Yoga's Brand Issues
Tuesday, November 30, 2010 at 09:51AM Recently, Dr. Aseem Shukla, co-founder of the Hindu American Foundation, lamented that “yoga has thrived, but Hinduism has lost control of the brand.” It’s a bizarre assessment, not only because of the present reality but because the tussles over yoga’s “soul” predate its arrival in the West.
Today, you’d be hard pressed to find a yoga studio that doesn’t display an image or statuette of Ganesha or Shiva. There’s little doubt of the provenance of these deities, and Americans have long understood that yoga is intimately linked to Hinduism. But in a parallel universe Americans might have favored other yogas.
A hundred and sixty years ago, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau learned about the yoga of the Bhagavad-Gita and the Upanishads; at the same time, they learned about Buddhism (which also incorporates yoga). Emerson at first mistook the Bhagavad-Gita for a Buddhist text. But he and Thoreau ended up favoring Hindu inflected yoga, setting the stage for our assimilation of it.
Once actual Indian teachers of yoga arrived, they faced a dilemma. Americans still had a pretty dim (and racist) view of Hinduism. Swami Vivekananda, one of the first to teach yoga to Americans at the turn of the 20th century, had to demonstrate that Hinduism was appropriate religion for Indians.
Downplaying Hinduism in order to teach yoga was a tactical move. Yoga, in his presentation, was a practical and scientific method of God realization, which, pace the view of many other Hindus, who didn’t think yoga appropriate for spiritually backward Westerners, might benefit Christian Americans. They agreed. But no one ever forgot Vivekananda was Hindu. The papers referred to him as that “Hindoo monk from India.” And his most ardent Western students traveled to India where they participated in Hindu rituals that Vivekananda felt most Americans weren’t ready for.
In Post World War II America, teachers like Indra Devi and Richard Hittleman popularized a highly secularized version Hatha Yoga. They too made a deliberate calculation; they sensed that McCarthy-era Americans wouldn’t be open to yoga if it were too closely associated with Hinduism.
And yet, within fifteen years, yoga was re-coupled with intense religiosity and, yes, Hinduism. In places like Ananda Ashram in upstate New York or at nearby Millbrook, the psychedelic ashram run by Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, or at the Hare Krishna temple in San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury, the connection between yoga and Hinduism was overt and celebrated.
More recently, yoga has been an avenue to Hinduism for many Americans. While few consider themselves Hindus (it's really not possible to "convert"), many make pilgrimages to India (Liz Gilbert being the apotheosis of the yoga tourism industry) and study the Bhagavad-Gita, the Yoga Sutras, and Hatha Yoga Pradipika. And there has been a huge spate of recent American yoga scholarship that reaches far back into its Indic roots and has generated new translations of its canonical texts.
For the past century, yoga—even the kind of highly secularized yoga you’d find in any Crunch gym—has been a gateway into the rich and variegated religious traditions of India, many of which (but not all) fall under the rubric “Hinduism.”
As for that $6 billion yoga industry we’re often reminded of, it’s a highly fragmented one. People like Deepak Chopra or Bikram Choudhury who have built “empires” on traditional Hindu knowledge without, in Dr. Shukla’s view, giving it its due, are outliers. Most yoga teachers scrape by, just like the rest of America’s dwindling middle class.
Far from lamenting Hinduism’s loss of control of yoga, Dr. Shukla should be gladdened by the discipline’s proven ability to open Americans up to India and Hinduism.
Meanwhile, we seem to be navigating the poles represented by Dr. Shukla—yoga isn’t Hindu enough—and Dr. Mohler, who believes yoga is too Hindu for Christians, rather gracefully. Most of us who practice yoga have some sense of its Hindu roots and yet don’t feel as constrained by that fact as Dr. Mohler wishes.
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