Is This Yoga?

Concepts, Histories, and the Complexities of Modern Practice

Anya Foxen, Christa Kuberry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781138390058
• eBook ISBN: 9780429750588
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Hinduism

This book provides a rigorously researched, critically comparative introduction to yoga. Is This Yoga? Concepts, Histories, and the Complexities of Contemporary Practice recognizes the importance of contemporary understandings of yoga and, at the same time, provides historical context and complexity to modern and pre-modern definitions of yogic ideas and practices. Approaching yoga as a vast web of concepts, traditions, social interests, and embodied practices, it raises questions of knowledge, identity, and power across time and space, including the dynamics of "East" and "West." The text is divided into three main sections: thematic concepts; histories; and topics in modern practice.

This accessible guide is essential reading for undergraduate students approaching the topic for the first time, as well as yoga teachers, teacher training programs, casual and devoted practitioners, and interested non-practitioners.

Part I
Concepts

1
What is yoga?

When we think about defining terms, our first impulse is often to consult a dictionary. Actually, this is a pretty helpful exercise where yoga is concerned, though not because it helps us arrive at anything like a simple or even useable definition. Here is the first half of the entry for “yoga” in the Monier-Williams Sanskrit-English Dictionary, which has served as an essential reference for scholars of South Asia in the English-speaking world since it was first published in 1850:

Yoga:

The act of yoking, joining, attaching, harnessing, putting to (of horses); a yoke, team, vehicle, conveyance; employment, use, application, performance; equipping or arraying (of an army); fixing (of an arrow on the bow-string); putting on (of armour); a remedy, cure; a means, expedient, device, way, manner, method; a supernatural means, charm, incantation, magical art; a trick, stratagem, fraud; undertaking, business; acquisition, gain, profit, wealth, property; occasion, opportunity; any junction, union, combination, contact; to agree, consent, acquiesce in anything; mixing of various materials, mixture; partaking of, possessing; connection, relation; in consequence of, on account of, by reason of, according to; putting together, arrangement, disposition, regular succession; fitting together, fitness, propriety, suitability; exertion, endeavour, zeal, diligence, industry, care, attention; application or concentration of the thought, abstract contemplation, meditation, (esp.) self-concentration, abstract meditation and mental abstraction practised as a system (as taught by Patañjali and called the Yoga philosophy); […]

Monier-Williams does then go on to list several more “sectarian” meanings of the word, belonging to many of the groups we’ll survey in the course of this book, like the “the union of the individual soul with the universal soul” (the Pāśupatas), “the union of soul with matter” (Sāṅkhya), and “contact or mixing with the outer world” (the Jains). The convention here, like in many dictionaries, is to list the most common usages for a word first, and then move towards the increasingly obscure.¹ So, as we can see, the most common meanings of “yoga” actually have very little to do with the kind of practices, be they physical or spiritual or both, that we’ll be discussing in this book. Indeed, if there is a connection to such generic usages to be found here, that connection is first and foremost figurative and metaphorical.

The fact of the matter is that “yoga” is a very basic and generic kind of word. It derives from the Sanskrit root √yuj, which means something like “to connect,” “to join,” or, in a more applied sense, “to yoke.” In fact, our English word “yoke” is a true cognate—meaning that it derives from the same common linguistic root. And so, if we want to understand why the meanings of yoga, even the more technical ones, have been historically so diverse, a helpful starting point is precisely to think about the basic and generic nature of the word itself and how this might lend itself to all sorts of imaginative applications. The simplest tools are often the ones that can be used for the greatest variety of purposes.

English speakers don’t tend to use “yoke” as robustly but, as yoga scholar David Gordon White has suggested, perhaps we could instead think of a word like “rig.”² Potentially functioning as either a noun or a verb, “rig” has a similar kind of range of meaning to “yoga.” A rig can be a structure or a device, as in a “sailing rig” or an “oil rig.” It can also be the act of assembling this structure, or really of assembling anything, as in “to rig the sailboat” or “to rig up a tent.” You can even “rig an election,” similar to the use of “yoga” to mean an illusion or trick.

So, imagine that, a few millennia ago, there emerged a spiritual practice called “rigging” based on, let’s say, the metaphorical likening of the complex arrangement of ropes, cables, and chains necessary to hold together the components of a sailing vessel to the complex and systematic self-discipline needed to achieve a particular spiritual state. Fast-forward two and a half millennia or so and, on the other side of the world, now you have people heading into fitness studios to get themselves “rigged up.” That, essentially, is the story of “yoga.”

But of course this is still all very general. Even if we’re talking specifically about spiritual practices, these still tend to be pretty diverse. Throughout human history, people have engaged in all sorts of spiritual disciplines to achieve all sorts of goals, depending on how it is that they imagine the universe to operate, what they imagine the highest purpose of this universe to be, and so on. If yoga is about “yoking,” then we might start by looking at the vast variety of things that people might have historically wanted to yoke or bring together in the context of South Asian worldviews. There we find that “yoga” describes the union of the individual soul with the absolute, but also to the union of one person’s consciousness and will with that of another, or else (perhaps most literally) to the union of warriors to the celestial chariots that were believed to carry them into the afterlife after a particularly glorious death on the field of battle. Add to this the fact that, as we’ll discuss imminently, there are things that we might want to call “yoga” in hindsight—maybe because they shared some crucial commonality with later yoga practices or eventually evolved into things that are called “yoga”—but that were not called this at the time. In other words, pinning down the history of yoga is very messy.

