Sri Sabhapati Swami and Śivarājayoga: A Book and a Visit
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Guided by Keith Cantú’s remarkable book on the Indian master, we visited his meditation hall in Chennai. The influential yoga teacher deserves to be rediscovered.
April 1, 2025
Sometimes, posting on Facebook pictures of international travel is not just for fun. When my colleague Keith Edward Cantú, who wrote a remarkable book on the subject, learned from Facebook that my wife and I were in Tamil Nadu, he recommended that we visited the meditation hall of Sri Sabhapati Swami in Konnur, Chennai, He put us in touch with the caretaker of the place, Vinayagam Swamigal, who kindly and quickly arranged a visit to the sacred place. There, we were welcomed by Vinayagam and by his friend, a priest who blessed us in front of a tumulus where we were told Sabhapati is buried.
According to Cantú’s book (“Like a Tree Universally Spread: Sri Sabhapati Swami and Śivarājayoga,” New York: Oxford University Press, 2023), this is possible but not certain. Cantú reports that he even considered hiring an archeologist or utilizing radar technology to ascertain whether a human body is buried under Shiva’s phallic stone (lingam) in what is called Sri Sabhapati Lingeshwarar Koil, but this proved problematic and might have hurt local religious sensitivities.
However, the meditation hall remains a unique place where the spirit of Sabhapati and his early students live, together with diagrams and literature illustrating his brand of yoga. In a perfect illustration of Cantú’s theory that it is often difficult, if not plainly wrong, to distinguish between “genuine” Indian yoga and its interpretation by Western practitioners and scholars, as the two have now cross-fertilized themselves for centuries, Vinayagam mentioned Cantú’s own book when explaining to us Sabhapati’s ideas.
Cantú’s book is important both to present a crucial but almost forgotten figure in the history of yoga and Tamil spirituality and to highlight his influence on Western esotericism, from the Theosophical Society to Aleister Crowley. Cantú’s reconstruction of Sabhapati’s life reads like a detective novel. There are three accounts of Sabapathi published during his lifetime, but they mix facts and legend and may not be entirely reliable. According to Cantú, Sabhapati was probably born in the Chennai (then Madras) area in 1828 in a wealthy, possibly Tamil Brahmin, family. He was educated at the Scottish Protestant Missionary school in Madras called Free Church Mission School, which explains his familiarity with the Bible.
He did not convert to Christianity, though. He married the daughter of a textile merchant and might have worked for the government and then with his father-in-law. He accompanied him in a business trip to Burma, where he met Buddhist monks. Upon his return, he became a disciple of guru Chidambara Periya Swamigal. When the guru died in 1858, Sabhapati moved to the predominantly Muslim city of Nagore, where he interacted with Sufi masters.
In either 1857 or 1858, he had been told in a dream that he should go to Mount Agastya where he would meet his second guru. Mount Agastya does host caves where yogi used to meditate, but most of the stories told about the place and the great masters who lived there are legends. We are told that Sabhapati spent either nine or twelve years on Mount Agastya with a guru called Shivajnana Bodha, whose existence according to Cantú cannot be confirmed. Perhaps the whole story should be interpreted symbolically. During this period, Sabhapati reported that one day he met three masters, two of whom were later revealed to be characters from the Indian epic “Mahabharata,” who granted him his wish to fly to the invisible Mount Kailash in the Himalayas and see Shiva there.
In 1879, Sabhapati appeared in Lahore where he had a first important meeting with Bengali intellectual Shrish Chandra Basu, who wrote about him and made his teachings about yoga nationally and even internationally known. Basu’s texts about Sabhapati appeared inter alia in “The Theosophist,” the organ of the Theosophical Society, which made his ideas known in Theosophical milieus.
This led to a meeting in Lahore in 1880 between Sabhapati and the co-founders of the Theosophical Society, Madame Helena Blavatsky and Colonel Henry Steel Olcott. Although they were interested in his ideas, as reported by Olcott in “Old Diary Leaves,” the meeting did not end well when Sabhapati reported to them his miraculous flight to Mount Kailash, which the American colonel dismissed as a “ridiculous falsehood.” Sabhapati regarded this as a misunderstanding, and continued to support his disciples who joined the Theosophical Society, although he never became a member himself.
After the Blavatsky-Olcott incident, Sabhapati left Lahore and according to the semi-mythical accounts published by disciples during his lifetime returned to Mount Agastya. He resurfaced in Bombay (Mumbai) in 1890 and moved back to Chennai where he established the still existing Konnur meditation hall. There is much incertitude about the date of his death, but Cantú places it in either 1923 or 1924.
Cantú also reconstructs the whole literary corpus of Sabhapati, who wrote in different languages creating a “vast forest of printed words.” The American scholar distinguishes between his local (Tamil), mesolocal (Indian) and translocal (international) influence. All were considerable, although his “cosmological religion,” his dialogue and criticism of all major religions other than Hinduism and of atheism, and his brand of yoga (Śivarājayoga) were all somewhat idiosyncratic. He proposed communion with the divine and enlightenment by “cancelling” through meditation the chakras, which for him were twelve in number.
Cantú, an expert in the field, reconstructs how this system influenced Western esotericism beyond the Theosophical Society, thanks in particular to German translations of Sabhapati’s works published by German Theosophist Franz Hartmann. Aleister Crowley might have given the impression in some of his writings that he personally met Sabhapati but he didn’t. However, he did read his works, was influenced by his theory of the chakras and included some of Sabhapati’s exercises, sometimes personally reinterpreted, in his confidential instructions to his disciples. They include imagining the spinal cord as the male organ (lingam) and the “cavity of the brain” as the female one (yoni).
Sabhapati also influenced the still existing occult organization Latent Light Society, originally based in Tirunelveli, Tamil Nadu, which had an early interest in Crowley, and the American founder of Super Mind Science, William Estep, a controversial character who ended up being convicted of mail fraud in addition to tax evasion.
Sabhapati, thus, deserves to be rediscovered by scholars both of yoga and Western esotericism. Happily, Cantú’s book brings clarity to several obscure features of his life and teachings. On the other hand, we were moved by our visit to the Konnur meditation hall. Whether it is the burial place of Sabhapati or not—we like to think it is—one has the impression there of coming into contact with sincere believers and deep, if complicated, teachings about human body and spirit.
Source: bitterwinter.org
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