The Real Roots Of Yoga (London Times)
RMJon23
life. Ostensibly a review by the formidable Doniger's of a recent book
_Yoga Body_by Mark Singleton, but I found the quality of "unearthed
history" most intriguing. YMMV. One could argue this as a wonderful
contribution to the history of ideas...I had subscribed to the
Patanjali view put forth by Barbara Stoler Miller. The history of yoga
seems palimpsestic to the nth, eh? -rmjon23]
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article7172361.ece
March 2, 2011
The real roots of yoga
Yoga is a rich, multi-cultural, constantly changing interdisciplinary
construction, far from the pure line that its adherents often claim
for it
Wendy Doniger
Some American Hindus have recently argued that Hindus should “Take
Back Yoga”. The Hindu American Foundation insists “that the philosophy
of yoga was first described in Hinduism’s seminal texts and remains at
the core of Hindu teaching”, that yoga is the legacy of a timeless,
spiritual “Indian wisdom”. Other Americans agree that the Hindus
should take back yoga – from the many Christians who embrace it: R.
Albert Mohler Jr, president of the Southern Baptist Theological
Seminary, advises Christians to abandon yoga if they value their
(Christian) souls. This fight evokes for me the Monty Python skit in
which Greek and German philosophers compete in a football game (which
ends with Marx claiming that the Greek goalscorer was off-side).
Declaring the Southern Baptists (or at least the Revd R. Albert
Mohler) off-side, we may still ask, why do so many American Hindus
care so much whether yoga is Hindu? And is it?
One reason for the Hindu concern is suggested by the capitalist
overtones of phrases used by Dr Aseem Shukla, a urologist who is co-
founder of the Hindu American Foundation: Hinduism has “lost control
of the brand” of yoga and has been the victim of “overt intellectual
property theft” by people who have “offered up a religion’s spiritual
wealth at the altar of crass commercialism”. In other words, yoga is a
sacred cash cow: about 15 million people in America practise (and
generally pay for) something that they call yoga, making it a multi-
billion-dollar industry.
But a deeper casus belli lies in the two-fold historical claim made by
activists of Hindu American identity politics: that yoga (a) was first
described in the ancient Vedic texts of Hinduism and (b) has always
been the core of Hinduism. Hindu Americans’ deep investment (to
continue the financial metaphor) in these claims about history has its
own history. For, given the human obsession with roots, those claims
generally take the form of arguments about the origins of yoga, a
quest for purity of lineage, for undefiled racial descent, here as
always a mad quest, since the history of yoga is, like most histories,
a palimpsest.
Mark Singleton’s excellent Yoga Body: The origins of modern posture
practice sets out to demolish the assertion that the roots of modern
yoga lie in ancient India. The Hindu arguments that he challenges, and
the evidence for or against them, can be sorted into a chronology of
four claims:
Claim 1: Yoga began before 2500 BC, in the Indus Valley Civilization,
in what is now Pakistan and northwest India (a civilization that left
substantial archaeological remains but no deciphered script).
