The idea of yoga's worth and value, its spirituality, is usually inextricable from the idea of its being an ancient practice
How ancient is yoga? And in what sense does the yoga we do today derive from its ancient form?
Certainly yogis of old did not wear leotards, carry coloured sticky mats to their classes, practice to DVDs of celebrity teachers. But they basically did what we do, didn't they?
Well, apparently not. Yoga as we know it today is largely a construct of recent times. The name yoga has become generic for a wide range of practices, especially those with an emphasis on physical movements and postures. The meaning of these, the attention to these, the attention to the meaning of these vary according to various teachers and schools. But they are all 'yoga' if they call themselves yoga .
If they have any common agreement, it may be that yoga isn't 'just physical'. What else is yoga and what else is it not? Is there anything else everyone involved in yoga agrees on? The idea of 'union', for that's what yoga means. But let a thousand flowers bloom. Else what will settle this argument? The loudest voice, the most followers, or an appeal to a higher authority? What authority? Is that authority 'tradition'?
Yoga as widely practiced today is largely the practice of asana. Some say this is because the West is so body-oriented, materialistic. There is also a wide-spread practice of 'meditation' although exactly what this is and how it is done has its variants. In Iyengar yoga – or Patanjali yoga, as BKS Iyengar prefers to call it (for yoga exists in other traditions) - meditation is an advanced practice that requires sufficient preparation, beginning with complete attention in the asana. This attention in asana leads to Dharana, concentration on a single point, also defined as stillness of mind; and when this continues for a long time it becomes Dhyana – meditation, also defined as integration into the object of contemplation.
In other popular practices, yoga aspirants can begin with various forms of 'meditation', and this can mean complete relaxation, or absorption in chanting or prayer, or sitting in still silence, or goal-oriented visualisations and so on.
Studies of tradition and the idea of tradition reveal that a great deal of what is unquestioningly accepted as tradition – as a correct and proper practice of lengthy provenance - was invented. Certain national costumes, religious customs, a church's strict doctrines, styles of painting in tribal communities, and similar matters – including rules of grammar, the meanings of words, and what is proper language - a range of cultural practices - are thought of as rooted in ages-old practice, and therefore tested by aeons and beyond human interference, but a little research shows that they were created at a specific moment – not always very long ago and often by identifiable persons. Google 'the invention of tradition' and you'll get hundreds of references.
There's the pattern of religion involved in the whole phenomenon of the yoga craze: a prophet's teachings are passed on by disciples, followers, whose different emphases and interpretations spread and multiply, forming themselves into factions, cults and denominations around new leaders, becoming established with hierarchical organizations, jealously guarded power structures, new decrees and doctrines, conflicts and even rivalries between and within them.
I've often heard it claimed that all religions ultimately say the same thing. But I can't find a consensus on what this one thing is. Seems to me a religion says whatever anyone says it says.
Yoga has its own equivalents of popes and bishops, mullahs and rabbis, celebrity spokespeople, claiming correct interpretations of doctrines and decreeing the revealed truth, insisting their own way is the best or only true way.
Since I was a child I've been bemused at the antics of public christians who seem to act in a spirit quite contrary to the sayings of the prophet Jesus with his tolerance and golden rule. Great revolutionary thoughts apparently all eventually become co-opted, enculturated and assimilated into our well known mainstream structures.
What is the original divine word? Who or what was the original prophet from whose teachings all yoga derives? In the Bhagavad Gita (the highly regarded poem that is often read apart from its larger context, the ancient epic Mahabharata), Krishna tells Arjuna to do yoga, and the apparent contradictory paths of various kinds of yoga – action, renunciation, knowledge – are declared to be known by the wise as a single yoga. Innumerable translations and commentaries lead to a range of conclusions. Do your duty is doubtless sound advice, but to know quite what your duty is, is a far from straightforward matter; and, the goal of acquiring detachment has an apparent wisdom though extreme detachment is pathological. The point of works of wisdom such as the Gita, it seems to me, is not in taking them as works of definitive prescription, but of endlessly yielding interrogation of the basic human drive to create meaning.
Similarly, the aphoristic nature of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali lend themselves to considerable variation in translation. Patanjali was said to live some time between 500 and 200 BC. His Yoga Sutras, a rich source of the prescriptions and philosophy of yoga is a text made up of 196 sutras, or aphorisms; they cover matters to do with conduct, knowledge and the nature of the self. He does not specifically describe any asana, although Asana is named as one of yoga's asthanga, that is 'eight limbs'. Patanjali's words are held to be of divine provenance and his own existence relies on legend; he is magically cited as both source and last word when it comes to tradition. BKS Iyengar's own translation and commentary are lucid and scholarly and enunciate the depth of the theoretical basis of his own work, which reaches a considerable distance beyond instructions for asana and their sequencing, and has continued to develop since his pioneering Light on Yoga (1966).
