Yoga and Religion

James Mallinson
jim@khecari.com

May ,

e growth of yoga in the west is relentless. e latest survey by the

American magazine Yoga Journal estimates the number of its practitioners
in America at . million and the value of the yoga industry there at $.
billion. With so much at stake it is not surprising that disputes about the
true nature of yoga and thus its ownership are aring up with increas-
ing regularity. Current controversies include the California Encinitas case,
in which Christian groups are ghting against the introduction of yoga into
school curricula, and the Hindu American Foundations Take Back Yoga
campaign, in which it is asserted that the Hindu roots of yoga have been
airbrushed out of its modern manifestations. Even the White House has
weighed in, clearly stating its opinion that Yoga has become a universal
language of spiritual exercise in the United States, crossing many lines of
religion and cultures. e opinions of many of the groups involved in
these controversies have been reasonably well thought out, at least in com-
parison to some more outlandish accusations put forward by fringe groups
who see yoga as, for example, the work of Satan. Whatever the arguments
put forward, at their root are the questions of whether yoga is Hindu and
who is entitled to practise it.
I am not going to address these controversies directly, but rather I shall
try to answer the underlying questions in the context of my specialist area,
traditional hathayoga,
. and in particular hathayoga
. during its formative pe-
riod in the th-th centuries. Hathayoga
. is the variety of yoga practice
is is the revised text of a lecture given at a seminar on Modern Yoga organised by the UK Hindu Christian

Foundation and held at Heythrop College, London on March th .

http://www.yogajournal.com/press/press release/ accessed April th .
http://m.economictimes.com/news/news-by-industry/et-cetera/barack-obama-white-house-embraces-yoga-

amid-conservative-contortions/articleshow/.cms accessed April th .

J :.



which places greatest emphasis on physical methods and from which mod-
ern yoga is, at least in part, derived. Furthermore, as we shall see below,
hathayoga
. came to be accepted within the orthodox Indian tradition as a
key part of yoga more broadly dened. In the process of answering the
questions of whether hathayoga
. in its formative period was Hindu and who
was entitled to practise it I shall also briey address another claim about yoga
which has recently had an airing thanks to high-prole sex scandals involv-
ing prominent yoga teachers, namely that such scandals are unsurprising
since yoga was originally a sex cult.
Scholars and commentators, such as the increasing number of yoga blog-
gers, have had diculty addressing these issues because, perhaps surpris-
ingly, the history of hathayoga
. has been very poorly studied. Most pro-
nouncements on the subject are based on three Sanskrit texts which were
arbitarily selected in the late th century and have since been held to be
the hathayoga
. canon. ese texts, the ivasamhit, . Hathapradpik
. and
Gheran. dasa
. mhit,
. provide only a limited view of the tradition. Over the last
two decades I and a handful of other scholars have been working on other
texts produced during hathayogas
. formative period and we are beginning to
get a better idea of the bigger picture. I shall now give a brief summary of
what I infer from that corpus to be the early history of hathayoga.
.
Close study of the teachings on physical yoga practice in the early hatha .
corpus shows it to be a combination of two yogic methods. e rst can
be traced back to before the common era, in descriptions of the practices
of ascetics found in the two great Sanskrit epics, the Mahbhrata and
Rmyana, . and in the Pali Buddhist canon (the Buddha says that he tried
these techniques but abandoned them on realising that they were of no use).
We also have reports from the entourage of Alexander the Great, who en-
countered a group of ascetics at Taxila, now in Pakistani Punjab, at the end
of the fourth century BCE. e ascetics of this period would hold dicult
postures, sometimes for years on end, practise extended breath retention and
use specic physical methods that were forerunners of techniques which ap-
pear in later hathayogic
. works as mudrs. eir aims were to still the mind
and to develop a store of ascetic energy within their bodies. is energy,
called tapas, could be used to win boons such as supernatural powers from
the gods, and to give blessings and curses, while the stilling of the mind
was associated with liberation from the wheel of rebirth. Tapas was closely
See e.g. William Broads // New York Times article on Yoga and Sex (http://tinyurl.com/uayu

accessed April th ). I shall address this question in much greater depth in a paper entitled Yoga and
Sex: What is the Purpose of Vajrolmudr? to be delivered at the University of Viennas Yoga in Transformation:
Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on a Global Phenomenon conference on September th .