Evidence: There are a few tiny soapstone seals bearing the image of a
man seated in what might be either just the way many people sit –
knees apart, feet together or legs crossed – or a basic yogic posture,
like the “lotus” (padma) or “perfect” (siddha) postures attested in
much later yoga texts. Aside from its unverifiability, this claim
assumes the position that yoga assumes the position, that the essence
of yoga is in its “positions” or “poses” (asanas, literally
“sittings”) rather than, for instance, in its philosophical or
religious concepts. This assumption is contradicted by the next claim:
Claim 2: Yoga began in around 1500 BC, in the oldest Sanskrit text,
the Rig Veda. Evidence: The word “yoga” occurs in this text, but only
in the primary sense of “yoking” horses to chariots or draft animals
to ploughs or wagons (the Sanskrit and English words are cognate, as
is the English “junction”); and then, secondarily, designating the
effort of “yoking” oneself to do physical labour. Here we have neither
philosophical nor postural yoga. Let’s try again:
Claim 3: Yoga began sometime in the middle of the first millennium BC
in the Sanskrit philosophical texts known as the Upanishads. Evidence:
The word “yoga” occurs in just a few passages in the early Upanishads,
designating a spiritual praxis of meditation conjoined with breath
control, “yoking” the senses in order to control the spirit, and then
“yoking” the mind, “yoking” the body to the spirit, and the soul to
the mind of god, in order to obtain an immortal body “made by the fire
of yoga”. This is the yoga that Mircea Eliade’s Yoga: Immortality and
freedom (1958) illuminated for a generation of Americans. (Eliade’s
personal experiments with yoga, and much else, are recorded in a roman
à clef first published in Romanian in 1933 and, in 1988, made into a
film, The Bengali Night, in which the Eliade role is played, believe
it or not, by Hugh Grant.) Buddhist sources in this same period also
speak of techniques of disciplining the mind and the body, and the
word “yoga”, owing as much to Buddhism as to Hinduism, soon came to
mean any mental and physical praxis of this sort. (Similar disciplines
arose in ancient Greece and, later, in Christianity, a subject on
which Pierre Hadot and Michel Foucault had a great deal to say.) This
is the general sense in which the word “yoga” is used in the Bhagavad
Gita, a few centuries later, to denote each of three different
religious paths (the yoga of action, the yoga of meditation, and the
yoga of devotion). But these texts say nothing about the physical
“positions” or “poses” that distinguish contemporary yoga.
Claim 4: Yoga began in India in Patanjali’s Yoga-Sutra, probably in
the third century AD. (Some would put it earlier, and it draws on
earlier sources.) Many contemporary yoga practitioners cite this text
as the basis of their praxis. But Patanjali says nothing about the
“postures” other than remarking that the adept should sit in a manner
that is relaxed and conducive to meditation and breath control. On the
contrary, he speaks of cultivating “aversion to one’s own body”. But
he describes magical powers (siddhis, literally “perfections”) that
result from the mastery of the mind, which include flying, becoming
invisible, walking on water, foreknowledge of death, knowledge of past
and future, entering the minds of others, and understanding the
languages of animals, claims that were later made by Hindu ascetics
who called themselves “yogis” (or “yogins”).
A degree of confusion arises from the fact that Patanjali’s text is
foundational for one of the six classical philosophies of ancient
India, the meditational school known as Yoga. This philosophy is often
called “Raja Yoga” (“royal yoga”) or the Eight-fold (ashtanga) Yoga,
to distinguish it from common or jungle varieties of yoga in the sense
of any spiritual discipline, as well as from the later “Hatha
Yoga” (“the yoga of force”). The word “yoga/yoga/Yoga” thus became a
triple homonym, referring sometimes to a physical praxis, sometimes to
a mental praxis, and sometimes to a particular philosophical school.
The confusion is compounded by the existence of various ascetics often
called “yogis” and connected to yoga in many different degrees.
Scattered evidence for these traditions begins in the Rig Veda’s
reference to naked ascetics who use (consciousness-altering) drugs and
“mount the wind” (i.e. both fly and control their breath); they are
associated with Rudra, the antecedent of the god Shiva who is closely
associated with yogis, himself a great yogi and Lord of Yogis
(Yogeshvara). Some later yogic traditions cultivated “the aversion to
one’s own body” in more extreme ways. Texts from the early centuries
of the Common Era deconstruct the body (particularly but not only the
female body) into its disgusting components of shit, piss, pus, and so
forth, while others tell of men and women who, going after a kind of
god one could find only by breaking away into madness and horror,
subject themselves to extremes of heat and cold, fasting, and other
forms of physical mortification, going naked, sometimes eating out of
human skulls, or eating carrion or faeces, generally demonstrating
their indifference to both physical pain and social conventions,
thumbing their nose at the body.
