 Welcome and thank you all for joining today's fascinating webinar on yoga past and present. I am Dr. Bharti Kansara, Vice President of American Friends of SOAS, which offers a brilliant MA in yoga and meditation, as well as a PhD program in yoga studies, and we have just started a SOAS yoga studies online. Although millions in the US and Europe practice some form of yoga today, in 2018 it was one out of seven in the United States. Most are unaware of its underlying history and metaphysics. So today's webinar will explore the deep philosophical roots of yoga in ancient times, its metamorphosis in the medieval period, and what it has morphed into today in the United States and in Europe. In today's world, yoga has become a way of promoting physical and mental health. Gyms run yoga classes, hospitals prescribe it for patients and pregnant women, psychotherapists encourage it. Today, yoga is ubiquitous and yet barely understood in its real nature as a profound spiritual practice begun in ancient India. Professor Andrew Nicholson will explore for us, yoga's roots in the Indus Valley civilization and in Vedic times. He is an associate professor at Stony Brook University, State University of New York, and author of many books, including the award-winning Unifying Hinduism, Philosophy and Identity in Indian Intellectual History, and also Lord Shiva Song, the Ishwara Gita. He is currently working on the king and the yogi, visions of ethical perfection in South Asian thought. Dr. James Malinsen, head of SOAS's Center of Yoga Studies, will reveal the contribution of the North and other Sampradayas or yoga lineages in medieval times, their contribution to the development of Hatha or physical yoga. He has written nine books relating to Sanskrit texts on yoga, poetry and epic tales. Amanda Lucia, professor of religious studies at University of California Riverside, will delineate for us what yoga has morphed into in present day United States and European societies. She has written an excellent book on this called White Utopias, the religious exoticism of transformational festivals published in 2020. In addition, she has explored the phenomenon of celebrity gurus, especially Amma, the hugging saint. Our moderator, Seth Powell, is completing a doctorate in yoga studies at Harvard University with a dissertation on the 15th century Sanskrit yoga text, Shiva Yoga Pradipika. He has created a leading online educational platform for yoga and South Asian studies. Our three experts will give a 10 minute presentation each, followed by a 15 minute panel discussion, moderated by Seth Powell, followed by a 10 minute audience Q&A. So please put any questions you have for our distinguished panelists into the Q&A box. And we will end with my vote. So without further ado, please welcome our first speaker and presenter, Professor Andrew Nicholson. Thank you very much, Andrew, take the stage. Thank you, Barati. And it's a pleasure to be here to see so many people interested in the history of yoga. So I've been given a fairly unenviable task in covering 2,500 years of yoga history in 10 minutes for obvious reasons that is impossible. But what I'm going to do instead is provide just a few snapshots of the early history of yoga and hopefully try to resolve some questions about yoga and who the yogis in the beginning were. So let me do a little share screen here. So I'm taking as my theme today is yoga Hindu. This is revisiting an article I wrote back in 2013 that was in part a response to an organization in the United States that made the claim that yoga is authentically Hindu and that therefore they needed to take back yoga and restore it and restore the appreciation for its Hindu roots. So in part because of that I chose to examine, you know, what does it mean for yoga to be Hindu and what does the historical evidence say. I think interestingly enough, in 2015 some five years after the take back yoga campaign. Prime Minister Narendra Modi came out and said that in fact yoga is not Hindu yoga is Indian broadly speaking so in 2015. He gave a talk at the UN and he said that quote yoga is an invaluable gift of ancient Indian tradition unquote, and some of his ministers and the BJP party clarified that yes in fact yoga is a practice for everyone you can be seek you can be Muslim you can be Christian and still practice and benefit from yoga because it is Indian, but not specifically Hindu. So that's an interesting move he made in 2015 I think it upset a lot of people in the Hindu right actually. Perhaps we can talk in the question and answer of why he made that choice to frame it that way. So, from my perspective as a historian. First of all, many people talk about the Indus Valley civilization and excuse me for showing you this again but this is the famous slide from its famous seal seal for 20. Sometimes on is the proto Shiva or Pashupati seal. And first thing I thought I would do is to reflect briefly on this seal and what exactly it is so in 1931, an archaeologist named John Marshall, said that this is proto Shiva, and he's sitting in some kind of yogic position. And furthermore, this is Shiva in his form as the Pashupati the Lord of beasts. And we know that because he's surrounded by animals and the seal. I would say that, although in the mid 20th century, authors like Richard Iliada and his famous book, yoga immortality and freedom accepted that understanding in the 21st century. A minority of scholars of the history of India, still accept that idea. There are a few reasons. I would say, one of them is, okay, we have this Shiva seal and an image of Shiva, and then somehow the portrayal of Shiva in Indian art vanishes for about 2000 years until the next unmistakably. Great depiction is in the first century BCE, during the Shunga dynasty in in Andhra Pradesh. So the question is, well, where did Shiva go for this 2000 year period if in fact he was already being worshipped and images such as this one were being made to Shiva at this time. Another question, I'm not sure if this Marshall addresses this, but the word Pashu, as it's understood in texts like the Tarvaveda does not mean a wild animal. Typically, Pashu refers to domestic animals, animals like horses or goats or sheep. And certainly when we talk about Pashupati and Shiva as the Lord of beasts. Almost exclusively those beasts are the type of beasts one has as domestic animals. And if you look on this slide, you can see that there are four animals from left to right. They appear to be a water buffalo, or an Osiris, an elephant, and a tiger. So by my estimation, only one of those animals, the water buffalo is a Pashu in the sense that's usually understood in invading texts. For every reason, I would be skeptical of the claim that this is Shiva. Recently, a scholar named Asco Parpola wrote a book called The Roots of Hinduism. And there he talks about this proto Shiva or Pashupati seal, connecting it to Mesopotamian culture and specifically proto Elamite art. This is a culture that existed between 3100 and 2900 BCE, just east of the Tigris River. And he said, the so-called yoga posture, the Harapandi dubbed proto Shiva, seems to derive from the way in which seated bulls are represented in proto Elamite art. And I think one of Parpola's enormous contributions to understanding the Indus Valley civilization is noting this connection between Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley civilization. And in fact, there was very likely trade and cultural exchange between Mesopotamia and Indus Valley civilization. Another thing he says is particularly stimulating. He says on the prior page, page 209 of this book, while this does not prevent it from also being a prototype of a particular yogic