Through Hatha Yoga as originally practiced, the practitioner works to achieve and "adamantine body."
1.) What is an adamantine body?
2.) What abilities does a person with an adamantine body have?
3.) How are these abilities like or unlike the siddhis that the practitioners of the ancient Tapas tradition worked to achieve?
4.) According to Feuerstein, what is required for a practice to count as "genuine spiritual practice?"
5.) In your opinion, does original Hatha Yoga meet this requirement?
6.) If yes, explain why. If no, do you think it should be considered genuine spiritual practice anyway?
I have no idea and have not heard that phrase associated with yoga in the ten years in which I’ve practiced. The word appears to come from the 13th century so I presume it is not being drawn from a classical yoga text which would pre-date that period.
so do you have an idea where to look, to help me understand
Georg Feuerstein discusses this issue in Chapter II (pp 29-30) of The Yoga Tradition. He returns to this theme is later chapters dealing with hatha yoga. No spiritual tradition can bypass the body … this very body, the Buddha!
There is a a real need to order all the concepts of yoga. That because yoga was “developed” in a time when people’s intellectual faculty was generally much lower. Yoga did not need to make sense, because it was a discipleship. Back than, trust and admiration were not yet exterminated like they are in today’s critical thinking. Simply, yoga did not require and still does not require an academic background. Beacuse of this, today it is called unscientific. Yoga is not unscientific, but it is a science of the soul/spirit. Or … a spiritual science. But because the spirit has been declared non-existant in one of the earliest christian councils, than the very existence of soul has been questioned by XIXth century materialism, and finally even the vital force theories has been conquered by progress of the same, today, anything what supposes the existence of spirit or soul is seen fundemantally unscientific.
We need not to forget that today’s scince is still a fable convenue to a certain level, based on academic education. One can’t beat that system, and if you digress, you can never become a scientist. Even with it’s proclaimed onbjectivity, materialst science is still subjective to a great degree, it is a natural response to cloudy idealism or dogmatic theology. It has great merit, but now, the same scientific rigour needs to be apllied subjective experiences. Yes, yoga can be a discipline, but what makes that hard is that today’s people need understanding. The gap between our modern world-view and the transcendental world-views of various religions or philosophies, is huge, and creates a fundamental conflict between yoga practice and one’s life.
The result is a superficial practice most of the time, and a simplistic and reductive approach to it’s spiritual side, most of the time in form of materialist dualism in an exotic mask.
Because of this, it is clear that in order to be what really once was, yoga needs to be “repackaged” and explained, but do not expect it to be easy to comprehend, or to fit nicely into what are common believes today.
[QUOTE=Hubert;26118]Because of this, it is clear that in order to be what really once was, yoga needs to be “repackaged” and explained, but do not expect it to be easy to comprehend, or to fit nicely into what are common believes today.[/QUOTE]
From all the books I have read, I feel this book to be the most logical approach. It is pretty easy to comprehend and goes into all the limbs.
http://www.aypsite.org/books-8limbs-contents.html
Thanks, I will check it out.
The only place that I aware of that a word like “adamantine” is used with reference to yoga is in sutra III.46. There Georg Feuerstein translates the sanskrit word [I]vajra[/I] as “adamant”. He also gives the etymology of [I]vajra[/I] as coming from the root word [I]vaj[/I], meaning “to be strong”. Since the context of the sutra is perfection of the body, the meaning seems fairly clear. As for how this relates to siddhis, I will leave that to your own meditation.
As to whether Hatha Yoga is a genuine spiritual practice, that is an interesting question. First, you have to define what you mean by “Hatha” yoga. In my mind, Hatha Yoga consists mainly of the performance of asanas and pranayama, like the Iyengar and Ashtanga and other brands of yoga that are commonly practiced today. Patanjali’s yoga, on the other hand, seems to be concerned mostly with the inner practice of yoga, and some would say it resembles Buddhism more than it does Ashtanga or Iyengar yoga. So there is some debate about whether Patanjali’s yoga and Hatha yoga originate from the same source or from different sources.
I make a distinction between “spiritual” practice and the inner practice of yoga, because to me, a spiritual practice involves some reference to a God or gods or other supernatural beings or forces. Up to a certain point, the inner yoga can be practiced without such a reference.