Samadhi; The Numinous and Cessative in Indo-Tibetan Yoga. By Stuart Ray Sarbacker.

SUNY Series in Religious Studies. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. Pp. xi + 189.

Stuart Sarbacker's Samadhi: The Numinous and Cessative in Indo-Tibetan Yoga attempts to reframe current methods for the study of yoga and meditation in South Asian religious traditions. Sarbacker presents an analysis of yoga that comes out of the history-of-religions approach, both heavily indebted to Mircea Eliade's influential work on yoga and critical of some of Eliade's methodological and interpretive oversights. Perhaps most importantly, Sarbacker corrects the prevalent understanding of Patanjali's Yoga Sutra as advocating a narrow path solely concerned with the cessation of all worldly activity, leading to an end goal of complete isolation (kaivalya) from the material world and from all other individual selves. In doing so, Sarbacker joins the increasingly prominent group of scholars (including Ian Whicher, Christopher Chappie, and David Gordon White) who argue that such an all-or-nothing approach to yogic engagement with the world ignores increasing textual and historical evidence suggesting a numinous, ecstatic dimension of yoga in the epic through tantric materials.

At the center of Sarbacker's book is a reexamination of the enstasis-ecstasis distinction posited by Eliade in his works on yoga and shamanism. For Eliade, the yogi and the shaman represent two poles of religious experience. The defining element of the shaman is ecstasis (literally "standing without"), the shaman's ability to abandon his gross body and embark upon journeys of the spirit. By contrast, the yogi concerns himself with enstasis ("standing within"), self-absorption or autonomy, culminating in aloneness (kaivalya), complete separation of self from world. Eliade's seminal book on yoga was first written over seventy years ago, but he still casts an enormous shadow over the field of yoga studies. Such is the influence of his interpretations that translators of the Yoga Sutra still commonly translate samadhi as "enstasis." Sarbacker accepts the basic typology of enstasis-ecstasis offered by Eliade, and correlates each of these terms with the concepts of "cessative" and "numinous," respectively. But Sarbacker argues that there are numinous and cessative dimensions in both Hindu yoga and Buddhist meditation, and that Eliade's understanding of both as fundamentally enstatic is based on a one-sided reading of the two traditions. Instead, Sarbacker argues that the dimensions of the numinous and the cessative "are related dynamically, demonstrating the tension between cosmological-mythic considerations and soteriological and ethical concerns" (p. 59). Specifically, Sarbacker sees the nirodha-samapatti distinction within yogic traditions and the vipasyana-samatha distinction in Buddhist meditation as exemplifying this dynamic tension between the cessative and the numinous.

Adopting this new frame has a liberating effect on readings of Patanjali's Yoga Sutra. For instance, the third section of the Yoga Sutra, which contains lengthy explanations of the yogi's superhuman powers (vibhutis), is perplexing under the Eliadean interpretation of yoga's essence, not to mention deeply embarrassing to modern yogis intent on giving Patanjali a rationalist or even a scientific gloss. Hence, most recent translators of Patanjali have emphasized that superhuman powers are a distraction to the yogi's ultimate goal, and that the yogi should just say no, for instance, to the acquisition of great strength by concentrating on an elephant (YS 3.25) or to the acquisition of the ability to fly by concentrating on a piece of cotton (YS 3.43). However, positing such practices as central instead of peripheral to the yogic path helps to emphasize the Yoga Sutra's continuities with numinous aspects of yogic traditions that came before and after. For instance, James Fitzgerald's recent work has revealed the importance of lordly powers (aisvaryas) in the Moksadharma Parvan of the Mahabharata, where the acquisition and application of such powers is portrayed as the central difference between Yoga and Samkhya. Fitzgerald translates the notorious passage at Mbh 12.289.3 as: "the consummate experts of the school of Yoga declare the excellence of their side with arguments such as 'how can anyone who is not a powerful Lord become absolutely free?'"[1] Both epic Yoga and epic Samkhya are theistic. This new analysis suggests that it is the embrace of the numinous by Yoga and its rejection by Samkhya that is the central difference between the two groups in the Moksadharma Parvan.

