"Yoga" (योग) is a Sanskrit term meaning "yoke" or "union" and is, technically, one of the six orthodox darshanas, philosophical schools or systems, of what is now collectively called Hinduism. Yoga has a plurality of definitions in classical Indian literature: Katha Upanisad 6.10-11, for example, defines yoga as "firm restraint of the senses," by means of which "one becomes undistracted, for yoga is the arising and the passing away." In the Bhagavad Gita, "Yoga is said to be equanimity" (2.48), "skill in action" (2.50), and "separation from contact with suffering" (6.23). The Yogacarabhumi Sravakabhumi says that "Yoga is fourfould: faith, aspiration, perseverance and means" (2.152); Patanjalayogasastra says that "Yoga is samadhi. It is a quality of the mind in all [its] states....that which, when the mind is single-pointed, causes an object to shine forth as it really is and cuts off the afflictions, loosens the bonds of karma [and] orients [one] toward suppression [of the activities of the mind] is called 'yoga with cognition.'" By contrast, "when all the activities of the mind are suppressed, that is samadhi without cognition (asamprajnata)" (1.1). Therefore, "Yoga is the suppression of the activities of the mind" (1.2). "Yoga is the union of the self and the Lord" (Pancarthabhasya 1.1.43); yoga happens when "the mind is in the self," and "there is no pleasure or suffering for one who is embodied" (Vaisesikasutra 5.2.15-16); "Yoga has been defined as contact," particularly "yoga is immersion into Him [Siva] arising from the contemplation of His nature" (Parakhyatantra 14.95-7); "yoga is the union of the individual self and the supreme self" (Vimanarcanakalpa 96); and so "[t]o have self-mastery [is] to be a yogi" (Mrgendratantra Yogapada 2a). Most of these definitions seem to point to a synthetic notion of yoga as an experience of union through the sublimation of the individual self to the supreme self, of the finite to the infinite, through the suppression of one's consciousness of the body and the mind to unveil the pure unity of consciousness with God.
It is in the Gita that the classic division of yogas--jnanayoga/"Yoga of Knowledge," karmayoga/"Yoga of Action," bhaktiyoga/"Yoga of Devotion," buddhiyoga/"Yoga of the Intellect," abhyasayoga/"Yoga of Practice," dhyanayoga/"Yoga of Meditation," and atmasamyamayoga/"Yoga of Self-Control"--are defined (BG 3.3; 5.2; 13.25; 14.26; 2.49; 10.10; 8.8; 12.9; 18.52-53; 4.27; 5.4-5). Each of these receive further developments in other texts. So Patanjalayogasastra 2.1-2 renames karmayoga, "Yoga of Action," as kriyayoga, and defines it as "asceticism, recitation, and devotion to Isvara [the Lord]," the last of which conflates karmayoga with bhaktiyoga, but this is done for the "purpose [of] the cultivation of samadhi or the attenuation of the afflictions." In the Bhagavatapurana 1.2.19, we read that when the "mind" of the yogi "'is purified by the yoga of devotion (bhaktiyoga) to the Lord, he who is free from attachment perceives the essence of the Lord.'" Then there is a further sort of yoga, hathayoga, "Yoga of Force," which is about the control of breath (Vimalaprabha 4.119), or else about "Posture, breath-retention, then various procedures called seals, and concentration on [internal] sounds" (Hathapradipika 1.56). It is later that we get talk about "[t]he yogic body, a collection of energy channels, coarse and subtle, possessing the energy fields, [which] is to be brought under control," which is the purpose of the various yogas (Chos drug gi man ngag zhes bya ba). In later texts, the four yogas are reclassified as mantrayoga, the Yoga of repeating the universal mantra of "hamsa" (the South Asian sound thought to be made by the act of breathing), hathayoga, layayoga or the "Yoga of dissolution" into "a state beyond the bliss [that can be found] in one's self," and finally rajayoga, a yogic state of supernatural powers (Yogabija 146-152). And of course, there are a host of preliminaries, auxiliaries, and criticisms of varieties of yogic tradition.1
Yoga receives historical and philosophical treatment in a variety of Hindu texts before the Common Era, but as a distinct school, most of its defining texts and systematizations have emerged in the last two millennia. This means that Yoga as a darshana has to be understood in relation to other Indian ascetical and philosophical traditions, like Jainism and Buddhism, which had already assumed most of their canonical shapes well before some of the classic yogic masters and texts appeared. Conversation and competition with these traditions likely had something to do with the formation of yogic ideals, goals, and metaphysical assumptions, as the intellectual scaffolding around meditative traditions in each differed from mainstream Hindu belief. Tantra, as an interreligious, first millennium CE esoterism spanning Hindu and Buddhist forms, bespeaks this religious and cultural marketplace within which yoga exists.
