The Zinal conference

 

On 23 to 29 august 2014, the European Union of Yoga organized its 41nd annual conference in Zinal, Switzerland. The village of Zinal, originally just a hutment for cowherds, lies between the high mountains in the Navizance river valley at 1600+ metres. It is now a tourist village for skiers and mountain walkers, though the obligatory Swiss mountain architecture for all the houses still gives it an atmosphere that city-dwellers like us find very charming. In Europe it is about as close as you can get to the heights of the ashrams in the Himalayas.

 

The Union of Yoga

The board meeting only brought together the bigwigs delegated by the constituent national federations. They elected a new president, and other such official matters that need not concern us here.

Since I had gone unprepared and in complete ignorance of what to expect, I was pleasantly surprised to meet quite a few people I knew, such as Anuradha & Vinayachandra from Bangalore, who sometimes come to lecture at Ghent University, and Dr. Jacques Vigne, with whom I had corresponded but whom I had never met. There were sessions in English, French, German, Dutch and Spanish. Since such a small village does not have the infrastructure for holding all the sessions in one building, much walking between sessions was inevitable but made a pleasant closer interaction with the mountainous terrain inevitable.  

Nearly 400 yoga practitioners participated. They stood out as good-humoured and friendly. They easily recognized one another by their carrying a yoga mat. They all had some years of practice behind them and proved it by an excellent physical condition. The mountains were a fitting environment for them, for they were upright people striving upwards and pointing to heaven. Perhaps outside scholars might want to criticize their defective or controverted intellectual understanding of certain matters, but there is just no doubt about their earnestness and sincerity of purpose. For me they were the real heroes of the gathering, for the positive atmosphere they created lifted me above some of my limitations.


The conference theme was Patañjali's understanding of kriya yoga, i.e. tapas, svadhyaya and Ishvarapranidhana. For Western yoga circles, yoga mainly means the Yoga Sutra, sometimes with some Bhagavad Gita and Kashmiri Shaivism thrown in. Tapas, "heat", cognate to the root of "temperature", is rather straightforward in meaning: discipline, asceticism. Svadhyaya, literally "self-study", means in contemporary Indian usage the study of sacred texts, which was all new to many participants. However, it is also used in the sense of "focusing on a mantra". Ishvarapranidhana, currently always interpreted in a devotional and theistic sense, is rather controversial among specialists. Jacques Vigne made a convincing case that it means "immersion in aum", "surrender to the sound of silence".

In Europe, yoga means primarily hatha (“power”) yoga, i.e. asanas and pranayama. Though meant as a basis for meditation (and the teachers here mostly focused on meditation), the general usage of the word “yoga” tends to leave out the very essence of what constitutes yoga. On the other hand, a grounding in hatha yoga implies that those who take up meditation have already proven their commitment in the non-negotiable way of getting their bodies in shape. Moreover, while asanas are only a more recent support of meditation, one should not underestimate them. It remains amazing how the dedicated practice of asana can swiftly weed out bothersome mental attitudes like low self-esteem, fickleness, irritability, slothfulness etc. and get the mind ready for meditation. Some so-called spiritual activities may be stratospheric, but disciplining the body and the mind is very down-to-earth.


The notion of "liberation" (moksha, mukti, nirvana) was practically absent from the discourse. In India, I have often noticed that yoga gurus are treated like some kind of different species: they are liberated, we are not, we are still tied to the wheel of reincarnation. Here, most people were dedicated to their practice but not goal-oriented towards "liberation", nor was anyone present treated as "liberated". Yoga has always had an array of different goals. Originally, it was probably aimed at acquiring magical powers, and "yogi" was another word for "magic worker". Patañjali was the best-known representative of a movement of purification which, in terms of the Sankhya philosophy, clearly directed yoga practice to the goal of kaivalya, "isolation" (of consciousness from nature), i.e. concentrating consciousness in itself, liberated from all contents. From almost the beginning, this goal got fused with the doctrine of reincarnation: the end result of meditation is the stopping of the wheel of reincarnation. From about 1000 BCE, the Nath Yogis developed hatha yoga with the goal of sharpening the body, but with the goal of making it more fit for meditation. Today the beautiful people in Hollywood and such places have taken hatha yoga as a goal in itself, with no more profound goal than to get better muscle tonus or more appealing buttocks.  


