What is Authentic Yoga?

Imagine yoga’s history as India’s geography. You are flying over the Ganges River from its source in the Himalayas to its mouth on the Bay of Bengal. You can’t see much. Most of the terrain is blanketed in clouds just as much of yoga’s past is cloaked in the mists of time. Occasionally, the vista opens up. You gaze intensely at each of these viewpoints to note the flow has grown in size and changed in color from tributaries that fed the river at junctions you did not witness but can reliably assume, much like academics squinting at the few yoga texts that dot the course of yoga’s development note shifts suggesting a new ideological stream has added to the winding course of yoga’s historical evolution.

Your plane pilot says little. From the beginning of your journey to Allahabad, where the mighty Yamuna River joins the Ganges, he merely quips, “That’s Upper Ganga.” A later revelation, “That’s Lower Ganga.” True enough but far from enlightening, and it recalls to you a yoga teacher who divided the entire history of the practice into Classical yoga and Hatha yoga. Is that accurate? Hasn’t the progress of yoga been added to by myriad philosophical rivulets, and why would a confluence with even the mightiest influences constitute a separate yoga? Despite absorbing a big Yamuna River, it’s still the Ganges.

Unsatisfied with your aerial exploration of the Ganga and your bird’s eye view on yoga ideological history, you buy some yoga texts and rent a car to drive along the riverway. Where exactly do you start? Is the source of the Ganges the clouds over the Himalayas, the snow on the Himalayas, or the dripping from the roof of a cavern in the Himalayas? Is it the slimy trickle through the cave or the cascade out of the cave or the stream that meanders away from the cave? You decide the Ganges officially begins at the first city along its route where you find a hotel room then curl up there to commence pilgrimage. Your dreams are fuzzy and half-remembered, much like the primordial origins of yoga.

“The most usual starting point for a history of Indic religions is the religion of the Indus Valley cultural tradition in what is now Pakistan and North-West India, best known from the extensive remains of the early urban societies at Mohenjo-Daro, Harappa and elsewhere … and dated to around 2600 to 1900 BCE. The large body of imagery found on the seals at these urban sites has been particularly significant for scholars seeking to understand the religious life of the Indus Valley peoples. In particular, ever since Sir John Marshall’s suggestion in the 1930s that one of the Indus Valley seals represented an early version of the god Siva in a specifically yogic posture, it has been common to trace the origins of yoga and of various other aspects of Indian religion back to the Indus Valley cultural tradition.”

However, you reflect the next morning over a steamy chai that these ancient pre-textual sources suggest nothing about the practice or even existence of yoga at the time without reading back into them what is known from later written sources. Therein lies paradox. Texts may not be the best way to learn about an experiential art that is passed down by memorization and oral transmission, but it may be the most preservable and verifiable. So, where does the yogic textual tradition begin? What is the oldest yoga literature?

“Prior to about 500 BCE there is very little evidence within South Asian textual or archaeological sources that points to the existence of systematic, psychophysical techniques of the type which the word ‘yoga’ subsequently came to denote. Passages in the oldest Sanskrit text, the fifteenth-to-twelfth-century BCE Rg Veda … indicate the use of visionary meditation and its famous hymn to a long-haired sage (10.136) suggests a mystical ascetic tradition similar to those of later yogis. The somewhat later Atharva Veda (c. 1000 BCE) … mentions practices which may be forerunners of later yogic techniques of posture and breath-retention … but it is entirely speculative to claim … that the Vedic corpus provides any evidence of systematic yoga practice.”

Scholars James Mallinson and Mark Singleton are joined by Geoffrey Samuel in denying any solid systematic pre-Vedic or early-Vedic expositions of yogic beliefs and practices.

“[One cannot detect] yogic or ‘Tantric’ practices in their developed forms in the Rgveda or Atharvaveda. There are certainly indications both of magical ritual for pragmatic purposes and of ecstatic religious practices … There is nothing, however, to imply yogic practice, in the sense of a developed set of techniques for operating with the mind-body complex. Our best evidence to date suggests that such practices developed in the same ascetic circles as the early sramana movements (Buddhists, Jainas and Ajıvikas), probably in around the sixth and fifth centuries BCE.”

Therefore, your quest for authentic yoga must begin in earnest with the ascetic seekers and the later Upanishads. You fetch a book from your backpack. There’s nothing like a conversation with death from the third century BCE to get a morning started out right. (That’s what my grandfather used to never ever say.) Flip over to the Katha Upanishad.

“Those who lack discrimination, with little control over their thoughts and far from pure, reach not the pure state of immortality but wander from death to death; but those who have discrimination, with a still mind and a pure heart, reach journey’s end, never again to fall into the jaws of death. With a discriminating intellect as charioteer and a trained mind as reins, they attain the supreme goal of life, to be united with the Lord of Love. The senses derive from objects of sense-perception, sense objects from mind, mind from intellect, and intellect from ego; ego from undifferentiated consciousness, and consciousness from Brahman. Brahman is the First Cause and last refuge. Brahman, the hidden Self in everyone, does not shine forth. He is revealed only to those who keep their minds one-pointed on the Lord of Love and develop a superconscious manner of knowing. Meditation enables them to go deeper and deeper into consciousness, from the world of words to the world of thoughts, then beyond thoughts to wisdom in the Self. Get up! Wake up! Seek the guidance of an Illumined teacher and realize the Self.”

