Study YOGA

TRANSCRIPT

DANIEL SIMPSON

Amy:

Welcome to the Study Yoga Online Summit. If you are seeking beyond the sea of superficial yoga flooding your feed, yearning for insightful conversations and community, or are a sincere seeker devoted to the depths of studentship, then the Study Yoga Masterclass series is the nectar that you need. Daniel Simpson is the author of The Truth of Yoga: A Comprehensive Guide to Yoga’s History, Texts, Philosophy and Practices. This book provides succinct answers to almost any question about yoga’s evolution, putting teachings into context and dispelling misconceptions. Ex-foreign correspondent Daniel’s approach combines scholarly knowledge with humour and insight making yoga philosophy accessible and relevant to practitioners today. Daniel teaches courses at SOAS, University of London, the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies, on yoga teacher trainings and online. He also offers workshops, private tutoring, and is the host of the Ancient Futures podcast. Drawing on a master’s degree in yoga studies and over 20 years of practical experience, he aims to help students explore their own path. Daniel, it’s so great to be speaking with you again, thank you for being here and welcome.

Daniel:

Well, thank you Amy. It’s an honour.

Amy:

So Daniel, today we are delving into the somewhat complex conversation around the promise and pitfalls, I would say maybe, or the virtue or value and drawbacks of yoga academia. And you yourself have been immersed in this field for a number of years alongside also being a practitioner of yoga. And no doubt there are a number of scholars and academics out there who fit into both of these categories. And perhaps those more commonly known would be, I would say, James Mallinson or Mark Singleton. I’m curious to delve into this reality and hear of your personal thoughts and experience, given that on the surface I can imagine that these two pathways seem to be complementary and yet simultaneously they could also create a degree of conflict, or perhaps undermine one another in some way. So could you begin by highlighting what you believe is of immense value concerning scholarly research within the broad field of yoga, and how does this not only uplift yoga teachings, but also add value directly to the path of a practitioner?

Daniel:

Thank you, Amy. Yeah, no, it’s a small question – we’ll deal with it in a sentence and then move on. I think there are a couple of things that I really want to underline first – one actually would be to mention another name, especially to your Australian listeners, somebody who’s based in Tasmania, Jason Birch…

Amy:

Of course, yes.

Daniel:

…who works together with James Mallinson and Mark Singleton, and has been collaborating with them on translations of yoga texts. And he I think is the bridge-builder in a way. Jim Mallinson’s speciality is the evolution of physical practices, anywhere from a thousand years ago or so, roughly up to the time of the Haṭha Pradīpikā. So still more than half a millennium in the past. Mark Singleton, best known for his book Yoga Body, that ruffled a lot of feathers in the yoga world by saying things that people tell you aren’t necessarily quite what they seem. He’s mainly been focused on modern yoga, and he’s currently I think working on research about the future of yoga and yoga and technology.

Whereas Jason has been really looking at the period between the birth of physical practice, let’s say, and the evolution of modern systems of posture-focused yoga. So he helps to show through his work how there is quite a lot of continuity, as well as a lot of things changing over time. And I think that sort of introduces quite nicely what the benefits of a little bit of academic study can be, because they put practices into context. And although Mark’s book Yoga Body was subtitled, I think by the publisher the origins of modern yoga practice, or postural yoga practice, or something of that sort, it grew out of a PhD that he wrote, which was all about contexts. So he was talking about the context in which postural practice became prioritised by a number of prominent teachers in early 20th century India. And it’s the context that’s interesting because all teachings on yoga makes sense in a particular context, but they don’t necessarily translate directly to other contexts.

And this is why when you open lots of different yoga texts, they say slightly different things. There really are no kind of universals across the traditions of yoga apart from some general themes – let’s say perhaps inward focus, removing the confusion that misleads us, perhaps working with one or two basic principles like the connection between the mind and the breath. Beyond that, it varies enormously. So you have to, I think, start to look at things in their specific context if you want them to make sense. And academics are a hundred percent focused on that. They try to explain not only how one context operates, so an in-depth explanation of where a text comes from, what it says, and how that might differ from other contexts. But they look at this over time and see how things change over time and how ideas sort of come into the mix at some point and then fade away again at other times, only to be revived a few centuries later.