connected with celibacy, and some of these ascetic methods were directly
aimed at ensuring the practitioners celibacy and enhancing its benets.
e other tradition of yoga practice, which combined with this older
ascetic tradition to produce the physical yoga systems formalised between
and CE, was developed within the tantric schools that ourished
in India during the rst millennium. For various reasons tantra has incor-
rectly come to be seen in the west as primarily about sex magic and other
antinomian esoteric practices, but these were always a relatively minor and
rarely practised part of its teachings which in fact ran the whole gamut of
what we would call religion. During the th-th centuries there devel-
oped within certain tantric traditions various techniques of visualisation of
a feminine energy known as Kun. dalin,
. the coiled goddess, rising up from
the base of the spine through a series of cakras up to union with a male deity
in the head.
is visualisation-based tantric yoga was combined with the physical
techniques of the older ascetic tradition to produce hathayoga.
. We see this
process happening in a somewhat clumsy fashion in earlier texts of the cor-
pus, such as the Vivekamrtan. da.
. Later works, in particular the ivasamhit,
.
do a more coherent job. e best known of the hatha . texts, the Ha thapra-
.
dpik, which is for the most part a compilation, is among the less coher-
ent works of the corpus. In his attempt at inclusivity, the texts compiler,
Svtmrma, includes a wide range of sometimes contradictory teachings.
A good example of this is found in one of the key techniques of hathayoga,
.
khecarmudr, in which the tongue is turned back and upwards into the cav-
ity above the palate. In its older ascetic manifestation it is associated with
stilling the mind and blocking the fall of bindu, a substance produced in the
head, which, if not sealed there by khecarmudr, drips down to be burnt up
in the re in the stomach or shed as semen. e loss of bindu causes old age
and death; its preservation stops the yogi from ageing and dying. Various
other yogic methods are also geared towards the preservation of bindu. e
headstand, for example, uses gravity to keep bindu in the head. In tantric
conceptions of the subtle body, on the other hand, the head is home to a
store not of bindu but of amrta,
. the nectar of immortality. e tantric khe-
carmudr causes Kun. dalin
. to reach this store of nectar and then, rather
than keep it where it is, ood the body with it. e Hathapradpik
. teaches
both these khecarmudrs.
ese references are detailed in my draft article on ktism and Hathayoga, which can be accessed via my
.
page on academia.edu.
e ultra-inclusivist Hathapradpik also includes teachings from non-hatha texts, such as the Amanaska,
. .
which is positively scornful of hat.ha physical methods. As indicated by its title, it teaches a yoga in which the


So who were the practitioners of these two types of yoga? As I have

already noted, the originators of the older tradition were celibate ascetics.
eir tradition ourishes to this day; pictures of them bathing at the tri-
ennial Kumbh Mela festival have just been beamed around the world. We
can trace them back via travellers reports and Mughal painting in the late
medieval period, through mentions in texts in the hathayoga
. corpus back to
the naked gymnosophists or ramanas . encountered by Alexander and the
Buddha.
e tantric tradition is also alive today, although it is likely to have
changed since its inception rather more than the ascetic tradition. It is now
best represented by an order of celibate yogis known as the Nths. e
Nths roots lie in rst-millennium tantric sects in which sexual rites were
practised, but by the time their hathayogic
. texts were compiled they had
turned their back on the so-called left-hand practices of tantra and be-
come celibate ascetics, as evinced by the nal verse of one of their earliest
texts, the circa thirteenth-century Goraksaataka:
.
We drink the dripping liquid called bindu, the drop, not wine;
we eat the rejection of the objects of the ve senses, not meat;
we do not embrace a sweetheart [but] the Susumn. nd,
. her
body curved like kua grass; if we have intercourse . . . it
takes place in a mind dissolved in the void, not in a vagina.
e original practitioners of hathayoga
. were thus all celibate ascetics; it
was no sex cult. eir teachings would have been passed on orally, from
guru to disciple. e older tradition is more than years old, but all
descriptions of its practices are from outsiders until the composition of the
hatha
. corpus starting in the th or th centuries. In fact, of all this tra-
ditions various ascetic practices, it is only the techniques of yoga that are
taught in Sanskrit texts. To this day there are no textual instructions on their
various methods of cultivating tapas, such as holding ones arm in the air for
years on end or sitting surrounded by smouldering res in the summer sun.
Teachings on such matters are still only passed on orally. e purpose of
the ascetic traditions hathayoga
. texts was to bring to a wider audience those
of their teachings on yoga which were suited to householders.
Similarly, the tantric traditions of the rst millennium consisted of a
variety of exclusive sects, access to which was through initiation from a guru
and whose practices, in addition to sect-specic visualisations, included the
repetition of secret mantras exclusive to each tradition and the use of secret
functions of the mind are to be stopped, but, unlike those of hat.hayoga, its techniques are purely mental.


ritual diagrams called man. dalas.

