The Origins of Yoga
Shrikant G Talageri
My recent article on Hathayoga, "Hinduism, Buddhism and Haṭha Yoga", led to a request from an anonymous reader for a response to two sources (an article dated 23/8/2010, and a video dated 24/6/2019, both by Koenraad Elst) claiming that not only Hathayoga but many other basic aspects of Yoga as a whole were borrowings from China. This goes much further than claims that Hathayoga was of Buddhist origin, because that claim still (I presume) keeps the origin within India (although stoking that agenda-based ploy of pitting Hinduism against Buddhism) while this claim takes the origins completely out of India. The two sources are:
http://koenraadelst.blogspot.com/2010/08/origins-of-hatha-yoga.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mmN-yOCsnoc
I was somehow not aware of the above article and video, and hence never went into these claims. But now I will do so, especially because the reader also pointed out that "In the 28th slide of his YT video he says "But to console Indian chauvinists: India could only integrate this Chinese contribution because it had its own ancient yoga tradition in which to integrate it"".
I am not an Indian chauvinist, at least certainly not in the sense of wanting to deny genuine contributions to Indian culture from outside — even in my work on the Rigveda, I have pointed out that both the main rituals of the Rigveda, the fire ritual and the Soma ritual, were contributed to the Vedic ṛṣis (Aṅgirases, the priests of the Vedic Pūrus) by the priests (Bhṛgus) of the non-Vedic Proto-Iranian Anus to their west, and while these Anus and their priests were as Indian as the Vedic Pūrus and their priests, the Soma ritual was not: it was originally borrowed by the Bhṛgus from other people of Central Asia to their northwest, which I would not say was from "within India". Also, I am not one of the biased Hindu critics of Koenraad, who consider him an "outsider" not qualified to speak on Hindu issues (a strange principle in itself!), and am in fact one of his strongest supporters and consider him to be a true friend of India and Hinduism whose contributions to Hindu/Indian issues is beyond compare. Hence, my response to his views on Yoga must be placed on record.
In his article, Koenraad accepts the latest possible date for the Patanjali Yoga Sutras (and presumably for other relevant texts), or at least for its final editing, 500 CE, although conceding that it contains much earlier materials. Some quotes from the article:
"the yoga being marketed and "developed" in the West nowadays is 99% hatha yoga, which is practically absent from the Yoga Sutra. What "Patanjali" teaches is a method for stilling the mind, along with the concomitant doctrine of why this practice is desirable and beneficial. His topic is meditation, and accessorily the lifestyle conducive to a fruitful meditation practice. It contains a very general outline of pranayama, breath control, a practice already mentioned prominently but only sketchily in Vedic literature, principally the Upanishads. Pranayama is definitely a very ancient practice and doctrine, though many of the specific breathing techniques now taught in yoga studios seem not have been described in the old scriptures, to the extent that we understand their sometimes cryptic language. The description of these specific techniques is found in the Hatha Yoga classics which do not predate the 13th century: the Gheranda Samhita, the Shiva Samhita and the Hatha Yoga Pradipika".
Further, about āsanas, he goes on to assert that only āsanas for "sitting up straight" are recorded before these 13th century texts. There are no "standing" āsanas and no āsanas involving "physical contortions": "I don't think any other asana postures except those for simply sitting up straight have been recorded before the late-medieval Gheranda Samhita, Hatha Yoga Pradipika and such. In the Bhagavad-Gita, Krishna calls on Arjuna to "become a yogi", but he gives no instructions in postures or breathing exercises. Libertines practising the whole range of Kama Sutra postures got more exercise in physical strength and agility than the yogis of their age, who merely sat up straight and forgot about their bodies."
In this context, he dismisses the claims about yoga postures in the Harappan civilization: "the claim that yoga dates back to "2500 BC" pertains precisely to the visual depiction of a well-known yogic posture. It very obviously refers to the Harappan "Pashupati seal" showing someone (claimed to be Shiva Pashupati, "Lord of Beasts", as he is surrounded by animals) sitting in siddhâsana, which simply means sitting on the floor with the legs crossed and knees touching the floor. This leg position takes some training for people in a colder climate, and Westerners only encounter it in yoga classes; but it comes naturally to people in a hot climate. In India you constantly come across tailors sitting in that posture for their work. So, though this posture is found to be conducive to keeping the spine straight and freeing the body from stresses hindering meditation, there is nothing exclusively yogic about it."
