The Chinese Rationale behind India’s Kuṇḍalinī Yoga

Abstract

The transmission of energy practices from China to India is so far a marginal hypothesis posited by only a handful of specialists and not worked out in detail. This paper seeks to give more body to the 
emerging paradigm of a transmission of energy practices from Chinese Neidan/Qigong to India, where Haṭha Yoga and Kuṇḍalinī Yoga are medieval innovations largely based on a psychophysiology unknown in the ancient Yoga classics. Their focus on vitality fits the older Chinese philosophy of Yangsheng, "nurturing life", and their energy-steering along the spine is indebted to the Chinese practice of Xiaozhoutian, “microcosmic orbit.” We discuss in detail how crucial elements in Yogic energy practices find their rationale only in the Chinese tradition, e.g. stimulating body points which had no special meaning in pre-medieval Indian physiology but are all-important in the ancient Chinese meridian system.