Lecture: Defining Body and Mind in Early Hindu Ascetic and Yoga Traditions

Dr Karen O'Brien is Lecturer in Modern Asian Religions at King's College London, she researches early South and Central Asian Sanskrit texts and culture on meditation, philosophy of mind, and mind-body practices – in particular exploring the interconnections of Hinduism and Buddhism. More broadly, her research interests are Indian religion and philosophy, theory, and method in the study of religion, global philosophies, literary studies and the health humanities. Between 2020-2025 she was co-chair of the Spalding Symposium on Indian Religions in the UK, as well as co-chair of the Indian and Chinese Religions in Dialogue research unit at the American Academy of Religion. She is a co-editor of the journal Religions of South Asia.

In the Indian subcontinent between 200 BCE and 800 CE, the cultural enterprise of defining body and mind was interwoven within, and in response to, a series of complex geopolitical changes and new translocal religio-political formations. Within this changing landscape of ideas and practices, what is much debated is the question of how and to what extent Vedic culture came to engage with the Śramaṇa (renouncer; lit. “striver”) communities that gave rise to Buddhism and Jainism. How did early Hindu theories of body and mind—enmeshed in complexes of religious ideology and systematic thought, asceticism, and yoga—come to be formulated in distinct and enduring ways? This talk will discuss Hindu practices of body and mind in the early first millennium, considering diverse sources such as Śaiva Pāśupata literature, the Sāṃkhya School, Greek travelogues, the Mahābhārata, and Tamil religious poetry.