Contemporary practitioners feel free to choose which if any aspects of tradition they will adopt, perhaps as someone renovating their home in a 'Tudor' or 'outback homestead' style will still install a modern bathroom.
The idea of tradition becomes inflected with the idea of history and customs and antecedents. Is tradition any more than that? What is its worth? A common idea of tradition is of an authoritative precedent, of validation and prescription, implying the forbidding or discrediting of what does not conform to it. Tradition becomes invested with the sense of the absolute.
In the India where yoga originated, the tradition was of absolute obedience to the guru. The disciple or sisya did what the guru told him to. The guru was not questioned. If you wondered about the reason for the instruction you might find it out by doing what you were told.
The yoga tradition was of great secrecy. It was not easy to find a guru. Part of your work as a disciple or would-be disciple was to find a guru and convince him to take you on. John Brunton's influential book of 1934, Search in Secret India, is an account of how difficult it was to investigate yoga. 'It may be' Brunton says early in the book 'that the secrecy in which [Yoga] was carefully enshrouded succeeded in killing all spread of this ancient science. When Brunton finally finds a Yogi:
'Does a Rajah keep his jewels on the highway for public display' he asks. 'No, he hides them in the treasure chambers deep in the vault of his palace. The knowledge of our science is one of the greatest treasures a man can have. Is he to offer it in the bazaar for all and sundry? Whoever desires to grasp this treasure – let him search for it. That is the only way, but it is the right way. Out texts enjoin secrecy again and again, while our masters will reveal the important teachings only to tested disciples who have been faithful to them for several years at least...
'But there is a branch of our science about which I may to talk to you more freely. It is that wherein we strengthen the will and improve the body of beginners, for only so can they be fit to attempt the difficult practices of real Yoga.... We have nearly a score of body exercises which strengthen the different parts and organs, and remove or prevent certain diseases ...' (Brunton:14)
This branch of yoga science – the bodily exercises usually known as asana - is now usually considered sufficient and complete. And in our commercial world if you don't offer what you know in the
bazaar (the market) who could believe it has any worth? Brunton found the notion of a yoga master in his time 'combining a Yoga discipline with a daily life based on Western ways and ideas' an 'astonishing and interesting notion'.
These days a guru or teacher has students rather than disciples. Students of today are expected to question, to experiment, to challenge. This is our Western tradition, and it infuses the practice of yoga. A student asks why we do something, and the teacher is expected to give reasons. If a teacher is reputed to have 'disciples', or call himself a 'master', the implications of authoritarian control and blind obedience are not complimentary and possibly sinister.
Whether it was because of the traditions of secrecy and obedience, or because of lack of interest, or lack of access, the idea of yoga being something bizarre and an interest in it marginal did not change until that disruptive decade, the 1960s. Pop versions of Indian thought, dress and music entered the counter-culture which swiftly became mainstream, and yoga teachers and schools, at first slowly, emerged. Yoga had a paradoxical appeal: the newest thing was the oldest thing.
It's not only tradition we like. Some things in our culture are good because they're new; their newness gives worth and value. So that many will seek out the 'latest' teacher or form of yoga, and the 'newness' and 'latest' aspects are cited as self-evident advantages.
In today's world though it's hard to know whether newness or established practice – novelty or tradition – is the value being claimed, as in the assertion, for example, that Bikram Yoga ('Hot Yoga') is over thirty years old. In this form, yoga is done in heated rooms, and attempts to patent or copyright the yoga done here are under dispute. The forms of yoga may be old, Bikram asserts, but the sequences he has devised are his intellectual property.
If they are interested at all in the historical bases of their work, if they look to antecedents for validation, yoga students are largely left floundering (or fantasizing). There is no textual basis for modern practices.
In Hindu tradition, lineage gives credibility to a teacher, guru or swami.
Both BKS Iyengar and Pattabhi Jois learnt from Krisnamacarya and they, along with Krisnamacarya's son TKV Desakachar who teaches in Madras (now officially called Chennai) between them account for the greater numbers of foreign as well as national yoga adherents. There are no indications where Krishnamacariar originally learnt yoga.
In his enlightening study The Yoga Tradition of the Mysore Palace, N.E. Sjoman points out an essential difference between linear traditions, oriented toward accumulation, and dynamic tradition, vitally initiated by introspection:
Dynamic tradition seems to imply openness to change, rapid adaptation and experiment – survival for other reason than being 'tradition'. By natural selection, certain aspects of tradition become prominent as a response to change environment and aspirations. In the case of the yoga asana tradition we can see that it is a dynamic tradition that has drawn on many sources – traditional yoga texts, indigenous exercises, western gymnastics, therapeutics, and even perhaps the military training exercises of a foreign dominating power. And that says nothing in regard to the ideologies that make a culture or the ideologies of the foreign element to be assimilated. These too are part of the processes of change, enrichment and loss. (Sjoman:51)
BKS Iyengar firmly places himself in the tradition of Patanjali; still he is the exemplar of dynamic tradition; his ground-breaking work was, among other things, to re-arrange asanas into groups - standing asanas, forward bends, backbends, twistings, hand balancings and inversions. He introduced ideas of precision, penetration and introspection into the asana system. Perhaps better known for his introduction of 'props', now widely considered an essential component of practice, he was perhaps most revolutionary in opening up the practice of yoga to everyone (at least in principle).
