About Jason Birch

Jason Birch is a Post-doctoral Researcher on the Haṭha Yoga Project at SOAS University of London. He received a doctorate in Oriental Studies from the University of Oxford in 2013. His area of research is the medieval yoga traditions of India, in particular, those called Haṭha- and Rājayoga. Jason teaches a course on the history of medieval yoga for the SOAS Master of Arts in Traditions of Yoga and Meditation and an undergraduate Sanskrit reading class on yoga texts.

The Purpose of Kukkuṭāsana: Notes from a Workshop

The Purpose of Kukkuṭāsana: Notes from a Workshop The second workshop of the Haṭha Yoga Project was held at a cottage on the Isle of Wight in September 2017. The focus of the workshop was reading the section on āsana in a manuscript of the Yogacintāmaṇi held at the Scindia Oriental Research Institute, Ujjain, India. This manuscript contains descriptions of seventeen āsanas, as well as two long lists of āsanas, that are not found in other works. Mark Singleton and I are preparing a critical edition of this passage, which is based on nearly a dozen manuscripts of the Yogacintāmaṇi, [...]

By |2018-06-19T08:31:40+00:00June 17th, 2018|

THE HAṬHASAṄKETACANDRIKĀ

The Haṭhasaṅketacandrikā and the Practice of Śaṅkhaprakṣālana (Yogic Cleaning of the Conch). One of the texts we have proposed to work on for the Haṭha Yoga Project is the Haṭhasaṅketacandrikā by Sundaradeva, a Brahmin living in Varanasi in the eighteenth century. The colophons of this work identify him as an āyurvedic physician (vaidya) and various catalogues report that he wrote works on Āyurveda, such as the Bhūpālavallabha (or Bhūpacaryā), the Cikitsāsundara, the Līlāvatī, the Yogoktivivekacandra and Yogoktyupadeśāṃrta. The Haṭhasaṅketacandrikā is a voluminous compendium on yoga (probably over three thousand verses in length) that integrates teachings on Haṭha and Rājayoga with those [...]

By |2018-06-17T17:47:55+00:00October 2nd, 2016|
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