to acknowledge those claims among spiritual subjects, to analyze them as religious claims, and, in the study of religion in contemporary society, to critique their relationship to the economic and social machinations of the dominant culture of consumer capitalism. (Jain, Peace Love Yoga, 64-5)
Well and good, students said. But surely the point wasn't that anything could with equal legitimacy claim to be yoga. Surely different contemporary practices and products are some of them guiltier than others of traducing an ancient tradtion! And if we don't want to let Narendra Modi claim yoga for an ahistorical and politically reactionary Hindutva, isn't he still closer to it than the fitness industrial complex? The class wanted to know: how did yoga start?
I think I found a way to preempt a default to the fallacy of origins. When Patañjali penned the Yoga Sutras, I said - nobody's sure when that was, by the way - he wasn't creating something new but rather recording practices which had proved themselves over centuries before. (Similar sorts of practices proved and would prove themselves to Buddhists, Jains, Daoists, and Islamic and Christian mystics.) He organized them into eight categories, only two of which are the postures and breathing exercised we think of as "yoga." Indeed, these two were means not ends, and means not to helping people be their fullest self in the here and now but to leaving their bodies and their very humanity behind.
When word of yoga was brought to these shores by Swami Vivekananda in 1893 (I passed around my book from the Congress of the World's Religions, describing its importance as the first time Asian figures spoke for their traditions in the West), it was as philosophy, not physical practice. Indeed a philosophy he claimed was consonant with the monotheistic religions... Is that what you were after, I asked?
