The practice of yoga is today widely associated with the improvement of health and well-being. In India, yoga is considered an indigenous form of health practice: The Ministry of AYUSH supports education and research in yoga medicine, and has established first steps in the regulation of practice with a voluntary certification scheme through the Quality Council of India. Now predominantly associated with physical practices (postural and breathing exercises), the health-related aspects of yoga practice have been promoted globally since the middle of the twentieth century. However, in its historic origins, the attainment of yoga was understood as a soteriological undertaking, and its auxiliary practices were directed at the attainment of spiritual aims. When did yoga become medicine? And how are medical claims within yoga traditions connected to the dominant Indian medical traditions of the past? Can ideas about healing and well-being arising in historic yoga traditions be linked to the scholarly medical tradition of ayurveda, or to the heterodox medicine of rasaśāstra (Indian alchemy and iatrochemistry)? How do these traditions compare with each other in their medical goals, concepts and practices?
To answer these and related questions, the Ayuryog project examined the histories of yoga, ayurveda and rasaśāstra from the ninth century to the present, focussing on the disciplines' health, juvenescence and longevity practices (Sanskrit: rasāyana) as potential key areas of exchange. The goals of the project were to reveal the entanglements of these historical traditions, and to trace the trajectories of their evolution as components of today's global healthcare and personal development industries.
Drawing upon the primary historical sources of each respective tradition as well as on fieldwork data, the research team explored the shared terminology, praxis and theory of these three disciplines and examining why, when and how health, juvenescence and longevity practices were employed; how each discipline’s discourse and practical applications relates to those of the others; and how past encounters and cross-fertilizations impact on contemporary health-related practices in yogic, ayurvedic and alchemists’ milieus.
Research was divided into three main areas of enquiry: In research area 1, Dagmar Wujastyk examined the reciprocal influence of ayurveda and rasaśāstra (Indian alchemy and iatrochemistry) on each other, exploring in particular the development of iatrochemical formulations and their use in applications in health, rejuvenation and longevity therapies (rasāyana) in Sanskrit medical and alchemical literature. Together with Patricia Sauthoff, she has also worked on a Sourcebook of Indian Alchemy, to provide a survey textbook on this less well-known historical discipline. In research area 2, Christèle Barois and Jason Birch studied the influence of ayurvedic thought on representations of yoga in relevant Sanskrit yoga literature. In research area 3, Suzanne Newcombe explored the more recent history of interactions between ayurveda, and yoga in institutionalized and in heterodox religious settings, examining continuities and disjunctures of aims and practices in the colonial and post-colonial period with the medieval and early modern forms of ayurveda, and yoga.
