The Turbaned Superman 23
the brahmin priestly social class, often coopted the language of martial power
that belonged to the ruling kṣatriya class. Thus, the brahmins, who were after all
believed to be the human representatives and descendants of the semi- divine ṛṣis
and whose power rested in their control over the ritual recitation of Vedic hymns,
were able to ideologically weave themselves into the system of political power by
linking their ritual orality to martial conquest and applying to the former the dis-
cursive register of the latter. According to White, it was precisely this association
that led to the first fundamental schism in the historical understanding of yoga,
stemming from a parting of the ways in both the means and the goals of “yogic”
practice starting in the third or fourth century of the Common Era:
On the one hand, there is the practice of yoga, which leads to supernatural
enjoyments and visionary “embodied” travel to the highest worlds, fol-
lowed by a deferred final liberation at the end of a cosmic eon; on the
other, there is meditation on the absolute, which leads directly to release
from suffering existence and a disembodied identity with the godhead.
The former carries forward the traditions of the yogic apotheosis of the
chariot warrior, while the latter, which is clearly on the ascendant, is an
adaptation of the visionary yoga of the vedic poets.^6White juxtaposes the yoga of the Vedic seers, based on knowing, with the yoga
of the Vedic warriors, based on going.^7 The ṛṣis were, of course, “knowers” par
excellence. It was they who first cognized the eternal Vedic hymns, which are
tied to the very fabric of creation. The kṣatriyas, on the other hand, aspired not
so much to mystical cognition as to a bodily apotheosis that accompanied the
battle field death of an accomplished warrior. White relies of the Vedic meaning
of yoga as “rig”— functioning as both a noun and a verb— to argue for its appli-
cability to the literal ascent of the fallen hero into celestial realms. So historically
the rṣis were indeed metaphorical Yogis but it is only after this paradigm shift in
the meaning of “yoga” and the internalization of apotheosis that they become the
literal model.
This disjunction also parallels a distinction between the worldly model of the
jīvanmukta (liberated while living ) and the transcendent state of videhamukti
(liberated after death), or embodied and disembodied liberation. Stuart
Sarbacker has quite elegantly expressed this in his typolog y of “numinous” and
“cessative” models of yogic practice that span across Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain
systems.^8 Whereas the cessative aspect refers to those segments of yogic prac-
tice that seek to extricate the practitioner from worldly existence, the numi-
nous models deal with the ways in which attainment manifests in the context
of worldly experience. And the ways in which it manifests is generally through