These disciplines often included difficult postures, such as standing
on one leg for days at a time. By the seventh century AD, such
postures became so notorious as to be subject to satire; the great
frieze at Mamallipuram (Mahabalipuram) depicts a cat (a symbol of
ascetic hypocrisy in Hinduism) standing on one leg in mimicry of a
human ascetic in this posture. Many texts reflect the uneasiness and
suspicion with which conventional householder Hindus regarded fringe
groups of yogis, depicting them as lunatics or magicians with
paranormal powers. Hindus were well aware that power corrupts, and
divine power corrupts divinely. There was always a conflict between
yogis as idealized superheroes and yogis as reviled super-villains.
Yogis were often regarded as ritually polluting or downright
dangerous, sinister in both senses of the word, as David White has
documented (in Sinister Yogis, 2009).
Yogis also posed sexual threats, through an ancient Hindu belief in
their erotic powers, along a spectrum from genuine ascetics, who were
said to be able to use their unspent sexual powers to bless infertile
women and thus make them fertile, to false ascetics, who were said to
use their status as yogis as a mask through which to gain illicit
access to women. In the medieval period, the bad sexual reputation of
yogis was exacerbated by the overlap between yoga and Tantra, an
antinomian and often sexual ritual praxis. One yogic text composed
some time between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries, the Hatha-
yoga-pradipika (“Illumination of the Yoga of Force”), describes
fifteen yogic postures. It also describes the Tantric technique of
raising the coiled serpent power (the Kundalini) up the spine, through
the series of chakras (centres of force), to the brain, and a related
technique whereby the adept draws fluids (such as the secretions of
his female partner in the Tantric sexual ritual) up through his penis
(the vajroli process).
By this time, most educated Hindus had nothing but scorn for postural
yoga, though there was still respect for yoga as a spiritual
discipline. The followers of the great Vedantic philosopher Shankara
(c.788–820 AD) rejected the physical discipline and engaged only the
philosophy and the meditational praxis. The Hatha-yoga-pradipika
became an embarrassment for Hindus, who invented an apocryphal story
about Dayanand Sarasvati (1824–83), the founder of the Bengal reform
movement called the Arya Samaj, who allegedly pulled a corpse from a
river, dissected it to see if the chakras were there, didn’t find
them, and threw his copy of the Hatha-yoga-pradipika into the water.
Well-born Bengalis considered exercise in general lower-class (a
Mandarin attitude that Noël Coward captured well in the line, “In
Bengal, to move at all is seldom, if ever, done”).
When the British arrived in India in the eighteenth century, they came
to share many of the Hindu anti-yogic biases, compounded by the
European horror of the nakedness and self-torture of the extreme
yogis. The yogi on a bed of nails became the stock European symbol of
India’s moral and spiritual backwardness. In addition to the
individual yogis, bands of yogis often posed military threats, using
yoga to strengthen their bodies for martial purposes. Warrior ascetics
are a very old Indian tradition, going back to the menacing troops of
Vratyas mentioned in the Veda. Under the Raj, militant yogis engaged
in exercise regimes to make them tough, in order to oppose the
British; they were generally indistinguishable from violent militants
whose training centres for resistance masqueraded as centres of yogic
instruction. In this period, to be a yogi often meant to train as a
guerrilla. The British rounded up many of the ascetic mercenaries and
broke up their organizations; some yogis became beggars or itinerant
carnival performers who displayed as circus tricks the more extreme
postures, such as a handstand from the lotus position.
