Is This Yoga? Concepts, Histories, and the Complexities of Modern Practice

255 Pages·2021·7.265 MB·English

by  Anya Foxen and Christa Kuberry

Is This Yoga?
This book provides a rigorously researched, critically comparative introduction to
yoga. Is This Yoga? Concepts, Histories, and the Complexities of Contemporary
Practice recognizes the importance of contemporary understandings of yoga and,
at the same time, provides historical context and complexity to modern and pre-
modern definitions of yogic ideas and practices. Approaching yoga as a vast web
of concepts, traditions, social interests, and embodied practices, it raises questions
of knowledge, identity, and power across time and space, including the dynamics of
“East” and “West.” The text is divided into three main sections: thematic concepts;
histories; and topics in modern practice.
This accessible guide is essential reading for undergraduate students approaching
the topic for the first time, as well as yoga teachers, teacher training programs,
casual and devoted practitioners, and interested non-practitioners.
Anya Foxen is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Women’s and Gender
Studies at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, USA. She is
a yoga teacher and long-time practitioner.
Christa Kuberry is a yoga teacher, yoga student, and yoga scholar. She is the Vice
President of Standards at Yoga Alliance.
“Foxen and Kuberry meticulously trace the historical paths of yoga and delineate
its key concepts, posing important questions, for example, about gender. They
manage to balance recovery and critique, complicating any straightforward nar-
rative of an authentic yoga tradition undergoing change and eventually morphing
into its modern practice. There is no competing study, but much demand, for a
textbook like this one.”
Andrea R. Jain, Indiana University School of Liberal Arts, USA.
Author of Peace Love Yoga: The Politics of Global Spirituality
Is This Yoga?
Concepts, Histories, and the
Complexities of Modern Practice
Anya Foxen and Christa Kuberry
First published 2021
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2021 Anya Foxen and Christa Kuberry
The right of Anya Foxen and Christa Kuberry to be identified as authors of
this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Foxen, Anya P., 1986– author. | Kuberry, Christa, author.
Title: Is this yoga? : concepts, histories, and the complexities of modern
practice / Anya Foxen and Christa Kuberry.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York : Routledge, [2021] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020050580 | ISBN 9781138390058 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781138390072 (paperback) | ISBN 9780429422973 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Yoga.
Classification: LCC B132.Y6 F69 2021 | DDC 181/.45—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020050580
ISBN: 978-1-138-39005-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-39007-2 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-42297-3 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents
List of figures vi
Preface viii
Acknowledgements x
Guide to Sanskrit pronunciation xi
Note on transliteration xiii
PART I
Concepts 1
1 What is yoga? 3
2 Cosmologies: yogic theories of the big world 15
3 Bodies: yogic theories of the little world 39
4 Mythologies: yogic role models 71
PART II
Histories 95
5 Ancient to classical yogas 97
6 Medieval to early modern yogas 123
7 The rise of modern postural yoga 147
PART III
Modern practice 171
8 Gurus, lineages, and yogic authority 173
9 Liberating the modern self through the business of yoga 194
10 Yoga therapies and the science of salvation 215
Glossary 232
Index 237
Figures
2.1 Jain cosmology depicting the universe as a human body, with
the earthly world at the navel and seven layers of hellish and
heavenly realms extending above and below 18
2.2 The tattvas (principles) of Sāṅkhya 25
2.3 The Cakrasaṃvara maṇḍala, featuring the deity (here an
enlightened being called Heruka) with his feminine counterpart,
Vajravārāhī 28
2.4 The mi’raj (ascent) of Muhammad 34
3.1 The six cakras in Buddhism 47
3.2 The three knots of the subtle body represented by their associated
deities, Brahmā in the navel, Viṣṇu in the heart, Śiva in the
cranial vault 49
3.3 Diagram of the three spheres from Robert Fludd’s Utriusque
cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atqve
technica historia 59
3.4 Diagram of the harmonic proportions of the human body and
cosmos from Robert Fludd’s Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et
minoris metaphysica, physica atqve technica historia 60
3.5 An example of a modern hybrid chakra system 61
3.6 The subtle body and its six cakras represented as lotuses
inhabited by deities 63
3.7 Newton’s heptatonic color wheel, as found in his Opticks 65
4.1 Śiva as Natarāja, the Lord of the Cosmic Dance 80
4.2 Kṛṣṇa dances the rasa līlā with the gopī maidens, multiplying
his form 82
4.3 The gods worshipping the Goddess in her form as Durgā
after her victory over a demon 83
4.4 Hanumān making the great leap to Lanka 85
4.5 Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār, one of three women among the 63
Nāyaṉmārs (“hounds of Śiva”), South Indian ascetic poet-saints
devoted to Śiva living between the 6th and 8th centuries 87
4.6 The Buddha emaciated during his extreme ascetic period,
