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    Sinister Yogis
    Sinister Yogis
    Sinister Yogis
    Ebook361 pages9 hours

    Sinister Yogis

    By David Gordon White

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Since the 1960s, yoga has become a billion-dollar industry in the West, attracting housewives and hipsters, New Agers and the old-aged. But our modern conception of yoga derives much from nineteenth-century European spirituality, and the true story of yoga’s origins in South Asia is far richer, stranger, and more entertaining than most of us realize.

    To uncover this history, David Gordon White focuses on yoga’s practitioners. Combing through millennia of South Asia’s vast and diverse literature, he discovers that yogis are usually portrayed as wonder-workers or sorcerers who use their dangerous supernatural abilities—which can include raising the dead, possession, and levitation—to acquire power, wealth, and sexual gratification. As White shows, even those yogis who aren’t downright villainous bear little resemblance to Western assumptions about them. At turns rollicking and sophisticated, Sinister Yogis tears down the image of yogis as detached, contemplative teachers, finally placing them in their proper context.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateJul 15, 2010
    ISBN9780226895154
    Sinister Yogis

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    Reviews for Sinister Yogis

    3.5/5

    13 ratings2 reviews

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    • 1/5
      Ignorant and presumptuous writings of a sinister author claiming, as if having first hand account, facts about a history tradition and science of which he has no experiential or even second hand knowledge.
    • 1/5
      The author doesn't know anything about yoga, yogic texts, yogis, yogic history or development and his single agenda is to malign Indian culture. I recommend to do one's research oneself and only then form opinions about a tradition. This book is the last thing one should choose to get knowledge of yoga. Book is highly biased and misinformed, structured in order to present unscholarly opinions of the author.

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    Sinister Yogis - David Gordon White

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