Yoga

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Yoga is the name in Indian thought for a family of disciplines that work on body, breath, and mind together, directed at a freedom the traditions call liberation. The Sanskrit word descends from a root yuj, and the question of what that root means is already the first of the school’s disputes. In its ordinary sense yuj is “to yoke, to join” — the same root, through the Indo-European inheritance, that gives English yoke and Latin iungere — and the metaphor reaches in two directions at once: the harnessing in of the unruly senses, and the joining of the practitioner to the divine. But the commentators on the classical system read the root differently, as yuj samādhau, “to concentrate,” so that yoga is less a binding-together than a gathering of the scattered mind to a single point. The choice of etymology is not idle. It marks the divide between the schools that make yoga a union and the schools that make it an isolation — between joining and unyoking — and that divide runs through the whole history of the word.

The roots before the system

The discipline is older than any text that systematizes it, and its earliest strata are correspondingly hard to fix. The seals of the Indus Valley cities include a horned figure seated with bent knees and heels drawn together that early archaeologists read as a “proto-Shiva” and lord of beasts — the so-called Pashupati seal — and which has since been pressed into service as the oldest image of a yogic posture. The reading is seductive and weak. The Indus script remains undeciphered, the gap between that civilization and the first textual yoga is on the order of a thousand years, and the seated figure may be a deity, a ritual functionary, or a scene with no relation to later practice at all; the honest verdict is that the seal cannot bear the weight placed on it. What can be traced with confidence begins later, in the speculative texts that close the Vedic corpus. The older Upanishads already carry a vocabulary of inward binding and concentration, and the Katha Upanishad gives the tradition one of its enduring images: the self as the rider in a chariot, in F. Max Müller’s rendering, with “the body to be the chariot, the intellect (buddhi) the charioteer, and the mind the reins,” while “the senses they call the horses, the objects of the senses their roads.” The man whose mind is never firmly held has senses like vicious horses; the disciplined one holds them like good horses, and reaches the place from which there is no return to birth. Here, before any technical system, is the whole architecture in miniature — a self distinct from the apparatus it rides in, and a labor of restraint by which it is brought under control.

The same word widens enormously in the Bhagavad-Gita, the dialogue set into the Mahabharata, where Krishna uses yoga to name several distinct paths to the same release: the yoga of action performed without attachment to its fruit, the yoga of loving devotion, the yoga of knowledge. The Gita does not yet present these as a fixed scheme, but it supplies the raw material from which the later tradition would assemble its map of the margas, the great roads to liberation. The library holds Kashinath Trimbak Telang’s 1882 translation of the Gita in the Sacred Books of the East, the philological standard of its era.

Patanjali and the eight limbs

The text that gave the word its classical shape is the Yoga Sutras attributed to Patanjali, a set of fewer than two hundred terse aphorisms in four chapters — on absorption, on practice, on the powers that arise from it, and on liberation — that most scholarship now places around 400 CE, drawn together from older material rather than composed at a stroke. The work opens by defining its subject in a single line. In Charles Johnston’s 1912 reading, held in the library here, “Union, spiritual consciousness, is gained through control of the versatile psychic nature” — yoga is the stilling of the turnings of the mind, and what remains when those turnings cease is the aim of everything that follows. The text and the figure behind it are treated in detail under Patanjali and the Yoga Sutras; what concerns the discipline as a whole is the path the Sutras lay out, the ashtanga or “eight limbs.”

These are, in Sanskrit, yama, niyama, asana, pranayama, pratyahara, dharana, dhyana, and samadhi — in Johnston’s English, “the Commandments, the Rules, right Poise, right Control of the life-force, Withdrawal, Attention, Meditation, Contemplation.” The first two are ethical: the restraints (non-violence, truthfulness, non-stealing, continence, non-grasping) and the observances (purity, contentment, austerity, study, surrender to the Lord). The third is posture, asana, which the Sutras treat almost in passing — a single line asking only for a seat that is steady and at ease — a point worth holding against the modern weight the word now carries. The fourth, the regulation of the breath, is treated under pranayama. With the fifth, the senses are drawn back from their objects, and with the last three the work turns wholly inward: concentration fixes the mind on a single point, meditation sustains an unbroken flow of attention toward it, and samadhi is the absorbed state in which, in the system’s own terms, the distinction between the knower and the known falls away and the seer rests in its own nature. The limbs are not so much a ladder as a set of supports that purify and steady attention; the Sutras catalog, soberly, the extraordinary powers that arise from deep concentration, and then warn that those powers are themselves obstacles to the one thing that matters.