asana, it somewhat weakens its power as evidence for the Harapan beginnings of yoga, unquote. So according to him, it's possible if we accept this as a yogi seated in perhaps Padmasana or Sidhasana, some seated pose like that, that the origins of asana go to Mesopotamia and not to Indus Valley. I'm not sure that I buy that. I'm also not sure that we can definitively trace yogic asanas to the Indus Valley civilization. I think I'm guessing the other scholars on this panel would agree that probably taking an agnostic position on the question of whether yoga was practiced in the Indus Valley civilization as wise, given just how ambiguous the evidence is. Since my time is running out, let me move ahead a little bit to what I think is the clearest evidence of yoga. No one, no sensible person can doubt that the Kata Upanishad, which is a Vedic text dated off into the third century CE, does give a definition of yoga that looks an awful lot like what we call yoga in later times. So chapter six, verse 11, when the senses are firmly reigned in, that is yoga. So people think from distractions, a man is then free for yoga is the coming into being as well as the ceasing to be. This is Patrick O'Level's famous translation. This definition of yoga as Indra Dharana, the reigning in of the sense organs should remind those of you who have read Patanjali. Of course, Dharana is one of the limbs of yoga. And this is unmistakably, I think, the definition of yoga, as we now understand it. But I would caution people about thinking that this means that yoga is exclusively Vedic. Because around the same time, we have Buddhists, for instance, in the Pali Canon, the Count of Theravada Buddhism, talking about the Buddha during his enlightenment, sitting under the Bodhi tree and going through a sequence of four jhanas is the word in Pali or jhanas and Sanskrit. And there too, this understanding of yoga as a kind of seated activity where one reigns in the senses, using the mind, the metaphor from the Kata Upanishad, of course, is the chariotier, who is the intellect. And he uses the reigns skillfully, which are the mind to reign in those horses. And the metaphor is the metaphor of yoga or yoking, because of course the word yoga is cognate with the English word to yoke or to join. So from my estimation, I think we can say with some certainty that sometime in the mid first millennium BCE, lots of different groups of people, not just Vedic people, but Buddhists, presumably Jains, other Shramana or spiritual strivers, we're all developing these sorts of meditative or yogic techniques. Of course, most famously, we have Patanjali, many centuries later, who sometime around the fourth century, third century common era, systematizes and really synthesizes lots of different yoga traditions. And one of the things I think we should remember about Patanjali is he too is not exclusively, quote unquote, Hindu. So a lot of good work has been done recently, exploring the Buddhist roots of Patanjali's Yoga Sutra. This is not to say he's just Buddhist. I think he was borrowing from lots of different sources, such as Samkhya philosophy, such as the Vedas, of course, and texts like the Kato Upanishad, but also from Buddhist ideas. So for instance, unmistakably, this idea of the four sublime attitudes or Brahma Viharas, which we find in Sutra 133. Patanjali says, by adopting the attitude of friendship, Maitri, toward those who are happy, compassion toward those who are suffering, sympathetic joy toward those who are virtuous, and equanimity toward those who are wicked, clarity arises in the mind. So he's adopting a framework that we find in the Pali Canon and the Te Vidya Sutra, sometime, perhaps around the first century BCE, we have the Buddha teaching a very similar thing. He says, with his heart filled with friendship, metha, that's the Pali word, Maitri is a Sanskrit, he dwells, if using one quarter, the second, the third, the fourth, thus he dwells of using the whole world. And then he moves to compassion, karuna, sympathetic joy, muddha. So here equanimity is the fourth, upekha or upeksha. So here we have clear Buddhist borrowings from early Buddhist meditative techniques in Patanjali. That doesn't mean Patanjali is a Buddhist, of course. It means he had a very interesting synthesis of many different earlier yoga traditions. And the last thing I want to end with is to caution that even though Patanjali today is remembered as being the fundamental or classical expression of Hindu yoga, that wasn't always agreed upon by later Vedic thinkers. So for instance, we find Kumadala Bhatta, a 7th century common era, Mimamsa Vedic ritualist, very famous influential scholar, who wrote, The Treatises on Righteousness Dharma and Unrighteousness Adharma that have been adopted in Samkhya, Yoga, Pancharatra, Pashupatta and Buddhist works are not accepted by those who know the Triple Veda, unquote. So there, at least in the understanding of Kumadala, as well as other 1st century common era thinkers such as Shankara, who also gives a caution about accepting Patanjali's yoga as authoritative, they do not understand Patanjali as being part of this Vedic tradition and instead want to associate it with these fringe groups such as Pashupattas. The worshipers of Pashupatta, interestingly enough, are not considered Vedic and Buddhists. So here I think we can see just how contested some of these categories have been historically. And I'll just end with the observation that, you know, we've talked about Buddhist yoga, Hindu yoga, of course, James from a very early time practiced yoga. But so too, when we get to the medieval period, we find Muslim Sufi Yogis adopting the Hatha Yoga scheme of the Chakras or power centers for their own type of Sufi meditation. And in the 20th century, we see Christian yoga where Christians will do Yogasanas and chant Bible passages while they perform these things. So I don't think this multiplicity of religious associations that we find in yoga in more recent times is actually that surprising. Yoga has been a kind of open source software, you might say, that has been widely adapted by many different groups over its history and therefore is not just exclusively Hindu. I'll end there. I apologize for going over time. And I will invite my colleague, James Malanson to present on medieval yoga. Thank you very much for your time. Hello everyone. Thanks, Andrew. Thanks very much. Thanks very much to Dr. Kansara as well for inviting me to speak to you. My what I'm going to say compliments Andrew's excellent presentation. He's sort of pinpoint the origins of what we can really identify as as yogi and the first instances of something that really does look like what we would understand the yoga around the time of the Kato Upanishad. So what I'm going to look at, I'm going to jump at least 1000 years forward. I'm looking specifically at origins of what we might identify as, you know, what looks to us like modern yoga practice I sort of complex physical postures and so forth. So in the period that Andrew was looking at we can be pretty confident we know for sure that the physical methods that were used as part of yoga. Essentially seated postures for meditation. And then the only other thing I hang on going to get my slideshow going where are we keynote. Is that working. I'm seeing all kinds of things. Okay, hopefully everyone can see that okay. And then. So around that period. So look first of all physical yoga methods before 1000 CE, I see that as a sort of crucial inflection point where things change quite dramatically. So in the period that the, the Kato Upanishad that Andrew was talking about. As I mentioned, yoga methods really are either seated postures for