Embodied Consciousness in Tantric Yoga and the Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty
Religion and the Arts January 1, 2008 James Morley
Yoga and twentieth-century phenomenology share a significant congruence, but not because both seek transcendence from the world, as earlier comparisons claimed. By applying Maurice Merleau-Ponty's existential phenomenology to the Tantric stream of yoga, the congruence emerges in the opposite direction: immersion into the "flesh of the world"—the lived human body as a homology of the cosmos. Yoga may provide phenomenology with a somatic contemplative practice, while phenomenology may offer yoga a basis for theoretical articulation.