. But in the texts produced by the tantric
hathayoga
. tradition in the rst few centuries of the second millennium CE
these exclusive features are removed. e teachings are made open to all.
In the Datttreyayogastra, the earliest text to teach a hathayoga
. named
as such, and which is in the tradition of the naked ascetics encountered by
Alexander and found to this day, we read the following (a-b):
Whether a Brahmin, an ascetic, a Buddhist, a Jain, a Skull-
Bearer or a materialist, the wise one who is endowed with
faith and constantly devoted to the practice of [hatha]
. yoga
will attain complete success. Success arises for one who is de-
voted to the practice; how can it arise for one who does not
practice?
Although some of the religious categories said in these verses to be able to
practise yoga are now somewhat obscure, they represent a broad swathe of
the religious traditions of India in the thirteenth century, when the text was
composed. Furthermore, the inclusion of the word Brahmin in addition
to ascetic (ramana). indicates that the teachings are for both ascetics and
householders, worldly people who have not completely devoted their lives
to religious ends, and we nd similar statements in other texts of the early

hatha
. corpus.
e materialist, or Crvka, mentioned in this verse is particularly in-
teresting. While little is known about this tradition we have none of
their texts, only allusions, usually negative, in the works of others they
correspond to what we might today call atheists. ey believed that there is
no life after death and no soul animating the material body. Yet yoga was
apparently for them too.
Sanskrit texts are written from a male (and generally Brahmin) perspec-
tive and so there is little in texts of yoga that directly applies to women.
Yet we do get some eeting references which make it clear that there were
women practising yoga. In addition, the text just quoted as saying that
people of all religious traditions can achieve success through yoga, adds that
this is true for the young, old and inrm.
e slightly later Hathapradpik,
. which is the most inclusivist of all the
hatha
. texts, borrows this verse about the young, old and inrm, and goes
E.g.Amr. tasiddhi ., ivasamhit ..
.
E.g.Datttreyayogastra a, Hat.hapradpik .-.
Datttreyayogastra .
Hathapradpik ..
.


out of its way not to include any teachings which might identify it exclu-
sively with any particular tradition. us there are no mentions of mantras,
man. dalas
. or initiations, nor even of cakras. e now almost universally ac-
cepted system of six-plus-one cakras was yet to achieve hegemony and any
mention of a particular cakra system would have betrayed allegiance to its
particular tantric tradition so cakras were omitted altogether.
e universalism of hathayoga
. meant that it could be adopted by any
religious tradition and adapted to its ends which sometimes involved
denying its universality. us its techniques are found in Jain and Buddhist
texts, while the ivasamhit,
. a late text of the early hathayoga
. corpus, teaches
it within a specic tantric tradition, complete with exclusive secret mantras.
Meanwhile, yoga was catching the attention of the increasing number of
Muslims in India. At rst this came through interaction between Sus and
ascetic yogis, but later on texts on yoga in a variety of non-Sanskritic lan-
guages, including Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Urdu such as the Persian
Bahr. al-Hayt
. or Water of Life, an illustrated manuscript of which from
includes the earliest paintings of non-seated yogic sanas were
commissioned by nobles at Islamic courts, both in India and the wider Is-
lamic world, and continue to be used among some Su orders to this day.
So, it is clear that in hathayogas
. formative period its codiers saw it as
something that could be practised by anybody. But was it Hindu? Before I
answer this question I should point out that the word Hindu is itself prob-
lematic. It was rst used by outsiders to describe the inhabitants of the
region around the Indus river, so rather than a religious marker it was a ge-
ographic or ethnic term, and the same is true of its rst occurrences in Indic
languages in the fourteenth century. Its use to denote religious aliation
is not found until several centuries later. e argument over the origins of
Hinduism, the religion of the Hindus, has two extreme positions. One side
says that Hinduism is the santana dharma or perennial religion which has
existed since time immemorial; the other says that it was invented by the
British as they sought to understand India in their own terms of reference.
e truth lies somewhere between the two. Certainly in the th-century
yoga text that I cited earlier, there is no notion of an overarching Hinduism
in opposition to Buddhism and Jainism. Indian religion has always com-
prised a huge range of diering worldviews and despite modern claims to
the contrary there has never been a universally accepted monolithic Hin-
e manuscript is in the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin. Ten of its twenty-three pictures of sanas are to be

displayed in the Yoga: e Art of Transformation exhibition to be held at the Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian
Institute, Washington DC, from October .
On the term Hindu and the concept of Hinduism, a useful starting point is L .