But the use of yoga for goals other than liberation, nowadays criticized by traditional Hindus as a Western distortion, has a long history. When Buddhism became established in China, Confucian literati mocked Buddhist notions of reincarnation and liberation, but appreciated the art of meditation, which they integrated in their daily duty-oriented routine as jingzuo, "peaceful sitting", sort of "tuning their instrument" before going out into the world to perform their duty. If yoga is good, then it is good, no matter what the ultimate benefit. As a youngster, I practiced aikido, and I remember Kanetsuka sensei advocating the practice of zazen ("sitting meditation", sad-dhyana, zuochan). To a questioner who wanted to know what zazen was good for, he answered: "When the emperor of China asked Bodhidharma: 'What's the use of zazen?', he said: 'No use!' I don't wonder about the use, I just sit." It is in that spirit that most serious practitioners of yoga do it. 

 

 

Politics

The good thing about Westerners practising yoga is that they do it from a completely fresh perspective. None of the social burdens that Hinduism carries, and of which quite a few participants did have some sobering knowledge picked up in passing during their trips to Indian ashrams. Hindus like to advertise the great success of yoga in the West, yet some hold it against Westerners that their manner of learning yoga is insufficiently traditional, or is even “stolen” from India. That latest reproach is certainly unjustified, for the West has paid untold millions to import gurus from India -- admittedly only fair after a long and lucrative colonization. However, Westerners should acknowledge their Indian sources, which was no problem here.

Only a few participants were even aware of the political situation in India, the legal discrimination against Hinduism and the ongoing war on Hinduism. Nevertheless, a few teachers, unbeknownst to their audience, happen to be involved in work with major “communal” (= alleged to be religiously divisive) ramifications; eventhough none of that work interfered with their job as meditation teachers. One very impressive meditation teacher from Pondicherry is involved with the rebuttal of the anti-Aurobindo campaign by some American scholars, an entirely dignified scholarly job which will nonetheless earn him the label “fanatic” from his opponents.


A psychiatrist teaching meditation and remedial consciousness techniques is involved with the psychological deconstruction of some godmen. He has earned the wrath of some Hindus with his qualified support to attempts to psycho-analyze the Keralite guru Amma, but ought to get their massive support for his radical deconstruction of Mohammed, reducing him to a classic case of paranoia (viz. entertaining the delusion of divine chosenness). I could add that even far better known gurus involve themselves in “communal” causes, which is natural, as in the dominant media parlance, “communal” is simply a pejorative term for "Hindu".

 

Personal

(If you have more important things to do, please skip this part. It is merely a testimony of some personal evolution as a conquence of this Yoga Week.)

After practising yoga for some years, even earning a teacher’s diploma at the fairly young age of 28 (1987), I left the European yoga scene when I first went to India in 1988. Other people go to India for yoga, I went there to study, research and work, neglecting much of the yoga I had learned. Over the years I visited most sacred places in Varanasi and briefly stayed at some ashrams, like Prema Padurang’s near Chennai and recently the Mahayoga Ashram in Ujjain, but it was not at all what I went to India for. I never went to yogic centres like Rishikesh and Haridwar. In my home country, I went to see some visiting gurus and practised their meditations, but some medical mishaps made hatha yoga rather difficult (though with the benefit of hindsight, I simply should have been more persistent and tougher on myself). Friends and medical personnel insisted I spare myself, and I was all too willing to oblige. It is only a few years ago that I returned to the European yoga scene, with a somewhat handicapped body, to teach Indian Worldviews and the Development of Yogic Thought at two yoga teacher training programmes in Brussels and Bruges, and Sanskrit at an Ayurvedic school in Ghent.  

This, then, was my first stay at Zinal. Since childhood I hadn't seen peaks like these, which proved a fitting setting for a Great Leap Forward. There was nothing sensationally new or deep in the yoga message, but the mere immersion into a large group of dedicated practitioners turned out to be just what I needed. The revolution took place on 29 August. Early morning, I took part in a session teaching the 24-verse prayer to the rising sun, interspersed with 24 physical sequences known as the Salutation to the Sun, a well-known exercise I had given up doing years ago. Resigned to being unable to do this anymore, I remained sitting on my chair during the physical part, at least the first few rounds. But then I decided to get up and give it a try. Though as expected, it was quite difficult and my bones were protesting, it kind of worked and I ended up doing it nine times. A large part was due to the inspiring influence of the no-nonsense Breton teacher Rodolphe Milliat.