Some immediate takeaways from these texts might be the following: “yoga” does not have a singular referent; as a practical philosophy, it developed a diversified ascetical profile over time; and its essential elements have always held cross-cultural and interreligious appeal. Insofar as yoga is interested in drawing near to the true nature of the human mind or self through discipline of the mind and focus of the attention, yoga has always intersected with other kinds of meditative praxis and often with metaphysical theories, assumptions, or desired outcomes that contradict those held by its magisterial authorities. To talk about “yoga” as though it were a single thing is to miss the multiplicity intrinsic to its quest for “union.”
Insofar as Jews, Christians, and Muslims have existed in the Indian subcontinent for centuries, well over a millennium, in fact, as well as in other regions of South and East Asia, the Abrahamic traditions were acquainted with yoga in its various forms--Hindu, Buddhist, tantric, etc.--well before modernity. Given the normative practice of the missions of the Church of the East in East Asia, by which “Nestorian” missionaries actively picked up and translated, linguistically and idiomatically, the gospel message into the various languages and cultures of the world connected by the Silk Roads, it is not unlikely that these Christians encountered yogis or close cultural parallels to yogis in their travels. Sufi Muslims clearly knew, used, and received various yogic practices under the Mughals, as evidenced by the Bahr al-Hayat, a 17th century translation of a Sanskrit text on yogic practice. Each of these religions, of course, boasts their own internal diversity of meditation traditions, replete with esoteric teachings on the subtle body whose purification is essential to some forms of yoga and aimed at goals phrased from within the vocabulary of their own doctrinal constructs. Kabbalistic Jews, for instance, speak of many souls or levels to the soul, while Eastern Christian writers like Origen and his spiritual heirs maintained a tripartite scheme of the human being as spirit (pneuma), soul (psyche), and body (soma), the last of which existed temporarily in a humiliated state of flesh (sarx). More on this below.
In modernity, yoga was introduced to the West largely during the 19th and 20th centuries. In the 19th century, academic interest in Indology and Asian religious cultures culminated in the tours of Swami Vivekananda (1863-1902) through Europe and the United States in the 1890s. Yoga had a catalytic appeal with intellectual movements indigenous to the West at the time, like German romanticist and idealist philosophy and esoteric groups like the Theosophists, whose philosophical interest in Vedanta--originally, a different darshana than Classical Yoga, but gradually the dominant school, to which other schools were variously subordinated--led to the conflation of the two in popular perception and to some extent reflexively in contemporary Indian religion. "Modern Yoga," or "Yoga as exercise"--the isolation of asanas/"exercises" and pranayama/breath-control from normative preliminaries and auxiliaries and often from broader spiritual goals--was popularized through the blending of Western athletic programs with the postures of hathayoga. At the same time, several gurus from South and East Asia came to the West at the time to found their own schools of yoga, which had a more explicitly spiritual, even evangelistic purpose to "bring Hinduism to the West"; figures like, for example, Mukunda Lal Ghosh, or Paramahansa Yogananda (1893-1952), were largely responsible for the formation of American perceptions about yoga which encouraged its reception into the broad category of beliefs and practices typically included under the umbrella of the "New Age" movement. In the 21st century, New Age spirituality, together with the counterculture that produced it, has been absorbed into the popular culture and to some extent commercialized, and so, too, has yoga as New Age sentiments understand it, often in a somewhat watered-down, syncretic, unsystematic fashion. The yoga advertised today for health and which is offered as a class in American gymnasia, and the yoga offered by private instructors, yogic retreat centers, or American ashrams are all quite different from one another, but in many ways, more similar to one another than any of them are to Classical Yoga with its diversity.
So yoga as most Western Christians have experienced it has not typically been "pure," so to speak, in the sense of direct encounter with texts, beliefs, practices, instruction, and so forth from the classical tradition of India. Rather, the “yoga” with which most of them are familiar is a yoga that has been filtered through many linguistic and cultural intermediaries whose assumptions do not always match those of the earliest practitioners or the canonical theorists. Even when Western Christians encounter these practices through the supposedly “authentic” teachers of yoga—presumed by their Indian ethnicity or their Orientalizing mystique—unfamiliarity with the complexity of the tradition and conditioning by modern assumptions is common. Yogananda, for instance, held to a vision of yogic cosmology and anthropology shaped in no small part by the dissemination of Western esoterica in the form of Theosophy. Other times, these figures are afflicted by moral scandals, typically involving financial or sexual abuse of some kind or another; Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (1918-2008), the founder of Transcendental Meditation (TM) and famous as the yogi of the Beatles, has no small degree of infamy for the excessive profit of his cultish organization and for his unwanted harassment of Mia Farrow. Particularly for white Protestants and Catholics in America, yoga’s emergence onto the cultural landscape came at a time of radical influx from the East of spiritualities they perceived, not altogether wrongly, as deconstructive and destabilizing for Western Christianities. Certainly, it was often rejection of Christianity as an inherited religion that conditioned embrace of yoga or famous yogis. For these generations and their contemporary heirs, yoga has seemed to be part and parcel of the de-Christianization of the West, the renunciation of the civilizational engineering of Catholic and Protestant Christians in Europe and North America that continues to so bother traditionalists and conservatives. The demonization of yoga, quite literally as something “demonic” or “pagan,” is for this historical reason sensible—that is, there is an immediately perceptible causal nexus that serves to explain why some people believe that—though it is fundamentally unintelligible, as the claim is bunk.