The darshana: Samkhya and Yoga

Within Indian philosophy, Patanjali’s system is one of the six orthodox darshanas, the schools that accept the authority of the Veda, and it does not stand alone. It is paired with Samkhya, the oldest of the speculative schools, whose dualist metaphysics it adopts almost entire. Samkhya divides all reality into two eternal, irreducible principles: purusha, pure consciousness, inactive and attributeless, a mere witness; and prakriti, primordial nature, unconscious and ceaselessly active, the material cause of everything including mind and intellect. Bondage is the misidentification of the witness with the apparatus it witnesses — the self taking itself to be the body, the emotions, the thinking mind. Liberation, kaivalya, is therefore not union but its opposite: the “isolation” or unyoking of consciousness from the matter it had been mistaken for, won through the discriminating knowledge that the two were never one.

Yoga takes this framework over but adds to it a single decisive element that Samkhya, in its classical form, refuses: Ishvara, the Lord — a special purusha untouched by the bondage that holds the rest. The handbooks summarize the relation by describing Yoga as the Samkhya school with God added, and the formula is exact in both halves: the metaphysics is Samkhya’s; the practical discipline and the devotional opening to Ishvara are Yoga’s own. Here the etymological dispute returns with full force: on the Samkhya-Yoga reading, the goal is precisely an un-yoking, the isolation of consciousness, which is why the school can name its liberation kaivalya, “aloneness.” The ultimate reality toward which the devotional and Vedantic readings instead direct the practitioner — Brahman, the single ground in which the self is not isolated but found to be already one with the absolute — belongs to a different grammar, and the schools reach their ends by different maps.

The four roads

Out of the Gita’s several yogas and the later commentarial tradition, Indian thought assembled a scheme of four great paths, the margas, suited to different temperaments and answering to the same liberation by different means. Jnana yoga is the path of knowledge — discrimination and inquiry, the via negativa of stripping away everything the self is not until what remains is recognized. Bhakti yoga is the path of devotion, the loving self-surrender to a personal God that the Gita and the later devotional movements make central. Karma yoga is the path of action, work performed as offering and without attachment to its fruit, so that the very activity that binds becomes the instrument of release; its mechanism is the law of karma itself, turned against its own momentum. And raja yoga, the “royal” yoga, is the name later tradition gives to Patanjali’s eightfold discipline of mental control — the path of meditative technique. The four are usually presented as parallel rather than ranked, alternative roads up one mountain, though every school in practice weights them according to its own metaphysics. This fourfold map is less a datum of the ancient texts than a synthesis that reaches its familiar form late, and it owes much of its modern currency to a single nineteenth-century teacher, whose lectures gave each road a book of its own.

Hatha and the subtle body

The medieval period turned the discipline toward the body with a thoroughness the Sutras barely anticipate. Between roughly the eleventh and fifteenth centuries, in the world of the tantric ascetics — the Nath yogis and the Siddhas above all — there arose the tradition of hatha yoga, the yoga of “force,” whose classic manual, the Hathayogapradipika of Svatmarama, is held in the library here in Pancham Sinh’s 1914 rendering. Where Patanjali gives posture a single line, hatha yoga makes the physical body the leading instrument: cleansings, postures held until the body becomes steady, breath-retentions, and the seals and locks that close off the body’s openings.

Behind these practices stands a map of a subtle physiology that the tradition takes as a real description of the body’s hidden architecture. The texts describe nadis, channels through which a vital breath, prana, moves; centers ranged along the axis of the spine, often counted as chakras; and kundalini, a coiled latent power resting at the base of the spine. The work of hatha yoga is to purify the channels, arrest the ordinary restless movement of the breath, and rouse the kundalini so that it ascends through the central channel to the crown — an ascent the texts identify with the meditative absorption of samadhi, and with liberation itself. The postures, the breath-disciplines, and the locks are the means to that interior event, never ends in themselves. This is the architecture of the system; its operative detail — which channel, which lock, which retention — belongs to the manuals and to the lineages that transmit them under instruction, and the texts themselves warn that the work, done wrongly, disorders rather than heals.

The word travels

The discipline that the modern world received was shaped at the meeting of this long Indian inheritance with the West, and it was substantially remade in the passage. The Theosophical movement, founded in 1875, absorbed the vocabulary of yoga early and supplied a Western audience already primed to read Indian non-dualism as the inner core of a universal wisdom; Charles Johnston, whose translation the library holds, worked squarely within that milieu and read the Sutras through its esoteric lens. The decisive figure, though, was Swami Vivekananda, whose address to the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago in September 1893, and whose subsequent American lecture tours, did more than any single source to fix the meaning of “yoga” in the Western mind. His four small books — Karma Yoga, Bhakti Yoga, Jnana Yoga, and above all Raja Yoga of 1896 — gave the fourfold scheme of paths its enduring popular form and recast Patanjali’s discipline as a “science” of the inner life, an empirical method whose results any practitioner could verify. His collected works are held in the library here.

