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Light on Yoga, 1966: The Book That Standardised the Poses
Before 1966, if you wanted to know how a yoga posture should look, you asked a teacher. After 1966, you could check. Light on Yoga, by B. K. S. Iyengar, contains around two hundred asanas and roughly six hundred photographs, with the author demonstrating each one. Every posture is named, described in numbered steps, given…
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The Yoga Vasistha: The Longest Argument That Nothing Is Happening
A prince comes home from a pilgrimage at sixteen and stops functioning. He will not eat properly. He will not take up his duties. He tells the court that he has looked at wealth, at power, at pleasure, at the body, at time, at death, and can find nothing in any of it worth wanting.…
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The Hatha Yoga Pradipika: How a Fifteenth-Century Compilation Became the Standard
Svatmarama says in his opening verses that he is not inventing anything. He states that he has gathered what was scattered, and he names his predecessors, listing teachers of the tradition he is drawing on. This is unusual honesty for a fifteenth-century Sanskrit text, and it turns out to be accurate. Modern comparison with earlier…
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The Amritasiddhi: The Oldest Hatha Text Is Not What Anyone Expected
For most of the twentieth century, the story of hatha yoga’s origin was reasonably settled. It emerged from the Nath tradition, associated with Gorakhnath, somewhere around the eleventh or twelfth century, within a Shaiva context, and the Hatha Yoga Pradipika of the fifteenth century was its major statement. Then a manuscript that had been sitting…
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The Samkhya Karika: The System Yoga Is Built On
Open almost any yoga philosophy book and you will meet the gunas, the three qualities. Sattva, rajas, tamas. Clarity, activity, inertia. They turn up in discussions of diet, of temperament, of practice, of time of day. Almost nobody mentions where they come from, which is a text of seventy-two verses composed around the fourth century…
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The Yoga Sutras: How a Text of 195 Lines Was Assembled
The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali is around 195 short lines, depending on the recension. Read aloud without commentary, the whole thing takes under an hour. It contains almost no explanation, no examples, no argument, and no stories. This is not a stylistic failure. A sutra is a compression format. The word means thread, and it…
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The Bhagavad Gita: A Reader’s Guide
Seven hundred verses, eighteen chapters, and a setting that lasts about four minutes. Two armies are drawn up. A man asks his charioteer to drive him into the space between them so he can see who he is about to fight. He sees cousins, teachers and grandfathers, and he puts down his bow and says…
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The Upanishads: What They Are and Which Ones Matter
Ask how many Upanishads there are and you will get answers ranging from ten to over two hundred. Both are correct, which is confusing until you understand what the word is doing. Upanishad is not a title. It is a category. Texts have been composed under that heading for well over two thousand years, and…
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The Rig Veda: A Book That Was Not Written for Two Thousand Years
Here is the thing that stops people when they first hear it properly. The Rig Veda was composed somewhere around 1500 to 1200 BCE. The oldest manuscript of it that survives dates from roughly the eleventh century CE. That is a gap of well over two thousand years, and for almost all of it the…
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The Teachers Who Made Modern Yoga
Almost every yoga class taught anywhere in the world today can be traced to one room in southern India. Between 1926 and 1946, Tirumalai Krishnamacharya taught in the Mysore Palace, under the patronage of the Maharaja Krishnaraja Wodeyar IV. Four of his students carried what they learned in different directions, and between them they built…