meditation physical yoga methods, or we see plenty of references to the performance of what sort of collectively known as tapas now this is obviously a 18th, I think it's early 19th sort of an illustration of a Ramayana manuscript from the British library but you see this complex of physical methods which effectively for mortifying the body okay there's not this idea that we find in modern yoga traditions of cultivating the body of sort of improving our body, and using it their buys a tool for higher yogic levels States of mind, it's more a case of subduing and controlling and really almost sort of battering the body I'm modifying it as we see here in these various different practices hanging, hanging upside down from a tree like a bat and, in particular to look a bit more closely at this one holding the arms up in the air for years on and you see a couple of instances of that here. In the, in our early texts, here's a passage from the Mahabharata, I won't translate the whole thing, but it's describing a Brahmin sage, ascetic, called Mondavya, you see here, and among his epithets at Urdu-Bhava Mahayogi. Okay, so he's been called a great yogi. And in the same breath he's been called Urdu-Bhava, which is this idea of holding the arms up in the air for years on end, which still goes on to this day. Incidentally, I'm not going to show you any pictures of that, but you can still find practitioners of that practice. So the two things, you know, yoga and these physical ascetic methods at this period are very closely identified and still are, as I say today, among certain traditions. And in our textual sources and also material sources for this period, so this is a, this depiction from the stupa at Sanchi from the first century BCE amongst one of our earliest depictions of ascetic practice. You can see here what are perhaps Urdu-Bhava ascetics and we only see these kind of methods up to about 1000 years ago. So here also from the very well-known relief at Mahabalipuram, Mamalipuram, as it's known today, you can see here that the identity of this character is not certain. But again, we see an ascetic standing on one leg, you know, he's emaciated, he's got his arms up in the air. And we get, you know, hundreds, thousands of stories of ascetics and yogis in the epics, Mahabharata, Ramayana, Varanas and so forth doing such practices. Similarly Parvati, the consort wife of Shiva, well before she married him, she wooed him by performing these sort of austerities. So here's an eighth century image of her with her arms in the air. Now all this changes about 1000 years ago. We get, so we get no mention what I'm looking to look at specifically here. There's a whole complex of methods that arrive around 1000 years ago which come to be called hatha yoga in Sanskrit texts. And here we see this new sort of dispensation of yoga practice with a positive attitude towards the body in which the body is cultivated rather than mortified and subdued as we saw in those practices of tapas. Now the innovations in these methods around 1000 years ago, they include complex balancing postures. I think this is a sort of crucial distinction. It's not until this period that we see postures that cannot be held indefinitely. Okay, until then all these methods of tapas and so forth would be held for days, weeks, months, years on end. Okay, suddenly we see the introduction of postures that you could only hold for a few minutes and I'll just give you a couple of examples in a minute. It's only at this period also that we first find in our texts these complex methods of pranayama of breathing so various different ways of inhaling holding the breath exhaling. Okay, prior to that we just get pretty simple techniques of inhalation holding the breath and exhalation. And then thirdly, these groups of practices which come to be called mudras. Okay, but in the early sources they're not all classified as mudras but these various different physical techniques for manipulating the vital energies in the body whether that's understood as prana the breath or the jiva the life force or kundalini or the vindu the sort of generative principle within the body. So there's all these different, different techniques for manipulating those vital energies and then finally cleansing techniques these methods nowadays collectively often called the shut karmas also referred to as kriya so methods for cleansing the body again we don't find any mention of those until in fact these last the cleansing techniques not until about 1400. So, I am acutely aware of time I shall just rattle through my remaining slides but here is this is the first posture the first, what I call a non seated yoga posture so and here it's a balancing posture that clearly can't be held indefinitely. This is my old asana or the peacock pose, and that's first taught in a text called the Vimarnachana Culpa, probably 10th century maybe a little bit later even could even be 11th or 12th century. Okay, we then see that the same practice the peacock pose taught in a, in text which derived from from this one. And then from a similar period a little bit later, we also find the kukut asana. Okay, so another the cock the cockerel pose so another balancing posture that again cannot be held indefinitely and that appears for the first time in the 12th century. Now, in probably the sort of most influential text on physical yoga practice is called the Hatha Pradipika. And that was composed what's compiled really because it draws from lots of earlier texts including these teachings on kukut asana and my or asana was compiled in about 1400. So we really see the first, you know, explicit explanation of what Hatha yoga is and what its purposes are what it brings about. And so we hear we see here very clearly in this this verse 278. So the signs of success or perfection of Hatha are leanness of the body, which rings true today. To some extent that's clearly why some people do physical yoga. The leanness of the face bright complexion, the manifestation of internal sounds, very clear eyes, freedom from disease control of Bindu which is the sort of basically sort of the sexual impulse. So we can really deepen them kindling of the internal digestive fire and cleansing of the channels. So we get this very specific statement, which was unprecedented that these by performing these methods of yoga you effectively perfect perfect the body. And we'll just wrap up a few more slides just to show that it's not just our textual sources that attest to this change, prior to about 1000 years ago. As you saw I showed you a few depictions of the practice of tapas these methods of you know standing on one leg holding the arms up and so forth. And we don't see any of these balancing postures in any material sources, whether that's temple architecture or you know illustrated manuscripts paintings and so forth until this was a discovery made in 2016 with a colleague Daniela from Iberlakwa in here in Dubois in Gujarat. There's this gate called the Mahudi gate on the northern side of this small town, and up here so the gate was created in 1230. And we were very surprised to see up here and no one had recorded this performing people must have looked at them but no one had paid much attention. A group of as 84 carvings of yogis about a dozen of whom were in these sort of balancing posture so we see a headstand we see an inverted lotus posture. There's a few others I'll just show you a couple more. And yeah these are the earliest known depictions of non seated complex yoga posture so they're only from about 800 years ago. And then I just wrap up just prior to this the earliest known ones, or more or less the earliest known ones were at Hampi or Vijayanagar in