- Lived:
- unknowable — scholars place him anywhere from the 11th to the 14th century; hagiographies give him no birthplace, and regions from Punjab and Peshawar to Bengal, Assam and Nepal all claim him; this book follows the earliest common scholarly estimate
- Field:
- yoga — by tradition the great master of the Nāth order of yogis and the systematizer of the body-centred discipline the texts call haṭha
- The Big Idea:
- The body is not the obstacle to liberation; it is the instrument of it. Trained with breath, posture and fierce attention, the ordinary human frame — anyone's frame, of any caste — becomes the laboratory in which freedom is made.
- In their words:
- "Die, yogi, die — dying is sweet. But die that death by which Gorakh, dying, saw." (the Gorakhbānī, the vernacular sayings attributed to him; our rendering)
- If you remember one thing:
- The man cannot be dated within three centuries or placed within a thousand miles — and the practice descending from his order is now performed, in some form, on yoga mats in every country on earth. The founder is a mystery; the inheritance is universal. Those two facts are connected.