But at this point, something transformative happened, which is the
basis of a new claim, not made by Hindus, about the origins of yoga:
Claim 5: Contemporary postural yoga was invented in India in the
nineteenth century. This is Singleton’s most provocative assertion. He
argues that a transnational, anglophone yoga arose at this time,
compounded of the unlikely mix of British bodybuilding and physical
culture, American transcendentalism and Christian Science,
naturopathy, Swedish gymnastics, and the YMCA, grafted on to a
rehabilitated form of postural yoga adapted specifically for a Western
audience. The Swedish gymnastics came from Pehr Henrik Ling, the
physical culture from a number of people including Eugen Sandow,
Bernard MacFadden, Harry Crowe Buck and Charles Atlas. Most
influential was the YMCA, in the hands of which physical culture was
eventually elevated to a position of social and moral respectability.
The British had always considered Indians weaklings, and Indians
shamefacedly agreed; Indian children in Gandhi’s day used to chant a
popular poem: “Behold the mighty Englishman / He rules the Indian
small, / Because being a meat-eater / He is five cubits tall”. The
playing fields of Eton had made the English frightfully brave, as Noël
Coward pointed out, but so had a regimen of exercise that they now
imported into India. Bodybuilding became a religion that resacralized
the body, and the British proselytized for this muscular Christianity
in India just as the missionaries did for their evangelical
Christianity. In Indian schools, the gymnastics instructor was usually
a brutal and ignorant retired non-commissioned British officer, most
often a sepoy, an Indian who served in the British Army. In an ironic
twist, Indian nationalists were able to use this colonial technique,
designed to build soldiers to master the inferior races in the Empire,
to train their own people to combat and resist the Europeans. Even
when they took poses from Hatha Yoga, they renamed them and
interpreted them in the language of modern gymnastics. In 1915, the
scholar S. C. Vasu, who wanted to make yoga medical and scientific,
prepared an English translation of the Hatha-yoga-pradipika for the
Sacred Books of the Hindus, but omitted the passage about the vajroli
technique.
The British then tried to suppress the Indian physical culture clubs
in India because they wanted to do it their way and to control it, to
inscribe English physical culture on the Indian body. YMCA leaders in
India had made the postures part of the physical programme in service
of Christian goals (leading some people to regard yoga as a variant of
Christian Science), but the European poses were then reabsorbed into
Hindu culture. The British passion for physical culture, spilling over
into the Hindu world, rescued physical yoga from the opprobrium into
which it had fallen and made it once again respectable. Hindu leaders
such as Swami Kuvalayananda developed more rigorous posture work to
refute the YMCA types who had insisted that the postures were not an
adequate physical regimen. Now the new yoga took the European
techniques and couched them in the discourse of the Bengal Hindu
renaissance, which is to say the Vedantic language of the Upanishads.
Many practitioners combined the more extreme postures, generally
associated with the marginalized itinerant yogis, with the more
central ancient meditative praxis, and regarded this yoga (now no
longer limited to breath control but incorporating the postures) as a
path to immortality.
The extreme postures then travelled back to England. Yogis in England,
where contortionists had performed in London for hundreds of years,
demonstrated exercises such as the Hatha Yoga technique of abdominal
isolation (nauli), in which the muscles of the stomach are made to
undulate in a separate column. K. Ramamurthy had a three-ton elephant
and a motor car driven over his body; he also included in the Indian
physical culture system a number of sports that he insisted originated
in India, including hockey, cricket, tennis, billiards and boxing.
The emphasis on the physical postures of yoga may have been bolstered
by the sensational publication, in 1883, of Sir Richard Burton’s
English translation of the Kamasutra, a text that became notorious for
its “positions”. The tendency to confuse the teachings of yoga and the
Kamasutra may have led to the overemphasis on the “positions” in both,
since yoga was always associated with sex in India and came to be
eroticized in England, and the general English and Indian ignorance of
the cultural content of the Kamasutra was matched by their ignorance
of the philosophical content of (classical) yoga. Both yoga and the
Kamasutra served the schizophrenic Victorian combination of public
condemnation of sex and private obsession with it. Undeniably erotic
photographs of naked women and naked men performing yogic postures
were published in journals like Health and Science, anthropologizing
and orientalizing sex, distancing it, making it safe for English
readers by assuring them, or pretending to assure them, that the
images were not about real bodies, their bodies, but merely about the
bodies of strange, dark people far away. (The same logic allowed
National Geographic to depict the bare breasts of black African women
long before it became respectable to show white women’s breasts in
Playboy.)
