Andrea Acri – Yoga in Javanese and Balinese Śaiva/Hindu traditions

This talk will survey the Indic traditions of yoga that developed in Java in the pre-Islamic period (ca. 8th–15th century), and continued in Bali up to the present.  It will discuss Old Javanese textual sources containing passages on the philosophical and soteriological traditions of tantric Śaiva yoga and Pātañjala yoga, highlighting continuities with Indian prototypical traditions as well as discontinuities (i.e., local reconfigurations of Indic ideas and practices). It will then review the ways in which some of these ideas have continued in modern Balinese ritual and religious practice.

Andrea Acri (PhD Leiden University, 2011) is Maître de conférences/Assistant Professor in Tantric Studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE, PSL University) in Paris. His main research and teaching interests are Śaiva and Buddhist Tantric traditions in South and Southeast Asia, Yoga studies, Sanskrit and Old Javanese philology, and Balinese Hinduism.