mok.sa

[Ulrich T. Kragh]

>Alex Watson wrote:
>Could people point me to things that have been written on why 
>such 'empty', cognitionless, sleep-like goals were considered so 
>desirable in India (the existence of satires of them by Indian authors 
>notwithstanding) but not in the West?

There is a short book (89 pp.) on this topic although it is written in
Danish:

Johannes Aagaard, "At leve døden for at døde livet : en bog om yoga" (in
translation meaning "to live death to deathen life: a book about yoga"),
published in Århus (Denmark) by Dialogcentret, 1991, 89 sider pp., ISBN  
87-88527-19-0.

The book is written by a Danish theologian and I think it has the agenda to
inform/warn western readers about underlying premises of yoga and how
different this is intellectually from Christianity. The author ran for many
years a state-supported centre in Denmark for dialogue between Christians
and various other religious movements. He was helpful in getting certain
Buddhist groups recognized as a religious minority with the church ministry
in Denmark but has been very outspoken against Scientology and certain other
religious movements.

If the book is not available at your library, I guess it could be ordered as
an interlibrary loan from the Danish Royal Library (www.kb.dk) where it has
the call no. FI8-A6404.

With best regards,
U. Timme Kragh
Harvard University.