The advent of mass photography at the end of the nineteenth century
greatly enhanced the erotic appeal of yoga. In 1902, Thomas Edison
made a documentary about a “Hindu Fakir” that was circulated along
with other early forms of the peepshow. (The erotic view of yoga
continues. In March 2003, a hilarious spoof, entitled “Yoga: A
religion for sex addicts”, imagined a Christian pastor defining the
ultimate goal of yoga practitioners as contorting their bodies into
demonic positions so as to be able to place their sexual organs in
their mouths.) The pendulum of mutual influence continued to swing, as
Hindus reacted against these new European versions of yoga and brought
yet another form of yoga to America. In 1896, repulsed by the physical
contortions and twisted bodies of the yogic postures, Swami
Vivekananda said that he rejected Hatha Yoga because it was very
difficult, could not be quickly learned, and did not lead to much
spiritual growth, and because the goal of making men live long and in
perfect health was not as important as the spiritual goal represented
by Raja Yoga, which Vivekananda claimed to be reviving. Yet he
believed that physical culture, of the European variety, was essential
for Indian youth, and he is said to have held the view that one can
get closer to god through football than through the Bhagavad Gita.
But the Vedantic yoga of Vivekananda was not the antecedent of the
yoga practised in America today. That came from many sources, but
particularly from the invention, by T. Krishnamacharya, between 1930
and 1950, of a novel sequence of movements, partially derived from a
royal gymnastics tradition in Mysore; and from B. K. S. Iyengar’s
Light on Yoga, published in 1966. Other techniques that we now
recognize as yoga were, by the 1930s, already a well-established part
of Western physical culture, particularly that intended for women, but
were not yet associated in any way with yoga. At the same time, some
women promoted “spiritual stretching and deep breathing” which they
called “yoga for women”. For now yoga became gendered: postural yoga
developed out of a male, muscular, Christian, nationalist and martial
context (still practised by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and other
Hindu nationalist organizations); while “harmonial” yoga, of the
“stretch and relax” variety, was a synthesis of women’s gymnastics and
para-Christian mysticism. To this day, women greatly outnumber men as
yoga practitioners.
After Vivekananda had expelled Hatha Yoga, the modern Hindu yogis
brought it back by rewriting the Hatha Yoga tradition, leaving out the
positions that they found repellent or simply impossible, and fleshing
out the tradition with diet, relaxation, cleanliness and breathing,
all attested in some of the many other forms of ancient Indian yoga.
They replaced the unpalatable ancient Indian material with more
attractive ancient material, as well as much new material, and claimed
that that was what yogis had always used. Ultimately new combinations
of Western and Eastern physical culture methods were naturalized as
ancient Hindu knowledge.
Yoga came into its own as a national pastime during the 1950s and 60s.
But it had attracted celebrities in Europe and America, from Henry
Thoreau, the first American yogi, to Aleister Crowley, who published,
in 1939, eight lectures about yoga under the megalomaniac pseudonym
“Mahatma Guru Sri Paramahansa Shivaji”, using a bit of Patanjali but
mostly pseudo-Tantric materials that further damaged yoga’s
reputation. In 1921, Fritz Lang made a film about crazy yogis.
“Yogi” (Lawrence Peter) Berra picked up his famous nickname from a
friend who said that whenever Berra sat around with his arms and legs
crossed, waiting to bat, or looking sad after a losing game of
baseball, he resembled a Hindu holy man they had seen in a movie.
