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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…
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Swami Vivekananda: The Monk Who Changed Yoga
He was not on the programme. The World’s Parliament of Religions opened in Chicago on 11 September 1893, and the thirty-year-old Bengali monk who addressed it had arrived in America without an invitation, without proper credentials, and without money. He had slept in a railway freight car in Boston. He had been turned away when…
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Samsara: The Cycle Nobody Wanted
Reincarnation, as it is usually presented in the West, sounds like a bonus. More lives. Another chance. The reassurance that death is not final. Indian traditions do not treat it that way at all. Samsara is presented as a problem, and the entire apparatus of Indian religious practice is aimed at getting out of it.…
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Ahimsa: The Principle of Non-Violence
The word is a negation. A-himsa. Not-harm. Sanskrit has no positive term for the idea, which means the concept is constructed by subtraction: you begin with the impulse to injure and you remove it. That grammatical detail matters more than it looks, because it shapes how the traditions treat the principle. Ahimsa is not a…
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Dharma: What the Word Actually Means
There is no English word for dharma, and translators have been apologising about it for two hundred years. Duty. Law. Righteousness. Religion. Order. Virtue. Nature. Teaching. Each catches part of it and none catches the whole, and the reason is that dharma is not a concept with one meaning. It is a concept with a…
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Dhyana: What Meditation Actually Is in Yoga
Patanjali defines meditation in nine Sanskrit words, and the definition is almost entirely about continuity. Tatra pratyayaikatanata dhyanam. Sutra 3.2. In that place, the uninterrupted flow of a single idea is meditation. Not effort. Not concentration. Flow. The Limb Before It Dhyana cannot be understood on its own, because it is defined against what precedes…
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Karma: What the Word Actually Means
Karma is not a moral scoreboard, and it is not the universe getting even. The word means action. That is all it means, before any doctrine is attached to it. Karman, from the root kri, to do or make. In the earliest Vedic usage it refers specifically to ritual action, the correct performance of sacrifice.…
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The History of Meditation: From the Vedas to the Clinic
Somebody sat down deliberately, closed their eyes, and tried to do nothing with their attention. We do not know who, or when, or where. Meditation leaves no artefacts. A pot survives. A wall survives. A person sitting quietly leaves nothing for an archaeologist to find, which means the history of meditation begins only when somebody…
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Mudras: The Real History of Yoga’s Sacred Gestures
There is a bronze Shiva in the Metropolitan Museum, cast in south India around the eleventh century, dancing inside a ring of fire. He has four arms. Each hand is doing something specific. The upper right holds a small drum, marking the beat of creation. The upper left holds fire, which destroys. The lower right…
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The Five Koshas: Yoga’s Map of the Human Being
A person, in this scheme, is five things wearing each other. The image the tradition uses is a sheath, kosha, the way a sword sits inside a scabbard. Each layer covers the one beneath it, and each is subtler than the last. It is one of the oldest attempts anywhere to map what a human…
