Modern Yoga

← Encyclopedia

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.

What the word once meant

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 — citta-vṛtti-nirodha — and posture, āsana, is one of eight limbs of a graded path. The text grants it a single terse line: the seat should be steady and at ease. That is the whole prescription. Āsana there is not a repertoire of shapes but the precondition for sitting still long enough to practise the inner limbs — breath-restraint, the withdrawal of the senses, concentration, meditation, and the absorptive states that crown the system. The body is settled so that the mind can be worked. Nothing in the Sūtras asks the practitioner to move.

The elaborate physical postures came later, with the medieval haṭha yoga of texts such as the Haṭhayogapradīpikā — Svatmarama’s fifteenth-century “Light on Hatha Yoga,” held in the library here in Pancham Sinh’s 1914 rendering — a discipline of the body undertaken in the service of an interior, often tantric, goal. The hatha practitioner purifies the channels (nāḍī) through which the vital breath moves, masters breath itself, and rouses a latent power coiled at the base of the spine so that it ascends the central channel to the crown — an ascent the texts equate with liberation. Here the body takes the leading part: postures, breath-retentions, cleansings, and the locks and seals that close off its openings. Yet even here the posture is instrumental. The āsana of the hatha corpus is the apparatus of a soteriology, a means of undoing the hold of birth and death. In neither tradition was the posture the point. It was a means, and usually a minor one — a fact the modern practice quietly inverts.

The making of the modern system

The system now practiced worldwide took shape mostly in the first half of the twentieth century, and its central figure was Tirumalai Krishnamacharya (1888–1989). Summoned to Mysore by the maharaja Krishnaraja Wadiyar IV, a patron of physical culture as of music and Sanskrit learning, Krishnamacharya ran the Palace Yogashala from 1933, teaching boys of the royal household a dynamic, athletic āsana practice unlike anything in the classical record. He drew on hatha sources he could cite chapter and verse; but he also drew, by the argument of recent scholarship, on indigenous wrestling and physical-culture movements, and on the European and Scandinavian gymnastic regimes — the women’s-exercise systems and the “primitive gymnastics” of the Dane Niels Bukh among them — that circulated through colonial India’s schools, armies, and nationalist revival in the 1920s and thirties. The flowing, linked sequences, the count and the jump, the postures held for strength rather than for sitting: much of this vocabulary belonged to the global culture of bodily exercise as much as to any paramparā.

His pupils carried the work outward, and each branch of the inheritance bears the marks of its founder. B. K. S. Iyengar (1918–2014) systematized posture and alignment, codifying a precision practice in Light on Yoga (1966) and building an institute at Pune; his name became a method. K. Pattabhi Jois (1915–2009) preserved and propagated the vigorous, breath-linked flowing sequences he had learned at Mysore, the form later called Ashtanga, and from the 1970s drew a devoted following of Western students to the southern city. Indra Devi (1899–2002), a Latvian-born actress who became the first prominent woman and first prominent Westerner to study with Krishnamacharya, opened a Hollywood studio in 1948 and taught the practice to a film-colony clientele, an early hinge between the Mysore room and the Western market. The result spread first through a Westernizing Indian milieu, and then far beyond it — into the studio, the gym, the corporate wellness program, and a global industry.

The contested antiquity

How much of this is ancient is exactly the contested question, and it is the question that organizes the scholarship. The historian Mark Singleton, in Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice (Oxford University Press, 2010), argues that the posture-centered practice is in large part a modern, transnational invention — a hybrid assembled in dialogue with British and Scandinavian gymnastics, the international physical-culture and bodybuilding movements, women’s stretching regimes, and selectively reinterpreted hatha material, then read back into the old texts as if it had always been there. On Singleton’s reckoning, the contemporary āsana form is a twentieth-century synthesis crystallized at the Mysore palace, not the unbroken descent of a posture tradition; and crucially, the yoga that Swami Vivekananda carried west in the 1890s was almost entirely āsana-free.

Elizabeth De Michelis had laid much of the groundwork earlier, in A History of Modern Yoga: Patañjali and Western Esotericism (Continuum, 2004), the book that opened the field to sustained academic study. She traced a modern lineage running through Vivekananda’s 1896 Raja Yoga — which, she argued, reconfigured the Yoga Sūtras along the lines of an emerging occultistic, secularized, individualist religiosity — and through the Western currents that had prepared the audience for it: the Theosophical movement of Helena Blavatsky, the reformist Neo-Vedānta that issued from Ramakrishna’s circle and the Brahmo Samaj, and the New Thought and mesmeric substrate of late-nineteenth-century Western metaphysical religion. De Michelis proposed a four-fold typology of the modern phenomenon — psychosomatic, meditational, postural, and denominational — that remains a working vocabulary for the field. Within it, the postural form most people now call yoga is one branch among several, and a late one.

The claim common to both is not that modern yoga is fraudulent. It is that the posture practice is recent, and more European in its physical vocabulary than its self-image allows — a serious, coherent, often profound discipline, but a new one wearing an old name. Many practitioners and teachers hold the opposite: that the postures transmit an unbroken wisdom of great antiquity, that the texts of hatha yoga describe what the modern body still does, and that the colonial-era borrowings were superficial overlays on a living tradition that absorbed and survived them. The two readings name different things by continuity. One looks at the shapes and the breath and the lineage of teacher to pupil and sees an inheritance; the other looks at the sequences, the alignment cues, the count, the gymnastic frame, and sees a modern composition. Much of the literature turns on which is meant, and the honest position holds both in view rather than settling it: the genealogy of sources and the felt experience of transmission are not the same kind of claim, and neither is refuted by the other.

Scholarship and sources

The modern academic study of yoga is, by the standards of religious-studies fields, young — De Michelis’s 2004 monograph is conventionally taken as its inauguration, and Singleton’s 2010 study as the work that made the “modern synthesis” thesis mainstream. The two are best read together: De Michelis reconstructs the genealogy of ideas, through Vivekananda and Western esotericism, that gave modern yoga its philosophical self-understanding; Singleton reconstructs the genealogy of bodies, through physical culture and gymnastics, that gave it its postures. Singleton’s later collaboration with James Mallinson, the source-anthology Roots of Yoga (Penguin, 2017), set the premodern textual record on a firmer footing and complicated the simple opposition, recovering far more bodily practice in the older corpus than the early invention-from-scratch framing allowed.

Behind the modern scholarship stand the primary texts the modern movement reread. Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras reached the early-twentieth-century English reader through translations such as Charles Johnston’s of 1912, held in the library here; the Haṭhayogapradīpikā through Pancham Sinh’s 1914 edition, likewise held here. These are the very kinds of accessible Western-language editions — esoterically framed, addressed to a seeker rather than a philologist — through which the practice’s modern interpreters met the classical record, and reading them alongside the critical scholarship is the cleanest way to feel the distance between the two yogas.

The scale of the transformation

What is not in dispute is the scale of the change. 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. The same hour might carry, for one body in the class, a path toward the absorptive stillness Patañjali named; for the next, a back regimen; for the next, a community and a discipline that asks nothing doctrinal at all. The lineage that runs through Vivekananda and the Vedānta missions, through Paramahansa Yogananda and the integral synthesis of Aurobindo, and through Krishnamacharya’s Mysore room, fed a single broad river that carried Hindu contemplative vocabulary into the everyday speech of places that had never heard of citta-vṛtti-nirodha. 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 · Hatha Yoga · Yoga · Yoga Sutras Of Patanjali · Patanjali · Swami Vivekananda · Pranayama · Neo Vedanta · Integral Yoga Aurobindo · Paramahansa Yogananda · Meditation · Hinduism