Bahr al-Hayat
The Bahr al-Hayāt or Ocean of Life is an illustrated Persian book, published c. 1602 by Muhammad Ghawth, which covers topics including asanas used for meditation.[1] [2] A lost book named Amrtakunda, the Pool of Nectar, was written in India, in either Hindi or Sanskrit.This was supposedly translated into Arabic as Hawd ma' al-hayat, the Pool of the Water of Life, in Bengal in 1210, though the scholar Carl Ernst suggests that the translation was actually made by a Persian scholar, perhaps in the 15th century, a man who then travelled to India and observed Nath yogins practising hatha yoga.Among other practices, it describes the khecarī mudrā, the elongation and folding back of the tongue so as to seal the passage to the nose; and anahad, blocking the ears so as to hear the unstruck sound of the eternal.Ghawth presents yoga as in many ways equivalent to Sufism; for example, he equates the 7 Sanskrit mantras that are linked to the 7 chakras with some of the Arabic names of God; the unconscious mantra so ham (सो ऽहम्, "I am That") which is the sound made as one breathes in and out, is equated to the Arabic rabb al-arbab, "the Lord of Lords"; and as one last example of many, the Hindu sage Matsyendranath (his name meaning "Lord of Fishes" in Sanskrit) is equated to Jonah, who is swallowed by a great fish.