Quick Answer
The book that told the West what yoga was for. Written by a Romanian who had practised in a Himalayan ashram and then spent twenty years turning the experience into scholarship, it follows yoga from Patanjali's classical withdrawal through the Upanishads, the Gita, Buddhist meditation, Tantra, Hatha, alchemy and the shamanic substrate, and argues that every form aims at the same thing: the abolition of the human condition, understood as bondage to time, and the winning of a freedom that is also immortality. The details have aged. The synthesis has not, and no later book has replaced it as the one to read on what yoga has meant.
Key Takeaways
- Yoga as the reversal of the ordinary flow of existence.
- Patanjali: isolation of spirit from nature, the classical standard.
- Tantra: the body sanctified, the world as the means.
- Shamanic roots: heat, flight, powers, with a different goal.
- A practitioner's scholarship, written by a man who had sat in the ashram.
17 min read
What This Book Is
Yoga: Immortality and Freedom is the English translation, by Willard Trask, of Le Yoga: Immortalité et liberté, published in Paris in 1954. It appeared in the Bollingen Series in 1958 and has been published by Princeton since. It is around five hundred pages, with nine chapters, a long section of additional notes, and a bibliography that was for decades the standard one.
Its ancestor is Eliade's doctoral thesis, submitted at Bucharest in 1933 after his return from India and published in French in 1936 as Yoga: Essai sur les origines de la mystique indienne. The 1954 book revises and greatly expands it, and the English version incorporates further revisions. It is a work of twenty-five years, begun by a young man in an ashram and finished by a scholar in exile.
The chapters run: the doctrines of yoga; the techniques for autonomy; yoga and Brahmanism; the triumph of yoga; yoga techniques in Buddhism; yoga and Tantrism; yoga and alchemy; yoga and aboriginal India; and conclusions. The order is roughly historical and the argument builds through it.
What kind of book it is. A history of religions, not a practice manual and not a philosophy. Eliade describes techniques in detail, but to explain what they were for, and he sets out doctrines, but to show what experience they codified. The book's question throughout is: what was the Indian practitioner trying to do, and what did he believe he had done when he succeeded?
Who Mircea Eliade Was
Mircea Eliade was born in Bucharest in 1907, was a prodigy who published from his teens, studied philosophy at Bucharest, and in 1928, at twenty-one, went to India on a scholarship from the Maharaja of Kassimbazar to study with Surendranath Dasgupta, the historian of Indian philosophy. He returned in 1931, submitted the thesis, and through the 1930s was Romania's most prominent young intellectual, publishing novels, essays and scholarship at a rate that has never been fully catalogued. He was also, in those years, associated with the Iron Guard, the Romanian fascist movement, a connection he never adequately explained and which has shadowed his reputation since.
In 1940 he was posted as cultural attaché to London and then Lisbon, did not return to Romania after the war, lived in Paris in poverty writing the books that made his name, Patterns in Comparative Religion, The Myth of the Eternal Return, Shamanism, and this, and in 1957 was called to Chicago, where he held the chair of history of religions until his death in 1986 and built the discipline in its American form.
The Indian Years
The experience behind the book, which it does not describe.
In Calcutta Eliade lived first in a boarding house and then in Dasgupta's own home, learned Sanskrit, read the yoga texts with the man who knew them best, and fell in love with Dasgupta's daughter Maitreyi, which ended the arrangement. He then went north, to Rishikesh, and spent six months at the ashram of Swami Sivananda, living in a hut, practising pranayama and meditation under a guru, and, as he later wrote, coming close to a decision to remain. He did not. He returned to Bucharest, and the return was the subject of his novels and his private writing for years after.
The book is the scholarly product of these years and it has the authority of a witness who does not testify. Eliade never says in it what he experienced; he says what the texts say and what the techniques are, and a reader can feel, in the precision of the descriptions of breath and posture and the stages of concentration, that the author had done what he describes.
The Argument: Immortality and Freedom
The thesis, given in the first chapter and the title.
