How Yoga and I Traveled Here

These days, just about everyone teaches that yoga is 5,000 years old. And it's true that the word yoga is 4,000 years old, but that doesn't mean that the yoga we practice today is 4 or 5,000 years old. Yoga has changed over time, even as the word has remained the same. To unpack this, I'm going to go all the way back to the origins of yoga, back to the beginning. But before I do that, I'm going to go back to the beginning of my own 40-year search for the origins and history of yoga.

So I'm going to talk about myself for a while. When I was a starving student in Paris, I lived there for four years, from 76 to 80. One of the things that I do to make some money was I would put up little note cards in Asian bookstores and so forth, advertising that I could teach people Hindi and Sanskrit and English and translate books for them from those languages to French, which was more or less true. And in early 1980, which was just about the time I had learned that I had been admitted to the University of Chicago's graduate program, where I wanted to study with Mircea Eliade and Wendy Donegal Flaherty, I got a letter, because there was no email in those days and I didn't have a phone, from a guy who had an alchemical text from India in Sanskrit that he wanted me to translate into French for him. And that was the Rasarnabam, this 11th century classic of Hindu alchemy.

I didn't know anything about the existence of such a text, I didn't know there was an alchemical tradition, but I needed the money because I didn't have any money to fly back from France to Chicago to begin studying there. So I took him up on it. And for the next six months, I translated this text, and I have to confess my translation was horrible because I didn't know enough about the tradition, no one did at the time. But it did get me back to Chicago. About a year later, I was reading poems by the Nath Yogi Gorakhnath with my Hindi professor, poems that are in a language from medieval India for which there is no dictionary.

We had to sort of triangulate from the languages we knew, Sanskrit and Hindi, to get to it. But these mystic poems by Gorakhnath, which were about the experience of a yogi practicing yoga, contained vocabulary that was virtually identical to the vocabulary that I had read about in the alchemical work, the Rasarnabam. And this was the first light bulb sort of moment I had. This was in 1981 or two. The insight that perhaps these yogis and these alchemists were working off the same page, that they somehow had a common background that permitted them to talk about the yoga of the yogi in alchemical terms and the alchemy of the alchemist in yogic terms.

So that research led to the first book that I wrote on this topic of the history of yoga that was called the Alchemical Body. Actually I'd written a term paper for another professor at Chicago that year, and that became my first article on the subject called, Why Gurus Are Heavy. And that sort of laid the foundation for this book that was 600 pages long called The Alchemical Body. And that came out in 1996. But it left some questions open in my mind because there's so much reference to sexual fluids in the alchemical and the Hatha yoga tradition.

And I just wondered what was up with all these sexual fluids, human, divine, mineral. And so in order to explore that further, I went to the next topic that became my next book on the subject, and that was the topic of tantric sex. What is it about tantric sex that involves these fluids, and why is that important to tantric sex, and how is tantric sex important to the broader realm of tantra? And that book came out in 2003, but it left other questions open in my mind because in the research I did for Kiss of the Yogini, I kept coming across these references to yogis as people who, for example, have become a yogi because they've drunk sexual fluids. And I just thought, well, this is totally weird.

What does this have to do with yogis and yoga as I know it? Why is there this presence of sexual fluids? And all sorts of other references to yogis that didn't make sense to me because they weren't sitting cross-legged. They weren't meditating. They weren't breathing and all that other stuff.

So that led to the next book, which called Sinister Yogis. I think that came out in 2009 where I wrote a history of yoga, but not of yoga as history of ideas and concepts, but rather through the lens of the agents of yoga, these people called yogis. And I came to very different conclusions about the history of yoga than others who have written on the subject because when you look at it through the lens of yogis, all sorts of new things appear like warfare and sitting out on cremation grounds in the middle of the night waiting to be eaten by jackals and other sorts of practices that I hadn't seen anywhere related to yoga. And then finally, I wrote a fourth book on yoga, which was more something I did because an editor asked me to do so and gave me a good advance. And that was the book called the Yoga Sutra of Patanjali Biography, where it rounded off nicely for me, though, my exploration.

That came out in 2014 because whereas I had covered in the three earlier books the history of yoga from about 1500 BC to 1500 CE or AD, the Yoga Sutra book pretty much brought things up to the present day and also covered some of the earlier material that I had missed. So that's kind of how I got to the practice of yoga and the history of that practice. Now while doing my research for the alchemical body in the early 1990s, actually the late 80s and early 90s, I went to Benares twice for extended stays, I started to practice yoga because I wanted to have a physical experience of this stuff that I was studying, the theory and so forth, the history of. And so through a professor at Benares Hindu University, I was guided to a young yoga teacher in Benares, his name was Sujit Pal. He had recently won the yoga Olympics in India and no doubt by virtue of that, he was now living in the house of an illustrious family of yogis in the Bengali neighborhood of Benares above the only temple of yoginis that still exists in Benares and that illustrious lineage of yogis were the Laharis.

