Sabhapati Swami

Śrī Sabhāpati Svāmī meditating in padmāsana.Sri Sabhapati Swami (also transliterated "Śrī Sabhāpati Svāmī" and "Sabhapaty Swami," Tamil: சபாபதி சுவாமிகள் "Capāpati Cuvāmikaḷ," Devanāgarī: सभापति स्वामी) was born around the year 1828 in Madras (modern Chennai), Tamil Nadu, India. Sabhāpati's writings survive in Sanskrit, Tamil, Hindi, English and German (with bibliographic records also in Bengali, French, and Urdu), and are notable for their rich visual depictions of the subtle body (liṅga-śarīra) and their early fusion of Rājayoga and Haṭhayoga techniques of meditation in a Vedantic and Tamil Śaivite context.

Biography Sabhāpati's earliest biographical sources

Teachings on yoga Sabhāpati's diagram on svarūpa ("inherent forms")Śrī Sabhāpati Swami’s literature contains detailed meditations that are designed to pierce one’s veils of delusion (bhrānti), caused by deceiving impressions (vāsana), in order to reach an isolated state of liberation (mukti). The delusions lift through a gradual awakening the kuṇḍalinī and its accompanying jñānākāśa ("aether of gnosis") or prāṇākāśa ("aether of vitality") along twelve cakras of the spine and through four transcendent principles. Together they published Sabhāpati's lectures in English with transliterated Sanskrit terms as early as 1880, over fifteen years before Swami Vivekananda's Rāja Yoga (1896), the publication of which Elizabeth De Michelis convincingly demonstrates as marking the birth of modern yoga. The original title of Sabhāpati's work was Om: a treatise on Vedantic Raj Yoga and Philosophy (1880), and it attracted even the attention of Indologists such as Max Müller, who cites it in his work The Six Systems of Indian Philosophy (1899). Henry Olcott's personal copy of this book has also been located in the library at Adyar, and reviews of it and Sabhāpati's other works populate early Theosophical periodicals. Elaborations and revisions of this 1880 text were later published in various languages, including in Sanskrit, Hindi and a Tamil version that, if the account of Sabhāpati's "admirer" is to be believed, likely contains material that predates the 1880 work in English. One of the most notable versions is a much more precisely edited and visually stunning two-part volume entitled Om: Cosmic Psychological Spiritual Philosophy and Science, published four years later in 1884.

The work also stayed in print well into the 20th century. In 1908 a German translation based on the 1880 work was made by one of the founders of the O.T.O., the Theosophist author Franz Hartmann. In 1915 an exclusively Tamil Sanskrit edition was published in Madras with a few new diagrams. Sabhāpati's works also made their way to the United States, and the eclectic and profiteering William Estep published a stripped down version of the two-volume 1884 edition in 1929. In India, a revised edition based on a later edition of the 1880 work was published in 1950 from a Hindu temple publisher in Mumbai, and a facsimile of the 1880 work was published in 1977 in New Delhi. Despite such an abundant publication history, Sabhāpati's English works today remain largely out of print and removed from popular memory.

Sabhapati also published his teachings on yoga in Tamil, Hindustani, Bengali (as a translation), and Telugu (no longer extant). His collected works, most of which are long out of print, are currently being edited and translated (where applicable) for re-publication.

Relationship with early modern yoga Sabhāpati has had a far-reaching impact on South Asian, North American, and European esoteric and occult conceptions of the body. With the exception of publications by Keith E. Cantú, Gordan Djurdjevic, and Henrik Bogdan, however, Sabhāpati has been mostly overlooked by scholars researching the subject of early modern yoga and tantra.

Relationship with the Theosophical Society Sabhāpati originally seems to have been on good terms with members of the Theosophical Society, as he is cited favorably in their works and periodical journals. However, he lost their favor after a misunderstanding over a vision in which he claimed to have been caught up to Lake Manasarovara in modern Tibet to commune with Mahādeva on Mount Kailāśa. The vision, which he communicated as happening in his physical body, is reminiscent of Kālidāsa's classical Sanskrit poem "Meghadūta," in which a cloud-messenger travels in the air to Mount Kailāśa to send a message on behalf of a lonely yakṣa to his lover. In any event, the Theosophists seem to have taken it literally — Henry Olcott (1832-1907) records in his diaries that both he and H.P. Blavatsky (1831-1891) were disenchanted with Sabhāpati after they met with him personally and he recounted his vision to them in terms of a physical experience. Olcott writes:

Whatever good opinion we may have formed of him before was spoilt by a yarn he told us of his exploits as a Yog. He had, he said, been taken up at Lake Mânsarovara, Tibet, high into the air and been transported two hundred miles along the high level to Mount Kailâs, where he saw Mahadeva! Ingenuous foreigners as H.P.B. and I may have been, we could not digest such a ridiculous falsehood as that. I told him so very plainly. If, I said, he had told us that he had gone anywhere he liked in astral body or clairvoyant vision, we might have believed it possible, but in physical body, from Lake Mânsarovara, in company with two Rishis mentioned in the Mahabharata, and to the non-physical Mount Kailâs—thanks, no: he should tell it to somebody else.

A response to this negative view can be traced in later editions of Śrī Sabhāpati Swami's works. For example, the 1895 reprint to OM adds the following footnote (presumably written by Vasu) in the part of Sabhāpati's account that mentions this vision:

This need not have been in the physical body of the Rishis; they might have flown towards the holy mountain in their Mayavi Rupa Kama Rupa (astral body), which to our author (who certainly is not an Adept in the sense the Theosophists use the word) must have been as real as if he had travelled through air in his physical body.

In any event, either from this misunderstanding or from other issues the Theosophical Society subsequently abandoned the support it may have had previously for Sabhāpati and his works. During Crowley's sojourn in Madurai he became exposed to Sabhāpati's works and became particularly interested in Sabhāpati's rich visual meditations (dhyāna) on the spinal cord as a phallus (liṅga) and the cranial vault as the kteis (yoni), which he published in modified form as an instruction for his students.

Sabhāpati's subtle physiology is situated around twelve tantric cakras and four transcendent states, which in part may also explain Crowley's willingness to entertain notions of additional cakra to the commonly known system of seven (or "six plus one") as usually found in Western New Age systems of the cakra that follow the pattern laid out by Charles W. Leadbeater (1854-1934) and John Woodroffe / Arthur Avalon (1865-1936). In any case, the continuing practice of certain aspects of Sabhāpati's system does live on in Thelema, a religio-philosophical tradition deeply associated with Crowley.