The Science of Yoga: The Risks and the Rewards (7 page)

Paul represented one of the early successes. In Calcutta, the first capital of British India, he enrolled in medical school and applied himself to the city’s intellectual life. At the Society for the Acquisition of General Knowledge, a hotspot of
upward mobility, he heard lectures on such racy topics as “The Interests of the Female Sex.”

Paul graduated in 1841 and proudly displayed behind his name the initials G.B.M.C.—Graduate of Bengal Medical College. It announced his elite status, as did the Europeanizing of his surname.

His big break came when he was transferred to Benares. For Hindus, it was the holiest city in India, located on the banks of the Ganges, the most sacred of rivers. His post gave him a commanding view of yogic life. Hundreds of temples lined the river, and pilgrims came from all over to bathe, or to cremate the bodies of loved ones, eager to wash away sins and win salvation. So, too, mystics flocked to the ghats, or wide stone steps, to take purifying dips in the river, to practice yoga, and to meditate. At least one slept on a bed of nails. The Buddha gave his first sermon nearby. For ages, Benares served as the heart of Hinduism, playing the same kind of role that Mecca does for Muslims and the Vatican for Roman Catholics. Many Hindus still consider it the holiest place on earth.

Paul’s
Treatise on the Yoga Philosophy
appeared in 1851. London that year was holding its Great Exhibition. It was meant to draw attention to Britain as the leader of the industrialized world.

The regimental surgeon seemed eager to show that the colonies, too, could participate in the march of progress.

Paul commented on such things as the Aghori, the cannibal sect, noting the group’s heavy consumption of liquor. But his book generally ignored the remarkable diversity of Hindu mystics and instead zeroed in on their talent for life suspension or, as he put it in his preface, “abstaining from eating and breathing for a long time, and of becoming insensible to all external impressions.”

His principal case study was the forty-day burial. The Punjab yogi’s triumph over death, Paul noted, “has puzzled a great many learned men of Europe.” But he—lowly Bengali surgeon that he was—would deign to enlighten his peers.

Paul’s explanation had nothing to do with challenging poses or purifications. Nor did it deal with anatomy. Instead, he focused on an unseen factor that scientists of his day were busy measuring and evaluating in people and the environment.

It was carbon dioxide,
the waste product of cellular respiration that we all exhale. He had learned much about the basics of the transparent gas in medical school and quickly realized that yogic rituals worked to bottle it up inside the body. The main technique of manipulation was pranayama—the Sanskrit term for breathing exercises and, more literally, control of the life force.
Prana
means “vital force” and
yama
means “to restrain or control.”

Paul gave many examples of how yogis manipulate their breathing to discharge less. For instance, he described a common practice in which yogis take fewer breaths. Such retention, he wrote, “has a remarkable effect” on reducing how much carbon dioxide a person exhales.

His figures showed big drops over an extraordinary range of breathing rates, starting with the fastest. A relaxed person takes roughly fifteen breaths per minute. Paul’s findings showed that a yogi who took ninety-six breaths a minute would expel seventy-nine cubic inches of carbon dioxide. At twenty-four breaths, the level fell by more than half to twenty-four cubic inches. At six breaths—far below the pace of normal breathing—the flow dropped again by more than half to ten cubic inches. Three breaths per minute cut the level still further to five cubic inches. And one breath per minute took the measurement down to two cubic inches. In other words, slow breathing produced huge drops in the exhalation of carbon dioxide.

Over a dozen pages, Paul told how many other yogic practices worked similarly to lower the outflow. For instance, he said the repetition of “om,” the holy syllable of yoga, “materially diminished” the carbon loss. Another tactic was to simply rebreathe the same air—a move Paul called “one of the easiest methods” for entering a euphoric trance.

The culmination of Paul’s analysis centered on a common feature of yogic life that worked inconspicuously to concentrate stale air for rebreathing. It was to live in a gupha, or cave, a kind of subterranean retreat with little light or ventilation, made for long periods of contemplative bliss. Paul noted that a yogi’s assistant would block the small doorway of the gupha with clay—not unlike the mud that was used to seal the Punjab yogi’s crypt. That produced “a confined atmosphere,” Paul noted, where the yogi expired less carbon dioxide than would be the case “in the free ventilated air.”

