ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores a small tradition of followers of Samkhyayoga, which emerged in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century in Bengal in India around the renunciant and yogin Hariharananda Aranya. It examines what Samkhyayoga meditation is as a contemporary practice. The book analyzes the role of some early Orientalists and their ideas about Samkhya, and its founder Kapila in the emergence of Samkhyayoga in nineteenth-century Bengal, and it discusses its possible impact on the teachings of the Kapil Math tradition. It suggests that Kapil Math has institutionalized this nineteenth-century view. The book also examines the rebirth of the Yoga of the Yogasutra in the same period and the emergence of a new type of bhadralok yogin, the educated upper caste yogin.