Karnataka on the various the many hundreds or even thousands of temple columns there. You see a few depictions of these complex arsenal postures so there's one rather interesting one using this funny little stick and that one is some rather difficult ones in fact what these ones in particular also the ones at Dubois. They do illustrate that, you know, they show us postures which we don't find in texts from these periods. Okay, so good reminder to textual scholars like me that that not everything is found in our texts. And to the couple more I'll show you I mean I could show you many many from some people this is my last slide so hopefully that wasn't too long I think we're more or less going to time. And thank you very much. I'll now hand over to Professor Lucia. Thank you everyone. Hello. Thank you everyone for being here and thank you to Dr Cassara and to our tech. Harris for being here and helping us manage ourselves. I'm going to skip ahead again. Just one second. It's been a while I'm on sabbatical. Excuse me I apologize. Okay yoga and majority of course is very complex and it's very diverse. And it's likely something that many of our viewers here today have stakes in so I'm going to try to briefly systematize this very diverse field and point point to some existing scholarship director attention to some questions that are currently shaping the field. But of course if I miss your favorite person it's not intentional, and largely just because there's so very much to cover. So if we were going to think about yoga in all of its different ramifications and diversifications today, we might come up with like a list of something like this. I've expanded a little bit beyond the posture to think about things like buck the yoga or path of devotion, karma yoga, jnana yoga. And then maybe the first example of yoga branding in the modern which would be Vivekananda's Raja yoga, and his eponymous book in 1896 Kundalini yoga create yoga hot the yoga as we've already heard a bit about. And then diversifying from hot the yoga into kind of different people's versions of that of on a side of a stronger than yasa younger video yoga. And then the even farther example of kind of wide diversification where we get things like hot yoga power yoga restorative yoga in yoga aerial yoga acro yoga, and then potentially even more controversially go yoga booze yoga weed yoga heavy metal yoga rage yoga booty yoga nude yoga dog yoga tantrum yoga Broga yoga paddle board yoga and on and on. So, how do we get from there to here I'll try to do a little bit of work to help unpack that this is a family tree of sorts that yoga journal published about 10 years ago. And the credit there goes to Michael Hill for creating it. It's not complete, but it's an interesting depiction of modern yoga and just how very diverse some of the different lineages are. I mean, the Tibetan yoga and the Himalayan Institute hearted us yoga Nanda. But there's been some concern recently I think it's quite valid concern that we should not be necessarily thinking in arboreal structures that if we think about yoga as having singular roots and origins that actually is counterproductive to how we should be doing modern yoga. So I would point to delusional guitar a who talked about rhizomatic structures and those rhizomatic structures which come from mushrooms in fact challenges the assertions of root essences and purity or origination and counters the importance for the return to the those very aspects. So instead if we think about rhizomes. I'm just going to try to kind of branch out into three different ways in which we can look at what's happening in modern yoga. So first spiritual exports and then go to what we've been kind of focused so far as postural yoga, and then nationalist yoga gurus. Now these are not categorical divisions more like what I would say is a useful then diagram, and kind of way to systematize our thinking. So first spiritual exports of course metaphysical yogas began to travel outside of India, what I would call in the long 20th century, many popular gurus maybe even most modern gurus popularized buck the yoga or the path of devotion. Seva or selfless service became a vehicle through which to popularize karma yoga, and jnana yoga or wisdom or logic teachings was also popularized, particularly in the first half of the 20th century. I mentioned Roger yoga already but then Kundalini yoga was popularized by Yogi budget and three HO, and but then also by Christian matria with a different interpretation of the of the meaning of the snake. Korea yoga, of course popularized by potter months of yoga nanda. And if we think about these gurus who are popularizing, which is oftentimes a spiritual or metaphysical practice that only sometimes includes a postural component that goes along with it. Often this lineage tends to be marked as a series of waves. With the first wave being Vivekananda speech at the 1893 World's Parliament of religions in Chicago, followed then by potter months the yoga nanda in the 1920s, but then other key figures as well like may her baba and juniors Christian worthy. And Philip just leaps normal notable work on Punjabi seek yogis traveling and tutoring and various yogas in the 1920s through the 1960s is a very important intervention so that we don't overlook some of the smaller figures who don't tend to make it into the kind of wave narrative. And we're incorporating what he calls a quote dizzying array of philosophies practices and techniques into what they were producing. So if most people are the most famous with or the most familiar with rather the famous yogis of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi who founded TM AC Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada founder of ISKCON. So the Siddha yoga Chin mayananda who famously opened up Woodstock. Sorry, Chin mayananda who was the founder of Chin my mission, excuse me and Swami such at the Nanda who opened up Woodstock, but one Rajneesh a bit notorious, but very influential and then Ron does with his famous be here now. And now this wave is, in some sense coming on the wake of a lot of scandals that happened in the second wave, and it introduced a lot of female figures like mother. mother Mira Kruta Maima, and then Guru Ma. But then I also put Swami Nithyananda in this category because he's established himself as persecuted by by the kind of Hindu mainstream which you can talk about in the Q&A if we want. on Guru-based spiritualized or soteriological yoga. And these are just a few of the kind of highlights of books that have come out in the last in this field. Okay. Moving then forward into pastoral yoga or physical yoga. And that's what we've mentioned mostly so far. The famous and most famous figures that are articulated of the 20th century would be Pathavi Joyce, founder of Ashtanga Yoga, Krishnamacharya and the Santikeya Desikachar and then Ayangar. In the 1920s, there's this linking between yoga and science where Sri Yogendra, Yogendra, founds the Yoga Institute and Swami Kuvalli and then publishes Yoga Mamamsa, both of which aim to prove the scientific efficacy of yoga. That will return as a theme again. In the 50s, Theos Brunar publishes Hatha Yoga, Indra Devi opens her yoga studio in Hollywood. Richard Hittleman pioneers yoga on television and the Baptists found their San Francisco Yoga Studio. Swami Vishnu Devananda founds the network of Sivananda Yoga Vedanta centers. By 1966, Ayangar has published his light on yoga and travels to the USA and Amrit Dasai founds the Yoga Society of Pennsylvania and later the Kripalu Yoga Ashram, which has since dissociated from his personage. Again, Swami Rama undergoes scientific testing to prove yoga efficacy and then