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Yoga

Contemplative Disciplines

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Yoga is a family of physical, mental and spiritual disciplines that arose within the religious traditions of the Indian subcontinent, encompassing posture, breath control, ethical restraint, concentration and meditation in pursuit of a still mind and, in most classical formulations, liberation from rebirth. Hindu, Buddhist and Jain sources each developed their own vocabulary and technique for it, and no single lineage owns the term. The postural, gym and studio yoga practised worldwide today is substantially a twentieth century synthesis of older Indian material with European gymnastics and physical culture, and its relationship to the yoga of the classical Yoga Sutras or the medieval hatha texts is genuinely contested among scholars rather than a simple unbroken line. Living streams of yoga range from meditative and philosophical schools to the devotional, the ascetic and the overtly physical, and they continue to diversify today.

Facts
Disputed
Origin Period
200 BCE to 400 CE 1
Scholars date the codification of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras anywhere from the second century before the common era to the fourth century of the common era, and the text appears to synthesize older oral and ascetic material rather than originate at a single moment, which is why no single date commands consensus. The postural, gym and studio yoga practiced worldwide today is furthermore a substantially twentieth century synthesis of this older material with European gymnastics, a separate and more firmly dated development.
Key Text
Yoga Sutras of Patanjali 1
The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali is the foundational text of classical yoga philosophy, but neither its author's identity nor its date is fixed by any external record. Edwin F. Bryant's The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary (North Point Press, 2009), a critical scholarly edition with commentary, surveys the range of proposed dates in the field, running from the last centuries BCE to around 400 CE. The method is philological and comparative, weighing the text's technical vocabulary, its relationship to Samkhya and early Buddhist thought, and its layered, compilation-like structure, since the text names no author who can be independently dated and survives only through a later commentarial tradition that itself has to be dated relative to the root text. Because the internal evidence brackets a period of several centuries rather than one moment of composition, the text's date remains debated among scholars working from the same sutras and the same commentarial evidence.
Lineage
Modern postural yoga traces largely to Tirumalai Krishnamacharya and his twentieth century Mysore students, including K. Pattabhi Jois and B. K. S. Iyengar. 3
Modern postural yoga, the asana-centered practice widely taught today, traces largely to Tirumalai Krishnamacharya's early twentieth century teaching in Mysore and to his students K. Pattabhi Jois and B. K. S. Iyengar, who each built influential systems from his teaching. Mark Singleton's Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice (Oxford University Press, 2010) is a scholarly history of how that practice developed. The method is historical, comparing Krishnamacharya's Mysore-era teaching, itself shaped by contemporary Indian and European physical culture movements, against the older hatha yoga textual corpus and its much smaller repertoire of postures. Singleton finds the modern emphasis on a large, flowing sequence of postures owes more to that twentieth century synthesis than to unbroken transmission from the classical or hatha lineages. Because the twentieth century innovation is documented and extensive while the claimed ancient continuity is not attested in the older texts, the atlas records the lineage as a recent synthesis.
Structure
Traditional Count
Eighty four asanas, said to have been taught by Shiva 4Tradition: Hatha Yoga
Sourced to the subject's own accountThe figure belongs to the hatha manuals rather than to yoga as a whole. Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, the older authority, give the posture a single line and no list at all, defining asana only as a seat that is steady and comfortable.
Origins
Place of Origin
India 1
Position Profile
Key TextSourced to the subject's own account
Hatha Yoga Pradipika (Svatmarama) 2
Status
Status Today
Living tradition, practised today 3
Living tradition, practised today in classical, devotional and modern postural forms
Learn More
The Practice: Postures, Breath and Stillness

A yoga practitioner today most often works through a sequence of asanas, held postures that build strength, flexibility and steadiness of the body, paired with attention to the breath and a settled mind, usually on a mat in a class or a home practice rather than a monastery. Classical yoga, as systematized in the Yoga Sutras, frames the discipline instead as an eight-limbed path: ethical restraints and observances, posture, breath control, withdrawal of the senses, concentration, meditation and finally a state of absorption in which the fluctuations of the mind fall still. Medieval hatha yoga added a physiology of subtle channels and centers, holding that disciplined posture and breath could redirect a latent energy toward the crown of the head, and it treated the body itself, purified and mastered, as the vehicle for that end rather than an obstacle to it.

Devotional streams within Hinduism instead treat yoga as union with a personal deity, reached through chanting, service and surrender rather than technique. Buddhist and Jain yogas set the same vocabulary toward their own goals, insight into impermanence in the first case, restraint of karmic influx in the second. What unites these otherwise divergent practices is less a shared method than a shared claim, that sustained, disciplined attention to body, breath and mind can still the ordinary noise of consciousness and open onto something the tradition in question considers more real. Contemporary studio yoga keeps the posture work and much of the vocabulary while typically setting aside the liberation goal for health, flexibility and stress relief.

