Hatha yoga's medieval technical system and the yoga most commonly practiced worldwide today are related but not identical, a distinction scholars of modern yoga have traced in detail. Colonial era reformers such as Vivekananda, presenting yoga to Western audiences from the 1890s onward, emphasized its philosophical and meditative side and largely set aside the ascetic hatha body of practice, which had by then acquired a reputation in parts of Indian society as marginal or disreputable. The posture centered, health oriented yoga now taught internationally took shape only in the early to mid twentieth century, chiefly through the Mysore teacher Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, who combined older asana material with elements of contemporary European gymnastics and physical culture into a vigorous, sequenced practice.
Two of his students carried that synthesis to global audiences by different routes: Pattabhi Jois, who systematized a fixed sequence of postures into what became known as Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga, and B. K. S. Iyengar, whose precise, prop assisted method built the practice most widely taught in the West under the Iyengar name. Because this modern lineage draws on hatha material without reproducing the Hatha Yoga Pradipika's own text, structure or stated aim, the atlas treats it as a documented historical development from hatha yoga rather than a straightforward continuation of the medieval system, the same distinction its parent Discipline entry, Yoga, already draws.