Three arguments typically advanced in favor of yoga’s demonic credentials are the following. First, and most basically, yoga comes from a non-Christian source, and therefore cannot be validly partaken in by Christians. Second, perhaps more specifically, yoga involves the invocation of and communion with beings considered demons in Christian thought, which is obviously unacceptable for Christian spiritual health as it is forbidden in Scripture and Tradition. Third, and the most coherent of the three, yoga involves nondualistic beliefs about the ultimate unity of self and God that are untenable from within Christian metaphysics. Yet despite the seriousness of this last objection, on all three lines of argument, the demonizers simply do not understand what they are talking about, whether they are talking about yoga or about Christianity.
Take the first argument. If Christianity is not allowed to use non-Christian sources, then nearly everything about Christianity, from its reliance on Jewish Scripture, to Jewish Scripture's reliance on the forms, myths, ideas, and practices of ancient Near Eastern religions, to the New Testament's use of Greco-Roman literature, myth, religious practice, and cultural aesthetics, to the formation of early Christian worship, art, morality, and so forth in continuity with Hellenistic and Roman norms, and on and on and on, is illegitimate. The New Testament itself actively quotes pagan literature in at least one place (Acts 17:28), and most scholars would agree quotes or alludes in several others. Nearly everywhere Christianity has successfully implanted itself in a local culture, it has done so through gaining credibility as an indigenous religion, whether in the Near East, the Mediterranean, Egypt, Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia, Armenia, Georgia, the Steppe, the Indian subcontinent, Western Europe, Scandinavia, and so forth; such is not possible without intentional embrace of a culture’s goods.
The second line of argumentation reflects a double ignorance both about the character of worship in antiquity as well as about the purpose of yoga. In antiquity, worship of gods was always sacrificial: it was not purely or primarily about prayer, nor about the attainment of ecstatic states. Worship was about offering sacrifices to gods in their temples, typically before their agalmata or eidola. In most ways, yogic theory and practice does not match the cultural context in which the New Testament articulates its call to avoid communion with demons, which is virtually always about dining in their temples with their worshipers on sacrificial meat, in contrast to dining with Christ and the assembly in the eucharistic feast. But also, while Yoga as a Hindu darshana is closely connected to the major Hindu sects--Vaishnavism (devoted to Visnu), Shaivism (especially, and devoted to Siva), and Goddess worship (devoted to Devi)--the concept of God articulated in Yoga is, as in other Hindu darshanas, intentionally pluralistic, international, and equivocating. The God of the Bhagavad Gita, for example, is nondual and universal: his "name" is "Visnu" or "Krsna" only in the sense that that is the name most culturally appropriate to the author to name the deity, since his description of God is one that encompasses all reality. Again, a Christian interlocutor may well object that this does not suffice for Christian standards, since to name ultimate reality Visnu is other than to name ultimate reality by the Hebrew Divine Name, YHWH, or even by its substitute title "Lord" when given to Jesus Christ. But here, again, ignorance of the New Testament is more to blame than anything. Luke's Paul in the verse cited above, Acts 17:28, quotes a pagan poet--Aratus--and approvingly cite his panentheistic, nondual description of God, the main caveat being that for Aratus, the God in question is unequivocally "Zeus."2 True, a Christian cannot and should not call on God as Visnu or Siva, anymore than she could justly call on Zeus: as Christians, we have been given the Name by which we may be saved in calling upon God as Father through the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit. But nonetheless, ancient Christ-followers were happy to follow Jewish precedent in equating the metaphysically supreme God of the philosophers, whom they called Zeus, with the God of the Bible. Why not also with Visnu or Siva?
