The volumes of the Project on the History of Science, Philosophy and Culture in Indian Civilization aim at discovering the main aspects of India's heritage and present them in an interrelated way. In spite of their unitary look, these volumes recognize the difference between the areas of material civilization and those of ideational culture. The project is not being executed by single group of thinkers and writers who are methodologically uniform or ideologically identical in their commitments. The Project is marked by what may be called 'methodological pluralism'. Inspite of its primarily historical character, this project, both in its conceptualization and execution, has been shaped by scholars drawn from different disciplines. It is for the first time that an endeavour of such a unique and comprehensive character has been undertaken to study critically a major world civilization.
History of Yoga is an attempt to trace the contours of origin and development of the discipline of Yoga in all its possible ramifications beginning from the Veda up till modern times. Long before Patanjali stood out as the greatest systematizer of the discipline, yoga had its origin in the aspirations, austerity and tapas of the Vedic seers undertaken to understand the mystery of creation of the universe and the individual both in their essence. In contravention of the Aryan Invasion Theory dominating the process of investigation into the history of ancient India, the volume traces the locus of the yogic Sadhana of the earliest Vedic seers in the high Himalayas getting percolated throughout the rest of the country gradually and leaving its remnants also in the Indus seals of the third millennium B.C. Being a product of total involvement of the personality of the Vedic seers in the task of investigation into the mystery of creation, the discipline has evolved into diverse paths such as bhakti, jnana, karma and meditation ranging from pure spiritual to the anatomical as is obvious in its hathayogic manifestation. This has expositions of stalwarts of the modern age such as Sri Ramakrishna, Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo, Raman Maharishi and the rest as a follow-up of the works of seers and sages. This development in the discipline has been possible through the works of a number of great yogins of the interventing period such as Sankara, Ramanuja, Nimbarka, Abhinavagupta among several others. The Volume is product of the cumulative effort of some of the best minds in the field available in India at present. |
