Paris Nanterre. Her PhD research was published by Routledge under the title Modern Hindu Traditionalism in Contemporary India: The Śrī Maṭh and the Jagadguru Rāmānandācārya in the Evolution of the Rāmānandī Sampradāya. She is now a Post-Doc Research Fellow at SOAS, working for the ERC funded Hatha Yoga Project (2015-2020). Her research interests are concerned with Hindu asceticism from a historical and ethnographic point of view.
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6 сен 2024