Yet I know many yoga students like to imagine they are part of a lineage of essential teachings reaching back into the mists of time.
BKS Iyengar is indisputably one of the greatest influences on yoga in the world. A great deal of the practices in denominations of yoga not known as Iyengar yoga also have their origins in his teachings. This is, if not quite esoteric knowledge, not essential knowledge for students and even teachers. That is, while he is widely recognised, the extent, originality and importance of his influence seems to be lost as it is spreads. His work is not always acknowledged where it is copied or adapted. I believe him to be a rare genius – as well as, by the way, a man of intensely impressive luminosity; a joy to be around.
It's like it would be 400 years ago being around Shakespeare and listening to him and to the language he heard – but you'd have to have come from this far into the future to fully dig it.
Imagine if Shakespeare had authorities around him to say – and imagine if he had listened to them – 'that's not proper English, we don't say it like that, that's not a real word, you can't just make up new words'.
But what is certain is this: that not BKS Iyengar nor Krishnamacharya are not able to prescribe to the world how to do yoga any more than the Queen of England prescribes to the world how to use the English language.
English, by the way, being the de facto world language, has to a great extent become also the language of yoga, especially as some teachers take their classes and workshops to various international settings. Sanskrit words are employed to name the various asana, and used more or less commonly depending on the school of yoga. In Iyengar yoga, we are taught the Sanskrit names from the start and encouraged to use them. Some of the names are, although made of actual Sanskrit words, neologisms, to name asanas that themselves are new variations – or newly named components – of the fewer basic asanas known in times before.
In some yoga schools and studios, pictures of Hindu deities, perhaps displayed on some kind of shrine, and the use of incense operate maybe as a tribute to yoga's antecedents, maybe as a kind of superstitious idea that it gives extra credibility or blessings to what is practiced there. In classes of experienced Iyengar students, we begin with a Sanskrit chant, an hommage to Patanjali, who not only is the putative author of the Yoga Sutras but also of ancient treatises on grammar and medicine.
In my view this works best as tribute and as a mechanism that operates to establish focus and intention. At worst it brings superstition and religiosity to practice. I admit it is with dismay I find that to this chant other chants have been added, invoking the name of Hindu gods. Or, as some would have it brahminical gods. Western yoga students are sometimes offered 'information' on the 'Hindu' religion to which, some imagine, they now have a special affinity. Such information is, perhaps necessarily, usually scant and superficial: names of gods, festivals like Diwali, wearing a tilak. The fact that the promoted version of 'Hinduism' is critiqued by outstanding writers on the perniciously abiding caste system as the exclusive religion of Brahmins is not known nor desired knowledge. (See for example Dipankar Gupta's Interrogating Caste or Kancha Ilaiah's Why I Am Not A Hindu.) In fact, some Western yoga students will say that the caste system is based on wisdom and goodness (because it is a Hindu tradition, because there is a correct metaphysical way to understand it).
No, I am not one who finds tradition an appealing idea. I'm more convinced that usually 'tradition' means safety in numbers, doing the same thing as everyone else, that its appeal is to a conformity closely allied to the refusal of skepticism or unconventionality.
In writing, too, tradition is cited as authority in language, especially when changes in, like, you know, English are deplored and new expressions taken up twenty-four/seven or whatever. But tradition as authority is antithetical to the inquiring, even disruptive spirit of writing, its spiritual drive.
We are not the same kind of humans, not in many ways, as those in the mythic or historic times of Patanjali, we have different relations to our bodies, our texts, our bodies of work. (We can plan to become a yoga-practicing, text-producing cyborg.) Still, a writer is aware of antecedents and influences, a history fro
m which we emerge. As far as I can tell, this is what people mean when they insist we write 'within a tradition', such insistence being usually trotted out to censure beginning writers who do not read the classics, or teachers of writing who set contemporary texts for their students.
It seems to me that anyone serious about writing will eventually read their predecessors, and usefully wonder whether there is anything new to say, and what that might be; whether the exciting changes in everyday language might be enriched by disused vocabulary; what wealth of references you can share with others who also read texts that have been around a long time and what qualities keep a book current well beyond the context of its creation; how a chain of influence binds us to the practice of literature; what deep pleasures can be found in stories, language and thought from that strangest country, the past.
But we do our writing and our yoga inquiring into the present, shaped by contemporary developments in both practices , and attaining the spiritual by being absorbed in the present.