Really, what is yoga anyway? In my teacher training, I was taught to repeat, in as clear Sanskrit as I could muster, Patanjali’s famed explanation; “Yoga Chitta Vritti Nirodha”. Literally, we’ve got yoga (to yolk or bind together), (chitta) the mind, (vritti) fluctuations lit. a wirlpool, (nirodha) cessation or extinction – to reduce to the point of eliminating completely. Yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind.
Ya, well, that’s nice, but what on earth does that have to do with one arm handstands. Has Patanjali even seen Instagram?
Maybe you’ve heard of rationalism, empiricism or nihism? These are different Western philosophical branches. India has its own philosophical traditions, with various schools of thought. Many correspond roughly to various Western philosophies, but not all.
Yoga is one of 9 major schools of Indian philosophy. Six of these schools accept the ancient religious texts known as the Vedas as legitimate sources of knowledge, and are considered orthodox, or astika. Three reject the Vedas as silly, superstitious rubbish, and are considered heterodox, or nastika. Yoga is an orthodox school.
Ok, so if yoga is a school of philosophy, and not just posing and ohm-ing, what kind of philosophy is it, and why do we keep doing downward dog and not just sitting around reading texts and having lengthy discussions? Well, the explanation is a bit long, so if you’re still with me, here we go…
The yogic school concerns itself with epistemology; that is, investigating how we gain knowledge, and what is ultimate reality.
Yoga says there are six ways. We don’t need to go into all of them here, but it’s enough to know that turning the attention inwards, studying the activities of the mind, and lengthy meditation, are some of the ways in which one can reach moksha, or realization of the ultimate truth.
Moksha is complex, but generally means release – in a super-natural sense from the cycle of birth and re-birth, and in the psychological sense, from obsession with the physical world, including wealth, ambition, self-gratification and so on. The ultimate truth in yoga is considered to be awareness that the physical world, including the self is an illusion we generate in our own minds.
Yoga postulates that we are all manifestations of the universal consciousness, or Brahman. Brahman, which could be considered God, although he isn’t personal or judgemental as in the Abrahamic traditions, is inside, is outside, Brahman, Brahman everywhere. That’s who we really are; manifestations of, and so part of, Brahman.
This realization shouldn’t just happen on an intellectual level, but be visceral, direct and experiential. You know you are part of Brahman because you can feel it, you are it. This is Samadhi, a state of oneness with the divine.
Up to the early 20th century, most yoga ashrams, or physical schools, accepted only committed adult students, and occasionally, orphans or the poor, and with the expectation that you would renounce any pre-yoga life. No job, no kids, no wife (sorry, only men need apply) and certainly no personal ownership. As a result, by the 1900’s, hardly any schools teaching the yoga philosophy were still operating.
Asanas were also rarely taught, and certainly not in the abundance as they are today in most modern yoga studios. Their original purpose was to keep students, who were required to meditate for many hours at a time, physically healthy enough to get through those inward looking marathons considered necessary for self-study.
It’s difficult to know how much or how little the yoga we practice today, particularly the vinyasa, or long, connected sequences of held poses connected through breathing techniques, differs from the asanas practiced in pre-20th century ashrams. What we do know that in 1909, a young South Indian philosophy teacher named Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, began compiling asanas from the few yoga ashrams still operating, particularly while travelling in Northern India and Tibet. He combined them with those he had learned from his own father, as well as original teacher Sri Babu Bhagavan Das. On his return to his home city of Mysore, he arranged these into several series of long, pre-defined sequences, and began teaching students.
With greater industrialization, migration and modernization came a greater control over one’s destiny, and to the inquisitive middle-class Indian boy, studying philosophy and history in the comfort of a modern University seemed much more attractive than chanting in a dirty courtyard, giving up all hope of marriage, children or personal property.
Since young men, willing to give up their lives to self-study were no longer showing up, a new market needed to be found. Fortunately, with the rise of large scale education in the cities, there grew a greater demand amongst rural Indians to also have their son’s receive formal educations, and so the rules around age, personal commitment and school fees, which had previously often come in the form of labour or donations of food, were changed. Young teen boys became the new students at many yoga ashrams, including that of Krishnamacharya.
