The Book on Raja-Yoga

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“The words I here address to you may, to be sure, bestir your will to search for timeless truth, but all the insights I can offer in my native tongue are always but a call that would awaken you within; because the wisdom from the Himavat is “taught” in other ways.”- Page 56

“Do not bar your way to God with questions! Let those who live devoid of God and all who worship idols argue whether God exists.”- Page 149

“In seeking God, the human being must become the point of your departure, lest God remain a stranger to your soul forever.”- Page 150

“God is alive in joy, not in the gloom of grief. Minds enslaved by grief conceived the “suffering” God to offer him their worship. But you should force your grief into your service that it may turn into a helper of your will to joy!”-Page 146

Bo Yin Râ is the spiritual proper name of the author and artist Joseph Anton Schneiderfranken (1876-1943). He was born in Aschaffenburg, Germany, and died in Massagno/Lugano, Switzerland, where he had lived since 1925. 1-lis formal education as a painter began at the Staedel Art Institute in Frankfurt/Main, Germany, and then took him to Vienna, Munich, and Paris.

The literary legacy of Bô Yin Râ includes forty titles, published between 1919 and 1939, in Germany and Switzerland. Thirty-two of these works comprise a closely related cycle which the author gathered under the title of Hortus Conclusis (The Enclosed Garden). In his books he addresses questions and concerns that, in the language of religion and philosophy, pertain to “final things”—the mysteries of mortal and eternal life, of God, the origin and goal of human existence—and gives advice on how one ought to live this present life to “lay up treasures” in the life to come.

What sets these books a part form other writings on these topics is their author’s background and horizon. Thus, he does not give the reader the results of learned thinking, speculations, and beliefs, but lucid insights into the objective structure of reality, based upon direct, reliable experience. His books, therefore, as he explains, are not intended to create “beliefs,” nor any new “religion,” but should instead be used as maps that guide the reader safely through the labyrinth of this existence to the goal that every spiritually concerns human beings finally desires to attain.

It would be folly to assume that evidence of the profoundest insights of a culture’s most enlightened sages might b discovered in the writings of a given people from that culture.

A still grater folly would be the assumption that all one has to do is conscientiously translate all the texts of such a literature in order to preserve the sparks of light entangled in its writings for the benefit of one’s own people and its culture.

To be sure, as long as the earth has been circling the sun, all living things have been its light arising in the East; and from the human being’ first attempts to find their timeless essence in themselves, the most successful of such seekers were natives of the Orient.

Yet of the treasures they uncovered, scarcely fragments ever found their way into the writings of the people from their culture.

As secret knowledge-even for the “sacred scriptures” – were guarded also then the insights that forever shall remain a secret, kept from all who do not in themselves experience what it comprehends.

How readers may acquire this experience, each in ways best suited to his nature, the present book is meant to help them see and learn.

The insights offered in these pages rest upon the bedrock of immutable reality.

Even so, their presentation here is neither an end in itself, nor would it foster “dogmas.” It has no purpose other than to offer needed explanations.

Not until the time that seeking readers gained their own experience through these teachings have they truly made this book their own.