Religious Therapeutics - Body and Health in Yoga, Ayurveda, and Tantra

It is a pleasure to read and to be asked to review this erudite book. I can thoroughly recommend it to anyone interested in the nature of existence and spirituality.

'Behind your thoughts and feelings, my brother, stands a mighty commander, an unknown sage - he is called Self. He lives in your body, he is your body'- Thus spake Zarathustra by Nietzsche. After the introduction, the book is divided into four chapters: Body and Philosophies of Healing The Meanings of Health in Ayurveda Classical Yoga as a Religious Therapeutic Tantra and Aesthetic Therapeutics Community:Relationality in Religious Therapeutics Religious therapeutics embraces the principles and practices that support human well-being whilst recognising the common ground and co-operation of health and religiousness. It explores the relationship between psychophysical health and spiritual health and presents a model for interpreting connections between religion and medicine in world traditions. This model is taken from classical Yoga, Ayurveda and Tantra. To this is added community to produce the branches of religious therapeutics. These are: 1. Metaphysical and epistemic foundations 2. Soteriology (theory of salvation or liberation) 3. Value theory and ethics 4. Physical practice 5. Cultivation of consciousness 6. Medicine and health care 7. Aesthetics 8. Community The study of these addresses the problem that the psychophysical person is bound to struggle with problems concerning embodiment and health, and takes the position that the spiritual Self suffers no illness, thus religiousness offers a means of realising one's primordial wholeness and freedom. The spiritual self is not subject to sickness and therefore healing in a religious sense means overcoming impediments that interfere with the realisation of one's Self-nature in its full identity and freedom. Classical Yoga provides an extensive system of religious therapeutics but it neglects rationality as its goal is kaivalya, 'independence' of Self as consciousness from entanglement with material nature, including body, nature and sociality.

By integrating the model of Ayurveda's holistic contribution to the understanding and preservation of health, and Tantra's approach that enlightenment is attainable through physicality and aesthetic experience, the model requires a component that embraces rationality. The idea of community embodies meanings of rationality between person and the sacred, among persons, and among aspects of creation.

The idea of community has applications to religion, human social life, and ecology. In religion, community refers to participation in or contact with the sacred. In religious therapeutics, communication includes, prayer, ritual speech, scripture and sacred music.

Tantra holds that material nature as sacred, thus grounding the valuation of relationality, Ayurveda gives the most attention to the significance of the biophysical environment, as illustrated by Ayurveda's view of pharmacology, which is a major branch of Ayurveda and contemporary medicine. Plants provide food and medicine and are central to Hindu cosmology.

As it says in the Chandogya Upanishad 1:1.2: 'The essence of things here is the earth. The essence of the earth is water. The essence of water is plants. The essence of plants is a person(purusa)'.

The agni or fire, the transformative energy of the life process exists throughout living nature. The plants we consume as food and medicine transmit agni to us. When the digestive agni is strong, food affords maximal nourishment but when it is weak, compromised digestion can contribute to disease. Life and health in biological terms depend on the nourishment extracted from other life-forms within the food chain. In human social life, health and healing depend in part on relations with others.

The Buddha identified malnutrition as a disease and as a cause of the root disease: suffering. The disease of suffering, caused by craving, is not merely an individual, psychological matter; elimination of craving requires reforms at the level of community. Health requires that entities and systems helpful exchanges.

Ayurvedic diagnosis and treatment invoke the idea of balance not only in pharmacological applications but more importantly how the relationship between persons and their environment and life circumstances interact. Important in this idea of equilibrium in the context of health is avoidance of extremes in diet, sleep, work, recreation, meditation and other activities. Ayurveda also looks at the relation of Prana or vital breath to plant medicines and mantras in restoring well-being. The healthful life is a holy life.

Healing must ultimately be generated from within oneself but its instigation may come from an outside source that somehow redirects or infuses energy to permit the re-establishment of integrity in the affected system.

The fact that we request healing, presupposes the order and well-being of life. In other words, the knowledge of health lies within each one of us. Freedom is the experience in which the individual and society enjoy the best of health and happiness.

One's religious aim might be transcendence of the body, or religious realisation in one's embodied state, but, in either case, our journey in this world is an embodied one, and the religious life demands our reconciliation in some way the dimensions of sacredness and physicality. It is valuable to articulate connections between religiousness and healthful living that utilise and support wholesome physicality and healthful community life. All our activities - in householding, work, relationship, social welfare, recreation, the arts, etc. - can be performed in a spirit that affirms wholeness and holiness - The Fourth Way of Ouspensky.

'Om! One should reverence the Udgitha (song) as this syllable, for one sings the loud chant beginning with 'Om'. 'The essence of things here is the earth. The essence of earth is water. The essence of water is plants. The essence of a person is speech. The essence of speech is the Rg(hymn) The essence of Rg is the Saman(chant). The essence of Saman is the Udgitha(song) The Rg is speech. The Saman is breath. The Udgitha is this syllable Om'.

Chandyoga Upanishad Om! - This syllable is the whole world... ...Om is the Self indeed....

Mandukya Upanishad Throughout the book there are innumerable references to the classical Sanskrit texts and etymology from Latin, Greek and Sanskrit. There are comprehensive notes on each chapter, full references to all the Primary and Secondary sources, an index, Sanskrit