And if we’re not aware of that process, we end up with this sort of, I guess, hybrid perspective, let’s say that is generally out there in the yoga world – “the yoga tradition”, in which yoga is X, Y, and Z. Yoga means union, it comes from Patañjali, and it’s all about cakras, as B.K.S. Iyengar basically says in his introduction to Light on Yoga, mixing together three things that completely contradict each other. The whole cakra-based Kuṇḍalinī-raising approach to physical practice comes from tantric texts. Patañjali himself explicitly says union is the problem that his yoga tries to resolve by separating puruṣa from prakṛti. And the combination of the idea that yoga means union really is something that develops in physical practice texts in the medieval era.

And obviously you can say this is all splitting hairs, how does this help anybody? But I think it does in the end help us to be a little bit careful about blending everything together, because we get a much better understanding of how things work if we go back to the specific context, and see what’s going on. you won’t get very far with understanding Patañjali‘s Yoga Sūtra if you keep looking for where it kind of all comes together into union. And similarly, you won’t get very far as a modern practitioner working with the body if you are entirely hung up on Patañjali’s idea that the body is a problem that needs to be transcended. So all of these contexts help to make practice make sense, and I think therefore a little bit of academic study, or as a modern yoga practitioner with access to the Internet or a book like the one I wrote, The Truth of Yoga, which tries to build a bridge between the practitioner world, the world of traditional Indian presentations of yoga philosophy and yoga practice through yoga texts, and then also this academic analysis of things that does a bit of both is a way, I guess, of dipping one’s toe into the ocean.

Obviously you can go much further. You can go and do a master’s degree, you can go on to do original research, you can become a yoga academic, but that’s definitely not for everybody. And even reading academic work is challenging, to be honest, without some kind of foundation in study of these subjects. And therefore I wouldn’t suggest that scholarship is for everybody, but the knowledge that scholars are making available is I think really important to get one’s head around even just at a basic level. And there are many, many channels through which one can do that. There are podcasts in which these luminaries are interviewed about their findings. There are popular presentations of what they do in talks. And then there are people like me. I used to be a journalist. My job these days is basically being a yoga hack. I go around, I take notes on what these researchers are producing in their work, and I try to put that across in clear, straightforward, accessible, engaging terms with a few graphics online or through my online courses, my own explanations, in which I’m not afraid to crack a few jokes and use pictures to lighten things up a little bit as a way to give people a foothold, so that they can start clambering around and explore for themselves should they want to. But at the same time, they’ll get the basic overview that I think is helpful just at that entry-level point. But there’s always further to go, and there’s always deeper to dive. And I think the most useful thing that yoga scholars have been doing in recent years is translating more texts, because for the most part, we’re reliant – very, very heavily reliant – on texts that don’t actually have a lot to do with the practices that most people are engaged with.

And I’m thinking here of the Yoga Sūtra and the Bhagavad Gītā – those are the two texts that most people will encounter if they start trying to explore beyond what they do on a yoga mat. And neither of them say anything about what you do on a yoga mat. The only reference to posture is about sitting still. And all of modern yoga is about non-seated postures, and often moving between them with perhaps even a soundtrack of music in the background. Although you won’t find too many precedents for that other than the recitation of oṃ in old yoga texts. So we need to look to other sources to find a bit more information about where did these physical practices come from? People tend to turn then to the Haṭha Pradīpikā, this compilation from around 600 years ago, putting together a synthesis of how physical practice leads to these deeper states of clarity and concentration that earlier sources were talking about.

But that’s also a quite confusing text, the Haṭha Pradīpikā, because it’s made up of I guess a copy-and-paste kind of compilation of other material. And so scholars have recently been translating a number of the texts from which the Haṭha Pradīpikā was compiled. And then in those individual contexts, a lot of the teachings become a lot clearer, and you understand different approaches to working with the body and different, I guess, prioritisations of other practices, specifically meditation. And from that, you get a much richer picture of what practice consisted of.