Later that day, I had withdrawn into my room to handle an important phone-call with a publisher. When I came out, I happened to meet a lady from my own town back home, on her way to a meditation class. Though from there on, the road was steeply uphill, she was determined not to come late so she kept up a firm pace. Normally I would have given up, but considering the company, I didn’t want it said that I couldn’t keep up with a woman, so I toughed it out and we arrived together, though me badly out of breath. Friends who saw me, later told me they were surprised at my swift pace. I was relieved to find that my heart didn’t suffer any ill effects of this sudden effort, so I will henceforth have to double my speed. Her too, I have to thank for pushing me beyond my limits.

We went in and sat down for meditation. In my case, this is easier said than done: it takes a long and complicated manoeuvre to even reach the ground, let alone install myself comfortably enough for meditation. Nevertheless, I decided that this was the right day to stop sitting on chairs and familiarize myself with sitting on the floor again. To my great surprise, I could sit for an hour and a half, carry out the instructions and end up enjoying a deep meditation. This was very largely due to my being carried by the field created by the hundred or so meditators in the hall. I am very grateful to them all. It is probably a subjective impression because this occasion meant so much to me, but this meditation with Shraddhalu Ranade felt like a historic event, the kind about which you proudly say to your grandchildren: “That afternoon with Shraddhalu, I was there.”  

So, my years of sickness and excuses have ended. If you are in good shape, praise yourself lucky, but some of us set great store by recovering their lost health. I look back on years of combative publications that may have given my opponents the impression of a formidable enemy. Sitting in front of the computer is so easy, even I could do it. But in reality, I was a very sickly person, a cripple, making up for my physical limitations with some written outpourings. Certain limitations are here to stay, but now most have given way or are to give way to a regimen of hatha-yogic and other exercises.

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Is yoga Hindu? The court verdict

 

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 19^th 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.

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The origins of Hatha Yoga

To whom does the discipline and doctrine, or "science", of yoga belong? Now that American entrepreneurial yoga experimenters try to patent their own versions of some yoga techniques, Indian private and public agencies try to counter this trend and retain yoga as a common heritage that, in spite of ancient traditions of private and confidential teaching, is now in the public domain. The debate about these trends and counter-initiatives raises the fundamental question: who invented yoga? Or at least: when and where did it originate?



According to V.K. Gupta, head of the digital library for yoga data set up by the Indian ministries of Health and Science, "Yoga is collective knowledge and is available for use by everybody no matter what the interpretation. It would be very inappropriate if some companies try to prevent others from any yoga practice, even if they call it some other name. So we wanted to ensure that, in the future, nobody will be able to claim that he has created a yoga posture which was actually already created in 2500 B.C. in India."

In a scholarly forum where this was debated the last couple of days, pat came the counter-question: "What I'm wondering is, was yoga actually created in 2500 BCE? Patanjali is dated ca. last century BCE or within first two of CE. Did the texts he compiled go back that far?"

In fact, we know little about the yoga author Patanjali. We know of Patanjali the grammarian and have good reason to date him to the 2nd century BC. Apart from the name, we have no solid reason for assuming that he was the author of the famous Yoga Sûtra as well. Possibly an anonymous author tried to give his own book a wider readership by attributing it to an ancient authority, just as was done with e.g. the Manu Smrti, completed in the early Christian age but attributed to the pre-Vedic patriarch Manu. So, never mind the person Patanjali, let us discuss the chronology of "his" Yoga Sutra instead. Opinions vary, but the final editing of the book may be as late as 500 CE, all while containing much older materials.

A more technical discussion of the book's chronology could lead us pretty far from the original question, and for the present purposes we are fortunate to be justified in foregoing the effort. The reason is that it contains none of the techniques currently claimed by fashionable gurus and yogic entrepreneurs. After all, the yoga being marketed and "developed" in the West nowadays is 99% hatha yoga, which is practically absent from the Yoga Sutra.

What "Patanjali" teaches is a method for stilling the mind, along with the concomitant doctrine of why this practice is desirable and beneficial. His topic is meditation, and accessorily the lifestyle conducive to a fruitful meditation practice. It contains a very general outline of pranayama, breath control, a practice already mentioned prominently but only sketchily in Vedic literature, principally the Upanishads. Pranayama is definitely a very ancient practice and doctrine, though many of the specific breathing techniques now taught in yoga studios seem not have been described in the old scriptures, to the extent that we understand their sometimes cryptic language. The description of these specific techniques is found in the Hatha Yoga classics which do not predate the 13th century: the Gheranda Samhita, the Shiva Samhita and the Hatha Yoga Pradipika.