Why teach young boys asanas, you ask? Have you ever tried to get a kid to sit still? Impossibru! These students were not the older, devoted aesthetics, shunning all aspects of their former lives, but energetic young teens, most of whom weren’t especially interested in chanting vedas or studying the mind, and who were expected to finish their educations and return to their families, ready to live normal, productive lives. Krishnamacharya needed a way to get rid of all that youthful energy, and long sequences of physical exercise, along with slow, calm breathing, seemed to do the trick.
He also believed that the asanas, the physical postures used to prepare the body for extensive meditation, could themselves be meditative. Slow, deliberate practice of ritualized movements could be a legitimate method of self-discovery, and so serve the same purpose as meditation for these younger students.
Krishnamacharya named his new curriculum ashtanga, or 8 limbs, in reference to the 8 limbs, or topics addressed in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras.
You might still be wondering how a branch of Indian philosophy, which happened to include some physical exercises, became what we think of today as yoga.
Krishnamacharya had many students through the years. Some excelled at philosophy and became notable academics in their own right. Some however, excelled at the physical asana practice, and focused almost entirely on teaching that. Two such students were Yogacharaya Shri K. Pattabhi Jois, and B.K.S Iyengar.
Each of them took the asanas taught to them by Krishnamacharya, and refined what they had been taught, putting their own spin on things.
Jois also called his teachings ashtanga, as he mainly took the asana sequences taught by Krishnamacharya, editing them based on his own experience and student needs, and included the 7 other topic areas taught to him as a student, but in much smaller doses. Jois style ashtanga tends to be physically demanding, and has a high focus on strength, body control and endurance. As Jois is often quoted as saying; “99% practice, 1% theory”.
Iyengar removed much of the strict sequencing, preferring to customize each practice according to student capabilities. He also added the use of blocks and straps to facilitate stretching without needing as much muscular effort, and focused on alignment, that is, doing the posture according to very specific rules for angle and positioning.
In the late 1960’s, Iyengar first, but eventually Joise, began taking on Western students, and travelling to the U.S to teach. They also taught philosophy, meditation, ethics and so on, but since both preferred practice over theory, and very few adult America students will show up for an hour every week-night with money hand for a course on ancient Indian epistemology, asanas became the near-sole focus.
Their students became the teachers of the teachers of (probably), your teachers, and the founders of the yoga industry, which is mostly just the asana and a bit of pranayama (breathing) industry.
So, if you want to understand how an esoteric branch of Indian philosophy focusing on discovering ultimate reality by looking for God inside the human mind became a bunch of weird stretches and acrobatics, done in sequences, with strange ways of breathing, you can blame these two guys. Some of the change was personal taste, some was economic. A lot was economic actually.
Changing times and changing needs made the strict requirements of the ashram system less popular, Patabhi Jois and Iyengar were both super good at asanas, and less concerned with the nuances of yogic philosophy, at least in a teaching capacity, though both had very deep knowledge of yoga theory. Western students, with no life-long grounding in the Vedas, and an ancient cultural pre-occupation with the physical body, were more willing to pay for exercises than for ideas. And what we think of as yoga was born.
So, if you’re going to a yoga class regularly, doing some breathing, some meditation, and lots of asanas, are you doing yoga? Well, that’s a tough question to answer. You can’t really do yoga. You can do asanas, you can use those asanas as a way of examining the activities of your mind. You could even, eventually, grow dispassionate about those activities, recognizing them as illusions. You might cease to have an emotional reaction to every thought that flickers through the brain on its short journey from existence to non-existence. Maybe, you might occasionally lose track of your sense of self completely, experiencing a profound feeling of connectedness with the world at large. But, maybe not.
The point is, yoga is a philosophy and a set of activities meant to reveal the truth of that philosophy to the practitioner. Postures and breathing are just the two most accessible of those activities. In my view, you don’t need to believe the assertions to engage in the practice. I’m not seeking union with Brahman, don’t believe that Samadhi reveals any hidden or ultimate truth, and don’t believe that the self exists as something separate from the physical brain, but I still think asanas, meditation, concentrated breathing, self-study, withdrawal of the senses and other practices associated with the yogic school can be enormously beneficial in distancing ourselves from the very real, very burdensome activities of the analytical/predictive mind.
Basically, get on your mat, keep breathing, pay attention and live, for a time, in the now. That’s yoga.
