The Language of Yoga between “the Great Chain of Being” and “Layers of the Cake”

Abstract

Metaphorical language and metaphorical gestures used to convey information about the subjective experience of the body have been explored in Mueller and Ladevig (2013) who consider gesture(s) as embodied forms of thought and understanding. In particular, in teaching dance, metaphors (in speech, gesture, and body) appear to be extremely useful means to communicate embodied experiences. Further, another study by Łozińska (2021) shows that metaphor is an important didactic tool used by yoga teachers to instruct practitioners about complicated postures and that the images permeating verbal and verbo-gestural metaphors used for didactic purposes during a yoga class are a mixture of static, dynamic and image-schematic elements.
The present paper explores the interplay of iconicity and metaphor in the terminology of the yoga practice by looking at the visual resemblance of asana names and the image content of the metaphoric source domain. According to Danesi (1995:299), “the particular content of a metaphor can be said to constitute an interpretation of reality in terms of mental icons that literally allows us to see what is being talked about.” As our aim is to indicate the possible relevance of categories of cognitive linguistics in the āsana practice, our objective is twofold: (1) to identify iconicity and metaphor in yoga asana terminology, and (2) to see how world /encyclopedic knowledge contributes lexical knowledge. To this end, we will attempt to answer the following research questions:
1. What is the role of iconicity in language processing in general and in the context of asana practice in particular?
2. What is the relationship between metaphor and iconicity?
3. Does the metaphor-icon link support asana practice teaching and learning?
Our metaphor analysis includes 80 yoga terms and verbal expressions accompanying the execution of yoga postures. The motivation for the choice of this topic is to understand how metaphor and iconicity can help communication in the context of yoga practice. The general framework adopted for this purpose is cognitive linguistics because metaphor is a key instrument in the presentation and understanding of yoga poses. We have identified and classified metaphors in the corpus according to the visual resemblance of asana names that evoke the mechanism of the Great Chain of Being, “a scale of forms of being – human, animal, plant, inanimate objects” (Lakoff and Turner 1989:167). We have also considered fragments from yoga lessons where metaphorical verbal structures point to the teacher’s linguistic creativity. Besides, the frequent use of prepositions and the use of the definite article instead of the possessive adjective before body part names round up the jargon characteristics in the context of asana practice.