There too, a number of asana-s or postures is described, though important ones now popular in the Western (and westernized-Indian) yoga circuit, particularly standing ones, are still not in evidence even in these more recent texts. In the Yoga Sutra, they are totally absent. Patanjali merely defines Asana, "seat", as "comfortable but stable". In ancient times, a "yogi" might be someone who, as per Patanjali, practised stillness of mind; or he might be someone developing paranormal powers through concentration exercises, hence a magician. But the term "yoga" did not connote physical contortions.

Yet, the claim that yoga dates back to "2500 BC" pertains precisely to the visual depiction of a well-known yogic posture. It very obviously refers to the Harappan "Pashupati seal" showing someone (claimed to be Shiva Pashupati, "Lord of Beasts", as he is surrounded by animals) sitting in siddhâsana, which simply means sitting on the floor with the legs crossed and knees touching the floor. This leg position takes some training for people in a colder climate, and Westerners only encounter it in yoga classes; but it comes naturally to people in a hot climate. In India you constantly come across tailors sitting in that posture for their work. So, though this posture is found to be conducive to keeping the spine straight and freeing the body from stresses hindering meditation, there is nothing exclusively yogic about it.

I don't think any other asana postures except those for simply sitting up straight have been recorded before the late-medieval Gheranda Samhita, Hatha Yoga Pradipika and such. In the Bhagavad-Gita, Krishna calls on Arjuna to "become a yogi", but he gives no instructions in postures or breathing exercises. Libertines practising the whole range of Kama Sutra postures got more exercise in physical strength and agility than the yogis of their age, who merely sat up straight and forgot about their bodies.

Geoffrey Samuel (History of Yoga and Tantra, 2008) argues convincingly that kundalini yoga and the whole system of chakra lore, definitely not older than the 5th century CE, is a highly indianized adaptation of Chinese "inner alchemy" including the "small celestial orbit" and some of its sexual techniques. Its core practice is the controlled circulation of energy, and the hatha yoga postures seem to have evolved out of the effort to facilitate this energy circulation through contribed postures. Much of "Tantra" is a Chinese import that has been so thoroughly indianized, e.g. by personifying various energy centres as "gods", that Indians and Westerners haven't even noticed its newness vis-à-vis Vedic or otherwise anciently Indian tradition.

To Samuel's argument, some more data from a comparison of practices may be added, e.g. "negative breathing" (in which the belly is not extended but drawn in during in-breathing, with the breath being drawn up so as to create an upward energy dynamic), and the whole Daoist-originated idea that yoga invigorates and lengthens life. The actual hatha-yogic postures are very different from Daoist exercises in some technical respects, such as Indian muscle-stretching straightness vs. Chinese avoidance of all full stretching, again seemingly traceable to the difference in climate. According to Chinese tradition, daoyin exercises, attested BCE, were devised to make the joints supple in an arthritis-prone cold/wet environment. (These exercises also were an influence on modern Swedish gymnastics.) Maintaining a fixed posture for a length of time, typical of hatha yoga, may seem to contrast with the continuous movement in taijiquan (13th or arguably even 19th cent.), but is in fact also found in qigong postures called an. That Chinese postures are mostly standing, Indian postures mostly on the floor, is again explainable by the difference in climate.

For devotees of antiquity and tradition it may be disappointing that their tradition is so recent. But conversely, one may applaud hatha yoga (and taijiquan etc.) as fruits of a long history of discovery and gradual progress. There is enough evidence by now for the health-enhacing effects of hatha yoga regardless of how old the discipline is. If it is only recent, it means that we now dispose of a system of health unavailable to the ancients. That is called progress, the opposite of "tradition", meaning the preservation of an ancient treasure that can never be bettered.

Likewise, the Chinese "gentle" types of martial arts, also often lauded as very ancient, must logically be younger developments from the natural, primitive "hard" martial arts. This is necessarily so, for they are far more sophisticated, taking a cumulative effort in their development and requiring a greater mastery through training before they become effective in combat. So, the Oriental disciplines that speak to the contemporary Western imagination the most, are necessarily less ancient than cruder practices that don't have the fascinating Oriental aura. By Asian standards of chronology, they are pretty recent.

As late as the 19th century, novelties were added to the array of hatha yoga techniques, partly under the influences of British military drill. Particularly the standing techniques are mostly late additions. Consider hatha yoga a modern innovation.


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