By Vithal C Nadkarni
For his biography of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra, David Gordon White trawled the world’s great manuscript archives. The scholar was measuring the popularity of each philosophical school: Yoga and Samkhya scored barely 2%; Vedanta with 40% “practically blew away the rest of the competition”.
“Samkhya had a great run for 1,000 or 1,500 years,” White told an interviewer. “Then it just ceased to be relevant.” White concluded that “qualitatively and quantitatively, in every respect, yoga and Samkhya were finished”. So they may well have been in the arcane world of scholars. But the outside world, away from academia, told a different story.
As White himself writes in his introduction to the anthology, Yoga Practice, “Yoga has become part of the Zeitgeist of affluent western societies, attracting housewives and hipsters, New Agers and the old-aged, and body culture and corporate culture into a multi-billion-dollar synergy.”
So why was something that White alleged was deader than a Dodo so alive and vibrantly kicking? Svatvarama answered the question in his medieval classic, Hathayoga-Pradipika: yoga was a Kriya-Yukta, or practice-oriented discipline: one can’t become a yogi by dressing like one, nor by talking like or writing like a yogi.
Svatvarama concludes the book by saying, “As long as the breath does not move in Sushumna and the mind does not stop without effort, all talk (and chat) about yoga is like the babbling of a mad man!” Yoga also had a strong teacher-to-student culture to keep out pedants and pseuds. The result: no books. Only practice!
For his biography of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra, David Gordon White trawled the world’s great manuscript archives. The scholar was measuring the popularity of each philosophical school: Yoga and Samkhya scored barely 2%; Vedanta with 40% “practically blew away the rest of the competition”.
“Samkhya had a great run for 1,000 or 1,500 years,” White told an interviewer. “Then it just ceased to be relevant.” White concluded that “qualitatively and quantitatively, in every respect, yoga and Samkhya were finished”. So they may well have been in the arcane world of scholars. But the outside world, away from academia, told a different story.
As White himself writes in his introduction to the anthology, Yoga Practice, “Yoga has become part of the Zeitgeist of affluent western societies, attracting housewives and hipsters, New Agers and the old-aged, and body culture and corporate culture into a multi-billion-dollar synergy.”
So why was something that White alleged was deader than a Dodo so alive and vibrantly kicking? Svatvarama answered the question in his medieval classic, Hathayoga-Pradipika: yoga was a Kriya-Yukta, or practice-oriented discipline: one can’t become a yogi by dressing like one, nor by talking like or writing like a yogi.
Svatvarama concludes the book by saying, “As long as the breath does not move in Sushumna and the mind does not stop without effort, all talk (and chat) about yoga is like the babbling of a mad man!” Yoga also had a strong teacher-to-student culture to keep out pedants and pseuds. The result: no books. Only practice!