And then coming back to where I started, talking about the work of Jason Birch, we start to see how some of the raw materials that innovative teachers in the 20th century started working with to come up with basically the foundations of what’s now vinyāsa flow – joining postures together, moving between them – those are there in some of the more extensive texts that, again, do a kind of compilation job in let’s say the 18th century in particular, but starting from perhaps a hundred years or so before that, tying together all these strands of different yoga traditions and making physical practice part of a system of philosophy that is, I guess, integrated with what we’ll read in the Gītā, from the early Upaniṣads, from Patañjali, from the tantric traditions that inspire physical practice – starting that process of jumbling everything together, but also at the same time teaching techniques that are, you know, familiar to us, and start to show how although there are new ideas in 20th century yoga that really don’t have a precedent in earlier sources, there are the building blocks out of which those have been built.

And that really helps us to understand that although there’s enormous change in the history of yoga, there are threads of continuity. And the main reason that I’m talking about all of this is because we are involved in it. Whatever we are doing as practitioners and teachers is changing yoga because we are involved with it now, in 2024 as we are speaking. That’s not the same as 2000 years ago, plus, in the history of yoga. It’s not even the same as 20 years ago. And we’ll have our own priorities, we’ll have our own objectives, we’ll have our own way of relating something timeless to this moment, and that will change the way in which yoga is presented. And the clearer we can be about the fact that we’re doing that, the clearer we can also get about whether or not we want to retain some kind of connection to yogic tradition.

And then we’ll have to get our thinking caps on and start to see what the threads of commonality might be. Because it’s definitely not the case that any of us is doing to the letter what Patañjali said, whatever we might like to tell ourselves. So we’ll need to have this bridge-building process for ourselves that explains how, yes, things keep changing. But yes, there are also connecting threads. Because if there aren’t any, why are we calling what we do yoga? This is a word from the Sanskrit language, it’s been referred to in many different contexts in these texts. If we can’t find a connecting thread to those, perhaps we need a new name for what we’re doing.

Amy:

It’s a very exciting time though, given that you highlighted that there are more and more texts now being translated. It’s such an exciting time to be able to access this knowledge and this information that will slowly come through. And I think it was through you or perhaps particularly through your book, which I continue to highly recommend, that you pointed out that there is so much emphasis on the Yoga Sūtra and the Bhagavad Gītā primarily because they were the first couple of texts that were translated to English and naturally thereby they kind of got out into the world, across the world most quickly and easily. And so I think that we have to consider that as well. And that’s not to diminish the texts. I think that they’re both wonderful, and I know that you teach about them and they add tremendous value. But yes, I think it’s such an exciting time to be alive and immersed in yoga right now to see what is to come and to see what unfolds and unravels.

And as someone personally who’s not a scholar, I’m not an academic, I feel really drawn to the research and learning and seeing what comes through and reading journals and things, because I feel like it helps me feel more anchored into something – for lack of a better word, authentic let’s say. Or I feel like I’m in greater integrity. I feel like I’m culturally more respectful, because it’s giving me this foundational background for the practice that I am entrenched in, which is related to a particular culture and dates back so far in time. And yeah, I think it’s incredibly valuable. I know that some people can be very resistant to academic research for a variety of reasons. Even a really common one is just the translation of Sanskrit. You’ve got to be sort of more dry and rational and look at things word by word. And then when it comes through a lineage, rather than comes through that academic lens, it can come through very differently. And I personally ascribe to thinking both have value and can we look at them side by side. So, with this in mind, in contrast to everything you’ve just shared, complementing and sharing with us, really highlighting the value of this academic research, what are the notable drawbacks that you’ve witnessed – and possibly experienced yourself maybe – of this academic approach to yoga? What are the potential conflicts or hindrances in your opinion?

Daniel:

Well, I think you’ve touched on one of the big ones right there. What scholars say is not always the same as what you hear from traditional lineages, particularly in terms of explaining their own history. And that causes disillusionment sometimes for practitioners, to be told, you know, everything you think you know is wrong, effectively. And also it can seem quite condescending and dismissive of a different way of seeing. And I agree with you that it’s important that neither of these perspectives colonises the other. Because, let’s face it, I mean some of the stories that lineages tell are not verifiable, to put it charitably. So for the academic perspective of putting together a clear, coherent picture of what we can demonstrate from sources to be verifiably true, that’s not really on. That’s just dismissing knowledge, it’s anti-intellectual.