duism. When such a ction is propounded it is usually aligned with the

Vedic and Brahmanical traditions. If we look at the early history of yoga,
however, we can see that it appeared outside of these traditions.
e word yoga in the sense of a soteriology, a means to salvation, rst
appeared in Brahmanical texts in the last centuries to describe the prac-
tices of the non-Brahmin ascetics amongst whom the techniques of hatha- .
yoga were developed (who were themselves yet to call their practices yoga).
eir yoga is one of a variety of features now seen to characterise Hin-
duism but which originated outside of the Vedic and Brahmanical tradi-
tions among the ascetics of the region known as Greater Magadha to the
east of Allahabad in northern India. Prominent among these features are
vegetarianism and institutionalised renunciation. But perhaps those most
closely identied with Hinduism are the concepts of karma and rebirth,
which are not found within Vedic texts but were adopted fairly early on in
the development of Brahmanical religion.
e best known and perhaps earliest indicator of yogas adoption by the
Brahmanical orthodoxy is Patajalis circa fourth-century Yogastra, which
teaches a soteriological method based on stilling the mind through medita-
tion and breath control but none of the more physical techniques of hatha-
.
yoga. Like the soteriological methods called yoga in earlier Sanskrit texts,
the teachings of the Yogastra originated in non-Brahmanical traditions, in-
cluding Buddhism. Even with the composition of the Yogastra, yoga was
still not accepted by the most orthodox Brahmanical traditions, nor did its
proponents seek it to be. Yoga as philosophy and its associated metaphysi-
cal system known as Smkhya
. were said in the circa fth-century Smkhya-
.
kriks to be opposed to Brahmanical Vedic religion because of the latters
practice of animal sacrice, and in his Tantravrttika the sixth-century
orthodox Vedic ritualist Kumrila groups Yoga and Smkhya . with other

heresies such as Buddhism and Jainism.
e proponents of Brahmanical Hinduisms perennial tradition often
base it on the six supposedly classical and mutually reinforcing daranas or
philosophies, one of which is Yoga. But Yoga does not appear in lists of the
B . Cf. John Henry G (:), an eighteenth-century traveller to India, who wrote

of the posture-practising ascetics encountered by Alexanders entourage ese Gymnosophists were undoubtedly
not Bramins [sic], as has been erroneously advanced by many authors,; but of that sect of men now called Gioghys.
B .
N :.
I write Yoga with a capital Y when referring to yoga as a darana or philosophy.
e other heresies listed are Pupata and Pcartra. See E :- for a translation and

discussion.


six daranas until the twelfth-century Sarvasiddhntasamgraha
. and then it
is only as a metaphysical system and meditational method the physical
techniques of hathayoga
. were still shunned by the Brahmanical orthodox
as they had been for over a millennium. In the Bhagavadgt, which can be
dated to the rst few centuries of the common era, Kr. s. na
. dismisses the tough
physical practices of the ramana . ascetics because they are not enjoined in
scripture and their purpose is to show o. It is only with the composition
of the Sanskrit texts of the early hathayoga
. corpus that the physical practices
of hathayoga
. started to enter the mainstream.
After hathayogas
. teachings had been universalised in the th-th cen-
turies, its practices slowly became a key part of orthodox formulations of
yoga, which was itself on its way to becoming, for the intellectual elite
at least, the dominant Indian soteriological method (amongst the popu-
lation as a whole it came to be superseded by bhakti, devotion). In the
centuries following its formative period the techniques of hathayoga. were
woven into the previously meditation-based yogic methods that had already
been adopted by the mainstream orthodox Brahmin tradition, to the extent
that long passages sometimes entire texts from the early hatha . corpus
were used to compile the so-called Yoga Upanisads. in the th and th
centuries. Contrary to the modern distinction, propounded by Swami
Vivekananda and others, between a mental rjayoga and an inferior phys-
ical hathayoga,
. in medieval India hathayoga
. was often seen as integral to

