I was fortunate to have a technical yoga letter to the editor published in the March Issue of Yoga Journal. I responded to an article in the November issue, Yoga's Greater Truth, discussing the historical origins of yoga asana practice.

Yoga Journal asked the author of the article, Mark Singleton, to comment. After being notified that my letter and his response were going to be published I sent a further response which was not published but can be seen here.

Both the original letter and the author's response were edited by Yoga Journal for publication. They can be viewed in the magazine. I am happy with the result but would like to present the unedited versions here.

Ron Blouch

Original unedited letter to Yoga Journal:

I was fascinated by Mark Singleton’s article on the history of asana practice. I had concluded long ago that if yoga asana beyond seated postures was important in Patanjali’s time he would have written about it. He did not. Singleton’s commentary on the twentieth century invention of modern yoga asana practice was interesting enough that I purchased his book.
 
He disproved his own premise – that yoga asana for health, flexibility, and strength of the body was created in the 1930’s – in the first two chapters. In citation after citation he reports that the ongoing practice of Hatha yoga asana was so prevalent, vital and robust in India as early as the mid-1600’s that foreign visitors could not miss it. Hatha yogis doing advanced asana were everywhere. According to one of his citations it was estimated that in 1676 there were between one and two million asana and ascetic practitioners in India.
 
What he did make very clear, however, is that few of the earliest western visitors who saw the Hatha yogins or the orthodox Hindus who lived with them liked them very much. That they were despised and disregarded in no way invalidates the fact that, apparently, on any street in India you could see someone standing with their leg behind their head for the purpose of cleansing the body, removing disease and extending life-span.  
 
Once again, looking at the numerous citations that Singleton provides, it is also clear that by the time of the invention of Western Gymnastics systems and the advent of the emphasis on physical culture that arose in the late 1800’s, any person in Europe with a serious interest in how the body works could not have reasonably been unaware of the postural and spiritual practices of Indian Hatha yoga. His contention that modern yoga was invented in the early 1900’s seems unbelievable. What does seem clear is that a few important yogis, T. Krishnamacharya among them, modified the already present practice of yoga asana in interesting ways and then began the process of making it respectable.
 

 

Mark Singleton's unedited response:

I don't claim anywhere that “yoga asana...was created in the 1930s”, nor that “modern yoga was invented in the early 1900s”. But I do, like you, believe that asana was “modified in interesting ways” by modern yogis. True also that traffic between Europe and India moved in both directions. Western gymnasts occasionally borrowed from Asia. And many important modern Indian yogis consciously borrowed from Europe. 

This dialogue between techniques, theories and cultures resulted in understandings of yoga which were simply unprecedented in Indian tradition. This history is much more important and real than who “invented” yoga. 

For instance, the yogic body as seen by modern medicine is clearly very different from the body of “traditional” hatha yoga. While concerns for health and longevity are certainly not foreign to hatha yoga, this shift is still historically momentous. Other “modifications”, such as T. Krishnamacharya's, are also critical watersheds in yoga history.

Yes, the story also includes the new, alienated caste of urban, mendicant “fakirs”. Note, however, that their postural displays reference motifs from renouncer traditions of tapas (mortification of the body) and are emphatically not examples of stretching for health and well-being. Also, a quick textual survey shows that such displays obviously did not inspire early mainstream gymnastics teachers.

Unpublished response to the Yoga Journal letters editor:

Thank you for letting me know [about publication]. Also, thank you for letting me see Mr. Singleton’s response.

I deeply appreciate what he has done, and you have done by publishing his article, in calling attention to the many historical untruths that are so frequently promulgated in modern yoga practices by teachers who should know better. I respectfully disagree with his main theses, however. It is an endless, but valuable, debate.

In the interest of keeping my original letter as short as possible – it was already too long – I chose not to cite support for several of my assertions.  I will leave you with three quotes and an idea:

“Some call this Padmasana. It is the destroyer of all diseases”. Hatha Yoga Pradipika 1.47, c.1450 ce

“The Mayurasana….. destroys the effects of unwholesome foods; it produces heat in the stomach; it destroys the effects of deadly poisons; it easily cures diseases like Gulma and fever… Gheranda Samhita 2.19.29-30, c. 1650 ce

Page 29, Yoga Body, “The texts promise miraculous results for the proper practice of these purifications such as the indefinite prevention of illness and old age.”

Is not Yoga Journal itself, 600 years later, a modern Hatha Yoga Pradipika? How many articles do you publish in which asana is described and ascribed specific therapeutic healing benefits? The rich intermingling of Yogic Metaphysics, the complete Indian medical system of Ayurveda and the beliefs of Western Science and Medicine that occurred in the early 1900’s has not changed the original goals for yoga asana of which medical therapeutic benefit is but one. The meeting of East and West in the early 1900’s has merely altered the context, methods of practice, and belief systems in which they exist.