38 Biography of a YogiAgainst the disfigured and self- destructive Yogis, Arnold represents the
Buddha in formidable contrast. Having regained his strength and vigor after
leaving excessive austerities behind, he is described as “Sitting serene, with per-
fect virtue walled / As is a stronghold by its gates and ramps.”^43 Thus, despite the
potential strangeness of the Buddha’s concomitant metaphysical doctrines— for
which Arnold expresses an admiration but ultimately devalues in the face of
Christianity’s superiority— the public was presented with a new and far more
appealing model of Indian mysticism. It is important to note that the Buddha
was not a “Yogi,” nor was he a “Hindu,” and thus it would be tempting to dis-
miss his impact on the formation of the former persona. However, given the
general lack of differentiation when it came to all things Oriental in the mind
of the contemporary American public, the general image would have been
understood simply as that of a “Mystic from the East.” And it proved to be a
memorable image.
This alternate model of Yogihood would slowly pick up steam as Western
interest in Indian thought became more earnest. The Yogi ascetics and magicians
would always be a passing curiosity, but in the Yogi mystic Americans and other
Westerners increasingly recognized a truth that some felt to be missing from their
own religions. A brief mention should be made in this context of Theosophy
and its Mahatmas, especially insofar as some of them were in fact declared to be
Indian Yogis. However, the Mahatmas were more ideas than they were people,
and as such they will be discussed more fully in the following chapter. As far as
people were concerned, the Indian intellectual elites’ acceptance of such figures as
universal adepts was reflective of an ideological shift that had much to do with the
neo- Hindu reforms of organizations such as the Brahmo Samāj, whose religious
leanings had strong universalistic tendencies.
Indians themselves, largely emboldened by Western affection for texts such as
the Yoga Sūtras, which were thought to represent a philosophical, meditative, and
therefore pure yoga, were seeking to reformulate the understanding of what con-
stituted authentic yogic practice. This caused the would- be ethnographer Oman
to observe in 1889:
Happily, there are already signs which indicate that even such educated
natives as cannot emancipate themselves from a belief in yoga- vidya—
national beliefs die hard— are beginning to be ashamed of the dirty, indo-
lent, and repulsive mendicants who perambulate the country, and, for the
credit of the so- called yog science, pretend that the real yogis are very dif-
ferent from these unclean and disgusting objects of popular veneration.
With the spread of Western ideas, and with the growth of new objects
of ambition created by intimate contact with the restless civilization and