And then, moving beyond āsanas, he quotes a western
scholar: "Geoffrey Samuel (History of Yoga and Tantra, 2008) argues
convincingly that kundalini yoga and the whole system of chakra lore,
definitely not older than the 5th century CE, is a highly indianized adaptation
of Chinese "inner alchemy" including the "small celestial
orbit" and some of its sexual techniques. Its core practice is the
controlled circulation of energy, and the hatha yoga postures seem to have
evolved out of the effort to facilitate this energy circulation through contrived
postures. Much of "Tantra" is a Chinese import that has been so
thoroughly indianized, e.g. by personifying various energy centres as
"gods", that Indians and Westerners haven't even noticed its newness
vis-à-vis Vedic or otherwise anciently Indian tradition.
To Samuel's argument, some more data from a comparison of practices may be
added, e.g. "negative breathing" (in which the belly is not extended
but drawn in during in-breathing, with the breath being drawn up so as to
create an upward energy dynamic), and the whole Daoist-originated idea that
yoga invigorates and lengthens life. The actual hatha-yogic postures are very
different from Daoist exercises in some technical respects, such as Indian
muscle-stretching straightness vs. Chinese avoidance of all full stretching,
again seemingly traceable to the difference in climate. According to Chinese
tradition, daoyin exercises, attested BCE, were devised to make the joints
supple in an arthritis-prone cold/wet environment. (These exercises also were
an influence on modern Swedish gymnastics.) Maintaining a fixed posture for a
length of time, typical of hatha yoga, may seem to contrast with the continuous
movement in taijiquan (13th or arguably even 19th cent.), but is in fact also
found in qigong postures called an. That Chinese postures are mostly
standing, Indian postures mostly on the floor, is again explainable by the
difference in climate".
In this article, he (without quoting any western scholar) even seems to go on to indirectly question the combined testimony of tradition and text that the far eastern martial arts originated in India, having been taken there by Buddhist monks from India: "Likewise, the Chinese "gentle" types of martial arts, also often lauded as very ancient, must logically be younger developments from the natural, primitive "hard" martial arts. This is necessarily so, for they are far more sophisticated, taking a cumulative effort in their development and requiring a greater mastery through training before they become effective in combat." — at least this is my understanding of the above sentence in the context of the rest of the article.
In fact he not only attributes the origins of yoga (and not just āsanas) to China, but even gives some credit to the British: "As late as the 19th century, novelties were added to the array of hatha yoga techniques, partly under the influences of British military drill. Particularly the standing techniques are mostly late additions. Consider hatha yoga a modern innovation."
To begin with his dismissal of the Yogic postures in the Harappan sites, see the charts available on google, showing small clay and other figurines in various āsana postures. Of course, they are few in number, and all are sitting poses. This still does not justify the arguments given in the article and video, which seem to consist mainly of citing similar things in Chinese traditions (explaining away all fundamental differences as being due to a difference in "climate" — China being in the colder areas and India in the warmer ones), citing the lack of references to various things in earlier Indian texts, and some very subjective views of Joseph Needham, 1990-1995, "an old China Hand", who "considers", for example, that alchemy is a Chinese invention, and "thinks" it went to India in the early Common Era. Also an extremely vague and dubious story about a "Buddhist party [which] travelled to India" in the 4th c. CE, "had audience with king of Udya (Swat)" and "told him about Chinese achievements, including Hua Tuo's medicine". But Buddhist parties were always travelling to and from India, and unless concrete evidence exists that this party revealed the essence of kundalini and chakras to this king of Swat following which it was transmitted to the rest of India, such assertions have no value. .
[The article by Koenraad Elst was written in 2010, but the video is much more recent, from 2019. And I am hampered from hearing the video in its entirety because of hearing problems (and hence am relying more on the power point presentation visible during the talk).]
The first flaw is that there is no tradition on either side (in China or in India) that any essential aspect of Yoga was borrowed from China. In fact, Koenraad points out in his power point that the "Chinese themselves arguably located origin abroad". However arguable it may be, it cannot be arguable to the extent that it shows that the Chinese actually originated and then loaned most of the essential points of Yoga to India. There is definitely no such tradition, arguable or otherwise, in India, locating the origin of Yoga abroad.
