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, [...]

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 [...]

A project in collaboration with the Maharaja Man Singh Pustak Prakash, Mehrangarh Fort, Jodhpur, Rajasthan. Maharaja Man Singh acceded as ruler of the princely state of Marwar (in present-day Rajasthan) in 1803, in what was an intensely contested fight for the throne. He attributed his ultimate, miraculous success to the intercession of the divine sage Jālandharanāth, of the Nāth lineage of yoga-practising ascetics. Man Singh was himself a devotee of the Nāth guru Devnāth, and during the forty years of his reign the Nāths enjoyed enormous power and influence in the kingdom, displacing the Brahmin religious establishment and Rajput aristocracy. [...]