And yet at the same time, for scholars then to turn around and dismiss the value of a lineage’s own, you know we might say mythology. I mean mythology doesn’t mean things that are untrue as such. It means that a narrative framework through which we make sense of things. And for that to happen, is just, I mean it’s disrespectful. It is actually colonialist in that sense. It’s basically saying our way of understanding is better than yours, and you can throw that one out the window. So there’s no value in either of them winning a debate. The problem is they do tend to see in terms of that kind of debate, and the scholarly world really doesn’t have any kind of place for not just the traditional perspective, in inverted commas, let’s say, from a lineage. It also doesn’t really have a place for the practitioner perspective, because first-person accounts of what you are experiencing aren’t really the kind of thing that rational critical analysis is made out of. You could do your sort of first-person ethnographic study of your own experience, but then you’d have to dissect it, or do something with it rather than have it.

And the whole point of yoga is not even to have it, it’s to be it. So it leads away from the direct experience that yoga traditions are pointing towards. In fact, at the most elementary level, let’s go back to Patañjali – yogaś citta-vṛtti-nirodhaḥ, the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind, basically sit down, shut up – that is not what academics do. They sit down and wax lyrical, and go on for thousands and thousands of words of, you know, endlessly anally retentively pulling things to pieces. And that’s not very helpful as a practitioner sometimes, to have everything pulled to pieces. It causes one to question what one is doing and perhaps even to abandon it, thinking I can’t trust anything. You use the word authenticity. If your faith in the authenticity of a practice tradition is completely undermined, you might go off and try a different thing instead.

And that would be a terrible shame because I don’t think that’s the message that scholars are really at their core trying to get across anyway. And I don’t think also authenticity needs to have anything to do with antiquity, you know, the age of things. It’s irrelevant. The true, I guess, significance of what’s authentic in traditional contexts is whether practices deliver the results they’re supposed to. And therefore what matters is defining objectives, understanding the purposes of various approaches, and then engaging in them. The whole point – come back to the Haṭha Pradīpikā – the only thing that matters is practice. There’s no point sitting around and talking about things. You’ve got to do your practice. So I don’t know, you just end up with this clash of perspectives again, that can get in the way, but it is, I think, helpful to be reminded of the fact that things don’t have to be old to be relevant.

What we have to do is to be clear about why things are being done, and a lineage has its own story about that. But there are also ways in which, as I say, we have to engage with things for ourselves and it helps to not be totally dependent on what somebody else tells us to do. Yoga was never supposed to be dogmatic repetition of anything. It’s an inquiry. And so there’s something about the kind of intellectual freedom and critical thinking skills that academia offers that can be very empowering, if it’s kept to reasonable limits. Unfortunately, the scholarly project is all about the critical thinking and not so much about the application of that in a practical context. So you will get scholars almost suggesting that engaging in yoga scholarship is the same thing as yoga practice. I’ve had someone tell me that once on Instagram. And, you know, what are you talking about, I said in response. It’s a practice of course, but it’s a completely different practice to what yoga texts were talking about, even if it stills your mind while you are engaged in this hive of mental activity.

So I think we need to be careful of that, the assumption that scholars have got some yogic contribution to make. I think they’ve got an interesting contribution to make, but it’s not yoga, it’s scholarship. I think we also need to be careful of the idea that we all need to listen to yoga scholars and that they’re the most helpful presenters of information. Again, they say something that’s very interesting and can potentially be enlightening, in inverted commas, in a slightly different way because it can be a lightbulb on moment of perhaps reframing the way we see things, a shift in perspective, but it’s still not going to be a yogic shift in perspective. It’s a way of understanding things analytically, rather than going beyond all concepts. So there’s all of that to bear in mind.

