Does the Mat Matter? Investigating the Materiality of Yoga Practice in the Bhagavadgītā

Embedded into the Sanskrit epic Mahābhārata sometime around the beginning of the Common Era (Malinar 2007: 244), the Bhagavadgītā offers one of the earliest comprehensive accounts of yoga practice in what we might call the classical Hindu tradition. While expounding the various methods of self-restraint, meditation, and self-realization that form the basis of the Gītā's yoga practice, Krishna instructs Arjuna to do all this while seated on a mat made of grass, antelope skin, and cloth (cailājinakuśottaram, BhG 6.11d). What did this mat do for the yoga practitioner? What did it signify? And why was it made of these three materials? What might this mat tell us about the material culture involved in actual, realworld yoga practice at the time of the Gītā's composition?

In this paper, I offer some preliminary reflections on these questions through an examination of these mat materials (grass, antelope skin, cloth) in earlier textual traditions, in the rest of the Mahābhārata, in later writings on yoga, as well as in the Gītā's extensive commentarial tradition. I proceed with a tentative hypothesis that Krishna's mat was participating in a symbolic economy of spiritual practice in post-Vedic India, but in a way that allowed the Gītā to both synthesize and subtly supercede earlier and competing visions of yoga.