it's not until 1975 that Pathavi Joyce travels to the USA bringing Ashtanga Vinyasa, which is now a very popular form of yoga postural practice. TKS Desikachar also brings Vinayoga to the West and in that same year, Yoga Journal publishes its first issue. From there, we would have an extraordinary expansion of what we would view as postural yoga teachers. I just pulled maybe the top 100 of people whom I could think about and oftentimes there's these top 100 lists that are published. Interestingly, of these many of them have their own brands and their own organizations that accompany their name. So it's not just a list of individuals, but also organizations and personalities, Instagram strategies, etc. A whole host of separate scholarship that focus on hatha yoga or postural practice and also this link with science you can see recurring again. The last theme that I want to talk about is nationalist yoga gurus and Dr. Nicholson discussed Modi is calling yoga as kind of an Indian national exporter treasure. This is a very conflated issue as well with Hindu nationalism, but not always as he's made clear. Swami Chinmayenanda of course becomes the first founder and president of the BHP and there's also a series of yogis or gurus who become advisors to prime ministers and head political officials. LK Advani of course is an interesting mix of a religiopolitical figure, Sadhvi Ritambara, who's made most famous by her hate speech at the demolition of the Babadi Masjid in 1992. On a more positive note, Babi Nagnath Yodeshwara fasted for a Ganga pollution or fasted against the continuing pollution of the Ganga in 2008. Bhuma Bharati also CM of Madhya Pradesh was put in charge of Ganga Rejuvenation project and then Yoga Day International was this International Yoga Day was established in 2014 with which many of you will be familiar. Today there are many different yoga gurus who are operating in India who are very closely linked to governmental politics and here we might just think of Baba Ramdev or Sri Sri Ravishankar even Yoga Adityanath, the CM of UP, Sakshi Maharaj, Computer Baba or Namdeodastiyagi, Shivaraj Chodan and on. Here too there's a whole separate literature of books that are focused on this what we might call Guru Governmentality or the Intersections of Religion and Politics or the integration of yoga science with nationalist ideologies. So if I were to think in terms of just a few questions that we might offer or what kind of questions are shaping the field, it would be thinking first about transnationalism. So how has yoga expanded transnationally and what are the impacts of that expansion? Religion, what are the ramifications of yoga being interpreted as either religious or spiritual or secular? Neoliberalism, how has yoga become an expression of neoliberalism? Can it be a site of resistance? And this is an interesting interrogation that really comes into question with regard to yoga as it becomes practiced and or mandated in prisons or corporations and schools. Several great books that have just come out on this. And then questions of power. So questions regarding whiteness. So as yoga had become popularized around the world, how has the practice become so dominated by whites located in the West? Is it accurate to say that yoga has South Asian origins? And if so, has South Asia, quote, lost control of the brand? Nationalism, how does yoga fuel Hindu nationalism or Indian nationalism? And how is that expressed through yoga? And then lastly abuse, how will modern yoga, both practitioners and scholars, confront recurring allegations of abuse in yogic environments? And that also relates not only to the teacher, student, practitioner relationship, but also the ways in which capitalism has impacted yoga teachers and their role in capitalism. And I'll end there. Thanks very much. Hey, I think I'll ask all of our panelists to their videos on and thank you to all of our esteemed panelists for these wonderful presentations. We've remarkably covered a few thousand years of yoga's history in about 30 to 40 minutes. No easy feat at all. So if your head is spinning from that, I think that's only natural. So we have about 15 minutes. It looks like for Q&A. I see some questions have already come in. If you'd like to pose a question, please use that Q&A box. It should be at the bottom of your Zoom screen there. And we can direct those individually to panelists or to the entire panel to stimulate some conversation. So I'll just go through these. We might not be able to get to all the questions that come in, but we'll certainly do our best. So the first ones are going back to Andrew's presentation. Maybe an easy one to get us started. What is the triple Veda? But then I'll add to that another question. So that was from Barbel. What is the triple Veda, Andrew? And then a second related questions thinking about the Vedas from Darminder. Is there nothing in the Vedas that yoga can be traced to? And if so, are there any parallels in the Avesta? So we talked about the Indus Valley and then kind of jumped to the Kata Upanishads. So maybe saying something about what we can or cannot say about yoga in the Vedas. But first, the triple Veda. Okay. So the triple Veda, oftentimes the triple knowledge, Trai Vidya, refers to the Rig, Yajur, and Samma Vedas, typically. Those are the first three Vedas chronologically to be created. The Atarva is sometimes left out as a kind of fourth Veda. Sometimes it's included, sometimes not. But my understanding is usually when they're referring to triple Veda, they're referring to the Rig, Yajur, and Samma. The question of whether there's anything about yoga in the Veda, well, first of all, just to define some terms, the Upanishads, of course, are part of the Veda. In fact, they are the end of the Veda, the Vedanta, literally, the Veda Anta. So yes, the text that I mentioned, the Gutta is undoubtedly part of the Veda. But perhaps the question was more referring to these earlier parts of the Vedas and the Veda Samhitas. And is there any evidence of yoga there? And I would say the reason I skipped so far is there are tantalizing glimpses of yoga-like activities in these earlier parts of the Veda. But nothing clear and definitive for a skeptically minded person. Certainly nothing like what we find in the Kata where they're just like, this is yoga, it's raining in the senses. That is a beautiful and comprehensive definition for these meditative practices of yoga. I would say to get us started, and there's a lot we could say about this, there's some really interesting sort of Proto-Yogi figures. One I'll mention is this figure known as the Keshin in the Rig Veda. So in Rig Veda 10, 136, this long haired one, this Keshin is described as wearing red or yellow clothes. This may remind you of renouncers in later times, because his long hair, you know, maybe that's something like later Shaivas having long matted hair. He's described as riding on the wind and having some kinds of supernatural powers. Perhaps that's something like what we see, for instance, in the third chapter of Patanjali's Yoga Sutra that describes these extraordinary powers one can attain, these Siddhis one attains through yoga. But again, they're sort of tantalizing and ambiguous glimpses like this Keshin that require a lot of interpretation. So if we want to project back, we might say, oh, yeah, that Keshin, he's a yogi. But again, I would caution that, you know, there's this kind of presentism, this tendency to project our present understanding back onto a Vedic seal, like the so-called Pashupati seal, seal number 420, or to project later Shaiva Yoga traditions onto the Keshin and the Rig Veda. It's a natural inclination, of course, but it's