Yoga was mostly about stillness and liberation long before it meant stretching
The poses filling Western studios are a recent blend of hatha yoga and European physical culture. Traditional yoga, born in ancient India, aimed at taming mind and body to win release from rebirth. Its name shares an ancestor with the English word yoke, and scholars say it may be the hardest Sanskrit word to pin down.
Yoga may reach back before the Vedas, but it is first attested early in the first millennium BCE, developing as several traditions in the eastern Ganges basin. Yoga-like practices surface in the Rigveda and early Upanishads, yet systematic ideas took shape in the fifth and sixth centuries BCE among ascetic Śramaṇa movements such as the Buddhists and Jains. Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, the classic Hindu text, grounded in samkhya philosophy with Buddhist influence, date to the early centuries CE. Hatha yoga texts appeared between the ninth and 11th centuries.
The Sanskrit root yuj means to attach, join or harness. One explanation holds that early practitioners were yoking in the senses, and only later did the word become a metaphor for linking oneself to the divine. The grammarian Pāṇini in the 4th century BCE allowed a second root meaning to concentrate, and traditional commentators on the Yoga Sutras, starting with Vyasa, prefer that reading, equating yoga with samadhi. Mikel Burley traces the earliest use of the root to a Rigveda hymn to the rising sun god.
Definitions multiply. David Gordon White observes that the word covers more meanings than almost any other in Sanskrit. Scholars such as John Bowker and Damien Keown frame it as disciplines for controlling the mind to escape karma and rebirth, while W. J. Johnson calls it, at its most neutral, simply a technique for whatever transformation a given tradition seeks. A committed practitioner is a yogi, and a woman may be called a yogini.
The export to the West started without poses. Swami Vivekananda's version, successful in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, omitted asanas and introduced the Yoga Sutras abroad. In 1925 Yogananda opened a Kriya Yoga centre in Los Angeles, which put him among the earliest people teaching yoga on American soil. The posture-heavy style most people know came later, as hatha yoga took off in the 20th century.
Source: Yoga
