Roots of Yoga
This book is dense and arduous, but it contains chapter-by-chapter extracts from the original texts, making it a monumental saving, an indispensable compass for anyone already lost in the multitude of Hindu texts!
Here's an insightful review by Ellen Goldberg, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Queen's University, Kingston, Canada (complete review here ).
"Roots of Yoga, by James Mallinson and Mark Singleton, is a timely and critical sourcebook of primary yoga texts in translation, many made available for the first time in English.
The majority of textual materials in this new collection derive from Sanskrit, and date from about 1000 BCE to the mid-nineteenth century CE. There are also translated materials from Tibetan, Arabic, Persian, Bengali, Tamil, Chinese, Pali, Kashmiri, Old Marathi, Avadhi, and Braj Bhasha (x).
Mallinson and Singleton succeed not only in bringing together an unprecedented range of materials from various linguistic sources, including vernacular languages and non-Indian texts, they also contribute to an emerging body of scholarship on the interaction among India's "trans-sectarian" and "pan-Indic" traditions (e.g., Brahmanical, Buddhist, Jain, Muslim, Vaiṣṇava, Śākta, and Śaiva).
This broadly framed approach to yoga's root texts vastly expands upon the relatively small canon of materials currently available (e.g., Upaniṣads, Bhagavadgitā, Yogasūtras, and Haṭhayogapradīikā), and their robust analysis reveals a rich genealogy, shared standards, patterns and dis/continuities, exchange and conversation - all of which, as Mallinson and Singleton argue, contributes to a "better understanding of yoga's development within and across practice traditions (for example, between earlier Sanskrit sources and later vernacular or non-Indian texts which draw on them) " "