But the bigger flaw is that there is not even the tiniest linguistic hint of this alleged borrowing from China. Even small things borrowed leave linguistic traces. Plants, for example, usually take their original names with them. The English or Indian names ananas, papaya, chiku/sapota, potato/batata, tomato/tamatar, tobacco/tambaku, cocoa, cashew/kaju, guava/peru, chilli are not English or Indian names: they are derivatives of native American names for the products which came from the Americas. Chai/tea are also not Indian or English names, they are Chinese names for the product which originally came from China (although later a separate Indian sub-species was discovered by the British in Assam and became Indian tea). Coffee/kapi is a late import from West Asia, although a native of Africa, and the names are derived from the Arabic name qahwah (originally a kind of wine). The word pepper is derived from the Indian word pippali. Sugar and gur are derived from Sanskrit names in most world languages, and jaggery from Dravidian names. Mango is derived from Dravidian mangay. The list is a very long one.
Every religion, whether Buddhism, Christianity or Islam, which spread over originally different areas, also carried with it a huge corpus of religious terms and words which point towards the language spoken by the original or earliest followers of that religion in its land of origin.
Similarly, in the case of games like chess, EJR Murray, in his "History of Chess" points out that "early Persian and Arabic tradition is unanimous in ascribing the game of chess to India" (p.26), but the linguistic evidence alone is sufficient. The Indian game, called chaturanga, became shatranj in Arabia, chator in Malaysia, chhôeu trâng in Vietnam, and shatara in Mongolia.
The same is the case with the Indian game pachisi or chaupar, known commercially as ludo, played all over India from ancient times (it is said to be mentioned as pasha in the Mahabharata, and is certainly depicted in the frescoes of Chandraketugarh from 100 BCE). It spread all over Asia, and local traditions as well as the local names (barjis or barsis in West Asia, parchis in Spain and Morocco, ch'u pu in ancient Chinese texts of the Song dynasty) testify to its Indian origin.
And now, here we come to a very strange phenomenon which defies explanation: an identical game known as patolli (the Aztec name, taken as a generic name for all the local variants) was found played in most of pre-Columbian America. The game, and its board and purposes, are so strikingly similar to pachisi, that a crossword clue about "an ancient game of seven letters, beginning with pa- and ending in -i, played on a board shaped like a cross, where the players move their pieces all around the cross until they reach home safely, the number of moves forward being decided by the throw of dice or cowrie shells or beans, with certain squares on the path marked as special safe positions" could mean either pachisi or patolli.
Even in so striking a phenomenon where the two games contain identical special features, people hesitate to postulate a movement of the game from India to Mexico in the pre-Columbian past (although some Indian scholars like Bhikshu Chaman Lal in his book "Hindu America" and some western scholars like Edward Burnett Tylor,1896 and E. Adamson Hoebel, 1966, have drawn this very plausible conclusion), perhaps because there is no general acceptance of any contact between the two in that earlier past. So linking two distinctly different features such as those in Chinese systems and in Indian Yoga on extremely specious grounds, dismissing fundamental differences as based on vague criteria like "climate", without the backing of linguistic or of recorded textual evidence is not valid.
Even today, in spite of all the attempts at "digestion" of Yoga (to use Rajiv Malhotra's telling phrase) and presentation of it in alternate ways in the west, the word yoga itself reveals the Indian origins. Likewise, a large number of Indian phrases of religious/spiritual nature have become part of common speech in the west: ashrama, moksha, nirvana, guru, mantra, karma, etc.
Although many Hindus like to deny it, Koenraad's assertions about the zodiac being borrowed from the Greeks are proved by the fact that the signs of the zodiac in Indian astrology/astronomy correspond exactly to the Greek/western names, siṁha (lion) for leo, kanyā (girl) for virgo, vṛścika (scorpion) for scorpio, etc. [Likewise, the names of the days of the week also correspond to the western ones: ravivāra (sun-day) for sunday, etc.]. But it is not just about this correspondence in meaning, the earliest Sanskrit texts referring to the zodiac signs actually have phonetically Sanskritized forms of the original Greek words (which were later translated into actual Sanskrit), and the name of the Yavana Jataka (an early post-Vedic Sanskrit text on astrology/astronomy) not only indicates the Greek influence, but has some other words of clearly Greek origin like horā and jāmitra. Vedic astronomy was indeed different, but that fact alone would not have been sufficient to postulate a Greek origin for some later and different astronomical/astrological terms and ideas: the linguistic evidence does it.
