Yoga Powers: Extraordinary Capacities Attained Through Meditation and Concentration. By Knut A. Jacobsen, editor. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012. ISBN: 978900421214 5. Brill’s Indological Library, Volume 37. 519 pp. $119.99 (cloth).
Author Affiliations: Indiana University, Bloomington, University of California, Santa Barbara and University of California, Irvine
摘要
The notion of extraordinary ‘powers’, usually translated with such Sanskrit terms as ‘siddhi-s’ ‘jñāna-s’, or ‘aiśvarya-s’ (in Pātañjala Yoga and Sāṃkhya texts), ‘vibhūti-s’ or ‘bala-s’ (in Hindu epic and Purāṇic texts), ‘iddhi-s’, ‘ṛddhi-s’, or ‘abhijñā-s” ’ (in Pali and Mahāyāna Buddhist Sanskrit texts), ‘labdhi-s’ (in Jain texts), and ‘guṇāṣṭaka-s’ (in Haṭhayoga and Tantric Śaiva textual environments) is the focus of this fascinating collection of essays edited by Knut A. Jacobsen. The volume grows out of a panel session on ‘Yoga Powers’ at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion in Chicago in November 2008. The original papers from the panel were expanded with the addition of twelve additional essays making a total of seventeen in this published volume. The book contains a long introduction by the editor, five photographic plates and an index.
The essays are for the most part grouped around five subject areas, namely, (a) three essays on Buddhist ‘powers’ both in Pāli materials and in Mahāyāna Buddhist texts in India and China (by Bradley S. Clough, David V. Fiordalis, and Ryan R. Overbey), (b) one extraordinary and detailed essay on Jain ‘powers’ (by Kristi L. Wiley), (c) three essays on ‘powers’ in classical Yoga texts (by Stuart R. Sarbacker, Christopher K. Chapple, and Lloyd W. Pflueger), (d) three essays on ‘powers’ in Tantric Śaiva and Haṭhayoga texts (by Somadeva Vasudeva, Sthaneshwar Timalsina, and James Mallinson), and (e) five concluding essays that look at contemporary examples of ‘powers’ in Sufi and Bhakti traditions, Sāī Bābā of Śirdī spirituality, the Rāmānanda Sampradāya, the ‘cave tradition of Kāpil Maṭh’ (Swami Hariharananda’s interpretation of ‘powers’), and vestiges of ‘powers’ in the Human Potential Movement (respectively by Patton Burchett, Antonio …