Transmission and the Modern Synthesis

Yoga's transmission has never run through a single channel. Vedic and Upanishadic material passed through Brahmanical teacher-student lineages; the Yoga Sutras generated a long Sanskrit commentarial tradition; and hatha yoga circulated chiefly through the Nath order of ascetics and later through Hindu and, notably, Sufi-influenced manuscript traditions in North India. Guru-to-disciple transmission has been the normal mode throughout, though the content transmitted changed considerably across periods. The decisive break came in the colonial and early independence periods. Reformers such as Vivekananda, addressing Western and Indian elite audiences from the 1890s, presented yoga chiefly as philosophy and meditation and downplayed the ascetic, ash-smeared hatha yogi as an embarrassment to a modernizing India.

A different lineage, running through Mysore court gymnastics, the Indian nationalist physical culture movement and direct contact with European systems such as Scandinavian gymnastics and British Army drill, produced the asana-centered practice that Krishnamacharya taught from the 1930s and that his students, including K. Pattabhi Jois and B. K. S. Iyengar, carried into the postwar global yoga industry.

The scholar Mark Singleton has documented this synthesis closely, showing that the standing sequences and vinyasa flow characteristic of much modern yoga have little precedent in the Indian textual tradition before the twentieth century. This does not make modern yoga inauthentic so much as it makes it a distinct, dated historical development, and the relationship between it and the older textual traditions is a live scholarly question rather than a settled lineage.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Associated With

Hatha Yoga, Disciplines

The specific medieval technical system within the broader Yoga discipline.

Objects and Practices of This Tradition

Abhinivesha, Vices
Source The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: A New Edition, Translation, and CommentaryEdwin F. Bryant
Asmita, Vices
Source The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: A New Edition, Translation, and CommentaryEdwin F. Bryant
Dvesha (Aversion), Vices

Dvesha is also the fourth of Patanjali's five kleshas in the Yoga Sutra, a systematic home standing beside its Buddhist Abhidhamma framing as the second of the three root kleshas.

Source The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: A New Edition, Translation, and CommentaryEdwin F. Bryant
Raga (Attachment), Vices

Raga is also the third of Patanjali's five kleshas in the Yoga Sutra, a systematic home standing beside its Buddhist Abhidhamma framing as the first of the three root kleshas.

Source The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: A New Edition, Translation, and CommentaryEdwin F. Bryant
Yoga Nidra, Practices
Source Yoga NidraSwami Satyananda Saraswati

Plants and Materia Used

Bakasana, Asanas
Balasana, Asanas
Bhadrasana, Asanas

Asana is one limb of yoga in the wider sense; the postures themselves are elaborated by the hatha manuals rather than by the older sutra literature.

Bharadvajasana, Asanas
Bhujangasana, Asanas

Asana is one limb of yoga in the wider sense; the postures themselves are elaborated by the hatha manuals rather than by the older sutra literature.

Dhanurasana, Asanas

Asana is one limb of yoga in the wider sense; the postures themselves are elaborated by the hatha manuals rather than by the older sutra literature.

Garudasana, Asanas

Asana is one limb of yoga in the wider sense; the postures themselves are elaborated by the hatha manuals rather than by the older sutra literature.

Gomukhasana, Asanas

Asana is one limb of yoga in the wider sense; the postures themselves are elaborated by the hatha manuals rather than by the older sutra literature.

Gorakshasana, Asanas

Asana is one limb of yoga in the wider sense; the postures themselves are elaborated by the hatha manuals rather than by the older sutra literature.

Guptasana, Asanas

Asana is one limb of yoga in the wider sense; the postures themselves are elaborated by the hatha manuals rather than by the older sutra literature.

Kukkutasana, Asanas

Asana is one limb of yoga in the wider sense; the postures themselves are elaborated by the hatha manuals rather than by the older sutra literature.

Kurmasana, Asanas

Asana is one limb of yoga in the wider sense; the postures themselves are elaborated by the hatha manuals rather than by the older sutra literature.

Makarasana, Asanas

Asana is one limb of yoga in the wider sense; the postures themselves are elaborated by the hatha manuals rather than by the older sutra literature.

Mandukasana, Asanas

Asana is one limb of yoga in the wider sense; the postures themselves are elaborated by the hatha manuals rather than by the older sutra literature.

