Modern Yoga

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Modern yoga is the form of practice most of the world now means by the word: a system of physical postures, held and sequenced, often joined to breathing and relaxation, taught in studios and gyms across the globe. Its lineage to the older Indian traditions that carry the same name is real but partial, and that distance is the first thing to get clear.

In the classical account, set down in Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras around the early centuries CE, yoga is the stilling of the mind’s movements, and posture — āsana — is one of eight limbs, glossed there as little more than a steady, comfortable seat for meditation. The elaborate physical postures came later, with the medieval haṭha yoga of texts such as the Haṭhayogapradīpikā, a discipline of the body undertaken in the service of an interior, often tantric, goal: to master the breath and the subtle channels and rouse a latent energy up the spine. In neither tradition was the posture the point. It was a means, and usually a minor one.

The system now practised worldwide took shape mostly in the first half of the twentieth century. Its central figure was Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, who taught in the 1930s at the palace in Mysore, drawing on haṭha sources, indigenous wrestling and gymnastics, and — by the argument of recent scholarship — European physical-culture and women’s-exercise regimes then circulating in India. His pupils carried the work outward: B. K. S. Iyengar systematised posture and alignment, K. Pattabhi Jois built the vigorous flowing sequences later called Ashtanga, and Indra Devi helped open the practice to the West. The result spread first through a Westernising Indian milieu, and then far beyond it.

How much of this is ancient is exactly the contested question. The historian Mark Singleton has argued that the posture-centred practice is in large part a modern, transnational invention, a hybrid that reads its own newer movements back into the old texts; Elizabeth De Michelis traced a comparable modern lineage through Vivekananda and the Western occult and Theosophical currents that received Indian thought in the late nineteenth century. The claim is not that modern yoga is fraudulent — only that it is recent, and more European in its physical vocabulary than its self-image allows. Many practitioners and teachers hold the opposite: that the postures transmit an unbroken wisdom of great antiquity. The two readings name different things by continuity, and much of the literature turns on which one is meant.

What is not in dispute is the scale of the transformation. A discipline once pursued by a few, toward liberation, became a worldwide practice pursued by millions, often for health and calm — the spiritual frame retained, set aside, or quietly assumed, depending on the room. Whatever else it is, it is among the most successful exports of Indian religious culture, and one of the least understood.

→ In the library: Johnston — The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (1912) · Sinh — The Hathayogapradīpikā (1914)

→ Related: Theosophy