And I think finally, there’s this other problem that’s crept in these days as yoga studies has grown as a field, which is quite politicised frankly, and it’s all about the politics of yoga and the sociology of yoga. And there’s many things that deserve that sort of lens shone on them because there’s all sorts of things in the world of yoga that really aren’t on – abuses, for example, either of power or of students, of all sorts – sexual, financial – there’s all sorts of misconduct out there and studying that is important. But again, you go so far with that that it starts to suggest sometimes that all lineage traditions are corrupt. They need to be dismantled. And again, you’d lose the connecting thread to how it is that any of us ever heard about yoga in the first place. So obviously there’s a need for critical thinking. There’s a need for a study of the way in which we engage with things. But again, you go too far with this, I don’t know, discourse of cultural appropriation, for example – which is also coming out of a traditional perspective too – and you end up with this, I guess, critical thinking of another disempowering kind, where white Western yoga practitioners start to feel that by being yoga practitioners, they’re disrespecting tradition unless they go and sign up to a traditional lineage, which I don’t think they have to do to be respectful yoga practitioners.

So again, we get into the realm of colonisation, reverse colonisation as a sort of decolonising project. And all of that’s a bit messy, and you can get lost in thinking about that too much. And in the end, yoga is there, it’s accessible. It’s something anybody can engage in, and it’s a state of being. It’s available to anyone who applies techniques that will help to awaken that. So nobody owns it. And yet at the same time, as you pointed out, it comes from a particular cultural context originally, and completely removing that is problematic. So I guess what I’m trying to say is the things that modern yoga studies have started to explore are worth exploring, but the ways in which academics often go about this, I think, complicate it so much that it becomes very hard to stay focused on practice, and it’s much more about politics, sociology, economics, whatever it might be, than it is about yoga.

And a lot of that is now the dominant theme of the world of yoga studies. And I therefore start to think, hmm, I’m less sure about that than I would be about saying go and understand the history of yoga’s evolution, and a more in-depth appreciation of what specific texts say by really engaging in depth with the commentarial traditions, and the deeper meaning of the Sanskrit. That’s where scholarship has an enormous amount of value to practitioners. All this other stuff, I’m less sure.

Amy:

That resonates for me what you’ve just said. So yeah, I appreciate that balanced perspective. I think that, yeah, we can almost make anything about yoga. Everything’s related to yoga, and then it just becomes, as you said, complex and messy. But one thing that I struggle to unravel is particularly reading yoga texts, obviously we are reading, well, I’m reading an English translation. So that in itself has slightly shifted the original perhaps teachings, intention, message because obviously every Sanskrit word has multiple, well pretty much, multiple meanings or translations depending on context. But then a lot of traditional yogic texts have these sort of esoteric or mystical or almost like let’s say secret teachings woven through that are not meant to be necessarily very obvious and that are said to be unravelled through the relationship with the teacher, that the text is meant to accompany that oral tradition with a teacher.

And so yeah, I think it is tricky because we want to… I have tremendous value and respect for the world of academia in terms of yoga studies. I think it’s really fascinating. I think it’s very helpful, very enriching for everybody, generally speaking, it uplifts yoga. But then it does, at least I’m personally experiencing that internal conflict like, well then how do I assimilate this? Because yeah, you’re coming through two lenses, essentially, and that at times can feel a bit sticky perhaps. But yeah, I think it’s interesting, because it’s important that we have these conversations, and we continue to pursue learning, exploring, growing, translating, looking at multiple translations of texts as well. And as mentioned earlier, the continual evolution of the research in terms of the more and more translations we receive of different texts, we might be able to piece some more of the puzzle together, and thread even the timeline of yoga together the more we unravel and translate texts.

So I think that over time perhaps we might actually see the penny drop around certain texts that we’ve relied heavily on. Like the Haṭha Pradīpikā, for example. As you said, it’s a compilation. So many people don’t even realise that. And it’s like this amalgamation of older previous work, and as we unpack the work that came before that, we might actually start to unravel those more seemingly mystical teachings or things that we don’t quite understand. And thereby that would emphasise that the academic research is actually tremendously of value. So I think we’re just at that stage where we’re just trying to fit everything together and perhaps just patience is what we’re just going to need, perhaps.

Daniel:

Patience is always handy, yeah. I mean, in the end though, we’re trying to build our own worldview, and that’s sort of part, I think, of the project of inquiry. On the one hand, you’re trying to dismantle it completely and see beyond everything, but that’s not for the day-to-day, that’s the transcendent. And in the day-to-day world, we need a perspective from which to operate. And so I think it’s really important as practitioners to have our own sense of, first of all, why do we do what we do? And secondly, why do we call it yoga? And it doesn’t help to just say, because Patañjali and citta-vṛtti-nirodhaḥ. That’s great. It’s lovely, but how is that actually attained? What are we doing towards that end and how does that have anything to do with what we might practice or teach? And how does that then relate to what we do in the rest of our lives?

