These articles are part of a series on Sahapedia emerging from the Haṭha Yoga Project (HYP), a five-year (2015–20) research project funded by the European Research Council (ERC) and based at SOAS, University of London. It aims at charting the history of physical yoga practice by means of philology, i.e., the study of texts on yoga, and ethnography, based on fieldwork among practitioners of yoga. The project team consists of four researchers based at SOAS—the principal investigator Dr James Mallinson, Dr Mark Singleton, Dr Jason Birch and Dr Daniella Bevilacqua—and two research assistants at the École française d’Extrême Orient, Pondicherry, Dr Vishwanath Gupta and Ramya Harimadhava. The project’s primary outputs will be critical editions and annotated translations of ten Sanskrit texts on haṭha yoga, four monographs, and a range of journal articles, book chapters and encyclopedic entries. In September 2016, a workshop for 20 scholars working on critical editions of Sanskrit texts on yoga was held at SOAS and All Souls’ College, Oxford University. A public conference will be held at SOAS in 2020. The ten articles on Sahapedia will include an overview of the history of yoga, as well as articles by subject-matter experts on haṭha yoga, modern yoga, meditation, Pātañjala yoga, prāṇāyāma, the subtle body, mantra, and Āyurveda.
All the photographs featured in this module have been taken by Dr James Mallinson and Dr Daniela Bevilacqua for the Hatha Yoga Project.