the classical yoga of Patajali. Yogic methods were also integrated with
Vedantic philosophy, whose Advaita or non-dual tradition was, mirroring
the trajectory of yoga, well on its way to becoming the dominant philoso-
phy of the emergent Hinduism. is combination of Advaita and Yoga
was then posited as a cornerstone of the santana dharma which the most
vocal proponents of Hinduism today claim to be its eternal essence.
In sum, although yoga and its hatha . or dicult physical methods did
become an accepted part of mainstream Hinduism by the late medieval pe-
riod, it was not always so and to claim that they are key to some perennial
Hindu tradition is, at best, to show a poor grasp of Indias religious history.
Perhaps more pertinent to modern practitioners of yoga than the ques-
tion of whether or not yoga is Hindu particularly in the light of recent
research which has shown that modern yogas techniques are drawn from a
H :-.
Bhagavadgt (.)
B .
See e.g. Vidyranyas th-century Dpik on the Aparoksnubhti (ad ; he expresses a similar sentiment
. .
in his Jvanmuktiviveka, vv. ..-) and the ninth chapter of the Hamsavilsa
. discussed in V .


wide range of traditions, many of which are clearly not Hindu at all
is the question of whether any of its practices are grounded in a system of
metaphysics which might preclude adherence to the tenets of other religious
systems. At rst sight I would say yes: the texts assume a belief in the princi-
ples of reincarnation and its corollary, liberation from the wheel of rebirth,
with the practice of yoga sometimes said to be the fruit of good deeds done
in past lives and its aim to be liberation. But, as I mentioned earlier, the rst
text to teach hathayoga
. says that it will work even for atheists, who we know
did not believe in karma and rebirth. And the radtilaka, a contempora-
neous tantric work which includes some hathayogic
. teachings, opens its nal
chapter by listing four conicting denitions of the metaphysics of yoga.
It privileges none of them, but simply launches into its teachings on yoga
practice, the implication being that whatever your metaphysical aim, yoga
will get you there.

Works Cited
Primary Sources
Amanaska, ed. Jason Birch. Critical edition as part of thesis submitted for
doctorate of philosophy at the University of Oxford, .
Amrtasiddhi
. of Virpksantha.
. Maharaja Mansingh Pustak Prakash, Jodh-
pur, Acc. Nos. and .
Goraksaataka.
. Government Oriental Manuscripts Library, Madras, MS

No. R .
Gheran. dasa
. mhit,
. ed. and tr. J. Mallinson. New York: YogaVidya.com.
.
Datttreyayogastra. Unpublished critical edition by James Mallinson based
on Datttreyayogastra, ed. Brahmamitra Avasth, Svm Keavnanda Yoga
Samsthna
. ; Man Singh Pustak Prakash Nos.; Wai Praj Pthal
.
/-, ; Baroda Oriental Institute ; Mysore Government Ori-
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Vivekamrtan. da. of Goraksadeva.
. Oriental Institute of Baroda Library. Acc.
No. .
S .
For details see my draft article Hat.hayoga and Philosophy which can be found on my academia.edu page.
On this text, which is dierent from the better known text of the same name, see M , in which

it is analysed and translated.

is edition was read with Professor Alexis Sanderson, Jason Birch, Dr Peter-Daniel Szanto and Dr Andrea

Acri in Oxford in early , all of whom I thank for their valuable emendations and suggestions.


radtilakam of Laksma
. nadeikendra.
. Patala
. as edited in B
.
ivasamhit,
. ed. and tr. J. Mallinson. New York: YogaVidya.com. .
Hathapradpik
. of Svtmrma, ed. Svm Digambarj and Dr Ptambar Jh.
Lonavla: Kaivalyadhm S.M.Y.M. Samiti. .

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do not accept the editors inclusion of a fth upadea within the text. e fth upadea is found in very few HP
manuscripts, verses from it are not found in citations of the HP and its subject matter, yogic methods of curing
diseases, is very dierent from that of the rest of the text.


-----------------. . ktism and Hathayoga.

. Paper presented at a con-
ference on the kta traditions in September and to be published in a
volume of the conference proceedings by Routledge. A draft can be down-
loaded from my academia.edu page.
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