In this five-lecture series, Dr. James Mallinson takes a deeper look at the Hatha Yoga lineage. He covers many areas from the texts to the practitioners, the philosophies to the practices. James is one of the world’s foremost experts on Hatha Yoga. His work has uncovered some of the most recent findings in the Hatha Yoga story, making a major contribution to the interpretation of Yoga in the modern world. This series is a fascinating look at the connections which led the ancient world of Yoga into the modern forms of practice today.

• Session 1: Prehistory of Hatha Yoga
• Session 2: Hatha Yoga textual traditions pre 15th century
• Session 3: Hatha Yoga textual traditions post 15th century
• Session 4: Practices of Hatha Yoga
• Session 5: Practitioners and purpose of Hatha Yoga

James Mallinson is Senior Lecturer in Sanskrit and Classical Indian Studies at SOAS, University of London. Dr Mallinson has a BA in Sanskrit and Old Iranian from the University of Oxford (1991), an MA in South Asian Area Studies (with ethnography as its primary subject) from SOAS (1993), and a DPhil. from the University of Oxford (2001). His doctoral thesis was a critical edition of the Khecarīvidyā, an early text on Haṭha Yoga, and was supervised by Professor Alexis Sanderson. A revised version of the thesis was published by Routledge in 2007.

After completing his doctoral studies, Dr. Mallinson worked as a principal translator for the Clay Sanskrit Library, for which he produced five volumes of translations of Sanskrit poetry. He has also published translations of two Haṭha Yoga texts, the Gheraṇḍa Saṃhitā (2004) and Śivasaṃhitā (2007) for YogaVidya.com. In addition to these books, Dr. Mallinson has published numerous articles, book chapters, and encyclopedia articles, all of which can be downloaded from soas.academia.edu/JamesMallinson. Roots of Yoga, a reader of translations of texts on Yoga introduced and edited by Dr. Mallinson and Dr. Mark Singleton, will be published in the Penguin Classics series in January 2017. Since October 2015, Dr. Mallinson has been leading a five-year six-person research project on the history of Yoga funded by the European Research Council. Among the project’s numerous outputs will be critical editions of 10 key Sanskrit texts on Haṭha Yoga and four monographs detailing its history and current practice in India.

In addition to his textual studies, Dr Mallinson’s work on the history of Yoga is informed by the several years he has spent living with traditional Yogis in India.