As to the third argument, the idea that yogic philosophy's goal of absolute union between Self and God is incompatible with the Christian understanding of God, all that can be said is that dualism is a symptom of modern Christian ignorance about classical Christian metaphysics a la Origen, the Cappadocians, St. Maximos the Confessor, John Scotus Eriugena, Nicholas of Cusa, and so forth. The Christian Tradition at its best has always clearly recognized and affirmed that the metaphysical logic of classical monotheism as accepted by the gospel has to be some species of what Mary-Jane Rubenstein calls “pantheology,”3 that is, an attempt to speak of to pan, “the All,” and God, ho theos, as mutually referential; and to do so is at least as old as Ben Sirach 43:27.4 Christian theology identifies the locus of the union between God and the world, and specifically humankind, in Jesus Christ: if Christ is one hypostasis and yet fully everything that it is to be God and fully everything it is to be human, then he can say, with confidence, atman (the Self) is brahman (the infinite); and if everything is created in, through, and for Christ, and is part of Christ's mystical body, then in and through him we, too, can say the same, realizing that through our co-crucifixion with Christ in baptism "it is no longer I who lives"--that is, my ego, my misidentified Self--"but Christ who lives in me" (Gal 2:20).
So with the caveat that a Christian cannot use yoga as a means of union with God conceived as Visnu or Siva, still less so as to attain communion with the devas or daimons (which is not the goal of most yoga anyway), the real question for Christianity is simply whether Yoga as a philosophy and particular practices of yoga can help inspire, cultivate, or deepen the inner experience of union with God in Christ, by which "he who unites himself with the Lord is one spirit with him" (1 Cor 6:17). The answer will vary from person to person, but generally it must certainly be an unequivocal "Yes," not least since the goals of classical Yoga parallel closely the goals of the mystical legacy internal to the Christian spiritual heritage. One need only gently peruse the lives and sayings of the Desert Fathers and Mothers, the Makarian Homilies, or the monastic catena of the Philokalia to see that a great deal of Christianity, as understood by those who have given their entire lives to it, skews close to yogic principles. For this lineage, the innermost point of our creaturely being is the point where we find only God, speaking and sustaining us into being moment by moment. The soul, purified from passions or sufferings (and therefore having attained apatheia), is the eikon or image of God in perfect charity for all beings, and through asceticism and exercise, physical and spiritual, repetition of scripture and prayer in mantric fashion, and the quest for nous beyond dianoia, the soul inherits the deification which Christ provides, the angelic life of the aeon to come lived in the flesh. It is as usual only our ignorance of our own Tradition and its real goals, which we have placed with worldly and materialistic objectives of faith, that causes us to revolt against Yoga as a negative influence, as something unspiritual or perhaps demonic. This is not to say that all yoga is good yoga, or that all yogis are good yogis; any practitioner could tell you that discernment is as necessary in Yoga as in everything else. But it is to say that our refusal to see the good here blinds us to what is perhaps a gift of God to our cultural moment for recovering some measure of spirituality in our age of deep spiritual repression. Rhetoric about demons is less about Christian principles, still less about yoga, and more about seeking to deepen that repression.
For all of these texts, see James Mallinson and Mark Singleton, trans. and eds, Roots of Yoga (New York: Penguin, 2017), 1-44.
The text is Aratus, Phaenomena 1.1-5, and reads: Ἐκ Διὸς ἀρχώμεσθα, τὸν οὐδέποτ’ ἄνδρες ἐῶμεν / ἄρρητον· μεσταὶ δὲ Διὸς πᾶσαι μὲν ἀγυιαί, / πᾶσαι δ’ ἀνθρώπων ἀγοαί, μεστὴ δὲ θάλασσα / καὶ λιμένες· πάντη δὲ Διὸς κεκρήμεθα πάντες. Τοῦ γὰρ καὶ γένος εἰμέν. The quotation of the Lukan Paul in Acts 17:28 is of the last sentence in line 5.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).
The LXX translation reads Τὸ γὰρ πᾶν ἐστιν αὐτός, that is, “For he is the All.” Generations of interpreters have tried to mitigate the force of that statement as too strongly pantheistic or panentheistic, but its literal meaning stands quite clearly.
Thank you so much for this article!! Your summation and thorough exposition on the subject of yoga was beyond refreshing. I stumbled upon this website while doing a little "digging" triggered by a very disturbing comment made by a fellow "Facebooker". I already knew her comment was GROSSLY misinformed but your article really drove the point home!! RESEARCH IS FUNDAMENTAL!! Thank you again! :-)
I’m not a Christian but I’m drawn to the faith, and have been thoroughly enjoying your interviews with DBH, and am now enjoying dipping into your articles. This one touches on something which has been pestering me for some time: the question of which specific practices the early Christians classed as sorcery (φαρμακεία), and whether it was just an admonition against any practice which could be seen to undermine or bypass the true God, seeking instead to gain power for oneself.
Could the practices of Plotinus be classed as borderline sorcery?
I’d love to read more about this topic, and also the Hebrew context around contacting familiar spirits, idolatry etc. Any book recommendations?