Indian thought, Eliade argues, begins from a diagnosis: the human condition is suffering, and the cause of suffering is bondage to time, to karma, to the endless becoming of the world. The remedy is not moral or intellectual but technical: a method for reversing the flow of existence, stopping the movement of mind and body that binds one to time, and reaching an unconditioned state that is at once freedom, since nothing determines it, and immortality, since time no longer touches it. This is what yoga means in every one of its forms. Classical yoga reaches it by withdrawal, Tantra by transformation, Hatha by the body, Buddhism by analysis; but the goal, the abolition of the conditioned and the winning of the unconditioned, is one.
The argument makes yoga a soteriology, a way of salvation, rather than a philosophy or a gymnastic, and it explains why the same word covers practices that look like nothing alike. It is also an Eliade argument, with his lifelong theme, the escape from historical time into the sacred, visible in its Indian form.
Samkhya and the Doctrine
The philosophy behind classical yoga, explained with unusual clarity.
Samkhya, the enumeration, is the dualist system that gives Patanjali his metaphysics. There are two ultimate realities: purusha, spirit, pure consciousness, a plurality of individual witnesses who do nothing and are not affected; and prakriti, nature, the one substance from which mind, senses, body and world all evolve. Suffering arises because spirit mistakes itself for nature, identifying with the mind and the body that are not it. Liberation is discrimination: the realisation that spirit was never bound, and the consequent isolation, kaivalya, of spirit from all that is not spirit.
Eliade sets this out as the doctrine yoga presupposes and then adds the distinction: Samkhya believes discrimination alone liberates, and yoga believes that discrimination must be won by technique, since the mind's habits are too strong for insight to undo. Yoga is Samkhya with a method, and the method is the book.
Patanjali and Classical Yoga
The system, and Eliade's exposition is still one of the best.
The Yoga Sutras, a text of a few hundred aphorisms compiled around the early centuries CE, define yoga as the cessation of the modifications of the mind, and set out the eight limbs by which it is achieved: restraints, observances, posture, breath control, withdrawal of the senses, concentration, meditation and samadhi. Eliade follows them in order, with the commentaries of Vyasa and Vachaspati Mishra, and shows that the sequence is a progressive disengagement: first from wrong action, then from the world, then from the body's restlessness, then from the breath, then from the senses, then from the mind's wandering, until consciousness rests in itself and spirit is isolated.
He reads Patanjali as classical, in the sense of the standard by which other forms of yoga can be measured, and as a systematisation of older practice rather than an invention. The chapter is the book's most detailed and most reliable.
The Techniques
The second chapter, and the one where the practitioner shows through.
Eliade describes asana, the posture, as the refusal of movement, the body made stable and then forgotten; pranayama, breath control, as the refusal of ordinary respiration, the rhythm slowed until the mind's rhythm slows with it, with the stages of retention described from the texts and, one senses, from experience; pratyahara, the withdrawal of the senses, as the closing of the doors through which the world enters; and the three inner limbs as a single continuous process of concentration deepening into absorption.
The account of pranayama especially has been quoted by generations of teachers, and it is a rare example of a scholar describing a technique in a way a practitioner recognises. The chapter's title, techniques for autonomy, gives the argument: every practice aims to make the practitioner independent of the conditions that ordinarily determine him.
Samadhi and the Powers
The goal and its temptations.
Eliade sets out the stages of samadhi as the texts give them: with support, in which the mind is absorbed in an object; without support, in which it is absorbed in itself; and the distinctions within each, the samadhi with and without reasoning, with and without bliss. He then treats the siddhis, the powers, that the Sutras say arise on the way: clairvoyance, levitation, knowledge of past lives, entry into other bodies. Patanjali lists them and warns that they are obstacles; Eliade reads the warning as the classical tradition's decision that the magical powers, real or believed real, belong to the world the yogin is leaving, and that to use them is to fall back.
The chapter's balance, taking the powers seriously as part of the tradition while explaining why the tradition subordinated them, is characteristic and it prepares the reader for Tantra, where the balance shifts.
Yoga in the Upanishads and the Gita
The third and fourth chapters, on yoga's place in Brahmanical religion.