In a bold display
of naturalism, Paul laid out a metaphor that avoided any hint of the miraculous and replaced it with a common feature of the natural world. The life suspensions of the yogis, he proposed, were simply cases of human hibernation, and the gupha of the saints were analogous to the burrows of hibernating animals.

Paul drove his point home by observing that hibernation was a common strategy that many different animals used to conserve energy. So the holy men resembled bats, hedgehogs, marmots, hamsters, and dormice, he argued. So too, like hibernating animals, yogis lined their caves with such insulating materials as grass, cotton, and sheepswool. “The guphá is as indispensably necessary to the Yogi,” Paul wrote, as a burrow is to “the hibernating animals.”

It was human hibernation, he concluded, that let the Punjab yogi survive his long interment. “If we compare the habits of the hybernating [
sic
] animals with those of the Yogis,” Paul wrote, “we find that they are identically the same.”

Today we know the Bengali surgeon was exactly right in terms of respiratory physiology, even if the slumber of hibernating creatures bears little resemblance to the ecstasy of accomplished yogis. Scientists have found that mammals preparing to hibernate do in fact seal off their burrows and experience the kinds of shifts in respiratory gases that Paul ascribed to yogis in their gupha. The closure of a den, notes David A. Wharton, a zoologist and author of
Life at the Limits
, “promotes a build-up of carbon dioxide which helps depress the metabolism of the animal,” slowing its biorhythms in preparation for deep sleep.

Paul’s analysis was brilliant in originality and import, his work all the more impressive given his humble status and the limited tools available to scientists of his day. He began uncovering what turned out to be one of yoga’s main influences on human physiology—how the discipline can slow the metabolism.

The rapture of yogis still held secrets. But Paul had taken a bold step that began a revolution.

Investigators who wandered the Asian subcontinent in search of the miraculous had to pay close attention to the possibility of cheaters, an issue that had clearly worried the maharajah of the Punjab. India teemed with street magicians who did feats of illusion for a living—everything from charming snakes and dismembering
one another to climbing ropes that disappeared into thin air. The ragtag clans had operated for centuries and had so refined their acts that Western conjurers often puzzled over the tricks and came to India to learn the secrets.

The magicians of India typically worked hard to cultivate religious associations, invoking the names of Hindu gods and saints. So, too, many poor religious figures in India—including yogis and swamis—gave in to the temptation of doing street magic as a way to make a living and often sought to pass off simple conjuring “as miraculous evidence of divine powers,” according to Lee Siegel, an analyst of Indian magic.

An Indian sociologist once disguised himself as a penniless monk. His survey of hundreds of Hindu holy men found that more than 6 percent admitted to the performance of magic tricks and pseudo-yogic feats, including live burials. Interred performers would get food surreptitiously or leave the cell through a secret hole. In one case, townspeople were surprised to find an ostensibly buried holy man strolling beside a river.

In 1896, Hungary held a Millennial Exposition in Budapest to celebrate its first thousand years. The festivities were to include two holy men from India. The yogis were said to have the ability to go into deep trances, seeming to die, and then return from the dead.

Professor Aurel von Török, director of the Anthropological Museum in Budapest, was famous for his precise studies of skulls. His personal appearance echoed his love of precision and his abiding sense of caution—his beard tidy, his glasses tiny.

The professor had a difficult time making arrangements to see the holy men and taking measurements. The yogis took turns displaying themselves in a glass coffin, going into trances and switching places every week or two, always with great fanfare and prayer and incantation. The awestruck crowds and all the comings and goings conflicted with the calm required for serious investigation.

With some irritation, von Török noted in a preliminary report that true science was difficult under the circumstances. Unexpected results had clearly aroused his suspicions: the professor studied the men carefully but could find no plunge in their vital signs.