What Vivekananda carried west was an asana-free yoga of meditation and self-realization; the posture-centered practice now most familiar by the name is a later and largely separate formation, treated under modern yoga. It took shape mainly in the first half of the twentieth century around Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, who taught in the 1930s at the palace at Mysore and drew on hatha sources together with indigenous Indian physical culture and the European gymnastic and women’s-exercise regimes then circulating in colonial India. His pupils — B. K. S. Iyengar, who systematized alignment, K. Pattabhi Jois, who built the vigorous flowing sequences later called Ashtanga, and Indra Devi, who carried the practice to Hollywood — made the discipline a global one, pursued now by millions, often for health and calm, with the older soteriology retained, set aside, or quietly assumed depending on the room.

Western esotericism has long reached for yoga as evidence of a shared inner discipline beneath the world’s religions, setting the samadhi of Patanjali beside the contemplative union of the Christian mystics and the gnosis of the Western tradition. Yet each system means something exact by its terms and reaches its goal by its own map, and the very word yoga carries the difference, naming at once a yoking-together and an unyoking-apart — a binding of the rider to his road in one school, a freeing of the rider from it in another. No single practice was handed down intact; the word was taken up again and again and refitted to new ends, its older senses surviving, half-buried, inside the newer ones — the chariot of the Katha Upanishad dismantled and reassembled across every later map of attention the discipline went on to draw.

Scholarship and the critical texts

The modern study of yoga has been transformed in the last two decades by historians who treat the tradition’s texts and its modern reinvention with equal rigor.

• David Gordon White, The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali: A Biography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), in the Lives of Great Religious Books series, is the indispensable account of the text’s fortunes. White argues that the Yoga Sutras fell into relative obscurity for some seven centuries, from roughly the twelfth to the nineteenth, before Vivekananda and the Theosophists revived it as the supposed master-key to yoga — a status, he shows, it acquired only in the past few decades. https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691143774/the-yoga-sutra-of-patanjali
• Edwin F. Bryant, The Yoga Sutras of Patañjali: A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary (New York: North Point Press / Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), the standard scholarly English edition, gives each sutra in Sanskrit, transliteration, and translation, with a commentary that draws on the traditional commentators across a millennium and a half. Bryant is also the author of the dedicated entry on the Sutras in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which defines yoga in Patanjali’s own terms as the stilling of the states of the citta. https://iep.utm.edu/yoga/
• Elizabeth De Michelis, A History of Modern Yoga: Patañjali and Western Esotericism (London: Continuum, 2004), established the analytic frame for the modern transformation, reading Vivekananda’s 1896 Raja Yoga as the founding text of “Modern Yoga” and tracing its debts to mesmerism, New Thought, and the Theosophical and Brahmo-reform currents of the late nineteenth century. https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/history-of-modern-yoga-9780826487728/
• Mark Singleton, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), is the foundational study of postural yoga, arguing that the asana-centered practice is a twentieth-century synthesis crystallized at Krishnamacharya’s Mysore school out of hatha sources, Indian physical culture, and European gymnastics — and emphasizing that the yoga Vivekananda brought west was itself posture-free. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/yoga-body-9780195395341
• James Mallinson and Mark Singleton, Roots of Yoga (London: Penguin Classics, 2017), is the major sourcebook for the premodern tradition, gathering and translating the primary texts of yoga’s first two millennia and dismantling the assumption of a single continuous lineage. https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/186891/roots-of-yoga-by-mallinson-james-and-mark-singleton/9780241253045

The public-domain translations the library hosts are themselves documents of this history as well as windows onto the texts. Charles Johnston’s Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (New York, 1912) reads the aphorisms through the Theosophical idiom of its day; Pancham Sinh’s Hathayogapradipika (Allahabad, 1914) is among the earliest full English renderings of the hatha manual; Vivekananda’s Complete Works preserve the lectures that fixed yoga in the Western imagination; F. Max Müller’s Upanishads in the Sacred Books of the East and K. T. Telang’s Bhagavadgita carry the older textual roots from which the discipline grew.

→ In the library: The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (Johnston, 1912) · The Hathayogapradipika (Sinh, 1914) · The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda (1924) · The Upanishads (Müller, SBE I) · The Bhagavadgītā (Telang, SBE VIII, 1882)

→ Related: Gnosis · Ganges · Theosophy · Patanjali · Yoga Sutras Of Patanjali · Hatha Yoga · Modern Yoga · Pranayama · Brahman · Karma · Meditation · Proto Samkhya Pre Classical Samkhya · Swami Vivekananda · Bhagavad Gita