We need our own language for this stuff. And the more we think about it just for ourselves, the more helpful that is, I think. You know, we don’t need to do it from the perspective of trying to undermine everything, it’s to build things up, not to deconstruct them. And the academic world, you know, this word critical creeps in everywhere. You don’t get a PhD unless it is constructed on critical scholarship, basically pulling things to pieces in some ways, even if that’s just an understanding of what people knew before. If you’re trying to build things up, that’s not really advanced academic research. That’s what they might call theology. So you’re building your own system of explanation rather than actually engaging in sort of an analysis of what other people do. So that’s the limits of academia. You’re not supposed to do this stuff. In day-to-day life, we need to do this. We need to build our own understanding.

And that’s what I try to do in my own teaching. I was just teaching at SOAS, the university in London where a lot of scholars were coming together in recent years to work on these translation projects, and I don’t really go about my teaching in the same way as some of them. I try to first of all make things accessible and fun. And I do try to keep stepping back from the idea that all of this research is cutting through the confusion and providing all the answers. Because the number one thing that most scholars do not say but need to say much more often is we don’t know how much we don’t know. And a lot of the reason for that is texts were never the means for instructing yoga. Yoga was an oral tradition, as you say, it’s teacher to student.

These random snapshots that we’ve got from different points in history – where somebody decided to set down, you know, some kind of Wikipedia entry, effectively, on what was known about this stuff, at this time – had some other function. A mixture of marketing, a mixture of archiving, a mixture of showing off, competing with other lineages. All this stuff is part of the story. But it wasn’t ever the case that as a yoga practitioner, you get this thing and read it. You have a teacher. So all of that oral world in which yoga was communicated is lost. We don’t even know who practised, or why they practised. We’ve only got these very, very specific sort of, I guess, summaries, typologies of yoga practice in texts. So even the texts themselves are not all that useful at the end of the day. What matters is how we engage with them. And that’s again, coming back to what I try to do, is to make space for us all to talk about that openly and honestly, trying at the same time to get clearer about what the texts say. So there’s two projects in the end – what do they say and what do I make of that? And the problem is most people want to collapse them into one and make Patañjali say everything about what we do in modern yoga practice, which isn’t very helpful. It’s much more helpful to say, well, he says this, and this text says that, and what I do is the other. But it’s inspired by some of this and some of that.

Amy:

It’s kind of humorous, because there’d be some people, probably a small percentage of people listening to this going, this is all just redundant. Just be on the path, find the state of yoga. Why are you even talking about this? This is so redundant. But then there would be other people that might defend all the thinking and the intellectualisation say, well, this is almost as though I’m walking the path of jñāna yoga. I’m conversing with people, I’m debating with people. I’m intellectualising things, I’m thinking about things, and that’s a path of yoga too. And so it is a complex kind of conversation, and I think it’s an endless conversation. And I do really appreciate the way that you propose everything you share online because it is a very, you share in a very open way, in a way that you put the question forward to other people, for us to consider. You lay out information and then you pose this question and get conversation going. And I think that that’s really important, particularly where we stand now in the yoga world or yoga land.

So academia asks us, yes, to apply that more objective and rational analysis, yet the proclivity of a practitioner is to lean on direct practical experience, or teachings they’ve received through lineage, perhaps, as we’ve touched on. So with all these considerations in mind, can we close by exploring, let’s say both sides of the coin through an example such as sun salutations? Would you give us some idea as to how one may approach sūryanamaskār through each lens and thereby how they may compliment or conflict each other?

Daniel:

Yeah, thanks. Couldn’t get a more iconic modern yoga practice that sun salutations. You know, you get people for charity events, or yoga day, let’s do 108 sun salutations. And for a start, the number 108 is something that is always wheeled out as sacred, but there are no ancient texts that explain why it’s sacred. You’ve got modern and medieval numerological attempts to make sense of the fact that it is, but nobody ever says, well, here’s why. So there’s always this, I guess, tension between something is there, it’s encouraged, and yet why, where does it come from? What’s it really for? And the academic side of things is to ask those “w” questions. The things that sort of open the box a little bit and make us think. The only really interesting question of that sort from the practitioner perspective is how? Just how do I do it? Get on with it. And the how is the key, it’s all in the how. But at the same time, I think, with a little bit more understanding of the what and the why and the when, the how comes into a slightly different focus.