Marichyasana, Asanas
Matsyasana, Asanas

Asana is one limb of yoga in the wider sense; the postures themselves are elaborated by the hatha manuals rather than by the older sutra literature.

Matsyendrasana, Asanas

Asana is one limb of yoga in the wider sense; the postures themselves are elaborated by the hatha manuals rather than by the older sutra literature.

Mayurasana, Asanas

Asana is one limb of yoga in the wider sense; the postures themselves are elaborated by the hatha manuals rather than by the older sutra literature.

Muktasana, Asanas

Asana is one limb of yoga in the wider sense; the postures themselves are elaborated by the hatha manuals rather than by the older sutra literature.

Padmasana, Asanas

Asana is one limb of yoga in the wider sense; the postures themselves are elaborated by the hatha manuals rather than by the older sutra literature.

Paschimottanasana, Asanas

Asana is one limb of yoga in the wider sense; the postures themselves are elaborated by the hatha manuals rather than by the older sutra literature.

Sankatasana, Asanas

Asana is one limb of yoga in the wider sense; the postures themselves are elaborated by the hatha manuals rather than by the older sutra literature.

Shalabhasana, Asanas

Asana is one limb of yoga in the wider sense; the postures themselves are elaborated by the hatha manuals rather than by the older sutra literature.

Shavasana, Asanas

Asana is one limb of yoga in the wider sense; the postures themselves are elaborated by the hatha manuals rather than by the older sutra literature.

Siddhasana, Asanas

Asana is one limb of yoga in the wider sense; the postures themselves are elaborated by the hatha manuals rather than by the older sutra literature.

Simhasana, Asanas

Asana is one limb of yoga in the wider sense; the postures themselves are elaborated by the hatha manuals rather than by the older sutra literature.

Svastikasana, Asanas

Asana is one limb of yoga in the wider sense; the postures themselves are elaborated by the hatha manuals rather than by the older sutra literature.

Ushtrasana, Asanas

Asana is one limb of yoga in the wider sense; the postures themselves are elaborated by the hatha manuals rather than by the older sutra literature.

Utkatasana, Asanas

Asana is one limb of yoga in the wider sense; the postures themselves are elaborated by the hatha manuals rather than by the older sutra literature.

Uttana Kurmasana, Asanas

Asana is one limb of yoga in the wider sense; the postures themselves are elaborated by the hatha manuals rather than by the older sutra literature.

Uttana Mandukasana, Asanas

Asana is one limb of yoga in the wider sense; the postures themselves are elaborated by the hatha manuals rather than by the older sutra literature.

Vajrasana, Asanas

Asana is one limb of yoga in the wider sense; the postures themselves are elaborated by the hatha manuals rather than by the older sutra literature.

Virasana, Asanas

Asana is one limb of yoga in the wider sense; the postures themselves are elaborated by the hatha manuals rather than by the older sutra literature.

Vrikshasana, Asanas

Asana is one limb of yoga in the wider sense; the postures themselves are elaborated by the hatha manuals rather than by the older sutra literature.

Vrishasana, Asanas

Asana is one limb of yoga in the wider sense; the postures themselves are elaborated by the hatha manuals rather than by the older sutra literature.

Yogasana, Asanas

Asana is one limb of yoga in the wider sense; the postures themselves are elaborated by the hatha manuals rather than by the older sutra literature.

Related To

Ojas, Subtle Energies

Ojas belongs to the subtle-body cosmology shared by Ayurveda and yoga.

Source The Roots of Ayurveda: Selections from Sanskrit Medical WritingsDominik Wujastyk
Prana, Subtle Energies

Prana is central to yogic physiology across yoga traditions generally.

Source Roots of YogaJames Mallinson and Mark Singleton (trans. and eds.)
Tejas, Subtle Energies

Tejas belongs to the subtle-body cosmology shared by Ayurveda and yoga.

Source The Roots of Ayurveda: Selections from Sanskrit Medical WritingsDominik Wujastyk
The Five Vayus, Subtle Energies

The five vayus are part of yogic and Ayurvedic subtle-body cosmology.

Source Roots of YogaJames Mallinson and Mark Singleton (trans. and eds.)

Works With

Lalana, Chakras
Source Hatha Yoga PradipikaSvatmarama
Yoga, Practices

The practice itself.

Sources
1. The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary
Edwin F. Bryant, North Point Press, 2009Introduction
2. Hatha Yoga Pradipika
Svatmarama, Panini Office, 1914View the Source
3. Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice
Mark Singleton, Oxford University Press, 2010View the Source
4. Gheranda Samhita
Gheranda (the text's own attribution), Panini Office, 1914Lesson 2View the Source
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