History of yoga
The history of yoga runs from early Indian texts such as the Upanishads, through the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali and the medieval hatha manuals, to the posture-based classes taught around the world today. Its exact beginnings are unknown, and scholars date the first clear written descriptions of yoga practice to the later centuries BCE.
Yoga’s history runs for well over two thousand years, from meditation texts to the posture class you know today. None of it is required reading before your first lesson at home, but it explains a great deal about what happens in one.
Before the texts
Nobody knows exactly when yoga began. Some seals from the Indus Valley civilisation show a figure sitting cross-legged, and these are often held up as the first picture of a yogi. Scholars are divided on what they show, so they are best treated as an open question rather than proof.
The word yoga does appear in the Rig Veda, the oldest Sanskrit hymn collection, but there it mostly means yoking, as in yoking horses. It is not yet the name of a practice.
The Upanishads and early meditation
The first clear accounts of yoga as a discipline come in the Upanishads, philosophical texts composed over several centuries BCE. The Katha Upanishad describes yoga as the firm holding of the senses. The Shvetashvatara Upanishad gives practical advice: sit with the body upright, steady the breath, choose a quiet, clean place.
The same period saw Buddhist and Jain teachers develop their own meditation methods, and historians generally see these traditions shaping one another rather than one simply borrowing from another.
The Bhagavad Gita
The Bhagavad Gita, part of the epic Mahabharata and usually dated to the last centuries BCE or the first centuries CE, uses the word yoga in a broad way. It describes paths of selfless action (karma yoga), devotion (bhakti yoga) and knowledge (jnana yoga), along with meditation.
The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali
The Yoga Sutras, Patanjali’s text of short sayings, gathered the ideas into a short, systematic text of about two hundred aphorisms, usually dated to the early centuries CE. It defines yoga as the stilling of the movements of the mind and sets out the eight limbs of yoga, from ethical restraints to deep meditative absorption. Posture is only one of the eight, and the text says little about it beyond steadiness and ease.
Hatha yoga and the body
From roughly the eleventh century onward, a new set of texts put the body at the centre. This is the body-centred practice called hatha yoga. The best known of these manuals is the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, written by Svatmarama in the fifteenth century, which describes postures, breath retention, cleansing practices and seals. Later texts such as the Gheranda Samhita added more postures.
Yoga travels
In 1893 Swami Vivekananda spoke at the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago, and his book Raja Yoga (1896) introduced many Western readers to yoga as philosophy and meditation. Posture practice travelled later. During the twentieth century, Indian teachers blended the hatha texts with ideas from physical culture and gymnastics, and the flowing, posture-based class took shape. B.K.S. Iyengar’s Light on Yoga, published in 1966, became a standard reference, and in 2014 the United Nations declared 21 June the International Day of Yoga.
How the history shows up in a modern practice
Almost every modern class carries pieces of this history. The Sanskrit pose names come from the hatha manuals. The closing rest and the idea of watching the breath echo the meditation texts. The word namaste at the end is a far more everyday greeting.
History in a private lesson
You do not need any of this history to practise. Still, knowing that postures were first a preparation for sitting still can change how a lesson feels. In a private lesson there is room to ask where a pose or a word comes from, and to spend a few minutes on breath and stillness rather than moving the whole time.
My own training was a 200-hour course at House of Om in Bali; you can read more about how I trained.