Much more ubiquitous within the West than mindfulness meditation, and for an extended time period, is yoga: particularly that means the apply of postural stretching workouts, with names like “solar salutation” and “downward canine”. They are often supplemented by respiratory workouts and maybe sometimes meditation, and there’s usually some ingredient of Sanskrit or philosophy concerned, however to a standard English-speaking layperson, the core of what yoga means is the postures. That is the kind of yoga that’s generally even a aggressive sport. Its well being advantages are not often contested; as my very own ageing physique will get much less naturally versatile, it’s most likely solely a matter of time earlier than I join with a neighborhood yoga studio myself.
In the meantime, within the classical Sanskrit from which the time period is derived, yoga refers to a wide range of non secular practices through which postures play a minor function, if any. Śāntideva makes use of the time period “yogin” to explain folks with a better understanding of actuality, with postures by no means being talked about within the textual content. Essentially the most well-known and influential yoga textual content, the Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali, says that posture (āsana) is one – only one – of the eight limbs of yoga, and the one factor it specifies about posture is that posture ought to be “agency and nice” (sthirasukham) (YS II.46). There’s no stretching concerned right here; certainly the textual content suggests the alternative, that one ought to be comfy, probably for meditation. The Yoga Bhāṣya commentary – historically included with the unique – names a number of sorts of posture with out explaining them; when Vācaspati Miśra’s subcommentary does come to clarify them, it exhibits that they’re postures for meditation, methods of putting your ft when you sit. Meditation, usually, performs the most important function on this classical yoga; stretching performs none.
So it’s pure to ask: how precisely did we get from one to the opposite, from a meditative classical yoga through which stretching performs no function, to a contemporary yoga through which it performs the first function? I’ve seen this query requested in surprisingly few locations. I needed to get a deeper understanding of that query, so I believed it could be value studying Elizabeth De Michelis’s 2005 work with the very promising title A Historical past of Trendy Yoga.
Sadly, it seems the title of A Historical past of Trendy Yoga is a false promise. Little of the e-book is definitely a historical past of the postural yoga that we all know as yoga within the twenty first century. Wikipedia claims the e-book was primarily based on De Michelis’s dissertation, and it exhibits, with way more time spent offering context for the historical past than truly discussing it. The primary 4 chapters (of eight) are explicitly recognized because the prehistory of contemporary yoga, recounting the by now very typical story of the creation within the Bengal Renaissance of the traditions we now know as “Hinduism”. Even as soon as we get to chapter 5, the place the e-book claims we are literally speaking about fashionable yoga, we simply get an account of what Swami Vivekānanda thought-about to be yoga – through which, as De Michelis herself notes (p. 164), postures (āsanas) play little or no function. Vivekānanda’s so-called “fashionable yoga”, just like the classical yoga of Patañjali, is a theoretical philosophical system; neither of them look very similar to what you’ll discover while you stroll into the Namaste Yoga Studio down the road.
Then, as we lastly start to strategy fashionable postural yoga on web page 183 – already two-thirds of the way in which by the e-book – in a weird twist we hear “House constraints forestall us from trying on the first fifty years of Trendy Yoga intimately”. A reader is effectively entitled to ask at this level: what sort of an excuse is that? If it’s house constraints stopping you from speaking in regards to the precise historical past of contemporary yoga in a e-book entitled A Historical past of Trendy Yoga, then what possessed you to waste actually half the e-book’s house speaking a few prehistory that has already been instructed earlier than, and has solely a tangential relationship to the trendy yoga any of us know? That’s high-quality in a dissertation, the place the purpose is simply to say one thing new and the readership is secondary – however to spend half of a e-book speaking about one thing tangential to the title after which plead house constraints to keep away from its precise subject, effectively, that signifies an editor asleep on the swap. You had loads of house to speak in regards to the factor your e-book’s title advertises, you simply created a “house constraint” by selecting to make use of that house on one thing else completely.
And so, whereas ultimately we do get some quantity of a historical past of probably the most influential college of contemporary yoga – the varsity of B.Okay.S. Iyengar – it’s handled as a “case research”, not set within the context of the opposite colleges that made postural yoga the phenomenon it’s.
The sections on Iyengar are probably the most fascinating (and related) components of the e-book. Even these components, although, are extra textual evaluation than historical past per se: they discover intimately what Iyengar believed, however not how or why he got here to imagine it. They notice that Iyengar drew on “Western bodily health and coaching methods” (197) however don’t elaborate or clarify why. A few of De Michelis’s historic feedback simply go away the reader tantalized. We study that for Iyengar “āsana apply modified the course of his life by remodeling him from a sickly youth right into a wholesome and powerful younger man” (200), with a quotation of commemoration volumes attributed to him. That tells us one thing crucial about what motivated Iyengar to create a lot of what’s now acquainted to us as postural yoga. However how did this occur? How was it that Iyengar was already doing āsana (posture) apply in his youth, when that apply wasn’t a big a part of even Vivekānanda’s yoga, not to mention the Yoga Sūtras?
Furthermore, for those who are going to concentrate on the prehistory of contemporary yoga, then absolutely that prehistory wants to incorporate the premodern works that the trendy yogins have been drawing on. However we don’t hear what these are both. On p232 she quotes Iyengar utilizing the tantric anatomy of channels (nādīs) within the physique, an anatomy that’s not within the Yoga Sūtras – and, from her footnote on p166, not in Vivekananda both. The place did that come from? De Michelis offers us no reply, and doesn’t even appear to ask the query.
One of many themes De Michelis hits ceaselessly is that the affect of Western esoteric traditions, like Theosophy, has been repeatedly underestimated within the research of contemporary Hinduism. I believe she’s proper about this (or a minimum of she was when the e-book was written); the issue is that you just don’t choose up a e-book with the title A Historical past of Trendy Yoga trying to higher respect the affect of esotericism on fashionable Hinduism usually. You wish to study about fashionable yoga! If the e-book had been known as The Esoteric Roots of Trendy Hinduism or one thing to that impact, I think about it could have gotten a a lot smaller readership – for a superb cause, that the individuals who did learn it could even have needed to examine its subject. However it could a minimum of have been fact in promoting.
We nonetheless really want a historical past of contemporary yoga. It will have been nice if that’s what A Historical past of Trendy Yoga was. Happily, there have been another such books printed since then; I hope a few of them do the job higher. From its blurb, Mark Singleton’s Yoga Physique appears to be like extra probably to provide us the historical past we want – however I’ll reserve judgement on that, since from the quilt I might have thought the identical about A Historical past of Trendy Yoga too.
