It is generally agreed upon that a text named Haṭhayogapradīpikā was printed together with the commentary Jyotsnā for the first time in the late 1880s in India. Three places, Bombay, Adyar and Calcutta were competing for the first publication and although exemplars of these first editions seem to be lost, the Bengali one, published in 1888 acording the catalogue of the Staatsbibliothek (Berlin), could have been the first. Unfortunately, the exemplar is tagged “Kriegsverlust” (lost during the Second World War).
But two decades earlier, Theodor Aufrecht, who was trained as a Sanskritist in Berlin and then worked as an assistant in Max Müller’s edition of the Rigveda in Oxford, was in pursuit of his long time plan to produce an index of authors and works for the mostly unedited Indian Sanskrit Literature. To this end he offered cataloguing Sanskrit manuscripts to all libraries that would permit him to do so. Indologists know that he eventually completed his project, the Catalogus Catalogorum, which for a long time was the first stop for almost any work on Sanskrit texts.
Through Anett Krause’s work on Indological letters we now know that Aufrecht (Krause 2024) did not even expect remuneration, only that the catalogue be printed. He also claimed to be able to catalogue 400 manuscripts in four weeks. Today such projects would surely be rejected as utterly unrealistic. And it is true, Aufrecht needed more than 4 weeks for the manuscripts kept in Leipzig, but with his one-man show he produced catalogues of Sanskrit manuscripts in Leipzig, Munich, Florence, Oxford, and Cambridge. From his cataloguee we known that Aufrecht read all the works thoroughly: we find substantial summaries, sometimes – see the Raghuvaṃśa manuscript (175, 176) in his first Oxford Catalogue (1859) – he gives a collation with other manuscripts. Today it is difficult to understand the 19th century efficiency which seems unreachable despite modern technology or modern project planning.
In 1884 Aufrecht’s second catalogue of Sanskrits manuscripts in the Bodleian Library appeared. In it he follows his practice of giving substantial excerpts of the unknown works and in the section on Yoga literature we find as no. 566 the Haṭhapradīpikā, where in a long entry (pp. 233-236) he quotes more than 60 verses. He even compared the resulting text – a rough edition in fact – with other manuscripts of this text that were available to him, namely the Berlin and a London manuscript. But there is more: passages that are not given literally are summarized, there is a list of āsanas, and other brief remarks about the contents. He also states at the end that in the work many verses of Gorakṣa have been adapted. The reader must recall that we are talking about unpublished works that Aufrecht was working in a manuscript culture. The catalogue, written in Latin for Sanskritists, cannot have had a wide dissemination and unsurprisingly the Haṭhapradīpikā could not have become known through it.
Twenty-four years later a text now called Haṭhayogapradīpikā was printed in India accompanied by a commentary called Jyotsnā. The exact relationship between the three prints from Bombay, Calcutta and Adyar is not known, but they must have been produced from local manuscripts that were not too wide apart, so that readers cannot easily notice that the variants of the Adyar manuscript are sometimes better than those of the Bombay edition. In any case the text of these editions became the standard version of the Haṭhapradīpikā for the next century and no one seemed to notice that these editions relied only on manuscripts of the Jyotsnā with the text of the Haṭhapradīpikā embedded – but not of the text of the Haṭhapradīpikā itself, as in Aufrecht’s approach.
The Jyotsnā was written by Brahmānanda in the 1830s and we know now that he followed a middle-length version of the Haṭhapradīpikā. There are some manuscripts that transmit versions similar to the text he gives, but there are more of these middle-versions and his choice could have been mere historical accident. After the publication of the vulgate editions, no Sanskritist has apparently looked at the sources again. And it seems that no one realized that the vulgate was produced not by reading any selection of the many manuscripts of the mūla text, but merely reproduced the text as edited by the commentator Brahmānanda in his Jyotsnā. Today this commentary is considered the voice of tradition of Yoga, but in Aufrecht’s time this was a very recent commentary, written just forty years earlier.
Aufrecht had collated only three manuscripts for editing the extracts, but he remained an exception. The wide-spread vulgate eclipsed the variety seen in manuscripts and became the standard text and some arbitrary decisions made during its production became almost irreversible. An obvious example for this would be the title of the work. A reader of the Sanskrit text as well as the commentary of Brahmānanda cannot remain ignorant of the fact that the text is called Haṭhapradīpikā, since the author calls his commentary Haṭhapradīpikājyotsnā in the first introductory verse. Surely the editors were well aware of this fact, and it was no more than an understandable editorial decision to name the book Haṭhayogapradīpikā in order to clarify that this is a text on Yoga. As a result this augmented form of the title was since then taken as the name of the text.
As a result of our project of editing the Haṭhapradīpikā based on the large number of manuscripts it became clear that Svātmārāma wrote a shorter text, which is if not identical with then at least much nearer to our group alpha. The text must have been reworked soon and grew further as new material demanded acceptance to what became one of the most widely read (judging from the number of copies) text on Haṭhayoga. With these new materials a more historically accurate view of the development of Haṭhayoga has emerged.
In Aufrecht’s time Yogic practices were subsumed under the rubric “Selbstpeinigung”, which was a standard German translation of Sanskrit “tapas”. Practices like the ṣaṭkarmas only confirmed what Europe thought it knew about Indian religions. He writes: Quae tormenta absurda et incredibilia superstitionis suae causa ne terrae Indicae quidem fanatici subire fastidierint, his sex operibus (= ṣaṭkarma) apparebit (Aufrecht 1859, p. 234).
Of course Aufrecht could not know that a few years later a student in Munich would translate this work into German for his PhD (Walter 1893), and that the demand for a German translation would cause reprints for the next century or so. Of course he could not predict that Yogic practices by then would have spread across the globe, and those tormenta absurda would be part of a wellness culture. He could not have guessed that Sanskrit Studies would by then be demolished in the last two places where he held his professorships, that is Edinburgh and Bonn. Perhaps he would have liked the idea that an Anglo-German cooperation project would take up the task of editing the Haṭhapradīpikā, continuing under very different circumstances where this pioneer left off.
References
Theodor Aufrecht: Catalogus Codicum Manuscriptorum Sanscriticorum Postvedicorum. Pars I. Oxford 1859.
Anett Krause (2024, 23. Februar). “But all for science!” – Theodor Aufrecht in the Light of His Correspondence as Cataloguer of the Leipzig Sanskrit Manuscripts. Alte Kataloge in neuem
Gewand. Abgerufen am 3. März 2024, von https://doi.org/10.58079/vw6x
Hermann Walter: Svâtmârâma’s Hathayogapradîpikâ (Die Leuchte des Haṭhayoga). Munich 1893
