Book Reviews 107

doi:10.1093/jhs/hir005
Advance Access Publication 2 March 2011

The Origins of Yoga and Tantra: Indic Religions to the Thirteenth Century.
By Geoffrey Samuel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. ISBN:
978-0521695343, pp. 432. £58.00 (cloth) £23.99 (paper).

As many of us experience, it is not always easy to talk or write about tantra—

especially to a wide scholarly audience. Tantra is notoriously difficult to define, has

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much ritual detail, and can get philosophically very complicated. The reported
practices of the physical and subtle bodies, moreover, can seem scandalous and
sometimes difficult to believe. One of the great strengths of Samuel’s new book,
I think, is simply that it is able to engage a broad academic readership. In doing so,
it might irk some specialists with its finessing, however adeptly, of issues of def-
inition, its avoidance of philosophical discussion, and its parsimony with ritual
detail. In return, however, Samuel offers his readers something not often found in
scholarship on yoga and tantra: some serious sustained attention to their social
contexts. This makes for a historical narrative of tradition that feels substantial,
with contours most of us can grasp. Focusing on religious practice, Samuel offers
his readers glimpses of intriguing mysteries while revealing broad continuities in
Indian tradition.
Indeed, the view Samuel gives us is very broad—both in the time frame and
traditions it encompasses and the contemporary scholarship of which it is aware.
He brings together a number of specific scholarly reconstructions into a grand,
new socio-historical imagining of Indian technologies of the self in their develop-
ment and transformations. More than once in his narrative, Samuel refers to
Weber’s ‘elective affinities’ a dynamic between individuals’ ideals and external
economic and political structures that often seems to drive socio-religious
change. This interplay between peoples’ inner lives and their outer circum-
stances—a very salutory approach in my opinion—runs throughout Samuel’s
work here, as it does in most of Weber’s work on religion. And like Weber,
Samuel does not flinch from the wide civilisational perspective; he ventures
deeply into areas of religious practice, however, both inward and outward, that
social scientists at the turn of the 20th century would not take seriously.
By the beginning of the present century, though, a number of scholars from
different disciplines—including a few social scientists—have begun to take yogic
and tantric practices very seriously, examining their ramifications from their own
disciplinary perspectives and areas of specialisation. Credible schematic solutions
have been offered to various puzzles in the development of Indian religions in
their diversity, from Thomas Hopkins’ two-culture theory at the beginnings of
historical Indian religion (Hopkins, T. J. 1999. Some reflections on Hinduism.
108 Book Reviews

Unpublished typescript) to David Gordon White’s three-stage periodisation

of tantra straddling some of its later middle stages (White, D. G. 1998.
Transformations in the art of love: k@makal@ practices in hindu tantric and
kaula traditions. History of Religions 38, 172–98). From the very large perspective,
however, solutions such as these—grounded as they are in specific places and
times—appear as separate clusters of put-together pieces in a giant jigsaw
puzzle, the rest of which remains as scattered odd-shaped bits on the table.
Samuel then appears as the master puzzle solver, making a few new clusters

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himself and joining them with the rest into a coherent whole. This is a magisterial
achievement.
Still, some of Samuel’s puzzle pieces seem to fit together more nicely than
others. On the whole, it was easier for me to see how the pieces fit together
within particular religio-historical contexts than to fathom their connections
over time. Although Samuel presents some interesting continuities between
Mahayana visions of the gods in the heavens and early Buddhist tantric visualisa-
tions, most often we hear simply of changing religio-historical patterns, with old
practices becoming marginalised or dying out and new ones taking their place.
Sometimes, of course, that’s all one can do, but a few more suggestions about
historical causalities would have been appreciated. The particular strengths of
Samuel’s book here is that he focuses on the interplay of the esoteric side of
religion with social reality and that he does so in the Brahminic/Hindu and
Buddhist/Heterodox traditions side by side. On each side, he regularly points to
the consistencies in the development of esoteric practice, while addressing differ-
ent traditions on their own terms.
Sometimes, though, the story Samuel tells seems a little too neat. This struck me
particularly when reading the beginning of Chapter Twelve, on tantra and political
authority, when Samuel sums up all that he had written about fierce goddesses
and hat.hayoga practice in the last two substantial chapters in four succinct para-
graphs. Was it really all so unbelievably clear? Moreover, in giving so many schol-
arly theories their due and emphasising the mutual interaction between Brahminic
and heterodox traditions, Samuel sometimes strikes me as a little too irenic: he is
never going to satisfy partisans of any one theory or tradition. Still, most often, in
writing as in life, being neat and irenic is helpful—a good thing, as it usually is
here. Whatever faults I or others may find in the work can only appear as quibbles
in a masterful book that I am very grateful to have read.

Daniel Gold
Department of Asian Studies, Cornell University