Contemporary yoga practices are a far cry both from the Upanishads and
from Hatha Yoga. Most of the new American yogis want to relax after a
hard day at the office, tighten up their abs, and reduce their
cholesterol and their blood pressure; their yoga of relaxation and
stretching may also involve regular enemas, a cure for back pain, a
beauty regime, a vegetarian diet with a lot of yogurt (which is not
etymologically related to “yoga”) – and a route to God. Siddha Yoga
has become “City Yoga”. Never the twain shall meet.
But they can, in fact, meet. For some people, yoga is a religious
meditation, for some an exercise routine, and for some, both. A few
years ago I met Gwyneth Paltrow, a yoga practitioner who delighted me
by reciting a long passage from Patanjali in flawless and melodious
Sanskrit. The union of physical and spiritual praxis was possible for
ancient Indians and remains a real goal for many contemporary yogis.
This sort of combination is affirmed by an old joke about a Jesuit
priest who, when his bishop forbade priests to smoke while meditating,
dutifully agreed but argued that surely there would be no objection if
he occasionally meditated while he was smoking. That one can, however,
choose merely to smoke or merely to meditate is denied both by
Christians of the Reverend R. Albert Mohler ilk and by Hindus of the
Hindu American Foundation ilk, both of whom insist that yoga is only
and always a religious system.
Such Hindu Americans, concerned about their image, fear (not without
cause) that their religion has been stereotyped in the West as a
polytheistic faith of “castes, cows and curry”. They counteract these
charges by swinging to the other extreme and arguing that everything
in India is, and always has been, spiritual, a blinkered view that
makes some people mispronounce Kama Sutra as “Karma-Sutra”. They want
to cash in on the popularity of yoga in order to use it as the symbol
of a more spiritual “Indian wisdom”. They argue that yoga – more than
temple rituals, the worship of images of the gods, or other, more
passionate, communal, and widespread forms of Hinduism – is the
essence of Hinduism, that yoga has always been entirely spiritual and
entirely Hindu.
But this claim ignores the complex history of yoga. There is an
ancient Indian yoga, but it is not the source of most of what people
do in yoga classes today. That same history, however, also
demonstrates that there are more historical bases for contemporary
postural yoga within classical Hinduism than Singleton allows. The
Europeans did not invent it wholesale. But they changed it enormously.
They changed it from an embarrassment to an occasion for cultural
pride, and from a tradition that encouraged the cultivation of
“aversion to one’s own body” to another, also rooted in ancient India,
that aimed at the perfection of the body. The modern Indian and
American yogis didn’t take their methods from European physical
culture; they took them back from physical culture. What Mark
Singleton does prove, with massive, irrefutable, fascinating and often
hilarious evidence, is that yoga is a rich, multi-cultural, constantly
changing interdisciplinary construction, far from the pure line that
its adherents often claim for it.
Mark Singleton
YOGA BODY
The origins of modern posture practice
262pp. Oxford University Press.
£60 (paperback, £11.99).
978 0 19 539535 8
Wendy Doniger teaches at the University of Chicago. Her books include
Siva: The erotic ascetic, 1973, The Bedtrick: Tales of sex and
masquerade, 2000, The Woman Who Pretended To Be Who She Was, 2005,
and, most recently, The Hindus: An alternative history, 2009.
TCBEvolver
"In March 2003, a hilarious spoof, entitled “Yoga: A
religion for sex addicts”, imagined a Christian pastor defining the
ultimate goal of yoga practitioners as contorting their bodies into
demonic positions so as to be able to place their sexual organs in
their mouths."
Well, why didn't you say so? Hey everybody, the Y has this awesome
class where they teach you to play your own piccolo! And thus was the
obesity epidemic defeated for ever.
RMJon23
ELL O! ELL!
No ut seriously: try 'n tell me you haven't tried it. I know I have.
Unsucksessfully.
Apparently you need at least a "six-pack" in order to...carry it off:
http://www.amazon.com/Art-Auto-fellatio-Oral-Sex-One/dp/1879967111
And that brings us full-circle: yoga!