Yogic

Visiting one of the discussion sections for "After Religion" today, I was asked to say a few words about "where yoga comes from." Students had done our reading on how criticisms of the inauthenticity of contemporary yoga practices fall prey to the same essentializing moves which drive the market for neoliberal spirituality commodities. Everyone's looking for the true pure authentic original yoga, but historians of religion know no tradition is true or pure in this way, and that claims for purity and authenticity do violence to the richness and complexity of living traditions. "[I]t is not the scholar’s place to establish or verify claims about origins or authenticity," she proposed, directing us instead

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?