– Wendy Doniger

Debates about these questions have been making headlines lately. Some
American Hindus have argued that American yoga is not Hindu enough, that
Hindus should  ¢â‚¬Å“Take Back Yoga ¢â‚¬  (the label of a campaign by the Hindu
American Foundation). Other Americans agree that the Hindus should take back
yoga ¢â‚¬”but because yoga is *too* Hindu: R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the
Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, advises Christians to abandon yoga if
they value their (Christian) souls, for  ¢â‚¬Å“yoga, as a spiritual practice, runs
directly counter to the spiritual counsel of the Bible. ¢â‚¬  The problem should
not have been breaking news; a spoof in 2003,  ¢â‚¬Å“Yoga: A Religion for Sex
Addicts, ¢â‚¬  depicted a Christian minister who was asked,  ¢â‚¬Å“Should Christians
practice Yoga? ¢â‚¬  He replied,  ¢â‚¬Å“Are we going to have to bring this whole thing
up about Yoga again? I thought our Sunday school curriculum included lessons
about the evils of everything Oriental, including Yoga! ¢â‚¬ 

But the issues involved are not trivial. Is yoga, in fact,  ¢â‚¬Å“a spiritual
practice ¢â‚¬ ? More particularly, is it a *Hindu* spiritual practice? The word
 ¢â‚¬Å“yoga ¢â‚¬  originally meant  ¢â‚¬Å“yoking ¢â‚¬  horses to chariots or draft animals to
plows or wagons (the Sanskrit and English words are cognate). Though many
yoga practitioners, particularly but not only Hindus, insist that their
practice can be traced back to the Upanishads (c. 600 BCE) and Patanjali (c.
200 CE), the word  ¢â‚¬Å“yoga ¢â‚¬  in these texts designates a spiritual praxis of
meditation conjoined with breath-control,  ¢â‚¬Å“yoking ¢â‚¬  the senses in order to
control the spirit, and then  ¢â‚¬Å“yoking ¢â‚¬  the mind in order to obtain
immortality.

Buddhist sources in this same period also speak of techniques of
disciplining the mind and the body, and the word  ¢â‚¬Å“yoga, ¢â‚¬  owing as much to
Buddhism as to Hinduism, soon came to mean any mental and physical praxis of
this sort. (Similar disciplines arose in ancient Greece and, later, in
Christianity, a subject on which Pierre Hadot and Michel Foucault had a
great deal to say). This is the general sense in which the word  ¢â‚¬Å“yoga ¢â‚¬  is
used in the *Bhagavad Gita*, a few centuries later, to denote each of three
different religious paths (the yoga of action, the yoga of meditation, and
the yoga of devotion). But these texts say nothing about the physical
 ¢â‚¬Å“positions ¢â‚¬  or  ¢â‚¬Å“postures ¢â‚¬  that distinguish contemporary yoga. The postures
developed much later, some from medieval Hatha Yoga and Tantra, but more
from nineteenth-century European traditions such as Swedish gymnastics,
British body-building, Christian Science, and the YMCA, and still others
devised by twentieth-century Hindus such as T. Krishnamacharya and B. K. S.
Iyengar, reacting against those non-Indian influences.

So there is an ancient Indian yoga, but it is not the source of most of what
people do in today ¢â‚¬â„¢s yoga classes. Contemporary yoga traditions are a far
cry both from the Upanishads and from Hatha Yoga. Most twenty-first century
American yoga practitioners have more in common with a jogger than with a
meditating sage; they want to relax after a hard day at the office, tighten
up their abs, and reduce their cholesterol and their blood pressure; their
yoga of relaxation and stretching may also involve regular enemas, a cure
for back pain, a beauty regime, a vegetarian diet with a lot of yogurt
(which is *not* etymologically related to  ¢â‚¬Å“yoga ¢â‚¬ )–oh yes, and a route to
God.

Is yoga, then, for the mind or for the body? Is it like going to church or
like going to the gym? Is it a spiritual praxis or an exercise routine? To
all these questions, the answer is: yes. For some people (both in India and
in America) it has been one, for others, the other, and for many, both.

In his online column and elsewhere, the Reverend Mohler has objected to the
frequent citation by yoga teachers of “the idea that the body is a vehicle
for reaching consciousness with the divine,” which he says is  ¢â‚¬Å“just not
Christianity. ¢â‚¬  But yoga is  ¢â‚¬Å“not just Hinduism ¢â‚¬ ; as we have seen, it has rich
European (and Christian!) elements. Despite this historical evidence,
however, many Hindus, such as those in the Hindu American Foundation, insist
that meditational yoga ¢â‚¬”rather than temple rituals, the worship of images of
the gods, or other, more passionate and communal forms of religion ¢â‚¬”has
always been, and remains, the essence of Hinduism,* their* religion.
Christians for whom a yoga class is simply physical exercise may offend such
Hindus but should pose no problem for Mohler; and Christians who take the
philosophical doctrines of yoga seriously should be no problem for a more
ecumenical, not to say multi-cultural, pastor.

*References*

Landover Baptist Church,  ¢â‚¬Å“Yoga: A Religion for Sex
Addicts<http://www.landoverbaptist.org/news0303/yoga.html>, ¢â‚¬ 
March 2003.

Dylan Lovan,  ¢â‚¬Å“Southern Baptist Leader on Yoga: Not Christianity, ¢â‚¬  Associated
Press, October 7, 2010.

R. Albert Mohler, Jr.,  ¢â‚¬Å“Yahoo, Yoga, and Yours
Truly<http://www.albertmohler.com/2010/10/07/yahoo-yoga-and-yours-truly/>, ¢â‚¬ 
AlbertMohler.com, October 7, 2010.

Paul Vitrello,  ¢â‚¬Å“Hindu Group Stirs a Debate Over Yoga ¢â‚¬â„¢s
Soul<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/nyregion/28yoga.html>, ¢â‚¬ 
*New York Times*, November 27, 2010.

*Wendy Doniger* is the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the
History of Religions at the University of Chicago and has published
translations of the *Rig Veda*, the *Laws of Manu*, and the *Kamasutra*. Her
latest book is *The Hindus: An Alternative History* (Penguin, 2009).

*Sightings*comes from the Martin Marty
Center<http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/>at the University of
Chicago Divinity School.

Attribution

Columns may be quoted or republished in full, with attribution to the author
of the column, *Sightings*, and the Martin Marty Center at the University of
Chicago Divinity School.