{"id":84,"date":"2014-09-24T22:35:38","date_gmt":"2014-09-24T12:35:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/2014\/09\/24\/on-the-question-of-yoga-as-a-religious-practice\/"},"modified":"2014-09-24T22:36:58","modified_gmt":"2014-09-24T12:36:58","slug":"on-the-question-of-yoga-as-a-religious-practice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/2014\/09\/24\/on-the-question-of-yoga-as-a-religious-practice\/","title":{"rendered":"On the Question of Yoga as a Religious Practice"},"content":{"rendered":"

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There is a question whether Yoga is necessarily<\/em> a religion or whether it is possible to be a practitioner and remain, for example, a good Christian. Now, \u2018Yoga\u2019 is the name of a wide variety of beliefs and practices \u2013 we might compare it to the Dao<\/em> of the classical Chinese culture \u2013 but in this context the yoga intended is obviously the physical practice of assuming poses associated with and supposedly justified <\/em>by the particular metaphysics found in the classic Hindu Samkhya<\/em>–Yoga darshana<\/em>. This yoga is roughly speaking Hatha<\/em> yoga \u2013 as described in the Hathayoga Pradipika<\/em>, and the ideological underpinning tends to look to the Raja<\/em> yoga and Patanjali\u2019s Yoga Sutra<\/em>s, which make no specific theological claims. The exact stemma of the typical modern western yoga is pretty confused, but it probably doesn\u2019t 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. <\/o:p><\/p>\n

Note that Vivekananda deliberately sought to create a secular practice suitable to be taught to the whole world, and Krishnamacharya\u2019s 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<\/a>, <\/em>New Delhi:Abhinav:1996 ref. in White, DG (2011)\u00a0<\/span>\u201c<\/span>Yoga, Brief History of an Idea\u201d <\/em>(Chapter 1 of Yoga in Practice<\/em>)<\/span><\/a>) Thus it would probably be a surprise if there was a coherent religious essence to the resultant practice.<\/o:p><\/p>\n

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<\/em> are references to various Hindu religious concepts \u2013 like the surya namaskar<\/em> \u2018Salute to the Sun (God)\u2019 \u2013 the practice of yoga will lead one willy-nilly to performing religious rituals and thus participating in another religion. (Kremer, W. \u201cDoes doing yoga make you a Hindu?\u201d BBC News Magazine.)<\/a> \u201c<\/span>Religious intentions may not be there to begin with but practising yoga might lead them to develop.<\/span>\u201d But it\u2019s 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. <\/o:p><\/span><\/p>\n

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<\/em> yoga as a religious practice because it\u2019s too hard to do anything else. I don\u2019t see that there\u2019s anything in that administrative decision to alarm or even interest practitioners outside India.<\/o:p><\/span><\/p>\n

On the other hand, there may be religious objections to the claims that are made for yoga\u2019s benefit to its practitioners. The traditional claim \u2013 made implicitly rather than explicitly in the older texts, so far as I can discover \u2013 is that the dedicated practice of Hatha yoga will demonstrate to the resistant mind (citta<\/em>) that the body (let it be prakriti<\/em>) is not part of the self (let it be purusa<\/em>) and that the self and body are indeed independent. The realisation of kaivalya<\/em> (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 <\/em>is appropriate to the yogin. This, however, suggests at least a couple of \u00a0comments.<\/o:p><\/p>\n

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 \u2013 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.<\/o:p><\/p>\n

Secondly, the realisation of independence is a step to liberation of the purusa<\/em> element from the cycle of reincarnation. This is a very much a religious doctrine. <\/o:p><\/p>\n

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!<\/p>\n

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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, \u2018Yoga\u2019 is the name of a wide variety of beliefs and practices \u2013 we might compare it to the Dao of the classical Chinese culture \u2013 but in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,20,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-84","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophy","category-religion","category-yoga"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevewatson.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}