Because the honest truth is that nobody has any evidence that sun salutations were associated with yoga, in the form that we know them at least, until very recently indeed. But the earliest reference to them in a yoga text is from the 19th century, in which it says don’t do them. They’re going to cause harm. They’re the kind of things that will damage your body if you excessively repeat them. So the sun salutation probably began as a wrestler’s training technique, or a technique used by soldiers to build strength and flexibility. In the sense of inhale, put your arms in the air, exhale, fold forward, do some form of stepping back, arch the body in both directions and come forwards again. That’s not something that is described anywhere in earlier sources, whether it’s to do with yoga or not. What you do get in earlier sources, right back to the oldest of Indian texts, the Ṛg Veda, is reverence for the sun. And the divinisation of the sun, and the idea that the light of the sun can spark an illumination within us. So that connection is made in the verses in the Ṛg Veda that are known as the Gāyatrī mantra.

You also find references in Upaniṣads to the sun up there and the sun in here being one and the same. And so this light of awareness, this transformative power within us is, I guess, alluded to through the connection to the sun, our dependence on the sun, there’d be no life on earth without the sun, and so can we find the thing within us that takes us beyond just being alive and actually being awake in this world. So there’s that power to understanding salutation to the sun, reverence for that capacity, which is very old indeed. There is also a tradition as part of the life of the higher echelons of Vedic society, you have a ritual that you perform, and part of that is to recite certain mantras and perhaps even to do some prostration. So the idea of putting the body down in worship is not new, but connecting it to the concept of yoga, making it a physical practice and using it as effectively the warm up for an āsana sequence, that’s a very different thing.

And so why does that matter? Well, I mean, I think it matters because it helps us to think for ourselves when we become clearer about the fact that this is not necessarily ancient, it’s not necessarily that helpful actually. It was warned against as a way that you can harm your body – too many caturāṅgas don’t feel so great in the shoulders – so there’s no harm if you don’t want to bother with sun salutations. They’re not obligatory. They’re not the oldest thing in yoga. The oldest thing in yoga is sitting still and shutting up. So do that. That’s fine. There’s also, I guess, no right way to do them, because there’s lots of different variations, and none is more right than the others. because they’re all just ways in which modern systems of physical yoga practice have taken this sort of basic framework and adapted it. And sure, you can try to say there’s one that’s more traditional than the others, involving the recitation of the mantras and aligning it all with that earlier approach. But you could recite mantras and align yourself with an earlier perspective without needing to do these movements.

So I do think it’s helpful and empowering to realize that a lot of, let’s say the form – the practical ingredients, the what we do – is entirely fungible, basically you can interchange it with lots of other options. But the function of it, that’s a bit less negotiable because that’s about the why we practice. So the academic kind of engagement with that, or just the willingness to ask difficult questions that we might not have easy answers to, I think is helpful so long as we don’t let it get in the way of us actually getting on with the practice. As you say, it’s a redundant thing if it does that, and it should be cast aside. I don’t have any attachment to the idea that thinking is the key to yoga. But, at the same time, thinking about how to practice is very important, because if you’re just going to say practice, who are you following? Why should you listen to them? Who’s to say they’ve got the answer? There’s all sorts of reasons for due scepticism about listening to somebody else and even listening to our own blah blah. Unless we’re enlightened, we’re quite likely to be misleading ourselves.

So it’s always helpful to ask critical questions but, in the end, yoga is a practical discipline, and if you apply its methods correctly, in a way that is aligned with a clear objective, it will deliver results. And the results are what matter. So, in the end, we can get derailed if we worry too much about what’s come from where.