Sarbacker sees the numinous-cessative typology as just as relevant to the understanding of Buddhist meditation as it is to understanding Hindu yoga. In the fifth and perhaps most ambitious chapter of his book, Sarbacker attempts to show the continuities of Theravada Buddhist meditative techniques with Tantric sadhana. Appealing once again to the dynamic tension within Buddhist traditions between vipasyana (insight meditation) and samatha (concentrative meditation), he argues that there are structural similarities between early Buddhist samatha on a visualized image and the development of visualization in later sadhana. However, Sarbacker stops short of claiming a historical connection. In his readings of major Buddhist meditative systematizers like Buddhagosa and Kamalas'Tla, Sarbacker goes a long way toward showing that the emphasis on vipasyana, and the deemphasis (or even vilification) of samatha, was historically part of an attempt to differentiate Buddhist meditation from Hindu yoga, two traditions with common roots. While cessative models of meditation have held sway in most schools of Buddhism, Tantric sadhana is an example of the reemergence of the numinous within Buddhism. It is curious that Sarbacker has no discussion whatsoever of Hindu tantra in his book, focusing solely on Buddhist tantric practices. In doing so, he seems to be consciously avoiding the question of whether classical yoga, as exemplified by Patanjali, itself contains the seeds of later Hindu tantrism. It would be logical to assume that Patanjali's concept of samapatti stands in the same relation to later Saiva and Sakta tantrism as the early Buddhist samatha stands in relation to Buddhist tantrism. As Sarbacker nowhere makes this connection in the current book, perhaps he plans to address this central issue in his upcoming work.

The second chapter is the most philosophically oriented of Sarbacker's book. There he attempts to ground his analysis of Buddhist meditation and Hindu yoga in recent developments in the theory of comparative mysticism. Robert Forman has made the distinction between "perennialist" and "constructivist" models in the study of mystical experience. Perennialists (such as Eliade and William James) argue that there is a core of mystical experience that is universal, the same in all times and places, while constructivists (e.g., Robert Cimello and Stephen Katz) accept as axiomatic that all religious experience is determined by linguistic and cultural conditioning. The constructivist perspective is at odds with many Buddhist and Hindu analyses of meditative experience, which are quite aware of the role of language in the construction of human conceptual categories, but nonetheless insist that the highest level of meditation involves a direct, unmediated experience of ultimate reality. Sarbacker follows Forman in embracing what he represents as a third option, "incomplete constructivism," which in Sarbacker's opinion is better able than "complete constructivism" to accommodate the complexities of the interaction between the religious practitioner and the external world encountered by the practitioner (p. 28).

In spite of the cogency of Forman's criticisms of complete constructivism, however, I have trouble seeing how his new position represents a coherent alternative to the two others. Sarbacker ultimately comes out in support of Forman's incomplete constructivism not because he finds it more philosophically compelling, but because he understands it as a better tool for studying meditation. Yet a principled skepticism toward both perennialism and complete constructivism functions just as well as Forman's incomplete constructivism for Sarbacker's methodological needs. While Sarbacker rightly points out that some of these "complete constructivists" claim Fou-cault as their inspiration, I would add that Foucault can also function as a corrective. He warned against the danger of turning his own genealogical method into a totalizing discourse, which is certainly what the creed of constructivism has become in some academic circles.

Stuart Sarbacker has written an important book for the study of yogic and meditative phenomena, one of few that advances the discussion from where Eliade left off in his own work. It is my hope that it will contribute to the ongoing conversations that are leading many scholars to new, more nuanced analyses of yogic traditions. Reclaiming the Yoga Sutra from rational reconstructionists and those who would deny any role for the numinous in classical yoga, Sarbacker's method provides tools for reconnecting Patanjali with the many other currents in the history of Buddhist, Jain, and Hindu yogas.

Andrew J. Nicholson    State University of New York at Stony Brook