There’s a common misconception that Tantric yoga is somewhat esoteric, or confined to Tibet. Yet in “The Extasie”, a poem written in 1595 or thereabouts, John Donne writes of a couple who become “by good love … grown all mind.” Buddha Sakyamuni is reputed to have said “If the body is not mastered, the mind cannot be mastered. If the body is mastered, mind is mastered.”
Now, of course John Donne didn’t actually know anything about Tibetan yoga, tantric or otherwise, but it’s interesting to see how similar concepts or ideas can independently arise in cultures so separated by time, ethnicity and distance, both employing the mind/body duality. In this case, it’s the practice of Mahamudra or “ultimate spiritual attainment,” as Baker defines it, which can be achieved, in tantric practice, through sexuality. “Without genitals there is no Mahamudra,” proclaimed the eighth century mahasiddha (literally “great achiever”) Saraha, and the Buddha Kapalatantra “presents passion as “a skilful means for transcending subject-object duality.” Now look at Donne. The lovers are sitting on a bank facing one another, and, as their eye-beams intertwine:
Our souls, (which to advance their state
Were gone out) hung ‘twixt her and me.
As this process moves forward,
We like sepulchral statues lay:
All day the same our postures were,
And we said nothing all the day.
This is very similar to the tantric yoga positions often depicted as a way to achieve spiritual union between the masculine and feminine principles, or, as Donne put it in “The Canonization”: “We in us find the eagle and the dove.”
In “The Extasie”, Donne asks
But O, alas, so long, so far
Our bodies why do we forbear?
For the transcendent union the physical is necessary; our bodies, which “are ours, though they are not we,” are the source for our attainment of the spiritual. As Donne puts it, they “Yielded their senses’ force to us”, while Yeshe Tsogyal wrote, again in the eighth century, “Enlightenment arises within the body, or it does not arise at all.” He went on to state that “the body is the perfect crucible for liberation.” A similar theme runs through Donne’s love poetry as a kind of leitmotif. “We see by this it was not sex,” Donne wrote in “The Extasie”, but without the sex there would be nothing else—no enlightenment arising within the body, which needs to be there to achieve the desired state, and this belief Donne shares with the practitioners of Tantric yoga.

Ian Baker, unlike John Donne, fortunately does know an awful lot about Tibetan yoga practices (there are six of them), and readers can find out all about them in this beautifully illustrated, comprehensive, highly informative and well-produced book produced on high-quality paper by Thames and Hudson. The illustrations range from ancient Tibetan art to photographs of actual yogis and yoginis demonstrating various techniques and practices. Indeed, one of the astonishing things about Tibetan yoga is its incredible variety, and Baker includes explanations of such topics as dream yoga, the use of mind-expanding plants or minerals as well as detailed exploration of the way practitioners use their bodies, how they breathe, how yoga ultimately reveals “the full spectrum of humanity’s cognitive and existential potential,” as the back cover description explains.
In short, though, yoga is all about the human body; as Donne put it, “to our bodies turn we now.” As Baker tells us in his introduction, yoga “engages the intelligence intrinsic to human embodiment,” which allows the practitioner to “explore dimensions of experience inaccessible to prevailing modes of neuropsychological and anthropological research.” This exploration, Baker explains, brings us to the “core aim” of yoga, which is “to transform the human condition, freeing it from disempowering struggle and discontent and awakening self-transcendent empathy and compassionate action,” two vital principles that we can recognise at the heart of Buddhism, and which we might (at a stretch, perhaps) equate with Donne’s “good love … grown all mind” Tibetan Buddhism offers its practitioners “a vision of human possibility based on autonomous processes within the human body.”
While greatly broadening what ordinary readers might know about Tibetan yoga, this book will astound them with the breadth and depth of its methods, practices and techniques, especially if they came to the subject thinking yoga was just meditation whilst contorting the body in a variety of seemingly impossible or uncomfortable positions or something reserved for Buddhist monks in monasteries. In this book we can see a range of meditation postures demonstrated by modern practitioners, from a photograph of a yogini simply sitting in a relaxed position or lying down prone to a yogi flying in the air or another appearing to balance on one hand with his body stretched out behind him. The two latter seem to illustrate the transformation of the human condition. Baker often places ancient depictions of yogic postures next to photographs of modern practitioners, to show how there is a continued tradition being upheld to the present day. As for monasticism or institutional practicing, Saraha again provides some wise words: “I have visited many shrines and temples,” he wrote, “but none are as joyous as my own body.”
Baker takes us into every detail of the practice, from its early history through to our own times; there are chapters on meditation, “enlightened anatomy”, dreams, sleep, movement, desire and imagination, to mention just some of them. The ultimate purpose of all this is, as Baker states, to help readers “transcend self-preoccupation and to act joyfully”, a purpose which is fully realized in this book, which never has a dull page in it. In order to do this, yoga engages a whole gamut of practices, including meditation, but many readers will be surprised to find out that there is much “beyond meditation”, and that no fixed environment is necessary to find enlightenment.
Don’t sit at home
Don’t meditate in the forest,
wrote Siraha,
But recognise the essence of mind
Wherever you find yourself.
Many of the illustrations show yoga being practiced outdoors, often by waterfalls or amongst trees, perhaps reflecting the belief that Buddha initially found enlightenment under a tree, and that, Baker explains,
processes in the natural world paralleled insight into the shimmering transience of mental states, ultimately revealing an emancipatory continuum of being beyond emotional reactivity.
Of course, a book like this can’t be cursorily summed up in a review; it’s a vast undertaking on the part of Ian Baker, but he obviously saw it as a labor of love, wishing to make the whole vast range of Tibetan yoga accessible to English-speaking readers. And he succeeds admirably. Yoga isn’t monolithic, but very complex, involving not just the body and mind, but the whole of a person’s being; it can free the imagination, give insights into the very core of our being, and help us achieve “innate perfection”.
Baker devotes an afterword to the practice of Tibetan yoga in the West, which, he writes, arises from “the convergence of Haţha Yoga and Vajrayãna Buddhism”, and the work of Theos Bernard (1908-1947), an American scholar of Hinduism and Buddhism and the self-styled “white lama”, who was actually invited to Tibet in 1936 and founded the American Institute of Yoga three years later. It was Bernard who put Haţha Yoga and Vajrayaña Buddhism together, but after his death Western interest receded until the 1960s. It was at that time that the hippie movement, taking their cue from Timothy Leary’s version of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, began to incorporate the use of hallucinogens (Baker discusses these in Chapter XII, “Potent Solutions: The Yoga of Entheogens and Elixirs”), the successor to the ancient practice of ingesting datura, also known as jimsonweed or devil’s snare.
Baker believes that along with the obvious possibilities for substance abuse, Western practitioners are sometimes prone to
unquestioning submission to a spiritual preceptor, rather to the wisdom and compassion that a particular teacher may or may not embody.
If we wish to practice Tantric yoga, we need to be clear about what it is and where it came from. As Baker says, “the vitalizing path of Tantric yoga is not for the faint of heart.” However, as Longchen Rabjampa Drimé Özer (1308-1363) wrote
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