Ashtanga Yoga North East :: History of Yoga

by George Feuerstein from his book The Yoga Tradition which is available from www.amazon.com

History for Yogins and Yoginis
In Yoga, theory and practice, as well as left brain and right brain, go hand in hand so to speak. Study (svâdhyâya ) is in fact an important aspect of many branches and schools of Yoga. This is another way in which Yoga's balanced approach shows itself.

If you want to know where something is going, it is good to know where it came from. "To be ignorant of what happened before one was born," said Cicero pointedly in his Orator, "is to remain ever a child." History provides context and meaning, and Yoga is no exception to this rule. If you are fond of history, you'll enjoy what follows. Many of the facts and ideas presented here have not yet found their way into the textbooks or even into most Yoga books. We put you in touch with the leading edge of knowledge in this area. If you are not a history buff, well perhaps we can tempt you to suspend your preferences for a few minutes and read on anyway.

The Origin of Yoga

The Origin of Yoga Despite more than a century of research, we still don't know much about the earliest beginnings of Yoga. We do know, though that it originated in India 5,000 or more years ago. Until recently many western scholars thought that Yoga originated much later, maybe around 500 B.C.E., which is the time of Gautama the Buddha, the illustrious founder of Buddhism. But then, in the early 1920s, archeologists surprised the world with the discovery of the so-called Indus civilization a culture that we now know extended over an area of roughly 300,000 square miles (the size of Texas and Ohio combined). This was in fact the largest civilization in early antiquity. In the ruins of the big cities of Mohenjo Daro and Harappa, excavators found depictions engraved on soapstone seals that strongly resemble yogi-like figures. Many other finds show the amazing continuity between that civilization and later Hindu society and culture.

There was nothing primitive about what is now called the Indus-Sarasvati civilization, which is named after two great rivers that once flowed in Northern India; today only the Indus River flows through Pakistan. That civilization's urbane population enjoyed multistory buildings, a sewage system unparalleled in the ancient world until the Roman empire, a huge public bath whose walls were water-proofed with bitumen, geometrically laid out brick roads and standardized baked bricks for convenient construction. (We are so used to these technological achievements that we sometimes forget they had to be invented.) The Indus-Sarasvati people were a great maritime nation that exported a large variety of goods to Mesopotamia and other parts of the Middle East and Africa. Although only a few pieces of art have survived, some of them show exquisite craftsmanship.

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