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Christianity and Yoga

2023· reference-entry· en· W4385143343 on OpenAlexaff
Michael Stoeber

Bibliographic record

Venuenot available
Typereference-entry
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicChristian Theology and Mission
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Toronto
Fundersnot available
KeywordsHatha yogaAsceticismHinduismContemplationChristianityKarmaMeditationRenunciationWorshipBuddhismAestheticsTheologyReligious studiesSociologyPsychologyPhilosophy

Abstract

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Hindu postural yogas of hatha and kundalini have come into significant theological and practical dialogue with Christianity historically. These are physical-sensory oriented yogas, that can include: āsana (body postures and movements); mudra (hand positions); prāṇāyāma (breath meditations); mantra (sacred soundings or chanting); or yantra (mental imaging and visualization). Hatha and kundalini yogas are marked off from other categories of yoga: bhakti (worship and devotional self-surrender); karma (selfless action); rāja (meditative emphasis, centered on Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra); and jñāna (discriminating knowledge through meditation). However, some of the physical-sensory practices and theoretical contexts of hatha and kundalini can function as significant prerequisites, helpful supports, or grounding for the devotional or contemplative goals of these other yogas. Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra (3rd century ce) and its commentaries systematize popular ascetic techniques and contemplative methods of ancient yoga practices and theories, which were then creatively expanded or adapted into hatha and kundalini yogas, and influence, relate with, and contrast to, other yoga types. This article highlights comparative studies and dialogue of postural yogas with Christianity, but also includes references to jñāna and bhakti. Although Christian-Hindu encounters with Indian yogas occur centuries earlier, with the St. Thomas Christians, reliable and detailed records begin in the early 17th century. Christian missionaries studied Hindu texts and communicated aspects of their comparative learning and personal dialogue, while travel writers and Western journalists informed European and American Christians about various practices of Indian yogis-fakirs (ascetic yoga masters). Scholars, religion-theorists, and theologians of the 19th and 20th centuries wrote about yoga, interreligious dialogue occurred among monastics from the early 20th century, and influential gurus introduced various yogas more widely to the West. Historically, this interreligious dialogue and comparative study can be distinguished by three general approaches—though it also occurs without reference to these stances: In Exclusivism, persons of a religious tradition regard the theories and practices of the “Other” tradition suspiciously or pejoratively, as misguided, flawed, or spiritually distorted and dangerous, even while possibly drawing upon significant aspects of the Other’s tradition; Inclusivist-Fulfillment orientations claim both the limitations of the Other—especially in terms of ultimate spiritual ideals—but also acknowledge the positive support of its theories and practices in relation to the fulfilment of one’s own religious tradition, in some cases in extremely complimentary ways. Pluralistic theories grant independent authenticity to certain aspects of the theories, practices, and spiritual ideals of the Other, sometimes recognizing the possibilities of multiple religious participation and belonging or religious hybridity.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.002
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: Other
Teacher disagreement score0.007
Threshold uncertainty score0.019

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.002
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0070.018
Scholarly communication0.0030.002
Open science0.0000.003
Research integrity0.0010.003
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0060.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.053
GPT teacher head0.253
Teacher spread0.200 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreOther

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

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Citations0
Published2023
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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