*Full Disclosure: I am not an academic, and this isn't really an academic article. I've tried to be as accurate as possible, but many of my sources are Wikipedia, general websites, discussion forums etc. I also gloss over a lot of details in order to make for a reasonably short post. If any serious academics out there want to provide feedback, please do!
Ya, well, that’s nice, but what on earth does that have to do with one arm handstands. Has Patanjali even seen Instagram?
Maybe you’ve heard of rationalism, empiricism or nihism? These are different Western philosophical branches. India has its own philosophical traditions, with various schools of thought. Many correspond roughly to various Western philosophies, but not all.
Yoga is one of 9 major schools of Indian philosophy. Six of these schools accept the ancient religious texts known as the Vedas as legitimate sources of knowledge, and are considered orthodox, or astika. Three reject the Vedas as silly, superstitious rubbish, and are considered heterodox, or nastika. Yoga is an orthodox school.
Ok, so if yoga is a school of philosophy, and not just posing and ohm-ing, what kind of philosophy is it, and why do we keep doing downward dog and not just sitting around reading texts and having lengthy discussions? Well, the explanation is a bit long, so if you’re still with me, here we go…
The yogic school concerns itself with epistemology; that is, investigating how we gain knowledge, and what is ultimate reality.
Yoga says there are six ways. We don’t need to go into all of them here, but it’s enough to know that turning the attention inwards, studying the activities of the mind, and lengthy meditation, are some of the ways in which one can reach moksha, or realization of the ultimate truth.
Moksha is complex, but generally means release – in a super-natural sense from the cycle of birth and re-birth, and in the psychological sense, from obsession with the physical world, including wealth, ambition, self-gratification and so on. The ultimate truth in yoga is considered to be awareness that the physical world, including the self is an illusion we generate in our own minds.
Yoga postulates that we are all manifestations of the universal consciousness, or Brahman. Brahman, which could be considered God, although he isn’t personal or judgemental as in the Abrahamic traditions, is inside, is outside, Brahman, Brahman everywhere. That’s who we really are; manifestations of, and so part of, Brahman.
This realization shouldn’t just happen on an intellectual level, but be visceral, direct and experiential. You know you are part of Brahman because you can feel it, you are it. This is Samadhi, a state of oneness with the divine.
Up to the early 20th century, most yoga ashrams, or physical schools, accepted only committed adult students, and occasionally, orphans or the poor, and with the expectation that you would renounce any pre-yoga life. No job, no kids, no wife (sorry, only men need apply) and certainly no personal ownership. As a result, by the 1900’s, hardly any schools teaching the yoga philosophy were still operating.
Asanas were also rarely taught, and certainly not in the abundance as they are today in most modern yoga studios. Their original purpose was to keep students, who were required to meditate for many hours at a time, physically healthy enough to get through those inward looking marathons considered necessary for self-study.
It’s difficult to know how much or how little the yoga we practice today, particularly the vinyasa, or long, connected sequences of held poses connected through breathing techniques, differs from the asanas practiced in pre-20th century ashrams. What we do know that in 1909, a young South Indian philosophy teacher named Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, began compiling asanas from the few yoga ashrams still operating, particularly while travelling in Northern India and Tibet. He combined them with those he had learned from his own father, as well as original teacher Sri Babu Bhagavan Das. On his return to his home city of Mysore, he arranged these into several series of long, pre-defined sequences, and began teaching students.
With greater industrialization, migration and modernization came a greater control over one’s destiny, and to the inquisitive middle-class Indian boy, studying philosophy and history in the comfort of a modern University seemed much more attractive than chanting in a dirty courtyard, giving up all hope of marriage, children or personal property.
Since young men, willing to give up their lives to self-study were no longer showing up, a new market needed to be found. Fortunately, with the rise of large scale education in the cities, there grew a greater demand amongst rural Indians to also have their son’s receive formal educations, and so the rules around age, personal commitment and school fees, which had previously often come in the form of labour or donations of food, were changed. Young teen boys became the new students at many yoga ashrams, including that of Krishnamacharya.
Why teach young boys asanas, you ask? Have you ever tried to get a kid to sit still? Impossibru! These students were not the older, devoted aesthetics, shunning all aspects of their former lives, but energetic young teens, most of whom weren’t especially interested in chanting vedas or studying the mind, and who were expected to finish their educations and return to their families, ready to live normal, productive lives. Krishnamacharya needed a way to get rid of all that youthful energy, and long sequences of physical exercise, along with slow, calm breathing, seemed to do the trick.
