Yoga

Genuinely ancient as a path to liberation, and genuinely modern as a system of postures — many of which owe more to European gymnastics than to medieval India.

What it is

Three distinguishable things share the name, and most confusion about yoga comes from not separating them.

Classical yoga is the system of Patañjali's Yoga Sūtra: an eight-limbed path aimed at stilling the movements of consciousness, so that awareness may stand free of nature altogether. It is overwhelmingly meditative and ethical. Posture — āsana — is one limb of eight, receives three aphorisms, and means a steady comfortable seat for sitting.

Haṭha yoga is the medieval physical tradition, developing from around the eleventh century in tantric and Nāth contexts, using posture, breath retention, locks and seals to work on the subtle body and awaken kuṇḍalinī. The Haṭha Yoga Pradīpikā (fifteenth century) describes around fifteen postures, most of them seated.

Modern postural yoga is what a yoga class is: flowing sequences of standing, balancing and inverted postures, taught for fitness, flexibility and stress reduction. It has roots in both of the above and a large amount that is neither.

Where it came from

The word appears in the Vedas; the practice as a soteriological discipline develops through the Upaniṣads, the Bhagavad Gītā, Buddhist and Jain traditions, and the tantric period. That lineage is genuinely ancient and genuinely religious.

The postural sequences are not. This is the finding of Mark Singleton's Yoga Body (2010) and subsequent scholarship, and it is well evidenced.

Many familiar standing postures — and the flowing vinyāsa linking of movement to breath — have no identifiable precedent in medieval haṭha texts. What they resemble closely is the international physical-culture movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Scandinavian and German gymnastics systems, British Army calisthenics, contortion and strongman traditions, and the Indian nationalist physical-culture revival that answered colonial claims about Indian physical weakness.

The synthesis happened largely in one place. T. Krishnamacharya taught in a hall at the Mysore Palace from the 1930s, next to a gymnasium, teaching boys with a strong athletic component. His students — B.K.S. Iyengar, K. Pattabhi Jois, T.K.V. Desikachar and Indra Devi — carried the system worldwide and between them account for most of what is taught today. The sūrya namaskār, sun salutation, was popularised as physical culture by the Raja of Aundh in the same period.

None of this makes modern yoga fake. It makes it a twentieth-century Indian creation, produced under colonial conditions, drawing on both indigenous tradition and European physical culture — which is a more interesting history than an unbroken five-thousand-year line, and is the one the evidence supports.

How it is practised

Posture sequences with breath coordination, held or flowing, generally with a relaxation period. Styles differ substantially: Iyengar emphasises precision and props, Ashtanga a fixed vigorous sequence, restorative styles long supported holds.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the health evidence is decent and unremarkable in its shape. Yoga improves flexibility, balance and strength; helps with chronic low back pain comparably to other exercise; and reduces anxiety and depression scores modestly. In trials that compare it with matched exercise, it generally performs similarly — which suggests it works because it is exercise plus attention plus breathing, all of which have their own support.

We can say injury is real but not exceptional. Rates are broadly comparable to other physical activities, with shoulders, wrists, knees, hamstrings and necks most affected; headstands and shoulderstands account for a disproportionate share of the serious cases.

We should say plainly that the appropriation argument here is live and is made by Hindus. The "Take Back Yoga" campaign, run by the Hindu American Foundation from 2010, argued that yoga's Hindu religious origins had been systematically erased in its Western commercialisation — that a practice aimed at liberation had been sold as fitness with the theology stripped out and the vocabulary retained. Others, including some Indian teachers who exported yoga deliberately, disagree. As the cultural appropriation article notes, source communities are not monolithic, and the honest response to internal disagreement is to report it rather than choose the convenient side.

We should also record that Pattabhi Jois was the subject of extensive allegations of sexual assault of students during physical adjustments, which senior Ashtanga institutions have publicly acknowledged. The pattern is the one described under the guru problem.

We cannot say modern yoga is not yoga. It is a living tradition doing what living traditions do. What can be said is that it should not claim an antiquity its postures do not have.

What it is

Where it came from

How it is practised

What we can and cannot say

Further reading