pre-enlightenment 89
Figures vii
5.1 The “Paśupati Seal,” uncovered in the Mohenjo-Daro
archeological site and dated to the late 3rd millennium BCE 99
5.2 An ascetic and his forest hut 105
5.3 Kṛṣṇa’s viśvarūpa or all-pervading form, evoking the idea
of the Cosmic Man 115
6.1 The Goddess Bhairavi and Śiva on the cremation grounds 124
6.2 A horse-headed Yoginī 128
6.3 A tantric Buddhist maṇḍala featuring the goddess Vajraḍākinī at
the center, flanked by circles (cakras) of attendant Ḍākinīs 130
6.4 A Nāth yogi and the divine energies of his body 136
6.5 Viparītakaraṇāsana (“inversion pose”) practiced by an ascetic 141
7.1 A pilgrim meeting a yogi ascetic 150
7.2 Exercises from Genevieve Stebbins’s “Special Drill for Home
Use,” as illustrated in George Herbert Taylor’s An Exposition of
the Swedish Movement Cure 157
7.3 Marguerite Agniel performing the “dervish-roll-around,” which
she describes in her book The Art of the Body 158
7.4 Shri Yogendra sitting in siddhāsana 163
7.5 Yogananda’s “Exercise for Waist” from his Yogoda or Tissue-Will
System of Physical Perfection, modeled on Ling 165
Preface
This book is meant to be a bit teleological—that is, it has a goal in mind. Specifi-
cally, it assumes that the reader wishes to understand the history and theory behind
yoga because they are already somewhat familiar with one version of it, and that
this version is some form of modern global yoga.
No book can speak to the whole world, and no author can speak for the whole
world. We, the coauthors of the book in front of you now, are two middle-class
women of European descent, living, practicing, and teaching in the United States.
Our scholarly background is in the Western academy, and our background as prac-
titioners of modern postural yoga stems from a mixture of global lineages as well
as more generic and deeply syncretized forms of modern yoga as spiritualized
physical culture. It’s inevitable that our lenses, both scholarly and personal, have
been shaped by this positionality. As scholars, our goal has been to present the
South Asian roots of yoga as faithfully as possible while simultaneously keep-
ing an eye on the larger global frameworks, second-order concepts, and cultural
homologies that can help up to better understand yoga’s complex evolution and its
vast diversity, both past and present. The modern material, especially, is sourced
from and enlivened by our experience as practitioners embedded in their own
lineages and communities, whose histories we have come to know and live both
as insiders and as scholars.
It should go without saying that this book is not intended to be a final or uni-
versal word on “Yoga.” In fact, as the title suggests, it’s meant to highlight the
inherently ambiguous and multivalent nature of “yoga” as a label. And, in the end,
while this book explicitly strives to center the idea of diversity, conversation, and
change when it comes to the story of yoga, even this is one perspective from one
set of voices. We encourage the reader to place this text alongside others.
The book is divided into three sections: “Concepts,” “Histories,” and “Modern
Practice.” The last section will be most useful to readers whose primary goal is to
understand the social and political dimensions of contemporary global yoga prac-
tice, including how it intersects with other aspects of our modern world, includ-
ing identity, economics, medicine, and so on. While we will occasionally gesture
towards pre-modern yoga traditions in this section, the focus will remain firmly
on global yoga as we know it today. Despite past tendencies by scholars to dismiss
or trivialize the importance of modern global yoga practices, a growing field of
Preface ix
scholarship has turned to making sense of these manifestations of yoga as authentic
and serious in their own right. We hope our efforts here strengthen these efforts.
If it’s yoga’s historical evolution and variability that you’re after, these will be
most apparent in the middle section. However, that diachronic (meaning, tracking
change through time) portion of the book is meant to complement the more syn-
chronic (meaning, focused on a single historical moment, in this case the one rep-
resenting the system’s most standard and robust form) of the first section. There,
you’ll find some of yoga’s core concepts, including how they might vary not just
across time, but across different religious, philosophical, and cultural contexts.
We placed these conceptual chapters at the front of the book because it seemed to
us that it helps to get comfortable with the general nature and shape of a complex
thing before trying to understand how it has evolved and changed. In this initial
section, we’ll still keep an eye on variability but, to the extent that we may some-
times treat concepts in an ahistorical manner, this should not be used to conclude
that this kind of standard and timeless version actually exists. The same goes for
cross-cultural parallels and analogies.
When it comes to our academic university audience, we hope that this book
might serve as a useful introduction to the relevant topics, and create a baseline of
knowledge from which the instructor might guide students to go deeper.
For practitioners, we hope that this will offer a glimpse of yoga’s rich history
and range of potential meanings, as well as offer new opportunities for questions
and self-reflection.