Eliade traces yoga's emergence in the Upanishads, where the ascetic techniques of the forest are joined to the doctrine of the Self, and in the epic, where the Bhagavad Gita makes yoga a way of acting in the world without bondage to the fruits of action, so that the warrior can fight and be free. He reads the Gita as the triumph of yoga, the moment at which a technique of withdrawal was reconciled with a religion of action and devotion, and he treats the reconciliation as the great achievement of Hindu thought.
The chapters are broad and move fast, and a reader who knows the texts will find the readings sound; one who does not will get a map.
Yoga and Buddhism
The fifth chapter, on the Buddha as a yogin.
Eliade argues that the Buddha's path is a yoga: the same techniques of posture, breath and concentration, the same stages of absorption, the same suspicion of the powers, directed to a goal that the Buddha refused to describe in Samkhya terms but that functions the same way, the extinction of the conditioned. He follows the jhanas, the meditative absorptions, through the Pali texts, compares them with Patanjali's samadhis, and treats the later Buddhist meditation traditions as developments of a common inheritance. The Buddhist reader will find the comparison illuminating and, at points, too quick to assimilate.
Tantra
The sixth chapter, the longest and the one for which the book was most read.
Tantra, arising from the fourth century and dominant by the eighth, reversed the classical attitude. Where Patanjali withdrew from body, senses and world, Tantra used them: the body as the microcosm containing the whole universe and all the gods, the senses as instruments of liberation, desire and even transgression as means. Eliade describes the Tantric practices, the mantras, the mandalas, the visualisations of deities, the ritual use of the forbidden, the sexual rite in which the couple become Shiva and Shakti and the seed is retained so that the energy rises instead of falling, and he explains their logic: if the world is the play of the divine, then liberation is found in it, not from it, and the body is the vehicle rather than the prison.
He also reads Tantra as a return, through the Brahmanical surface, of the archaic Indian religion of the Mother and of fertility, and this reading connects it to the book's later chapters on the aboriginal substrate. The chapter was, for thirty years, the fullest treatment in a Western language, and it remains the clearest introduction to what Tantra was trying to do.
Hatha Yoga and the Subtle Body
Within the Tantra chapter, and the section modern practitioners come for.
Hatha yoga, the yoga of force, developed within Tantra as the technique of the body: the postures multiplied, the breath controlled with the locks and seals, the subtle body of channels and centres mapped, and the serpent energy at the base of the spine awakened and raised through the chakras to the crown, where Shiva and Shakti unite and the body itself is made immortal. Eliade sets out the doctrine of the nadis and chakras, the practice of kundalini awakening, and the Hatha texts' claim that the perfected body does not die, and he reads the claim as the literal form of the book's title: immortality, in Hatha, is not a metaphor.
He is careful about the physiology, treating the subtle body as a mystical anatomy rather than a medical one, and the section is a model of how to describe a practice without either endorsing or dismissing its claims.
Yoga and Alchemy
The seventh chapter, and a theme Eliade pursued elsewhere.
Indian alchemy, rasayana, the way of mercury, sought a body made incorruptible by the transmutation of its substance, and Eliade shows that it was a sister discipline of Hatha yoga, sharing the goal of bodily immortality and many of the techniques. He connects it to the Chinese and Western alchemies, as he did in The Forge and the Crucible, and reads all of them as expressions of the same will to master time by mastering matter. The chapter is brief and speculative and it is the seed of a larger argument.
Yoga and Aboriginal India
The eighth chapter, on the substrate.
Beneath the Brahmanical and Buddhist forms, Eliade argues, lie the religious practices of pre-Aryan India: the cult of the Mother, the ascetic in the forest, the ecstatic and the magician, the fertility rites and the Indus Valley figure seated in what may be a yogic posture. He reads yoga as the Aryan systematisation of an aboriginal technique, and Tantra as the substrate's return. The chapter draws on archaeology and ethnography that has since been revised, and the Indus Valley argument in particular is now regarded as unproven. But the claim that yoga has roots older than the Vedas is still held by many, and the chapter is where it was first argued at length.
Yoga and Shamanism
A section of the last chapter, and the bridge to Eliade's other great book.
