Steve Watson

There is a question whether Yoga is necessarily a religion or whether it is possible to be a practitioner and remain, for example, a good Christian. Now, ‘Yoga’ is the name of a wide variety of beliefs and practices – we might compare it to the Dao of the classical Chinese culture – but in this context the yoga intended is obviously the physical practice of assuming poses associated with and supposedly justified by the particular metaphysics found in the classic Hindu Samkhya–Yoga darshana. This yoga is roughly speaking Hatha yoga – as described in the Hathayoga Pradipika, and the ideological underpinning tends to look to the Raja yoga and Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, which make no specific theological claims. The exact stemma of the typical modern western yoga is pretty confused, but it probably doesn’t matter all that much at the moment. Suffice it to say that it is that form transmitted to us by Vivekananda, Yogananda, Sivananda, Kuvalayananda, Hariharananda, Krishnamacharya, and others.

Note that Vivekananda deliberately sought to create a secular practice suitable to be taught to the whole world, and Krishnamacharya’s version, which he taught to BKS Iyenagar, K Pattabhi Jois, and TKV Desikachar, was an extraordinary mix of techniques from hatha yoga, British military calisthenics, and South-western Indian wrestling traditions (Sjoman, NE, The Yoga Tradition of the Mysore Palace, New Delhi:Abhinav:1996 ref. in White, DG (2011) “Yoga, Brief History of an Idea” (Chapter 1 of Yoga in Practice)) Thus it would probably be a surprise if there was a coherent religious essence to the resultant practice.

The arguments that have been presented for considering yoga to be a necessarily religious practice have both trivial and even more trivial forms. The trivial form can be seen in the claim that as yoga is a product of a certain religious tradition, and the very Sanskrit names of the asanas are references to various Hindu religious concepts – like the surya namaskar ‘Salute to the Sun (God)’ – the practice of yoga will lead one willy-nilly to performing religious rituals and thus participating in another religion. (Kremer, W. “Does doing yoga make you a Hindu?” BBC News Magazine.) “Religious intentions may not be there to begin with but practising yoga might lead them to develop.” But it’s not at all clear that there is a necessary connection between the performance of the postures and the holding of certain beliefs. What counts is always the intention, and unless the claim is that the intention will be generated by habit, if the intention to worship is not there then there is no worshipping being done.

The even more trivial form is that now endorsed by the Indian Supreme Court: that yoga is traditionally understood to be a religious practice and therefore must always be that. But this is really a determination that in the cultural circumstances of India, the law will simply define yoga as a religious practice because it’s too hard to do anything else. I don’t see that there’s anything in that administrative decision to alarm or even interest practitioners outside India.

On the other hand, there may be religious objections to the claims that are made for yoga’s benefit to its practitioners. The traditional claim – made implicitly rather than explicitly in the older texts, so far as I can discover – is that the dedicated practice of Hatha yoga will demonstrate to the resistant mind (citta) that the body (let it be prakriti) is not part of the self (let it be purusa) and that the self and body are indeed independent. The realisation of kaivalya (independence) in more than a merely intellectual manner is the desired point of this practice, and will assist the practitioner in the achievement of whatever particular style of moksha is appropriate to the yogin. This, however, suggests at least a couple of  comments.

First, the absolute independence of body and self cannot be acceptable to all religious traditions: the Christian sinner, for example, may be a sinner because of the effect of the flesh upon the soul – in the gnostic tradition corrupting it, but in any case facilitating its decline. Certainly, Christians believe that the soul can be saved from the flesh and that it will continue to exist when the flesh is sloughed off at death; but while the soul is incarnated it forms a complete person and the flesh is not irrelevant to that person.

Secondly, the realisation of independence is a step to liberation of the purusa element from the cycle of reincarnation. This is a very much a religious doctrine.

Now, it is possible that this can all be dismissed as irrelevant to the practice of modern yoga, but in that case what is the evidence that there is any benefit at all? Is it just massively coincidentally the case that the postures intended to fulfil one very specific metaphysical function also fulfil a general physical fitness function. How lucky is that!