The Roots and Practice of Yoga

Where the word began, and the systems that carry a lineage

Yoga is among the oldest surviving disciplines on earth. The word “Yoga” is Sanskrit, from the root yuj, to yoke — the image is an ox yoked to a cart. What is joined is the individual self and the divine. Commonly known as a form of physical exercise, it is an ancient science that goes beyond physical postures. Its original purpose was to attain union with God: a practice to experience one universal consciousness.

The oldest definition

The word appears in the Rig Veda, earliest of the four Vedas — the ancient Hindu scriptures, written in Sanskrit, containing hymns, philosophy and guidance — composed between roughly 1500 and 1200 BCE. The first clear definition arrives around 300 BCE in the Katha Upanishad, one of the philosophical texts that close the Vedas:

“Tam yogam iti manyante sthiram indriya-dharanam” — They consider that state to be yoga: the steady holding, or firm control, of the senses. (Katha Upanishad 6.11)

Shiva, the first teacher

The name Shiva carries two meanings, and both are in use here. Shiva is the creative conscious potential in our world; and Shiva is Lord Shiva, the embodiment of that potential. The potential does not teach. The embodiment does.

It is the embodiment that the Shaiva traditions — those centered on Shiva — call Adiyogi, the first yogi, and Adi Guru, the first teacher. He gave the discipline to the Saptarishis, the seven sages. A rishi is a spiritual exponent, an enlightened person who has accomplished third eye awakening and kundalini awakening. Every Shaiva lineage traces itself back through those seven.

The four paths

From that source the discipline branched, and the map most used to sort the branches is modern. Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) divided yoga into four paths, drawing three of them from the Bhagavad Gita and the fourth from Patanjali, and giving each its own book in the 1890s.

  1. Karma Yoga — the path of action. Karma is a Vedic concept of actions determining reality, associated with the universal law of cause and effect. Krishna sets the rule in the second chapter of the Gita: “You have a right to action alone, never to its fruits” (2.47). The work continues; the claim on the result is released.
  2. Bhakti Yoga — the path of devotion, and bhakti means devotion: worship, chanting and surrender to a chosen form of God. Arjuna asks Krishna outright which is higher, worship of the personal form or of the formless absolute. Krishna answers that those who fix the mind on him with steady faith are the most perfected in yoga (12.2), and that the formless road is the harder one for anyone who has a body (12.5). The Gita closes on that same path: “Abandon all duties and come to me alone for refuge” (18.66).
  3. Jnana Yoga — the path of knowledge. Inquiry into the true nature of the self. Krishna gives it the same weight: “In this world there is nothing as purifying as knowledge” (4.38), and the fire of knowledge burns action to ash (4.37).
  4. Raja Yoga — the royal path. Meditation and mastery of the mind. This is the one path Vivekananda took from outside the Gita: the name belongs to the system of Patanjali, and the eight limbs are its stages. The Gita teaches the same seated meditation in its sixth chapter, under the name Dhyana Yoga.

Three maps of that inner journey follow. They differ in count and in age, and each one belongs to a living tradition.

Patanjali and the eight limbs

Ashtanga means eight limbs — ashta, eight; anga, limb. It is the system of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, a collection of Sanskrit sutras on the theory and practice of yoga: about 195 short lines in four chapters, composed in the early centuries of the common era. The German Sanskrit scholar Philipp Maas, of the University of Leipzig, established from the manuscripts that the sutras and their oldest commentary came from a single hand as one work. The eight limbs are set out in its second chapter:

  1. Yama — discipline, in the form of restraint. Harmlessness, truthfulness, honesty in what one takes, continence, freedom from grasping.
  2. Niyama — the rules one keeps. Purity, contentment, self-discipline, self-study, surrender to God.
  3. Asana — body postures. Patanjali gives posture a single line: sthira sukham asanam — the seat should be steady and at ease (2.46). One line, out of 195.
  4. Pranayama — the practice of breath control in yoga. This limb has a literature of its own, and its techniques are set out in the article on pranayama.
  5. Pratyahara — sense withdrawal, the senses drawn back from the things they reach for.
  6. Dharana — concentration: the action or power of focusing one’s attention or mental effort, held on a single point. Most often that point is the third eye, where we meet our creator.
  7. Dhyana — meditation, a general term for various methods and practices having the same goal of awakening the consciousness. Here it is the concentration of the sixth limb, sustained.
  8. Samadhi — bliss; a state of consciousness beyond the ordinary states of waking, dreaming and deep sleep, in which the meditator and the object of meditation become one.

The first two limbs are conduct. The last three are stages of one act of attention, and together they carry a name of their own: samyama.

The Agamas and the six limbs

The Agamas are a body of Sanskrit scripture set apart from the Vedas and given as the direct speech of Shiva. The word means “that which has come down.” They are the working scriptures of Shaiva Siddhanta, and they cover how a temple is built, how worship is performed, how a follower lives, and how the inner practice is done. Twenty-eight principal Agamas are counted.

