Think of yoga as Hinduism's gift to humanity

Does doing yoga make one a Hindu? This question has come up often in recent years.

It is especially relevant now that yoga has become a mainstream phenomenon: 20 million Americans practice it, it is a $6 billion industry and researchers are continuing to study its benefits.

But let’s first look at what yoga was originally, and its transformation here in the U.S. Yoga originated in ancient India as a Hindu spiritual practice and as a school of philosophy, and it has been described in some seminal Hindu texts. Interestingly, the physical postures popular in the U.S. — the asanas — were seen as the preliminary rung on the pathway leading to spiritual enlightenment.
When yoga traveled to America, however, it underwent a transformation of sorts. The genius of America is to accept cultural imports from all over the world, supersize them and then make them uniquely American. So, the humble pizza from Italy became the four-meat, three-cheese, stuffed-crust monstrosity here. Likewise, yoga came here and became crazy, commercial, competitive and secular.

But these are generalizations. Millions of Americans practice yoga and quietly avail themselves of its benefits, be they physical, spiritual or psychological.

Along the way, though, the increasing number of Catholic, Jewish and Protestant yoga practitioners here were, perhaps understandably, discomfited by yoga’s Hindu underpinnings. Gradually, this has resulted in attempts to disassociate, even deny, yoga’s Hindu origins.

Enter the Hindu American Foundation, which has taken umbrage at this recasting. It started the Take Back Yoga campaign in 2010 to educate people about yoga’s inextricable link to Hinduism.

Their aim is not to establish proprietorship but to ask for respect. In effect, they say: Practice yoga for whatever reason or benefit, but acknowledge and honor its Hindu origins.

As Dr. Aseem Shukla, the foundation’s co-founder, wrote a while back, Hinduism had experienced “overt intellectual property theft,” and it had happened because legions of Hindu yoga teachers had “offered up a religion’s spiritual wealth at the altar of crass commercialism.”

There have been prominent critics of the Take Back Yoga campaign who say that this is nothing but Hindu nationalism. They state that yoga predates Hinduism and, therefore, can be seen as a separate spiritual practice.

There are two problems with this argument: One, Hinduism is essentially a Western term conferred on the belief systems of the Vedic civilization that flourished in India millennia ago. Two, it isn’t really an “organized” religion in the sense that it has one founder, one holy book, or a date or even century of founding, so the above point is not valid.

My own view is that yoga is Hinduism’s gift to humanity, just as the Enlightenment ideals and the ideas of democracy and religious freedom were the West’s gifts. Together, they, along with other ideas and philosophies, form a common fount of knowledge and wisdom to be used by humankind.

All sides of the yoga debate would benefit from following said practice’s spiritual lessons: Close eyes, breathe deeply, try to become calm and centered, relinquish all egoistic attachments.

Saritha Prabhu of Clarksville is a columnist for The Tennessean. Her column runs on alternate Sundays; sprabhu@charter.net.

Courtesy: The Tennessean