The shaman masters heat, flies in ecstasy, and wields powers over spirits; the yogin generates inner heat, ascends through the centres, and acquires siddhis. Eliade sets the parallels out and then insists on the difference: the shaman's ecstasy is a flight out of the body and back, in the service of the community, and the yogin's samadhi is a withdrawal into the unconditioned, in the service of his own liberation. Yoga is not shamanism but it grew, he suggests, from the same archaic soil, and the powers it disowns are the shaman's inheritance.
The book's distinction between shamanic ecstasy and yogic enstasy, Eliade's own coinage, is its most useful conceptual gift. The shaman goes out: he leaves the body, travels, meets spirits, and returns with something for the tribe. The yogin goes in: he stops the body, stops the breath, stops the mind, and rests in a consciousness that goes nowhere and needs nothing. Both master the ordinary condition; only one seeks to leave it permanently. The distinction explains why yoga treats the powers as obstacles, why Tantra's re-embrace of the world was a reversal, and why the Western reader who wants an experience from yoga is asking for the shaman's gift from the yogin's practice.
The Escape From Time
The conclusions, and the book's place in Eliade's thought.
Eliade closes by returning to the argument: that yoga is India's response to the discovery that existence in time is suffering, and that its every technique aims at a reversal, a going against the current, by which the practitioner steps out of becoming into being. He connects this to the wider theme of his work, the human longing to escape historical time into the sacred, the eternal return, the paradise of the origins, and he reads yoga as the most rigorous and technical expression of that longing in any culture.
Readers of The Sacred and the Profane will recognise the argument; readers who come to Eliade through this book will find the whole of him in embryo.
The Scholarship Since
What has changed, so that the reader can weigh the details.
The historical study of yoga has grown enormously since 1954. The chronology of the texts has been revised, often later; the Indus Valley seal is no longer read confidently as a yogin; the relation between Samkhya and Patanjali has been reargued; the Tantric and Hatha traditions have been studied from manuscripts Eliade did not have, especially by James Mallinson, Mark Singleton and David Gordon White; and the idea of a single yoga with one goal has been challenged by scholars who find many yogas with many goals. White's introduction to the 2009 Princeton printing sets out the revisions fairly and should be read with the book.
What has not changed is the book's standing as the synthesis. No later work covers the whole ground with the same command or argues so clearly what the whole was for, and the newer scholarship is mostly correction of a picture Eliade drew.
The Prose
Eliade wrote French as a Romanian and Trask translated it into an English that is formal, clear and slightly grand. The sentences are long and balanced, the terms are explained, and the argument never disappears. The book is not easy but it is never obscure, and its difficulty is the difficulty of its material. The chapters on the techniques and on Tantra are the most readable; the philological sections and the notes can be skipped on a first pass.
The Objections
Three.
The unity is imposed. Many yogas, many goals; the single soteriology is Eliade's.
The details have aged. Chronology, archaeology and some readings have been revised, and the book should not be cited without checking.
The author's politics. Eliade's 1930s fascism is not in the book, but readers should know it and decide how much it matters to a work on freedom.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you practise yoga in any form and want to know what it was for before it was exercise.
Read it if you study Indian religion and need the classic synthesis, with White's introduction as a corrective.
Read it with Shamanism, its twin, and with The Sacred and the Profane, its summary, and you will have the shape of Eliade's thought.
Read chapters one, two and six if you read nothing else: the doctrine, the techniques and Tantra. That is the argument and the two poles between which it moves.
The book's underlying teaching is that the human condition is a current, and that yoga is the decision to go against it. Everything in ordinary life flows one way: the breath in and out, the mind from thought to thought, the body from birth toward death, the self from act to consequence. The yogin stops the breath, stops the mind, stills the body, and cuts the thread of action, and the stopping is not a death but a stepping out of the stream onto ground that the stream does not touch. Eliade found this idea in Patanjali, saw it inverted in Tantra, found its roots in the shaman, and recognised it as the most complete answer any culture had given to the question of how to be free of time. Whether the ground exists is the reader's question. That the current does is not.
The history of yoga from Patanjali to Tantra, from the scholar who had sat in the ashram and knew what the texts were describing.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. Our account of the book's dated details and of the author's politics is given above and was not softened for the link.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Yoga: Immortality and Freedom about?