The wisdom of von Török’s caution soon became apparent. A few skeptics hid themselves in the apartment with the glass coffin. Late one night, they watched in
astonishment as the lid of the coffin opened and the yogi stepped out. He proceeded to enjoy a cake and a bottle of milk.

They seized the startled man.

He and the other impostor managed to escape—Houdini-like—and save their show for another city and another day.

Inquiries into the miraculous side of yoga deepened in the course of the twentieth century, as we shall see. But the analyses and exposés amounted to little compared to a potent new force that surged across the length and breadth of yoga, concealing its unbecoming aspects and bestowing on its scientific investigation new legitimacy. That, in turn, caused the sheer quantity of research to explode.

The force was Hindu nationalism. It took shape as the nation’s elite, drawing on decades of rising anger over British colonial rule, worked hard to create a national identity that could unify the masses, counter notions of Western superiority, and forge the popular will necessary to oust the hated foreigners. (Around the same time, a similar effort got under way in Ireland, with similar results.)

The surge in nationalism sought to revive and modernize Hinduism as a foundation for Indian national identity, and did so across the subcontinent in countless political groups. They saw Indian antiquity as a time of cultural, religious, and social greatness. Scholars agree that the fundamental objective was to replace the myth of the white man’s superiority with one of native genius.

Yoga—with its ancient roots and mystic aspirations—was seen as a potential star. But it had problems. Middle class Indians found its obsession with sex and magic to be “an embarrassing heritage,” according to Geoffrey Samuel, a yoga scholar. As a practical matter, yogis had fallen so low in status that many Indians saw the unkempt drifters as symbols of all that had gone wrong with the Hindu religion.

The practice needed an extreme makeover. And it got one.

In October 1924, at the age of forty, Jagannath G. Gune established something quite new in the world—a sprawling ashram devoted to the scientific study of yoga. It was perched on a mountainous plateau south of Bombay and adjoined a hill resort where people fleeing the coast’s heat would go for cool
refreshment. There, amid rolling acres of lush vegetation, Gune (pronounced GU-nay) conducted what is considered the world’s first major experimental investigation of yoga.

He built a laboratory, filled it with the latest instruments, hired assistants, and donned a white lab coat. He founded a quarterly journal,
Yoga Mimansa
(Sanskrit for “profound thought or meditation”), and filled it with the results of his research. True to his nationalist roots, he made sure his rambling complex had room for armies of individuals interested in yoga cures and instruction, especially young people. The ashram, he declared in a veiled reference to the Hindu drive for independence, would excel at “sending out youths that will selflessly help the building of their nation.”

For nearly a half century, Gune worked with missionary zeal to direct scores of scientists who wrote hundreds of pioneering reports, helping to recast the ancient discipline as a boon for health and fitness. His toils won the admiration of Gandhi, Nehru, and many other stars of the independence movement, as well as major gurus who spread the reformulated yoga around the globe. And he did it all with a curious mix of pride and bravado, humility and innocence.

“He never wanted people to honor him,” O. P. Tiwari, secretary of the ashram, told me as monsoon rains fell outside his office window. “He never wanted that people would give him credit—would say he had done a great work.”

Most surprising of all, Gune came to his scientific passion not as a scientist or a physician. In terms of credentials, he was nothing close to a respected von Török, a lowly Paul, or even a student who had majored in the sciences. Nor did he have any money. What he did have—in spades—was the confidence of the independence movement.

Gune (1883–1966) had grown up north of Bombay in an area that became a hotbed of the insurrection. An orphan at fourteen, he threw himself into the nationalist struggle. He eagerly read
Kesari
(or
Lion
), a populist newspaper that urged a fallen people to boycott British goods and influence, to educate themselves, and to strive for self-rule. As a young man, he resolved to devote himself to the cause of Indian freedom through national and religious service. He vowed to remain celibate, to forgo a family, and never to serve the British. Instead of British-made textiles, he wore khadi, or homespun cloth. At one point, he roamed from village to village using
the medium of Hindu music and song to spread
Kesari
’s message of independence.