Any of you who've read the autobiography of a yogi by Yogananda knows that one of his teachers was Lahiri Mahasaya and there's a photograph of him inside the book. It's a fairly blurry photo but it's of a middle aged man with just a loin cloth seated in lotus posture. When I first met my teacher and when I would come to meet him every morning in the courtyard of this house, I would sit next to two life sized statues and those statues were of none other than Lahiri Mahasaya and his disciple who was called Tinkur Lahiri and his disciples disciple and I still don't know if they were actually biologically linked, that is father, son, grandson or just linked in the terms of a yoga lineage. But I would sit next to these life sized statues of none other than the Lahiri Mahasaya of Yogananda's life of a yogi and his disciple Tinkur Lahiri and his disciples disciple or his grandson who was named Satya Charan Lahiri was still alive and I got to know him quite well and he subsequently died and on this slide that you see here are the three generations of yogis. So I was very fortunate to actually learn Hatha Yoga in the house of a most illustrious yogic lineage.

I'm using this slide here, one of my favorite examples of Renaissance art from one of my favorite Renaissance churches in one of my favorite Renaissance towns in Italy. The church is a little Catholic church in Spello and it has in one of its side chapels a triptych and this is one of the three paintings in that triptych of the Nativity and what's interesting about it, it's not unusual but it's worth noting, is that everyone in the picture looks like Italians from the 16th century, they don't look like people living in Palestine in the year zero and that's altogether common. Painters tend to paint their historical figures that are their subjects in costumes and in attitudes of their own time in the here and now. That's also why you find posters of blue eyed Aryan Jesus in certain parts of the United States these days because those blue eyed Aryans think Jesus looked like they do now, drove big trucks and stuff like that. So the Virgin Mary and Joseph, they are dressed like lower middle class Italians, the three kings like nobles but in somewhat exotic oriental garb.

Some of the others who come to view the child look like Italian peasants. So this is by way of saying that just as Renaissance painters did not have a kind of idea of historical relativism, that is that their vision of how the Christ child looked in the 16th century might not have actually been the way that Christ child looked for real, so too I would say with yoga as it's taught today. So let me just move you through a sort of brief thumbnail history of art and show you how I see it as informing us about the way that yoga or the history of yoga is taught to us by most yoga teachers today. So art, this is of course Andy Warhol's soup cans, they're from the 60s, this was pop art. So just imagine 1960s, that's about when yoga is being introduced to the west by people like Maharishi Maheshi Yogi and so forth.

The yoga that they're introducing is a very much 1960s yoga and they're saying this is yoga, this is yoga as it has always existed. So just think that well okay, if we transpose that to the art world and someone were presented with Andy Warhol soup cans and told that this was art and this is art as it's always existed, well then that same person when looking at the cave paintings at Lascaux would say well that's not art, there's no Andy Warhol soup cans, so that's not art. But of course if you put that on the wall of the cave in Lascaux, oh there's art, Andy Warhol soup cans, do you see where I'm going with this? And then we could put lots of different works of art on the walls of the cave at Lascaux and then we'd have a history of art. Well this is where I see the world of yoga and the way that the history of yoga is taught or not taught going in the present time.

So the yoga world that people know and practice, the yoga that people know and practice today is a kind of a recent gentrified vanilla yoga and in fact the embodied history of yoga comes in many flavors and it comes from across a great swath of time in which yoga changed just as much as art changed during that same time frame. And so what I'm going to do in these talks is to go through this history of yoga in much the same way a historian of art would do for artwork. Like every system of knowledge in India, the yoga system is a theory of everything, much like modern day theoretical physics, but also like the natural theologies of ancient and medieval Europe, China and other great cultures. What makes the yoga system unique has been its use of the yogic body as the grid upon which the multiple interactions between forces, cycles, rhythms, beings, essences and objects are projected. In tantric yoga especially the yogic body has been a prime instrument for ordering the universe.

But here I need to take a step back and correct myself. There is no one yogic body because there has never been a single unified tradition of yoga. Over the centuries and millennia there have been many, many yoga traditions that have followed their own paths and their own logics. What they have had in common has been the yogic body as an ordering structure for their systems of knowledge. But the content of those many yoga systems has varied from century to century, region to region, school to school, not like other cultural systems such as art, music, cuisine or fashion.

