Tradition · spiritual and physical practice tradition
Yoga
/joːɡɐ/
Also known as yoga (practice tradition), Pātañjala yoga, Haṭha yoga, Yoga as exercise
A family of physical, mental and spiritual disciplines from ancient India aimed at controlling body and mind to reach liberation, practised in Hindu, Jain and Buddhist traditions. Systematic yoga emerged in the ascetic and shramana movements of the fifth and sixth centuries BCE; Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, from the early centuries CE, became its classical Hindu text, and hatha yoga texts followed from the ninth to eleventh centuries. The postural yoga practised worldwide today is largely a twentieth-century blend with Western physical culture.
- Function
- Religious institution & practice
- Confidence
- Mixed / layered
Worth knowing
Before 1900 hatha yoga had few standing poses; the Sun Salutation was pioneered in the 1920s by the Raja of Aundh. The United Nations made 21 June the International Day of Yoga, kept since 2015, and UNESCO listed yoga as intangible heritage in 2016.
A pre-Vedic or Indus origin has been argued from the Pashupati seal, whose seated figure Eliade and others read as a yoga posture; more recent scholars such as Geoffrey Samuel and Wendy Doniger call that speculative. The date of the Yoga Sutras is also uncertain, with one proposal placing the work c. 325–425 CE.
Connections (5)
- Canonised by textPatanjali
The Yoga Sutras attributed to Patanjali are the classical text of Hindu yoga: four chapters of 51, 55, 56 and 34 sutras on absorption, practice, powers and absolute freedom, Samkhya in their metaphysics but accepting a personal god, and influenced by Buddhism. Karel Werner saw the systematisation begun in the Yoga Upanishads culminating in Patanjali's eightfold path. The work's original title may have been Patanjalayogashastra, possibly including Patanjali's own commentary.
- TransmissionSwami Vivekananda
Swami Vivekananda was the first Hindu teacher to advocate and spread elements of yoga to a Western audience, touring Europe and the United States in the 1890s, and he introduced the Yoga Sutras to the West. His was a yoga without postures, received by a public already primed by the New England Transcendentalists and German Romantics. The Sutras became prominent in the West only after hatha yoga's twentieth-century success, and other gurus from India followed where he had led.
- TransmissionParamahansa Yogananda
In 1925 Paramahansa Yogananda started a Kriya Yoga centre in Los Angeles and became one of the first Indian yoga teachers to settle in the United States. He worked in the opening Vivekananda had made in the 1890s, among Western readers already drawn to yoga through Theosophists such as Helena Blavatsky. His school carried the meditative strand of yoga abroad, a generation before Krishnamacharya's students, trained in Mysore between the 1930s and 1950s, spread postural yoga worldwide.
- Associated withRishikesh
Rishikesh, on the Ganga in Uttarakhand, is nicknamed Yoganagari and the Yoga Capital of the World, and has held the International Yoga Festival in the first week of March every year since 1999. Its Sivananda Nagar houses the ashram and Divine Life Society of Swami Sivananda, whose Sivananda yoga is one of the twentieth-century schools. The Beatles' stay at Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's ashram in February 1968 brought the town wider fame abroad.
- TransmissionAl-Biruni
Among the Sanskrit works al-Biruni translated into Arabic in the eleventh century, with the help of Hindu scholars, was Patanjali's Yoga Sutras. His version kept many core themes but restated some sutras and commentaries to fit monotheistic Islamic theology, and it reached Persia and Arabia by about 1050. Mainstream Sunni and Shia Islam did not take up yoga, but Sufis in South Asia later adopted its postures and breath control, and the hatha text Amritakunda was translated in the sixteenth century.
Sources
Wikipedia, "Yoga" and "Yoga Sutras of Patanjali". Geoffrey Samuel, The Origins of Yoga and Tantra (2008); Mark Singleton, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice (2010).
Open Yoga in the repository →