The whole history of yoga as a spiritual technique: Patanjali's classical system, the yoga of the Upanishads and the Gita, Buddhist meditation, Tantra and Hatha yoga, alchemy, and the folk and shamanic practices beneath them, presented as India's answer to the problem of the human condition and its escape from time.
Who was Mircea Eliade?
A Romanian historian of religions, 1907 to 1986, who studied yoga in Calcutta and in a Himalayan ashram from 1928 to 1931, wrote novels and scholarship in Romania, left in 1940, and from 1957 held the chair of history of religions at Chicago, where he shaped the field for a generation.
Did Eliade practise yoga?
Yes. He studied Sanskrit and Indian philosophy under Surendranath Dasgupta in Calcutta, then spent six months at Swami Sivananda's ashram in Rishikesh practising under a guru. The book was his doctoral thesis, first published in French in 1936, and it draws on this experience without describing it directly.
What is the central argument?
That yoga is a technique for abolishing the ordinary human condition, which India understands as bondage to time, karma and suffering, and for reaching a state of unconditioned freedom that is also immortality. Every form of yoga, however different, aims at this reversal of the normal flow of existence.
What does it say about Patanjali?
That the Yoga Sutras systematise an older practice on Samkhya foundations, that the eight limbs are a progressive withdrawal from the world ending in samadhi, and that the goal is the isolation of pure spirit from nature. Eliade treats this as classical yoga and the standard against which others are measured.
How does it treat Tantra?
As the great reversal: where classical yoga withdraws from the body and the world, Tantra uses them, sanctifying the body, employing sexuality, and finding liberation in the midst of experience rather than by escape from it. Eliade's chapter on Tantra was for decades the fullest account in a Western language.
What are the shamanic connections?
A late chapter argues that yoga has roots in and parallels with the archaic religious techniques of shamanism, in the mastery of heat, the ecstatic flight and the magical powers, while insisting that yoga's goal of liberation is different from the shaman's ecstasy.
Is the scholarship still current?
Partly. The chronology, the Indus Valley speculation and some textual readings have been revised, and the historical study of yoga has grown enormously since. The book's synthesis and its account of the goal remain influential; its details should be checked against newer work.
Is it a practice manual?
No. It describes techniques, postures, breath control and meditative stages in detail, but as a historian, not a teacher. Readers who want instruction should look elsewhere; readers who want to know what the instruction is for and where it came from should read this.
How hard is it to read?
Moderate. Eliade writes clearly and the argument is always visible, but the book assumes patience with Sanskrit terms, has long notes, and covers a great deal. The chapters on Patanjali and Tantra are the most accessible; the philological sections can be skimmed.
What edition should I get?
The Princeton Bollingen edition, translated by Willard Trask from the 1954 French revision, with the additional notes. The 2009 printing has a new introduction by David Gordon White that sets the book in the light of later scholarship.
Who should read it?
Practitioners who want to know the history and meaning of what they do, students of Indian religion who want the classic synthesis, and readers of Eliade's other work who want the book in which his lifelong themes of time, escape and sacred technique were first worked out.
Go against one current
Eliade's yoga is defined by reversal: the breath slowed against its rhythm, the mind stilled against its wandering, the body held against its restlessness. The book's practical suggestion, never stated as one, is that the direction matters more than the technique. Pick one current you ride without noticing, the reach for the phone, the next thought, the next thing, and for a few minutes go against it, not to achieve anything but to feel the pull. The pull is what the yogin spent a lifetime learning to stand in. Feeling it once is the beginning of understanding what the five hundred pages are about, and it costs nothing but the minutes.
Sources & References
- Eliade, Mircea. Yoga: Immortality and Freedom, trans. Willard R. Trask, Bollingen Series LVI, Princeton University Press, 1958; 2009 printing with introduction by David Gordon White.
- Eliade, Mircea. Autobiography, Volume 1: 1907-1937, Journey East, Journey West, for the Indian years.
- Patanjali. Yoga Sutras, with the commentary of Vyasa.
- Mallinson, James and Mark Singleton. Roots of Yoga, Penguin, 2017, for the newer textual scholarship.
- White, David Gordon. The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali: A Biography, Princeton, 2014.
- Eliade, Mircea. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, 1951, for the companion argument.