The term yoga tends to be awkward for students of Indian philosophy today. Traditionally in Sanskrit, yoga meant something like “spiritual exercises” in Pierre Hadot’s sense – practices intended to transform oneself. The term has this sense in the work most often associated with it, the Yoga Sūtras attributed to Patañjali. There yoga is a set of eight practices: vows of self-restraint (yamas, the same ones as in the Jain tradition, and very similar to the Buddhist Five Precepts); ethical observances (niyamas); bodily postures (āsanas); breath control (prāṇayāma); withdrawal of the senses (pratyāhāra); concentration (dharana); meditation (dhyāna); and meditative concentration (samādhi). The goal of all this is to reach a state of “aloneness” (kaivalya, again similar to Jainism) – a state in which one has transcended the world and merely observes it, a super-Cartesian subject detached from all the objects of observation. (In Thomas Kasulis’s terms, Patañjali’s yoga has a stronger integrity orientation than just about anything in Western thought.)
But none of this tends to come to mind when most Westerners think about “yoga” today. In English, the term has come to mean nothing more than the third of the eight practices, the āsanas or postures – perhaps occasionally with some of the fourth (breath control) attached to them. One might add some meditative practices as well, but certainly not with the intent of reaching kaivalya, a goal that would freak out hippie Westerners enthused about “interdependence.” The point is merely a limber body, and perhaps a slightly more disciplined mind – the philosophy of yoga has become a mere technique, a theme that pervaded this year’s conference of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy.
But even those who have made yoga into a technique have started to become uncomfortable with the idea. Two recent American news articles highlight the issue. First, the founders of Bikram yoga have recently been trying to make yoga into a competitive sport, even an Olympic sport – an approach which seems to stress an entirely physical approach to yoga, so that it is not different in kind from decathlon or beach volleyball. The article quotes California yoga teacher Julie Kleinman as saying competition “seems fairly antithetical to what yoga is all about”: “I don’t really understand how you would compete to be the happiest, most balanced person.”
At the same time, Missouri now charges a sales tax on yoga centres, even though it is not allowed to tax “religious” organizations – partially because yoga advocates had spent a long time trying to convince people yoga is not religious, in order to gain a toehold in a conservative Christian society. As I noted before, this is a common rhetorical move made by many teachers in the West, including Goenka and the teachers of “Christian Zen”; it allows one to practise the “technique” without sacrificing the exclusive loyalty demanded by Abrahamic traditions. But one shouldn’t be surprised when the “technique” move bites back. If all you’re teaching is a technique, then it can be taxed like any other technique, and it can be used for purposes (like competitive sport) that are entirely alien to its original intent.
The status of yoga is ambivalent even within India, in the sense that, apart from yogadarsana, yoga practices (a????ga yoga or other forms of it) have been adopted in many other schools. I am not using ‘yoga’ here as a synonym of ?sana alone. That seems to be, indeed, a Western innovation.
I guess that takes us to the question of what yoga (in a non-Western context) actually is: to what extent is it specifically practice in the Yoga Sūtra tradition, and to what extent is it spiritual practices more generally? That other practices borrowed from the YS doesn’t necessarily tell us too much, in that the YS themselves seem to have borrowed a lot from Jainism and elsewhere.
Amod:
In that competition nice guys would come first. The little hatha yoga I know I learned at the Sivananda Ashram in Rishikesh. The tuition was entirely free as it should be if one believes it to be a spiritual practice. Certainly not the cult of the body as one of the signs with sadhana advice had on it – Sleep separately (for married couples).
Sure – I think there are plenty of ashrams where some amount of traditional philosophy is imparted along with ha?ha yoga practice. But I’m intrigued here by the way some kinds of yoga practice have lost that entirely, making it a purely physical exercise. (I took a few yoga classes some years back, which were in that latter category as far as I could tell.) I sometimes hear people say “you can’t treat religion as a shopping cart,” picking and choosing the practices you like – but some people not only can and do, the practices seem to work very well for them.
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Two recent American news articles highlight the issue. First, the founders of Bikram yoga have recently been trying to make yoga into a competitive sport, even an Olympic sport – an approach which seems to stress an entirely physical approach to yoga, so that it is not different in kind from decathlon or beach volleyball.
Late as usual, but I thought I’d inform you (or remind you, if you knew about this already) that there was a hilarious Onion article several years back, parodizing this very topic.
Life really has a way of imitating the Onion, doesn’t it? When razor blade companies started introducing cartridges with two blades and then three, they ran an article about a company saying “F*** it, we’re going straight to five blades!” Sure enough, the five-blade razor came out within a year or two after the article.
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