History & Philosophy of Yoga

Vedic and pre-classical roots

The word "yoga" comes from the Sanskrit root "yuj", meaning to yoke, join, or unite. Its earliest known appearances are in the Vedas and the Upanishads, a large body of Indian religious and philosophical texts composed over roughly a thousand years (traditionally dated from around 1500 BCE onward). In these early texts, yoga refers mainly to disciplines of meditation, self-restraint, and ethical conduct aimed at inner stillness and self-understanding — not to physical postures.

Physical asana practice as most people picture it today — a wide variety of standing, seated, and inverted postures — is a much later development. For most of yoga's early history, the body was a supporting tool for meditation, not the main subject of practice.

Patanjali and the classical definition of yoga

The best-known classical source is the Yoga Sutras, a collection of aphorisms traditionally attributed to a sage named Patanjali. Scholars disagree on an exact date, generally placing it somewhere between the 2nd century BCE and the 4th century CE, and see it as compiling and systematizing ideas that were already circulating rather than inventing yoga from scratch.

Its opening definition is often translated as "yoga is the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind" — placing the goal of practice squarely on mental and emotional steadiness, not on flexibility or fitness. The text also lays out an eight-limbed path (ashtanga): ethical restraints (yama), personal observances (niyama), posture (asana), breath control (pranayama), withdrawal of the senses (pratyahara), concentration (dharana), meditative absorption (dhyana), and a state of deep meditative union (samadhi).

In this classical framework, "asana" originally meant simply a steady, comfortable seated position that allowed long periods of meditation without discomfort — a single pose, not the many postures found in a modern class. The wide catalog of physical poses in this dictionary reflects a much later stage in yoga's development.

The Hatha Yoga Pradipika and the medieval hatha tradition

Centuries later, a distinct branch known as hatha yoga placed far more emphasis on the physical body as a direct path to the same meditative goals. Its most influential surviving text is the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, compiled by the yogi Svatmarama, generally dated to around the 15th century CE. It systematically describes physical postures (asanas), breathing techniques (pranayama), internal purification practices (shatkarma), and energy locks and seals (bandhas and mudras) as preparation for meditation and, ultimately, samadhi.

The text is also the source of several traditions still referenced in yoga teaching today, including associating particular postures with specific yogis or sages. This dictionary draws on the Hatha Yoga Pradipika only for its practical descriptions of postures and breathing; it does not cover the text's separate chapter on tantric practices, which is not relevant to a general contemporary asana practice and is not appropriate for a general audience.

From Indian monasteries to a global practice: the 20th-century revival

The style of yoga practiced in studios worldwide today owes a great deal to a small number of 20th-century Indian teachers. Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, often called one of the fathers of modern yoga, taught in Mysore, India, and trained several students who went on to shape distinct branches of the practice: Pattabhi Jois developed Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga, a flowing, sequence-based style; B.K.S. Iyengar developed Iyengar Yoga, known for its precise attention to alignment and its use of props; and Indra Devi helped bring yoga to a Western audience, including celebrities, starting in the 1940s.

Separately, Swami Sivananda founded the Divine Life Society and trained teachers who spread a more holistic version of yoga — combining postures with meditation, chanting, and selfless service (karma yoga) — to students around the world, including through the Sivananda and Integral Yoga lineages.

These teachers, and the many styles their students went on to create, are the reason contemporary yoga looks the way it does: a practice centered on physical postures, adapted for general fitness and wellbeing, that still carries traces of a much older meditative and philosophical tradition.

Why this history matters for how we practice today

None of this history changes how to safely perform a particular pose — that is what the rest of this dictionary is for. But it helps explain two things practitioners sometimes notice: why yoga philosophy talks about the mind far more than the body, and why the same pose can be taught slightly differently by different teachers, since each style descends from a specific 20th-century lineage rather than a single unchanging original method.