I consider myself to be a historian of religions, which means that I'm most interested in how religious ideas, practices and categories have changed according to changing circumstances, contexts and human activities. While India is often presented as a land of timeless unchanging traditions, nothing could be further from the truth. So it has been with yoga. What we often view as a single stable system is in fact the product of thousands of years of historical development as multiple yogas have morphed into ever-changing configurations. What is so fascinating about the history of the yogic body is that virtually every one of these historical developments has left its trace, its mark on the yogic body, constantly enriching the content of the ordering structure.

Why for example are the energy centers aligned along the spinal column often called chakras? Because over 3,000 years ago, war chariots called yogas were cutting edge technology of the Vedic world and the wheels on which those chakras rolled were called chakras and that's a word that's related to the English word cycle. Later just over a thousand years ago, circular temple fortresses consecrated to protective war goddesses called yoganis were known as circles of mothers, matra chakras. Then in a final move, the machinery of war, arguably the most ancient stratum of India's yoga traditions was inscribed onto the yogic body in the form of the chakra system. But this chakra system is a structure whose content has also been highly variable, a far cry from the standard six plus one configuration that so many of us take for granted.

When the yogic body is the vector for the intersection of thousands of years of thought and practice, its inner landscapes and horizons can be quite fantastic and mind boggling in their integration of every conceivable system of knowledge. This is what makes the embodied history of yoga so compelling for in it we can also excavate Indian systems of astronomy, sacred geography, demonology, theology, alchemy and Ayurveda just to name a few. And we can do it in living color because the Indian artistic record of the yogic body is so vivid and varied. The Sanskrit term yoga is first encountered in the Vedas where it referred to the act of yoking, to the animal so yoked and the conveyance pulled by the yoked animal. The Vedic poet also applied the term to the yoking of their minds to poetic inspiration by which their thoughts journeyed outward to distant worlds of the gods.

This led to techniques of meditative ascent found in the 600 BC to 200 AD classical Upanishads. And because they linked the mind to the breath, the Upanishads also introduced breath control as a component of meditative practice. The 200 BC to 200 AD Vaisheshika Sutra and Yaya Sutra classified the level of perception proper to the Vedic poets and seers as the most powerful and valid source of knowledge because it comprised perception of imperceptibles. And this became known as yogi perception. These traditions coalesced in the time of the Bhagavad Gita around 200 AD, an early teaching on yoga by the god Krishna.

The most important philosophical system of all these earlier traditions was the yoga sutra of Patanjali, perhaps 350 CE. And its rich commentarial tradition, which continue down to the present day, comprise yoga philosophy. In about 450 to 600 AD, yogic postures, asanas first appear in texts, and iconography. These become the principal focus of works from the later phase of Hatha yoga, about 1400 to 1800 AD. The mudras and bandhas having been introduced in an earlier phase, between 1100 and 1400.

It was also in this period that the dynamics and practice of alchemy was integrated into the Siddha yoga traditions of Goraknat and the Nat Yogis. Also from the same period, the northern and southern yoga Upanishads, dating from between 813 for the northern and 1500 and 1750 for the southern, wove together the philosophical and meditative traditions of the yoga sutras with asana practice. Prior to both the Hatha yoga systems and those of the yoga Upanishads, the Buddhist and Hindu tantras, 500 to 1400 CE, innovated yoga systems of their own. Combining meditative ascent, visualization techniques, the manipulation of mantras and breath control. It is in the tantras that the centers, the chakras, were first introduced as meditation supports and grids for the arrangement of metaphysical categories.

The Kundalini also appears in about the ninth century in the tantras, first as the embodiment of the transformative phonemes of the Sanskrit language, and later, increasingly, as the dynamic conduit for the thermodynamic transformation of the physical body of the practitioner into an immortal replica of the divine. Here as well, as in later Hatha yoga literature, the yogic body came to be identified, if not transformed into, the universe in all its parts after the model of Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita. Leading from the same period as the earliest yoga Upanishads and the middle tantras, the 800 to 1000 AD Kashmirian yoga Vasishta combined yoga philosophy, yogic perception, tantric yoga and Hatha yoga into a unique synthesis. Since the late 19th century, modern yoga has retrieved and reinvented many of the elements of these earlier systems, relying heavily on the yoga sutras in formulating its theoretical principles, but also appropriating elements from tantric and Hatha traditions into constantly evolving novel forms.