Each Agama is divided into four sections called padas. A pada is a foot, a step or a quarter in Sanskrit, and it names a division of a text. The four are conduct, ritual, yoga and knowledge. The Yoga Pada is the yoga section, and three Yoga Padas survive:

  1. The Suprabheda Agama
  2. The Mrgendra Agama
  3. The Kirana Agama

Dominic Goodall, of the French Institute of Pondicherry, published the definitive edition of the Kirana in 1998.

The yoga those three sections teach is Shadanga Yoga — six limbs. The same count appears in the Maitri Upanishad and throughout classical Tantra, the ritual and inner disciplines of Shaiva, Vaishnava and Buddhist teaching. Its six are pranayama, pratyahara, dharana, tarka, dhyana and samadhi. It begins at the breath and ends in samadhi, the same destination the eight limbs reach. What it adds is tarka — discernment, the reasoning that tests an experience against what the scripture says that experience should be.

Nithyananda Yoga

Sri Bhagwan Nithyananda Paramashiva is the Supreme Pontiff of Hinduism and the founder of KAILASA, the nation established to revive the most ancient Hindu civilization. Paramashiva means the ultimate Shiva.

The yoga he teaches is built on the Kirana Agama, cited to its Yoga Pada, verse 2.3. It is called Shashtanga Yoga, six-limbed — the count the Agamas carry. The tradition places the original revelation more than 60,000 years before Patanjali, and holds Paramashiva to be the originator of yoga and Patanjali its organizer.

The system counts 800 asanas. Its central sequence is the Prathama Vinyasa Krama, the first sequence: 108 asanas woven with twelve components — herbs, ornaments, mantra, japa and ajapa (the mantra repeated aloud, and the mantra carried in thought through the day), bandhas and mudras (the locks that hold energy in place, and the hand signs that distribute and seal it), pranayama, asana, weights and visualization.

It is performed as ritual worship of Paramashiva, and the declared end is Shivoham — I am Shiva. The tradition also holds that the sequence builds physical and mental health and awakens Kundalini Shakti. It is taught in both registers at once: as worship, and as a discipline for the body.

Hatha yoga, and the body as a vessel

Hatha yoga exists to build the body. In the higher states of consciousness a force of divine energy moves through a person, and the body has to be built to house it. Posture, breath, cleansing and diet are the work of building that vessel, and they come first because everything inward rests on them.

Hatha means force in Sanskrit. James Mallinson, of SOAS University of London, reads it as the yoga whose results come through effort. A second reading, first recorded in the 14th-century Yoga Bija, takes ha as the sun and tha as the moon, joined.

The standard manual is the Hatha Yoga Pradipika — light on hatha yoga — compiled in the 15th century by Svatmarama, who traced his lineage to Matsyendranath and Gorakhnath, the founding Nath yogis. Two companion manuals sit beside it: the Shiva Samhita, and the 17th-century Gheranda Samhita.

The Pradipika runs in four chapters: asana; the cleansing routines and pranayama; mudra and bandha; and samadhi. Svatmarama states his purpose in the second verse. Hatha yoga is taught as a stairway to Raja Yoga, and the postures are the first tread of that stair.

Shaolin reached the same conclusion from another direction: Shi Heng Yi teaches Shaolin as two disciplines — the visible training of the body, and the inner training that a trained body makes possible.

Kundalini, Kriya and Nada yogas

Three disciplines take the instruments hatha yoga assembles — breath, mantra, mudra and bandha — and carry them further.

  1. Kundalini Yoga, also called Laya Yoga. Kundalini is an extraordinary potential energy hidden inside every human body; awakened, it takes a person to a different plane of consciousness or existence. This yoga raises it through the chakras along the sushumna, the energy that runs along the center of the spinal cord, to the sahasrara at the crown of the head, known as the gateway to Shiva. Its instruments are breath, mantra, mudra and bandha.
  2. Kriya Yoga — a technique of breath and energy. Mahavatar Babaji is the deathless master of the Himalayas, described by Paramahansa Yogananda as the one who revived Kriya Yoga and gave it to Lahiri Mahasaya (1828–1895) in 1861. Lahiri’s student Sri Yukteswar taught Paramahansa Yogananda (1893–1952), who carried the technique to America and set the whole line down in Autobiography of a Yogi. All three are spiritual masters in Babaji’s lineage.
  3. Nada Yoga — the ancient science of sound, based on how sound vibrations affect the body, mind and spirit through the tongue, the mouth, and chemical changes in the brain. Its instrument is the mantra: a specific sound formula and a direct method for attunement to the original creative vibration. Japa is the mantra repeated aloud, commonly known as chanting; ajapa japa is the mantra held in thought or intoned under the breath through the whole day.

What they all agree on

Eight limbs, six limbs, and the four chapters of the Pradipika. The systems differ in count, in age and in lineage, and they place the same two things at the center: the breath, and the attention. The Katha Upanishad named it first, and named it in one line — the steady holding, or firm control, of the senses.

Sources

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