Here, stating that Indian medicine or Yoga is based on the 300 BCE text Huangdi Neijing "classic of internal medicine", or that Ge Hong, "Inner alchemy", 343 CE, is the source of prāṇāyama, "energy exercises" (actually "breath control"), or that Chinese waidan "outer cinnabar" became rasāyana "path of the essence" in India, where neither the sounds nor the meanings show any connections, is diifficult to accept.
Koenraad points out that the Chinese texts refer to three energy centers, in the abdomen, heart and head, and says that these are the Chinese concepts which became the chakras in the kundalini concept in Indian Yoga. But not only are there different numbers of chakras in the spinal column in the texts on Yoga, but these (being purely connected with internal spiritual energy) are fundamentally functionally different from the three centers in the Chinese texts, which are actually physical points, part of the purely physical acupressure/acupuncture systems of curative treatment in Chinese and other East Asian cultures. There can be no doubt that acupressure and acupuncture are the truly great contributions of the three great East Asian cultures (of China, Japan and Korea, with China the point of ultimate origin). It would be strange if the ancient Indians had adapted the idea of centers of energy in the spine, and modified and elaborated them at length, but totally ignored the much more important aspects of acupressure of which the Chinese energy centers actually represent the essence. [I was personally cured in 2017, within a few weeks, by the Korean acupressure system called Sujok, after suffering ten years of chronic vertigo from 2007-2017, where no other system of medicine helped].
But that does not have anything to do with Yoga, any more than the Chinese concepts of Yin and Yang have anything to do with the origin of the concepts of Prakriti and Purusha in Indian Sankhya philosophy, or Charvaka's rejection of afterlife represents a "loan"from similar rejections by other seers in other cultures (Greece, China, etc.). The human intellect is equally active in all advanced intellectual cultures, and often traverses similar paths, and ancient Indian thinkers have left extremely few ideas totally untouched. Unless traditional testimony and/or linguistic evidence show something, such claims are superficial. Note that, when examples of interaction surface, the evidence is very clear: Koenraad himself gives an example, where, in sexual activities, cīnacāra "the Chinese practice" apparently means "saving semen while kindling pleasure in the woman in order to prolong the man's life". Here, there is no subterfuge. It is inconceivable that any major and fundamental contributions by China to Indian Yoga could have been so successfully hidden or totally blanked out.
While "digestion" and de-Hinduization of Yoga has been going on for decades — even as fundamentalists in the west blast Yoga as a satanic Hindu attempt to lead Christians away from God into the arms of the Devil — it has gathered strength in the last few years and has become a significant part of anti-Hindu, anti-Indian and, in many cases, especially after the espousal and international broadcasting of the Indian Yoga heritage by the present government, even anti-BJP or anti-Modi, propaganda. Cherry-picking on bombastic statements of Indian politicians and officials about the 5000-year Yoga heritage of India, these articles strive to "show" that Yoga is a very recent and modern phenomenon, spurred on by individual Yoga gurus and western enthusiasts, and in fact influenced by western/European physical systems! All that is part of a much larger picture, and I will not bother to go into the politics behind it in this article. The point is that in none of these articles, that I at least have read, is a Chinese origin postulated.
Yoga is a very vast subject, and its processes include a wide range of branches, including massages, mudrās and mind-and-body cleansing processes. Not having made a study of the subject, I am not personally in a position to cite the earliest textual evidence for each of these myriad aspects in India. But these aspects exist as part of Yoga, and unless actual textual and linguistic evidence shows a foreign origin for any particular aspect, such an origin cannot be cited. When such evidence is there, it should not be denied either. If Koenraad can present such evidence, it will enrich our knowledge of ancient India and its relations with other ancient civilizations. After all Indian cuisine is not the less Indian because it uses potatoes and chilies which originally came from pre-Columbian America, nor does the use of sugar, pepper and lemons in European cuisine make those dishes less European. And it does not matter whether every single aspect of Yoga is 5000 years old or 2500 years old or less. Every science and every discipline (like language itself) is constantly evolving, and Yoga, whatever the age of different parts of it, is very much an Indian and a Hindu contribution to the world.
