Classical or Patañjala Yoga diagnoses die human conditon as state of suffering caused by ignorance whose specific form is misidentification of self with psychophysical nature. This paper argues that liberation in Yoga is healing in an ultimate sense, i.e., attainment of well-being with respect to the person's fundamental nature and soteriological potential. Vyāsa's Yogabhasya presents the yogic remedy in terms of a medical model, and this paper excavates the therapeutic paradigm of the Yogasūtras using concept of health distilled from the (...) Āyurvedic medical text Caraka-saṁhitā. Determinants of health according to Āyurveda include wholeness, self-identit), and freedom, and these concepts are utilized to ground the claim that in classical Yoga, liberation is healing: curing the dysfunction and consequent suffering of one's psychophysical self, which is coextensive with realization of one's true Self as consciousness. (shrink)

Religious therapeutics is the term I use to designate relations between health and spirituality, and medicine and religion. Dimensions of religious therapeutics include religious meanings that inform medical theory, religious means of healing, health as part of religious life, and religion as a remedy for human suffering. Classical Yoga is analyzed to establish an initial matrix of religious therapeutics with 5 branches: philosophical foundations, soteriology, value theory, physical practice, and cultivation of consciousness. Through comparative criticism of classical Yoga, the study (...) presents a heuristic of religious therapeutics: a model for interpreting relations among healing and liberative functions in world religions. ;Body and health are of instrumental but not ultimate value in classical Yoga: the body is used to transcend itself for attainment of Yoga's soteriological goal, realization of self as pure consciousness. Yoga's Samkhya-based metaphysics contains an unreconciled dualism, and while practice of Yoga is paradigmatic of mind/body holism, Yoga prescribes realization of a spiritual self, independent of material and psychological nature. The study rehabilitates the body in respect of the compatibility of embodiedness with religiousness. ;Other Indian and world traditions suggest dimensions of religious therapeutics both resonant with classical Yoga and lacking from it. India's Ayurvedic medicine represents the sixth branch of religious therapeutics: medical therapeutics. I distill from Ayurvedic and Western sources a set of determinants of health: biological, medical/psychological, cultural, and metaphysical. Significant determinants of health are wholeness, self-identity, and freedom; these are incorporated in discussion of the complementary functions of medicine and religion, grounding the claim that in classical Yoga, liberation is healing in an ultimate sense. ;Tantric yogas utilize material nature for human spiritual progress, and unlike classical Yoga, esteem nature, body/mind, the feminine, and relationality. Tantra provides another branch of religious therapeutics: aesthetic therapeutics. The study anticipates elements of health/medicine in western religions, Buddhism, and Lakota religious philosophy. Sacred speech and song are explored to demonstrate comparative inquiry into religious therapeutics; some Native American Indian and Hindu applications of sacred language are considered. Finally, the model of religious therapeutics is supplemented with community, embracing ecological, social, and religious relationality and communication. (shrink)

Explores the relationship between health and religion based on the model offered by the Hindu traditions of Yoga, Ayurveda, and Tantra.

Eleven interdisciplinary essays investigate embodiment in contexts including epistemology, medicine and psycho-therapeutics, language, and art. An excellent resource for education in medicine, psychology, and other healing arts, as well as for researchers and others concerned with the body. Each essay opens meanings in the increasingly active field of philosophy of body. Western and non-Western sources contribute to "a metaphysics that upholds the truths of experience.".