Amy:

It’s interesting, because as you speak I really think of the interest and therefore my personal pursuit in studying, let’s say, other disciplines of India. So, studying for about 10 years, classical Odissi dance, but I also have done a very, very humble small amount of studying Kalaripayattu, a martial art, and I see these overlaps, and there is a lot more coming out now, I think, through academic research and scholarly research, but also just awareness in general about concepts like vyāyāma as being exercise and even the kāraṇa that we see on the temple walls. And this is something that I’m really interested in delving into at the moment to try and amalgamate everything. And I, at least personally, I have contentment thinking, well, these are potentially quite literally movements of exercise.

It’s just verifying what we are seeing historically, that these are more gymnastic-style movements. It’s about physical fitness, taking care of this physical vessel, which is an important thing and helpful.But yeah, how yogic is it? I don’t know. But let’s say vyāyāma can fit into yoga, but, you know, sun salutations can be then vyāyāma and sit in the yoga umbrella, let’s say. But are they yoga? Not necessarily, but that’s okay. Like, just clarifying what these physical movements are, let’s say historically speaking perhaps, helps us just reaffirm what we’re doing on the path and perhaps might then assist us in propelling beyond just an obsession with this dominance of physical yoga where we realise, okay, actually maybe it is just vyāyāma, maybe it’s just exercise. Okay, what’s next? I like to think that it prompts us to then inquire further with that clarification. I don’t know if you want to add any closing thoughts on that.

Daniel:

I wholeheartedly agree, and I think actually to come back to where we started, talking about Mark Singleton and his Yoga Body, he did say in there that there’s no reason why physical exercise and the deepest spiritual realisations need be in any way mutually exclusive. It’s quite possible to achieve one through the other, but something else has to be there for that to happen. And in the modern yoga world, people have made this word yoga synonymous with āsana. So people “do” yoga, which basically means perform āsana practice. And I think to actually own that and realise that is quite liberating, because then it raises this next level question of, well, what actually makes āsana practice yoga, rather than just assuming that making shapes is somehow taking us somewhere other than into bendy land. What else has to be there? What other engagement is necessary?

It doesn’t necessarily also mean doing something else. B.K.S. Iyengar had this whole theory that you could access everything through the practice of āsana. And in some ways, perhaps, although you do need to be quite still to get into the most refined states of concentration. But he used to do that. He used to lie down and pin weights on his body and make sure he couldn’t move. But coming back to that key question, what is it that makes something yoga is the ultimate, I guess, inquiry for us as practitioners, because not everything is yoga. And at the same time, yoga is not so refined – as some academics would suggest, that you can’t actually pin it down because everybody says so many different contradictory things that it’s an almost non-existent entity. That’s nonsense. Obviously there is yoga, but what isn’t yoga and what are the ingredients that make something yoga? If we can have our own way of thinking about that, we’ve got a much clearer way of engaging in our practice that will be fruitful, rather than just assuming that by contorting we’re going to get enlightened.

Amy:

And that just opens up a brand new layer of conversation, depth of conversation here that could just send us down a new trajectory. Super interesting and yeah, again, endless. And I just think this is really fascinating, a fascinating point of conversation. And for anyone tuning in, please ensure that you do head to Daniel’s website, which is truthofyoga.com, and this is where you’ll find access to all of his online courses that cover all the major yoga-related texts. And at the time of listening, if you jump onto his website, Daniel is going to be running an Upaniṣads course throughout May. So just check in and see if you have timed that well. We’ll see if we can get this out just before that begins. We’ll converse closer to the time, but there’s other obviously pre-recorded classes there and also some live calls that you’ll be able to jump on with Daniel.

The website will also point you to Daniel’s absolutely essential book for all serious students and teachers of yoga. I cannot recommend it more highly. If you do teacher trainings, please put it on your must-read list for all your trainees.

Daniel:

Yay, thank you.

Amy:

A hundred percent. No, truly, I really mean that. And of course you can access Daniel’s podcast there as well, which is filled with wonderful conversations and lots of inquiry, lots of questions like we’ve delved into today, which I love. And also, don’t forget, you can upgrade to gain lifetime access to all these wisdom-fuelled conversations. Thank you for tuning in, and of course, thank you, Daniel for your compelling work and ongoing efforts in bringing us engaging ideas to reflect upon that help us to evolve along our own path in yoga. Thank you so much.

Daniel:

Thank you, Amy. It’s been a real pleasure to chat.