something that we should also be aware of our own biases when we're doing that. So yes, there's lots of tantalizing things that look a little bit like yoga, but the really clear stuff, I would say, comes in these post-Buddhist Upanishads like the Katha Upanishad. Thank you, Andrew. All right, the next question is from Vishal. He says, I think what is more interesting is not from which religious or spiritual group yoga emanated from, but why yoga was being practiced. Would the panelists agree? So this could be for Andrew or for anyone, but do we have any sense? You know, we talk a lot about origins and is yoga Hindu, is yoga Buddhist, does it belong to one particular tradition or not? But this question is sort of getting us to think about why did yoga emerge in the first place? Do you want me to say something about that? I can jump in here. Yeah, I agree. I mean, the easy answer to Vishal's question is yes, I think you're actually right, and I think it's almost impossible. So with the texts that I primarily look at, those hatha yoga physical texts, we can be confident that the first one actually was written by Buddhists in the 11th century, but I don't think that necessarily means that they were the first people to do physical yoga practice. They were just the first to write it down. And we see lots of other traditions, various different subdivisions of Hinduism and so forth, also producing texts in a similar period. But yes, I would totally agree with you that the more interesting question really, and the much more difficult question is why was it being performed? I think if we go back to the period Andrew looks at, many scholars would agree that the really specific period is about the 5th century BCE when we have these groups of ascetics called shamanists, and there seem to be these new ideas of karma and reincarnation, and then the corollary, which is liberation and getting off the cycle of rebirth, and these new techniques appeared as methods of dealing with that problem, not just yoga, or not just the physical methods, you know, all kinds of practices are taken. And then similarly in the period that I focus at, and this is a question that really exercises me, and I don't have a solid answer to it. Why do these practices appear? Why do people start doing these physical methods about a thousand years ago? We do see parallels in China, fun enough, in fact slightly in some slightly earlier Chinese texts. We see some of the physical techniques that appear in India a couple of hundred years later. We see them first of all, but why that should be the case? Why there should be this turn to the body? I don't know, and this is a question that exercise me, as I say, and I find very interesting. So if anyone's got a better answer than mine, I'm all ears. Sorry. No, no, you go ahead, Andrew. This question of origins I think completely overblown, this sort of mania for origins is really a holdover in some ways of very traditional sorts of orientalist scholarship and assumptions that whatever is the earliest is therefore the most authentic and the best. But again, if we think of yoga instead of a kind of pure primordial tradition, think of it more like, I don't know, software or your iPhone. Am I really going to claim the iPhone one back in 2006 is to appear right on the iPhone 14? So perhaps the kinds of yoga that Jim is talking about or even who knows hot yoga or doga or broga, was there a broga in there? Perhaps that is an improvement honor or at least more relevant development than these very early forms of yoga, which I think, for instance, looking at early Buddhist history, I think the odds are that the types of meditations actually performed around the time of the Buddha were very simple and they become more interesting the later we go on in history. And so who cares about origins? Ultimately, I was sort of tasked with being the origins guy for this webinar. But I agree that in some ways it's not a very interesting question like these questions of identity, who owns yoga, what the oldest yoga is. I'm more interested in what yoga does and what it does for people and how they interact with it. And just to repeat something Jim said, that I mean, the glib or obvious answer to why do yoga is this word moksha or nirvana, which, again, was an innovation probably in the second half of the first millennium BCE, this new idea that there's a cycle of death and rebirth. You have to escape this. Well, how? Well, yoga seems along with esoteric wisdom as a very good candidate for a method to escape this vicious cycle, this cycle of suffering. But more interestingly, perhaps there are all sorts of other reasons one might do yoga. Jim hinted at being slim and attractive. Also, I've always been intrigued in Tantric circles and Hatha yoga circles by this idea that it's not just mukti, liberation. It's also mukti. There's sort of extraordinary pleasures that one can attain through yoga as well. So it's not exclusively liberation, moksha or mukti. There are other things you get from yoga too. And I think clearly in modern yoga, maybe Amanda can talk about, you know, is moksha the main reason people do modern yoga? I think there are a lot of other motives why one might do yoga. All right. Well, our next question is for Amanda. This is from Nico. What is the role of yoga alliance and its YTT in producing, quote, teachers of yoga who then go out and teach and compete and participate in generating a lot of confusion about practices and philosophy. So maybe you have some thoughts on the role of yoga alliance, yoga teacher trainings and the production of the yoga teacher in today's yoga climate. You've picked a very difficult. There's a lot of difficult questions for me in the chat. I'm reading them very quickly and trying to answer them. But certainly that is one of them. I think that, you know, we have to remember yoga alliance. It's only founded in 1997. So it's quite recent if we're talking about a few thousand years of history today. Yeah, I think that yoga alliance is. Okay, let me think about more broadly about some of the positive things that are happening in terms of trying to educate yoga teachers, which is a lot of these master's programs that are popping up. So us being one of them, Loyola Marymont in California being another one with Chris Chappell at the head. There's also a lot of people who are very educated in the practitioner scholar role. I think that the field of yoga studies is quite blurry, in fact, as far as scholars and practitioners. Now, as far as the kind of factory training that we might say of 200 hours and the push to encourage people to become teachers in order to make money for yoga studios who offer those programs. I think there's really frightening things happening there. But it also depends on how you think about what is the requirement for one to have a baseline knowledge of yoga. So in my fields, I was in the field of yoga classes hearing kind of a lot of things that I thought, okay, that's just not true, or that's just not real. But then I had to really question for myself, what am I thinking is true and real? And where am I asserting that? Andrew's comment about how Omidiproga yoga is an improvement on the past. It's hard if you don't want to make a value judgment about what people are doing, you kind of end up in one camp or another either saying that, yes, there's a standard that we're trying to uphold and these people are not meeting it and it's actually corrupting influence, or we want to allow kind of a marketplace freedom of ideas and that checks and balances on true and real are not productive. So I think there's a lot of other scholars who have written about, in fact, the ways in which the yoga