Within this early text, there are at least hints of yoga ideas that will be emphasized to a greater or lesser degree by later yoga writings and practitioners of multiple persuasions. Consider a few: a cycle of births and deaths, a discipline of sense control, a Samkhya-ish evolution of intellect, ego, and mind, a Patañjali-ish mind stilling leading to one-pointed inward meditation, a Vedanta-ish discriminative knowledge of Brahman as the Self in all, a Bhakti-ish unity with the Lord of Love, and a proto Tantra-ish emphasis on a guru. Yoga may not be systematically detailed but at least looks foreshadowed in hindsight.

Still, the primary emphasis of most Upanishadic sages was realization of the individual Atman and also its identification with the universal Brahman. Not so the ascetics. At the time of the Upanishadic philosophers, yogic practitioners were proliferating across the Gangetic plain. Such world-renunciates engaged in body mortifying lifestyles reflecting more the dualism of Samkhya than the union of Vedanta. One such was Alara Kalama. His disciple Gotama rejected this extreme ascetic yoga affiliated with Samkhya to become the Buddha and teach a middle path between body indulgence and denial.

The Bhagavad Gita expanded yoga philosophy by insisting that non-renunciates can do yoga by fulfilling their dharma but renouncing any expectation of results and that the Ultimate Reality can be approached not only as impersonal Brahman but as a personal deity who loves and assists the yogi in their quest. “Your authority is in action alone, and never in its fruits; motive should never be in the fruits of action, nor should you cling to inaction. Abiding in yoga engage in actions!” “Those who are eternally joined to yoga, and who honour me with the mind fixed on me, and gifted with the highest trust, I think of them as the most joined to yoga. But those who honour the imperishable one, who is undefinable, and without form, who pervades all and is beyond thought … also reach me.”

The later Yoga Sutras systematize the wealth of yoga philosophy that had come before.  Author Patañjali endorses the role of personal deity devotion found in the Gita and the role of discriminative self wisdom found in the Upanishads. Yet, the Yoga Sutras focus on the need to eventually still the mind of all fluctuations (whether wise or devout) and offers a complex analysis of the citta to expand our understanding of yoga psychology.

Between the Yoga Sutras and the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, our vast ideological waterway absorbed a deluge of Tantra from the cultural watershed of the time. Svatmarama’s text reflects this clearly in the citation of gurus Matsyendra and Goraksha and techniques described. Written about the same time, the Shiva Samhita characterizes ascetics, ritualists, atheists, Buddhists, and Samkhyists as sophists who are not liberated from rebirth and shun the Ultimate Reality. The author then constructs a Hatha foundation still based on Tantra but adding an equal portion of Vedanta as well.

Around 1700, the Gheranda Samhita still expounds a Hatha yoga based solidly on Tantra and Vedanta, but unorthodox Tantric elements have been sanitized. Thus, the swelling flow of yoga from its origins to the 18^th century is not the story of a few separate yogas. That history reveals a transforming and growing but never-ending flow without a clear division of river segments / yoga types. We must now conclude our meandering story.

Despite the proximity of two lines on your map, Rudyard Kipling could have accurately written Ganges is Ganges and highway is highway and never the twain shall meet. You cannot drive the river route. After many time-consuming detours to stand on the banks and observe the rushing waters, you abandon your quest. You now realize it is equally implausible to trace the flow of yoga history. The texts we wish to make travel guides are not maps, only snapshot photos of random waypoints along the route, fortunate to survive the ravages of time. Just as you cannot define where the river begins or which segment is the most authentic Ganges, you cannot force such organizational constructs onto the dynamic and complex history of yoga. Perhaps, it is fine that we do not have too many texts, since the point of yoga is doing it, not merely reading about it.

As the Ganges encounters the Bay of Bengal then merges with global seas, many yogis permeated Western culture then accepted Western influence on yoga. Is this inauthentic abomination? Is Western physical culture confined to Kardashians? Are Italian bodily celebrations of Michelangelo and da Vinci lacking in beauty? Are bodily disciplines of the Greek Olympians and Homeric warriors below admiration? Did a Jewish teacher echoing Plato’s “The body is the prison of the soul” with “The body is the temple of God’s spirit” have nothing to say that Samkhya and Tantric thinkers might want to discuss? Perhaps, Indian yogis were just as wise when adapting Western culture as when creating Eastern culture. Indian scientists who recently explored the moon may go farther. Should they reach a heavenly sphere without grass or vinyl mats then adapt a yoga practice using local materials (or the local preference for addressing the almighty as Steve), it will still be a worthy endeavor and worthy of the moniker authentic yoga.

Sources

Akers, Brian. The Hatha Yoga Pradipika. YogaVidya.com. 2002.

Armstrong, Karen. Buddha. Penguin Books. 2001.

Bryant, Edwin. The Yoga Sutras of Patañjali: A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary. North Point Press. 2009.

Easwaran, Eknath. The Upanishads. The Blue Mountain Center of Meditation. 1987.

Mallinson, James. The Gheranda Samhita. YogaVidya.com. 2004.

Mallinson, James. The Shiva Samhita. YogaVidya.com. 2007.

Mallinson, James and Singleton, Mark. The Roots of Yoga. Penguin Classics. 2017.

Patton, Laurie. The Bhagavad Gita. Penguin Classics. 2008.

Samuel, Geoffrey. The origins of yoga and tantra: Indic religions to the thirteenth century. Cambridge University Press. 2008.