Where is Kundalini ("Serpent power")?

Today, Yoga means a practice that revolves around the mystic force Kundalini. Most modern Gurus swear by various theories of this mythical force that is believed to be lying dormant in the human body, just waiting to be awakened.

But the reality is that, no mention of any such force or mysterious ‘techniques’ to arouse it can be found in any of the scriptures prior to the composition of “Hata pradeepika” by a Nath mystic Swatmarama in the 15th century A.D.

If one looks at early available literature, one can see a gradual building up of this theory over centuries.

Early Upanishads did not talk about Kundalini. Bhagavadgeetha as we saw in the previous posts did not talk about it. As I discussed in my book “Buddha’s soul”, Buddha never talked about it. Even Patanjali never talks about it in his Yoga Sutra.

The word Kundalini appatrntly appears in Yoga Vashishta - a 10th century A.D. composition which was continuously updated till it reached its final form sometime in the 18th century A.D. Even then, the mechanism of chakras, the weird scheme of arousing these chakras, and merger of Kundalini with the Siva in the Sahasrara chakra is not to be found in this book.

Some ealry ideas about Kundalini appear in much later works of Nath mystics sometime around 12th century. But a clear consolidation and development of ideas as we understand them today can be found only in 15th century and later texts.

But the irony is that many Gurus – some of them highly reputed – have interpreted ancient texts to suggest Kundalini based ideas in them. Even works of saints like Jnaneshvar (12th century A.D.) on Bhagavadgeetha seem to have been modified to read Kundalini in them.

But none can show any corroborative evidence or quote exact verses that they are basing their theories on.

There are others who claim that eventhough Kundalini ideas cannot be found in ancient texts, there did exist a long ‘Yogic tradition’ around Kundalini and related concepts. This is a vague and unsubstatiable argument. Anything and everything can be justified with such a reasoning and that can be misleading and dangerous.

I willl be happy to hear from my readers, any verifiable evidence – not just claims – from anceint texts on Kundalini. I will be too glad to correct my views.

Let us leave at that and contnue with our dicussion on Bhagavad Geetha in the next post.

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Based on Bhagavad Geetha, one of the most quoted and widely translated of the ancient Indian scriptures, believed to have been composed by Vyasa as part of the great Indian Epic Mahabharata, 5000 years ago. The interpretation of the verses and audio recital are by Dr.King (Copyright © 2018 Dr. King)