teacher training can be a money making enterprise. And that's an important thread to keep in that conversation is just how much it is a capitalist engagement. Yes, there's a lot more that could be said about that, certainly. And I'm sure as many in attendance know that these teacher trainings are very much tied to the livelihood of yoga studios and to keeping those centers open, they have to run these trainings. And so that inevitably leads to a surplus of more teachers. But I think we also know a lot of those teachers don't go on to continue to teach, they might see that as just a, you know, an immersion into their practice in a more formal way. But certainly the onus is on any teacher to continue to educate themselves, you know, as best that they can. Okay, we have, I think, maybe a few more minutes, we're at about the hour mark here. There's definitely a lot more questions here in the box. So thanks everybody for sending these in. And again, just apologies, we won't be able to get to all of these. Let's see, I think these next few are sort of related. An anonymous attendee asks, after all that we've heard, isn't it reasonable to question any lineage claiming or tradition affirming something really solid or consistent. So this one is about lineage and traditions claiming. I think the idea here is about a sort of essentialist view of their history. But then somewhat related to this, Stefan asks, what are yogic arguments on mixing various traditions for one's own practice versus sticking to a particular lineage or a single tradition. So I guess to put this out to everyone who ever wants to answer thoughts on whether we should have skepticism about people making claims about their own lineages history, and then thoughts about what do what do the traditions, maybe the texts say about mixing and matching or sticking with one particular tradition. Should I jump in? I'll address the second one because I think I've got something pertinent to say there about sticking to one tradition. I mean, within texts and so forth, of course, the dominant teaching is that you have to learn everything from a guru, normally your particular guru. But I've been struck by, so I've spent a lot of time with ascetic traditions in India. And in fact, there's, you would never be advised to move outside of your sort of initiatory tradition, but they can be pretty big. You know, there can be thousands and thousands of Sardhus gurus and so forth. And I've been surprised that you're not expected just to copy your guru. You know, if your guru is an expert in even a particular practices of physical yoga, but you are more suited to or you want to learn another method. So for example, I did a lot of fieldwork on a practice called Kechri Mudra. If someone's guru doesn't practice it, there's no reason why you shouldn't then go and learn from another ascetic, another teacher within that tradition. In fact, there's a saying that there's Samaj, the society of Sardhus, the guru. So you're learning from everyone within that broader tradition. But yeah, it's not generally seen as good form, though, to get it, you know, to go and learn from a teacher completely out of your particular, the individual Samprada that you've been initiated into. So I hope that's useful in some way with that question. I think there's a traditional metaphor. One of my teachers in India, I think it might be from the Bhagavata Purana that just as a bee goes from flower to flower, picking out the rasa, the sap, the juice from each, so to a wise person will go from tradition to tradition, taking that which is best from each of the traditions. So although there is, you know, in some cases an emphasis on lineage there are these kind of counterarguments you find in the tradition as well about eclecticism, the value of being eclectic. And I think as a historian, the more I see, the more I realize every yoga is a kind of hybrid yoga. I don't think, you know, I don't know what it would mean to have like a historically pure lineage. And that applies to religious traditions more broadly as well. I would just add the counter adage, which I've heard a lot of gurus say, like the big celebrity popular gurus of just if you're trying to dig for water, don't dig a lot of shallow holes, right, dig deeply once in a well to try to get the water. So I think it is a competing field where there's a lot of contested ideas. But certainly any one guru, you know, it's not really if they're saying you can't look elsewhere, then that might be a red flag, I would say, for knowledge. Yeah. And of course, related to, you know, hitching your wagon to one guru, we know that there's also all kinds of problems that can ensue from that. So another question, and maybe I can direct this to Amanda, because I know this is something that you're working on quite a bit these days. In discussing the abuse of yoga, what about the texts that insist that one must completely believe in the guru no matter what, even if there is sexual or emotional abuse? Can you speak to practitioners being duped by abusers or gurus? This is obviously another huge topic that we cannot do justice here in just a minute or two. But if you want to say anything to that. Sure. I'll make a personal plug that we have a project that we're working on right now called Religion and Sexual Abuse. And you can go to religion and sexual abuse project dot com, I believe, or dot org. And it's a large group of scholars. And there's also a conglomerate of scholars here in Britain as well, working on religion and sexual abuse that's including yogic environments in that. So I would say in an Indic yogic sense, there's again competing texts. There are texts like one I won't name, but there are texts that say that one should obey the guru no matter what, that one should surrender the guru, that the guru is beyond reproach, that whatever the guru does is more than what humans could understand. So why would you with your small human mind try to critique the guru? And then there's counter texts that would argue that or even traditions that in fact, it's the intention and the goal of the shisha to question the guru and to put the guru through a certain amount of trials before that one signs up to follow someone and that it's a testing and relationship for both the guru and the shisha or for the both the guru and the student before there's a kind of match made. With that said, back to yoga alliance, they're they're working on measures to kind of address sexual abuse and emotional abuse in yogic environments. And one of the things that I think becomes really problematic in religious communities is when there is no outside of, and we've seen this in a lot of different traditions where there's no kind of HR rep that one can kind of address claims to or problems to. And so one then if one gets into conflict with the leadership, one is forced to then leave and leave without supports of sometimes basic economic sustenance family members who would be encouraged to kind of separate yourself from from the person who's leaving. So I think in in yogic and religious worlds more generally abuse becomes a highly charged issue that deserves more attention than it's getting her scholarship. All right, so there's a lot more questions here. But I know our time here is limited and we do need to wrap up. What do you guys think do you want to do one or two more? How are we feeling? Is there one is there a question here I think can you guys that you guys can see is there one that you really want to address? I can keep kind of picking them out as I like. Jim, I was thinking maybe this question for you from Zahira about the original purpose of hatha yoga because I think there's there's a lot of