Yoga

What is taught around the world as yoga is one limb of an eight-limbed system, and not the limb the classical texts spend their time on.

Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, compiled somewhere in the early centuries of the common era, set out the sequence. Yama, restraints: non-harming, truthfulness, not stealing, continence, non-possessiveness. Niyama, observances: purity, contentment, austerity, study, surrender to God. Asana, posture. Pranayama, regulation of breath. Pratyahara, withdrawal of the senses. Dharana, concentration. Dhyana, meditation. Samadhi, absorption. The first two are ethical prerequisites rather than optional additions, and the text is explicit that the later limbs do not work without them.

Asana in the Sutras means a seat: a posture that is steady and comfortable and can be held a long time without distraction. It does not describe a sequence of shapes, and the text says almost nothing further about it. The elaborate postural repertoire belongs to the much later hatha yoga literature, from roughly the eleventh century onward, which developed a physical technology of postures, locks, seals and breath retention aimed at manipulating an internal anatomy of channels and centres.

The goal is also not what most modern practice implies. Classical yoga aims at kaivalya, isolation: the seer standing entirely apart from the movements of mind. That is a dualist framework, close to Samkhya philosophy, in which spirit and matter are permanently distinct. It is not the non-dual Vedanta commonly used to explain yoga today, where the self and the absolute turn out to be one. Substituting the second for the first is a genuine distortion rather than a simplification, and it is made constantly.

The history of modern postural yoga is unusually well documented and unusually contested.

The forms that dominate practice today, sun salutations, flowing sequences, the long precise holds of the Iyengar method, were assembled in the first half of the twentieth century, above all at the palace school of Krishnamacharya in Mysore, whose students Iyengar, Pattabhi Jois and Indra Devi carried the method worldwide. Mark Singleton's study of the period argues that these sequences drew substantially on European and Indian physical culture, gymnastics and military drill circulating in India at the time, alongside genuine hatha yoga sources. That argument is accepted by many scholars and rejected by many practitioners and by some Indian scholars as an attempt to write India out of its own tradition. It is a live dispute. What is not disputed is that the specific sequences are modern, and that hatha yoga is not.

What followed is not contested at all. Yoga became a global industry, largely secular in presentation, commercially dominated by studios in wealthy countries, and in most of its forms detached from the ethical limbs entirely. The Indian government has responded with institutional promotion: a national ministry with yoga in its remit, an International Day of Yoga at the United Nations from 2015, and a large documentation project intended in part to prevent postures being patented abroad.

Two objections now run in opposite directions. Some Hindu organisations campaign against what they describe as the appropriation of yoga and its severance from its religious source. Some Christian and Muslim authorities instruct their members not to practise it on the ground that it is inescapably religious. Both objections are sincerely held, both have a case, and they cannot both be right.