Yoga and the Luminous: Patañjali's Spiritual Path to Freedom. By Christopher Key Chapple. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008. ISBN-13: 978-0-7914-7475-4: (hardcover); ISBN-13: 978-0-7914-7476-1 (paperback), XV + 301. $74.50 (hardcover); $21.95 (paperback).
摘要
Chris Chapple's Yoga and the Luminous: Patañjali's Spiritual Path to Freedom is a survey of the work of one of the most influential contemporary scholars of yoga in the United States. The work brings together a number of Chapple's important earlier contributions to the study of yoga with a range of new material. Chapple indicates that the work is intended to forward a literacy about yoga traditions, especially for American and European practitioners of yoga that lack the philosophical background necessary to contextualise their practices (16). He notes that his own perspective on yoga is the product of decades of committed practice as well as academic study of the philosophy of yoga (X–XI). Chapple's ability to navigate the worlds of both academic theory and contemporary practice is the hallmark of the work, and a basis for his assertion that the theory and practice of yoga has a place in promoting pluralism, ecological sensibility, and social justice in our contemporary world.
Chapple's work begins with an overview of yoga traditions followed by four ?sections, entitled ‘The Practice of Yoga,’ ‘Yoga and Liberation,’ ‘Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra,' and ‘Interpreting Yoga.’ Chapple frames his study of yoga within the context of the global dissemination of yoga out of modern Hindu traditions, while noting yoga's rootedness in Jain, Buddhist, and Sikh traditions as well. He also focuses on the ‘pluralist’ aspect of yoga, and traditional perspectives on this point are ?illustrated by referencing the …