confusion about this. So Zahira is asking is the original purpose of hatha yoga to prepare the body for the raising of kundalini energy and is this a part of a shdanga yoga? Okay, a few things to unravel there. The earliest I mean I think all these all these these physical and tantric yoga methods tend to have a fundamental idea of something right going up the central channel some sort of vital physical energy. It's not always called kundalini and in the earliest texts which teach well the earliest texts which teach methods of hatha yoga there's no mention of kundalini whatsoever and there's this idea of the breath and perhaps been do this kind of generative fluid in the body rising up. Are the practices just preparation for that? Well not just I mean later texts would do say that you do these physical methods to strengthen the body in order to be able to do the higher the higher practices you know the kind of dynamic arson of more like you know as a cool exercises to make your body stronger. But in the earliest manifestation of it's the practices themselves that make the energy rise up the central channel so they're not preparatory as such and I think the last part of the question so I haven't got it in front of me was what's the relationship between these methods and ashtanga yoga? So if that's the ashtanga yoga you know most famously taught by patanjali, well as I I'm not sure I did say this earlier but in this early period of physical methods appearing lots and lots of different religious traditions put texts out there that teach physical yoga some of whom the kind of more orthodox hindu schools do frame their teachings in the ashtanga system of patanjali well with the they don't necessarily reference patanjali but they use that eight auxiliary framework and in fact fun enough I'm just coming to the end of teaching a course with Seth's yoga studies platform of a teaching from a text called the dhatathre yoga shastra which I've been editing and that is the first text it's probably 12th century I think probably around 1200 and that incorporates ashtanga yoga with physical methods of hatha yoga but it's somewhat you know unusual in that early period because most of those early texts derive from more tantric traditions in which the the usual framework for for a system systematic yoga is it has six angus six six parts to it rather than eight all right and then let's do maybe one more question here that maybe could go to everyone again from vishal thinking across all of our topics today is is there a dichotomy that you see between traditional and modern yoga or are the lines much more blurred and nuanced than this and he kind of observes sometimes the phrase modern postural yoga seems to be referenced in somewhat negative or pejorative terms but I think it depends on who's speaking right but how do you see these lines if there are any between modern and pre-modern or modern and so-called traditional yoga maybe andrew if you have any thoughts and and then amanda if you have any thoughts on that yeah I mean I don't I think oftentimes it's more like a rhetorical strategy like I'm doing the traditional yoga I'm doing the classical yoga even you know petabi joyses tradition associating itself with ashtanga yoga for instance I would consider you know every one of these traditions to be a form of modern yoga and there's nothing wrong with that I think you know their reasons people had certain motivations for doing certain things like pretty exotic practices putting a lead rod up your urethra or something in some of jim's texts there's a reason we don't do that anymore right and we have a different understanding of physiology and what's important and what's valuable so oftentimes those you know genuinely traditional practices they're no longer done for a reason it's because you know that they don't appeal they're not relevant to people anymore so you know I think all of these traditions are modern traditions and that's just fine there's nothing wrong with that you know like I said you know I'd rather have an iphone 14 than an iphone 1 I'd rather do some of these updated yoga traditions that are informed with scientific understandings of human physiology and you know dangers one might have for some if you have issues with sciatica or you know ruptured disc or something these are things people didn't know about in medieval and classical times and I'm glad that these yogas have been updated and Amanda do you want to say anything about how perhaps you approach this question in your work yeah just that um I feel like those are loaded terms both right traditional and modern and they're activated for political purposes by all of the actors in the field and so sometimes people will want to call themselves modern to show that they're innovative or that they're egalitarian or they're scientific logical or ethical to produce some kind of like modern value system of liberty and such but then there are others who want to refer to themselves as traditional that they are unearthing or recovering or putting forward the ancient tradition and so I think when we hear these words being kind of bandit or tossed about that we have to kind of investigate like what's underneath them and why are people using those as identity markers and claims yeah and I could just also point out that there's no there's no clear moment you know where the pre-modern becomes the modern you know this is this is something that's debated and studies and modernity and cultural studies so people have devised origins theories for for moments where this thing called modern yoga or modern postural yoga maybe was born but that's sort of just a convenience there's there's no there's no clean clean lines that are separating these things so so thank you so much again to our esteemed panelists to to our hosts to so as for inviting all of us to be here to share with you all some of some of our work to all of our attendees for these great questions and discussion Barty do you want to come on to help us close up here or say anything absolutely yes I would love to close and thank you all for this very wide ranging very fascinating discussion and I was so interested to hear about the link with Mesopotamia and so I think we can conclude that yoga is many things and has evolved in many ways in different cultures and societies it is about the body beautiful it's also about health and wellness and it's also a spiritual practice because really we cannot separate the body the mind and the spirit these things are all one whole and so all these elements will naturally come into it so thank you so much for this amazing discussion and I just to conclude I will say that yoga is a universal gift to humanity and end on that note and also if you've enjoyed today's program and our terrific experts we would be delighted if you could make a donation to soas I think you can go to the soas website and make a donation and there are many different causes to donate to and one of my favorite is the John Loyalo scholarship whereby we bring an American student who otherwise would not have the financial resources to go to soas in London so we collect monies to fund their tuition and their living expenses in London so that's the John Loyalo scholarship so please do donate to soas and it's very exciting that Dr. Mallinson is starting an online program so there's much to look forward to and thank you again for all your fascinating and thought-provoking discussions so with that we will end our webinar today thank you to everyone and hope you enjoyed it and you will find this on the soas website as well so you can revisit this discussion at your own leisure in your own way thank you all very much indeed bye everyone