New Light on Yoga

From loincloths to leotards, yoga has come a long way in 5,000 years. But is yoga as we know it really that old?

By Anne Cushman

Yoga's Banyan Tree

Of course, Sjoman's scholarship is just one perspective on the Mysore Palace lineage. His research and conclusions may be flawed; the information he has uncovered is open to multiple interpretations.

But his theories point to a reality that you don't have to probe very deeply into yoga history to confirm: There really is no one monolithic yoga tradition.

Rather, yoga is like a twisted old banyan tree, whose hundreds of branches each support a full load of texts, teachers, and traditions—often influencing one another, just as often contradicting one another. ("Be celibate," admonishes one scripture. "Get enlightened through sex," urges another.) Like snapshots of a dance, different texts freeze and capture different aspects of a living, breathing, changing tradition.

This realization can be unsettling at first. If there's no one way to do things—well, then how do we know if we're doing them right? Some of us may long for a definitive archaeological discovery: say, a terra-cotta figure of a yogi in Triangle Pose, circa 600 B.C., that will tell us once and for all how far apart the feet should be.

But on another level it's liberating to realize that yoga, like life itself, is infinitely creative, expressing itself in a multitude of forms, re-creating itself to meet the needs of different times and cultures. It's liberating to realize that the yoga poses are not fossils—they're alive and bursting with possibility.

That's not to say that honoring tradition is unimportant. It's vital to honor the common goal that has united yogis for centuries: the quest for awakening. For thousands of years, yogis have sought to contact directly the luminous source of all being; and for hatha yogis in particular, the vehicle for touching the infinite spirit has been the finite human body. Every time we step on the mat, we can honor tradition by "yoking"—the original meaning of the word "yoga"—our purpose with that of the ancient sages.

We can also honor the forms of yoga—the specific asanas—as probes for exploring our own particular forms, for testing the limits and stretching the possibilities of the bodies we have been given. In doing so, we can draw on the experience of yogis that have come before us—the wisdom that's gradually accrued over time about working with the body's subtle energies by means of physical practices. Without this heritage—whatever its sources—we're left to reinvent afresh 5,000 years of innovation.

Yoga asks us to walk a razor's edge, to devote ourselves wholeheartedly to a particular pose, while fully understanding that on another level, the pose is arbitrary and irrelevant. We can surrender to the poses the way we surrender to incarnation in general—letting ourselves pretend, for a while, that the game we are playing is real, that our bodies are who we really are. But if we cling to the form of the poses as ultimate truth, we miss the point. The poses were born from the practice of yogis who looked inside themselves—who experimented, who innovated, and who shared their discoveries with others. If we're afraid to do the same, we lose the spirit of yoga.

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