Is Yoga Hindu?

Is Yoga Hindu?

Source: blogs.abc.net.au

MELBOURNE, December 12, 2009 (By Margaret Coffey)

At the Parliament of the World’s Religions’s Hindu Convocation, the host of the forthcoming International Yoga Festival, Swami Chidanand Saraswati, urged the taking up of yoga. For the good of our health, Swami Saraswati said. He wasn’t the only one advocating the merits of yoga at the Parliament: so were yoga practitioners who described themselves as ’spiritual’ rather than Hindu. All of which gives rise to some interesting questions: what is the fate of a practice when it is detached from its source tradition? The Hindu American Foundation is interested in having yoga (as practiced in the West) recognised as a spiritual practice of the Hindu tradition. It sponsored a PWR panel session called “Practising Yoga: Covert Conversion to Hinduism or the Key to Mind-Body Wellness for All.” In Malaysia the National Fatwa Council thinks it is the former: in November 2008 it issued advice that yoga is inherently Hindu, so Muslims should not do it. However, the PWR panel included Dr Amir Farid Isahak, a medical practitioner and the Chairman of Interfaith Spiritual Fellowship Malaysia: he said there was no problem, provided a Muslim understood what they were getting into. His Holiness Satguru Bodhinatha Veylanswami (publisher of Hinduism Today) remarked that if you have the root of Hinduism, then the stem is Hinduism, and the flower is Hinduism. Another panellist, Professor Christopher Key Chapple, explained that in his view yoga had traces of Jain and Buddhist elements in it too. The Moderator of this session, Rev Ellen Grace O’Brian, runs the Centre for Spiritual Enlightenment in San Jose, California. Rev O’Brian said that yes, yoga had Vedic origins, and she certainly draws on the Patanjali Sutra, though at her centre they taught it as a spiritual practice for people of all religious backgrounds.

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Comments. By Laura Douglass

While yoga is emphatically not a religion (Feurstein, 2003), the complex truth is that some Hindus do practice yoga as a vital and interconnected aspect of their religious identity. It is understandable that many individuals want to keep the practice of yoga linked to the cultural context from which it is rooted – Hinduism. Colonialist societies have a tendency to take “practices” from cultures independent of the context (historical and religious). I believe that educators and scholars need to make the decision to remove yoga from its context consciously; asking themselves “what is lost in this process?” and “what is gained?” To other scholars, however, yoga is “transcultural” (Hauschild, 2007; Michelis et al., 2008; Strauss, 2005); the very concept of yoga is influenced by a confluence of personal, historical, political and religious ideologies.

While yoga emerged from a Hindu context, it is also true that Jains, Sikhs, Christians, and Jews practice yoga as an important part of their lived spiritual expression (Sri. Aurobindo, 1997; Sri Aurobindo & Mother, 2006; Cullen, 2005; "Holy Yoga: Exercise for the Christian Body and Soul," 2007; "Torah Yoga: Experiencing Jewish Wisdom Through Classic Postures (Book)," 2004; Zaleski, 2007). An example of yoga’s complex ties to multiple ethnicities and religions can be found in the example of an Elementary School in Aspen, Colorado that integrated the Yoga Ed program as part of an attempt to increase exercise and reduce stress for students. A parent and local pastor demanded the removal of yoga from the curriculum citing connections between Hinduism and yoga. The yoga teacher, Agai Akal Singh Khalsa, is not Hindu, but an American Sikh (Breitman, 2006). Yoga reflects the diversity of ways in which individuals in the United States approach their identity; including the largest proportion of yoga practitioners, who see it as a secular practice that improves health and aids in cognition (Castillo, 2008; Hannon, 1994).

Yoga’s exclusive ties to Hinduism is usually promulgated by a small subset of the population with a political agenda. For example, a few vocal Christian leaders in America have also positioned yoga as the exclusive domain of the “Hindu tradition.” This positioning may have a conscious or unconscious political agenda. Rev. Craig Branch of Alabama, who actively participated in passing a law making yoga in the schools of Alabama illegal, sees yoga’s inclusion in the school as part of the “diminishing influence of Christian worldviews” (Breitman, 2006, p. paragraph 16). The popularity of yoga by individual's from diverse religious religious traditions, is a reminder that one's own religious identity is one among many.

References

Aurobindo, S. (1997). Yoga and education. Pondicherry, India: Sri Aurobindo Press.

Aurobindo, S., & Mother, T. (2006). On Education. Twin Lakes, WI: Lotus Press

Breitman, R. (2006). Parents getting bent out of shape over yoga in schools. why? [Electronic Version]. Columbia New Service, www.//jscms.jrn.columbia.edu/cns/2006-04-04/breitman-yogainschools, retrieved 11/11/2002.

Castillo, A. (2008). Yoga Makes Headway in Business Schools. Business Week Online, 4-4.

Cullen, L. T. (2005). Stretching for Jesus. Time, 166(10), 75-75.

Feurstein, G. (2003). The Deeper Dimensions of Yoga. Boston: Shambala Press.
Hannon, K. (1994). Yoga goes mainstream. (Cover story). U.S. News & World Report, 116(19), 79.

Hauschild, T. (2007). Yoga between Indo-Aryan Nationalism and Multisited Fieldwork. Current Anthropology, 48(3), 463-465.

Holy Yoga: Exercise for the Christian Body and Soul. (2007). Publishers Weekly, 254(22), 51-51.

Michelis, E. D., Alter, J., Strauss, S., Singleton, M., Liberman, K., Nevrin, K., et al. (2008). Yoga in the Modern World: Contemporary Perspectives. New York: Routledge Press.

Strauss, S. (2005). Positioning Yoga: Balancing Acts Across Cultures. New York: Berg Press.

Torah Yoga: Experiencing Jewish Wisdom Through Classic Postures (Book). (2004). Publishers Weekly, 251(10), 69-70.

Zaleski, C. (2007). Christian yoga. Christian Century, 124(9), 57-57.