A county judge in San Diego CA has ruled that yoga is not always
religious (Washington Post, 2 July 2013). Parents in a San Diego school
district had complained that yoga is intrinsically intertwined with the Hindu religion
and that its practice in a public school setting violates the constitutional
separation of church and state. The court ruling means that these parents had
it wrong: it is possible to divorce yoga from Hinduism, and that is how the
local school authorities have gone about their yoga classes.
While yoga may be religious in some contexts, and then notably Hindu, it
can also be practised and taught purely for its benefits. Modern school
authorities see these benefits mostly in the form of strength, suppleness and
nervous relaxation, as well as combating aggressiveness and bullying.
Therapists might add the benefit of restoring or at least improving normalcy in
individuals afflicted with burn-out, nervous breakdown, certain complexes and
other mental disorders. Serious practitioners would invoke calmness,
renunciation, even Liberation (howsoever defined), as worthy goals for human
beings who are perfectly healthy from the beginning. But all of them would do
so without reference to Shiva or Ganesha or whichever God it is that Hindu
yogis invoke.
Yoga is intrinsically Hindu
This judgment is part of a broader struggle over the origins and nature
of yoga. Some Christians, apparently including the litigating parents from San
Diego, object that Yoga is intrinsically Hindu and that it serves as a conduit
for Hindu polytheistic God-worship and even for “evil Hindu social mores” such
as caste discrimination, arranged marriage and widow-burning. It is of
course also debated in how far these mores and this polytheism are bound up
with Hinduism, but it is universally agreed that at least as a system of
worship, Hinduism is different from Christianity. For the same reason, these
circles had in the past opposed Transcendental Meditation, a simplified form of
mantra meditation, for being obviously Hindu eventhough advertised as
“scientific”. They had hired specialized lawyers (or “cult busters”) to show
that the various Gurus who seduced Americans into yoga were salesmen of
Hinduism-based cults.
These Christians find odd allies in the Hindus who insist that yoga is
indeed naturally Hindu, and that the bead-counting and incense-waving and
greeting gestures and indeed prayers that Hindu yogis practise all come with
the Yoga package and cannot be divorced from it. They criticize American yoga
aficionados such as many showbiz stars and indeed the San Diego yoga
schoolteachers for reducing yoga to a fitness system without its cultural
roots.
Yoga is up for grabs
On the other side of the divide are those Hindus who say that yoga is
scientific and universal, so that it is only normal for it to take on local
cultural forms wherever it goes. The motorcar was invented in Germany, but few
people driving a Japanese car still remember this. The aeroplane was invented
in America, but this invention is now available to travelers all over the
world. The Chinese don’t put a sign “invented in America” on their planes, nor
do they pay intellectual property rights on them. Of course, Chinese textbooks
have a line or two on the aeroplane’s invention by the Wright brothers, and
that nod to American honour will suffice. As the late Bal Thackeray used
to say: “You cannot take the ‘national produce’ (swadeshi) policy too
far, for then Indians would have to do away with the light bulb.” So, Hindus should
be happy that Americans are willing to practise their yoga, and apart from a
historical detail of origins, India or Hinduism no longer come in the picture.
And this still is a neutral rendering of the viewpoint of a sizable
number of Hindus. We don’t even mention money-makers like Deepak Chopra who try
to obscure yoga’s Hindu origins in order to claim certain yoga techniques as
their own. Some yoga schools, whether manned by native Hindus or by
Christian-born Westerners, have patented their own brand name and techniques so
that nobody, and certainly not Hindu tradition, can claim these. This tendency
is strengthened by the attempt of some Hindus to deny a Hindu identity even to
the worldview they themselves are advertising, e.g. the Hare Krishnas worship
Krishna, a Hindu god par excellence, yet tell Western audiences that they are
not Hindu; or the Ramakrishna Mission, founded in the late 19th
century under the motto “Say with pride, we are Hindus”, now say that their
message is “universal” rather than “narrowly Hindu”.
Again these Hindus find odd allies in many Christians, both of the
lukewarm and of the activist kind. Lukewarm Christians as well as New Age
ex-Christians see yoga as a neutral and universal commodity. For them, it can
be practised as a fitness system without having any serious implications on
their worldview or religion. Just as the European colonizers used the compass
and gunpowder without bothering that these were Chinese inventions, American
yogis have taken yoga for its tangible benefits without bothering about its
Hindu origins. Even the Sanskrit names of the yoga exercises have been
translated, so that you can become an accomplished yogi without even being
reminded of its exotic origins.
Activist Christians, by contrast, admit that yoga is not religiously
neutral. They want to adapt yoga because of its inherent attractiveness and
transform it into “Christian yoga”. To them, yoga has indeed historically been
linked with Hinduism, but can be delinked from it and tied to another religion.
We have even reached the stage where some Christian centres and schools in
India offer classes in “Christian yoga”.
Yoga has Hindu roots
So, the San Diego verdict was a victory for lukewarm Hindus and
adaptable Christians, and a defeat for serious Hindus and doctrine-conscious
Christians. But what do we ourselves make of the issue?