He also believed that the asanas, the physical postures used to prepare the body for extensive meditation, could themselves be meditative. Slow, deliberate practice of ritualized movements could be a legitimate method of self-discovery, and so serve the same purpose as meditation for these younger students.
Krishnamacharya named his new curriculum ashtanga, or 8 limbs, in reference to the 8 limbs, or topics addressed in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras.
You might still be wondering how a branch of Indian philosophy, which happened to include some physical exercises, became what we think of today as yoga.
Krishnamacharya had many students through the years. Some excelled at philosophy and became notable academics in their own right. Some however, excelled at the physical asana practice, and focused almost entirely on teaching that. Two such students were Yogacharaya Shri K. Pattabhi Jois, and B.K.S Iyengar.
Each of them took the asanas taught to them by Krishnamacharya, and refined what they had been taught, putting their own spin on things.
Jois also called his teachings ashtanga, as he mainly took the asana sequences taught by Krishnamacharya, editing them based on his own experience and student needs, and included the 7 other topic areas taught to him as a student, but in much smaller doses. Jois style ashtanga tends to be physically demanding, and has a high focus on strength, body control and endurance. As Jois is often quoted as saying; “99% practice, 1% theory”.
Iyengar removed much of the strict sequencing, preferring to customize each practice according to student capabilities. He also added the use of blocks and straps to facilitate stretching without needing as much muscular effort, and focused on alignment, that is, doing the posture according to very specific rules for angle and positioning.
In the late 1960’s, Iyengar first, but eventually Joise, began taking on Western students, and travelling to the U.S to teach. They also taught philosophy, meditation, ethics and so on, but since both preferred practice over theory, and very few adult America students will show up for an hour every week-night with money hand for a course on ancient Indian epistemology, asanas became the near-sole focus.
Their students became the teachers of the teachers of (probably), your teachers, and the founders of the yoga industry, which is mostly just the asana and a bit of pranayama (breathing) industry.
So, if you want to understand how an esoteric branch of Indian philosophy focusing on discovering ultimate reality by looking for God inside the human mind became a bunch of weird stretches and acrobatics, done in sequences, with strange ways of breathing, you can blame these two guys. Some of the change was personal taste, some was economic. A lot was economic actually.
Changing times and changing needs made the strict requirements of the ashram system less popular, Patabhi Jois and Iyengar were both super good at asanas, and less concerned with the nuances of yogic philosophy, at least in a teaching capacity, though both had very deep knowledge of yoga theory. Western students, with no life-long grounding in the Vedas, and an ancient cultural pre-occupation with the physical body, were more willing to pay for exercises than for ideas. And what we think of as yoga was born.
So, if you’re going to a yoga class regularly, doing some breathing, some meditation, and lots of asanas, are you doing yoga? Well, that’s a tough question to answer. You can’t really do yoga. You can do asanas, you can use those asanas as a way of examining the activities of your mind. You could even, eventually, grow dispassionate about those activities, recognizing them as illusions. You might cease to have an emotional reaction to every thought that flickers through the brain on its short journey from existence to non-existence. Maybe, you might occasionally lose track of your sense of self completely, experiencing a profound feeling of connectedness with the world at large. But, maybe not.
The point is, yoga is a philosophy and a set of activities meant to reveal the truth of that philosophy to the practitioner. Postures and breathing are just the two most accessible of those activities. In my view, you don’t need to believe the assertions to engage in the practice. I’m not seeking union with Brahman, don’t believe that Samadhi reveals any hidden or ultimate truth, and don’t believe that the self exists as something separate from the physical brain, but I still think asanas, meditation, concentrated breathing, self-study, withdrawal of the senses and other practices associated with the yogic school can be enormously beneficial in distancing ourselves from the very real, very burdensome activities of the analytical/predictive mind.
Basically, get on your mat, keep breathing, pay attention and live, for a time, in the now. That’s yoga.
*Full Disclosure: I am not an academic, and this isn't really an academic article. I've tried to be as accurate as possible, but many of my sources are Wikipedia, general websites, discussion forums etc. I also gloss over a lot of details in order to make for a reasonably short post. If any serious academics out there want to provide feedback, please do!