The Yoga Debate: Culture and Counter-Culture, Ancient and Modern

Just lately, I’ve been re-reading Vivian Worthington’s excellent A History of Yoga (1982) and I’ve been struck by how greatly Worthington’s account of the early history of Yoga resonates with our current situation. Consequently, I believe, it is quite useful for helping us to gain some clarity about where we yogis should be going as a community.

Worthington describes Yoga as a “… free-thinking, free-acting, unorganized discipline standing outside of established religion, and outside of any government administrative or educational system” (pg. 5).

Yoga is like this, according to Worthington, because its spiritual roots are in the Sramanic stream of ancient Indian spirituality rather than in Vedic religion. The Vedic stream was held in the custody of the Brahmin priestly caste, but the earliest yogis were Sramanas, independent spirits who valued profound spiritual experience above all else and who devised practices to gain it and explore it. Their outlook was in sharp contrast to that of the Brahmins who thought that spirituality was a matter of accepting authority, maintaining orthodoxy and practicing and preserving prescribed rituals which would placate the gods. This deep conservatism on the part of the Brahmins is not surprising since they were the highest caste of a rigidly stratified society, and consequently they often held enormous political power and enjoyed great social advantage. In short, the Sramanas were outsiders whilst the Brahmins represented the establishment.

Obviously, these two types of worldview, each with its distinct religious practice, were bound to be in tension and this panned out in all sorts of ways as history unfolded. At times, the establishment would attempt to suppress the outsiders, even at times killing them. At other times, orthodoxy was too weak politically to do this and instead attempted to co-opt the outsiders, absorbing them into itself, claiming its ideas and practices as its own when this was to its advantage. Hence, the Upanishads, Sramanic testaments if ever there were any, were nevertheless claimed by the Vedic stream and called Vedanta, the end of the Vedas.

Worthington’s account of this early history of Yoga is clearly speculative to some degree. There is little hard evidence about the period in question. However, the logic of Yoga is such that the general shape of this account is bound to be true and, indeed, the establishment/outsider tension is bound to be present throughout its history.

Let’s explore this logic a little. For Yoga, individual experience is central to the whole project. Individual experience is thought to give us the most reliable knowledge and is thought to be the means which will transform us into the divine beings we already are.

By contrast, the conservative, orthodox religion of the establishment, requires us to conform, to perform the prescribed rituals and accept the dogmas of the faith. In most cases, it doesn’t want us to think too freely or experience too deeply in case our free thoughts and authentic experiences contradict the dogmas of the faith. And the dogmas have to be protected at all costs because getting people to adhere to them is the means of securing a position of power.

The upshot of this is that an emphasis on the value of personal spiritual experience is bound to be in high tension with an emphasis on official dogma and the requirements of orthodoxy, even when some modus operandi between the two has been established.

All this can be summarised thus: Yoga is essentially counter-cultural.

My contention is that the same tension between the establishment and the outsider-experientialists exists today and animates the debate that has been going on on these pages and elsewhere about the future of Yoga. We have our modern equivalents of the Brahmins and the Sramanas, the fitness industry and its help-mates being equivalent to the former and those yogis who are dismayed at all this being equivalent to the latter. The former are attempting to subjugate Yoga to the will of the fitness industry, which is deeply enmeshed with corporate power, and to regulate its teaching to the utmost degree. If you doubt this, look at the so-called National Occupational Standard for a Level Three Fitness Instructor. This is what they want Yoga to conform to and it is utterly lifeless, mechanical and devoid of any understanding of Yoga’s spiritual nature and the organic nature of its transmission.

On the other hand, the Sramanas, as they always have, are resisting this attempt to co-opt and kill their beloved art by those hot in the pursuit of profit. They continue to recreate Yoga in themselves and the hearts of their students in a vast array of ways, but always ultimately through direct experience of the divine depths of the human being. They are nurtured by their lineages, to be sure, but lineage is as nothing if one has no experience and in any case exists only to pass on the spark to each new generation. Vivian Worthington expressed what was required of Yoga to maintain its authenticity with brilliant clarity: “To be true to itself [Yoga] must ever stand close to the spontaneous fount of human creativity” (ibid pg. 1). What an irony that this perspicuous Yogi was once a British Wheel of Yoga Secretary-General who in the intensity of their desire to be “official” have long since forgotten that the fount exists.

By Peter Yates - Heart Yoga

www.heartyoga.co.uk  

We are grateful to Pete for his permission to reproduce this excelent article - Kevala.