First off, it is a matter of course that Yoga is Hindu. The word “Hindu”
is a very general term encompassing every Indian form of Pagan religion no
matter how old. It is therefore simply silly to say “Yoga is older than
Hinduism”, as salesman Deepak Chopra does. The question then becomes: whether
Yoga can be divorced from Hinduism and given a neutral universal identity, as
claimed by the San Diego yoga teachers, or even relinked to another religion,
as is claimed by the adepts of “Christian Yoga”.
A system of physical fitness, if it is only that, can certainly be
integrated in modern Western or purportedly global culture. The Shetashvatara
Upanishad already says, and the later Hatha Yoga classics more colourfully
assert, that the Yoga practitioner develops a healthy and lustrous body. They
even lure the readers into practice by intimating that one becomes irresistible
to the opposite sex – the very reason why most modern Americans take up Yoga.
Like the aeroplane or the light-bulb, a system of physical fitness can be
exported and inculturated, divested of its original couleur locale.
However, it is worth emphasizing that yoga, and even particularly hatha
yoga, does have Hindu roots, because this seemingly trivial knowledge is
now being challenged. A few academics have claimed that Chinese “internal
alchemy” (neidan) travelled overseas to coastal India and influenced
Indian Siddha yoga and Siddha medicine. A few techniques of hatha yoga
do seem similar to Daoist exercises from China. The influence has been posited
but by no means proven. I am willing to consider it probable, but even then it
was only an influence on a few exercises in a long-existing native
tradition. It is nobody’s case that the Rg-Vedic reference to “muni-s”,
wandering ascetics with ashes over their naked bodies (still recognizable as
the Naga Sadhu-s), or the Upanishadic glorification of the breath as the
key to consciousness and self-mastery, or Patañjali’s description of a whole
yoga system, is due to foreign influence.
Very recently, the American media have gone gaga over a theory claiming
that hatha yoga is very recent and is essentially a gift of the British
colonizers. This can of course not be said for the breathing exercises so
typical of hatha yoga, but many of the postures are said to be standard
exercises of British soldiers, or to be part of Western systems of gymnastics.
Even in this limited form, the claim is ridiculous. The essence of hatha-yogic
postures is relaxation and allowing a steadily-held pose to take its effect
over time. By contrast, Western gymnastics pride themselves on being “dynamic”,
on emphasizing movement and muscle strength. Further, a very physical
circumstance comes in the way: yogic exercises are mostly done on the floor. In
cold England, the floor is avoided, witness the generalized use of chairs and
of the “English” water closet. Any influence would have to be confined to the
standing exercises. At any rate, if at all there was Western influence, it can
never have been more than an influence touching the skin of an already old
native tradition.
But even hatha yoga sees its physical and breathing exercises
only as a means to a higher end: liberation. A fortiori, the ancient yoga
synthesized by Patañjali was totally geared towards liberation, howsoever
defined. The definition of the Buddha’s nirvana (“blowing out”, as of a burning
candle) is to get off from the wheel of reincarnations by stopping its motor,
viz. desire. Patañjali’s definition is less metaphysical: quieting the mind so
that it consciously rests in itself and is not absorbed by its usual objects.
It doesn’t matter whether you believe in reincarnation or an afterlife or
nothing at all: it suffices to let the Self rest in itself, right now. Whatever
liberation may be, it is definitely different from, and incompatible with
Christian salvation.
But this is a goal not pursued in most American yoga studios. They aim
to make singers better singers, caregivers better caregivers, workers better
workers. This has been done before: after the Buddhists had familiarized the
Chinese with meditation, some Confucians still rejected the Buddhist philosophy
of renunciation and liberation but embraced the practice of meditation, just to
"tune their instrument", to function better in society. You can do
this, but it is not the fullness of yoga. Also, all the Western therapeutic
adaptations of yoga, as a treatment of physical or mental ailments, are
designed to make a defective human being normal; while the original yoga was
meant to make normal people liberated. So, by commodifying yoga, Americans are
importing something from India, but not the whole package.
5 comments:
K. Elst: "First off, it is a matter of course that Yoga is Hindu. The word “Hindu” is a very general term encompassing every Indian form of Pagan religion no matter how old. It is therefore simply silly to say “Yoga is older than Hinduism”, as salesman Deepak Chopra does."
That strikes me as circular reasoning, Mr. Elst. 'Hindu' is indeed a very general (and late) term that encompasses the various forms precisely because the impulse and process of encompassing came later. Since there is considerable evidence that significant parts of subsequent yoga practices can be traced to very ancient, non-Aryan practitioners, there's nothing silly about suspecting yoga arose long before the 'big tent' of Hinduism subsumed it.
Like a broken clock, even Mr. Chopra is right from time to time.
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Real yoga is all about the Hindu religion taught by Hindus! Today's yoga is all bogus sadly permitted and even encouraged by weak Indians (they often avoid the word "Hindu").
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