In the end, there’s a two-fold trick to wrapping your head around yoga (or anything else historical). The first step is to realize that people are people. Meaning, regardless of time and place, human society is complicated. It’s colored by diversity and disagreements, social and political and above all economic interests, power grabs, noble intentions, and the vast distance between ideals and their lived realities. From this perspective, to imagine that there was a time in the golden past when everyone sat down in perfect isolation from the hustle-and-bustle of daily life, read a single text (say, the Yoga Sūtras), understood it perfectly, practiced it to the letter, and mutually agreed to call this “yoga”—well, it just isn’t very realistic.

The second step, though, is to recognize that people can and do have radically different worldviews. Especially when separated by time and place. Think about it: a few hundred years ago, you could have lived your life thinking that the sun revolved around the earth. This would have been perfectly rational and supported by the day’s most advanced science. So, from this perspective, to project our modern understanding of bodies, minds, and everything in between onto pre-modern yoga texts and their practitioners isn’t very realistic either. If we’re going to understand yoga practices, we have to think about them in the context of their culture and their time. This includes recognizing variability and change, as well as letting go of the notion that ancient practices are somehow more authentic or that modern practices are somehow more rational.

Given all of this, it should come as no surprise that not only has there never been a universally agreed upon definition of yoga, but yoga practices (the entire spectrum of them) have continuously changed and evolved in tandem with the culture around them. So, when we attempt to define yoga, we can take one of two fundamental approaches. We can really double down on the historically and contextually variable meanings of yoga and try to trace the intricate relationships between these. How do groups define the methods and goals of yoga differently based on their specific understanding of the world? How do they interact and respond to one another based on these different definitions and understandings? How do the usages and applications of yoga change through these interactions? Otherwise, we can look for common trends. What, in the end, seems to stay more or less constant across time and space and context? Is there some shared story or set of assumptions that tends to characterize “yoga” wherever it pops up? For our part, we’ll be doing some of both.

Before we dive deeper into various ways or defining yoga, though, one caveat: we won’t really be focusing on postural practice. That is, the idea of moving the body or putting it into different poses, with which the casual Western observer might be most familiar. After all, the idea of moving the body is not in and of itself very interesting. We do this all the time. What’s interesting is why we move the body in specific ways, and in order to get at the “why” we have to (for instance) consider what’s going on inside the body. What is putting the body in one pose or another, moving it this way or that supposed to be doing? And towards what purpose? In other words, if we want to understand the specifics of yoga practice, postural or otherwise, it’s these framing questions that we have to answer first.

To this end, let’s look at some of the traditional ways in which South Asian texts have talked about and defined yoga. From this, we’ll move to examine a few modern scholarly definitions. And finally, at the end of the chapter, we’ll propose a few helpful frameworks of our own.

Traditional definitions

Historically, Indian sources have tended to use the word “yoga” to designate the goal of a certain practice, rather than the practice itself. That is, traditionally, one doesn’t “do yoga,” one achieves yoga by doing some other designated thing or set of things. Sometimes, of course, these two ideas can overlap, insofar as the state of yoga is described as the successful accomplishment of some actionable goal.

One of the first places the term “yoga” becomes linked with a body of mental (meditation) and physical (asceticism) practices is in the early Upaniṣads, a set of mystical texts mostly composed between the 5th century BCE and the 1st century CE. The Kaṭha Upaniṣad (6.11), for instance, tells us: “They consider yoga to be firm restraint of the senses. Then one becomes undistracted, for yoga is the arising and the passing away.”³ The same text famously compares the human mind-body organism to a chariot, wherein the Self is the rider, driven by an intellect, which grasps the reigns of the mind yoked to the senses or horses. So, in this case, we can very clearly see the connection between “yoga” in its more generic sense as hitching up a chariot and its more figurative sense as restraining the senses. A well-yoked mind is a yoga.

Somewhat similarly, the Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali, a famous compilation of aphoristic verses probably dated to sometime between 325 and 425 CE, tells us that “Yoga is the suppression of the fluctuations of the mind” (yogaś-citta-vṛttinirodhaḥ, 1.2). The traditional commentary for the text’s opening verse also equates yoga with the state of samādhi or completion, wherein the mind is single-pointed in such a way as to reveal reality in true nature, thereby cutting off psychological afflictions, loosening the bonds of karma, and creating the proper conditions for the full stilling of cognition.⁴ This definition, like the previous, focuses on the mechanics of the mind, or its internal rigging, so to speak.

Other definitions treat yoga as a way of connecting some aspect of oneself to something else. For example, the Pañcārtha Bhāṣya, a 4th-century CE commentary on the earlier Pāśupata Sūtra, specifies that “in this system, yoga is the union of the self and the Lord” (1.1.43).⁵ The Lord, in this case, is God and specifically Śiva. Yoga, then, is the state of being connected to Śiva. Notably, the Pāśupatas, to whose tradition this text b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Guide to Sanskrit pronunciation
• Note on transliteration
• Part I Concepts
• Part II Histories
• Part III Modern practice
• Glossary
• Index