Authentic Yoga

by Nina

On Friday evening, Brad and I went to the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art in New York City, an exquisite, small museum with a very impressive collection of Hindu and Buddhist art. Our primary reasons for being there were to take a break from our hectic, urban vacation in the peaceful oasis that the museum curators have created and to revisit the permanent collection, which we remembered loving from an earlier visit. And I highly recommend this special museum to anyone who is visiting the city. However, as I gazed at the life-sized facsimiles of an entire sequence of 18th century murals from the Lukhang, the Dalai Lamas’ Secret Temple near the Potala Palace in Lhasa, Tibet, I was struck in particular by a section of one mural (shown above) that depicts meditation and yoga practices in vivid color and detail. Because they were: perfect, clear images of authentic yoga from the 18th century.

You see, by chance, I’m currently reading The Yoga Body: The Origins of the Modern Posture Practice by Mark Singleton, which traces the development of the asana practice that most of us currently consider “yoga” from its hatha yoga roots to the revolutionary work of the early twentieth-century yoga teachers, such as T. Krishnamacharya and Swami Kuvalayananda. I’ve already known for a number of years that, contrary to what is commonly claimed by some teachers and publications, the “yoga” we do these days is primarily a 20th century invention. But this mural from the 18th century (not so long ago, right?) really brought home the message. For what do we see here? Mostly versions of Lotus pose (some with interestingly asymmetrical spines), along with a few standing forward bends and a one-legged standing pose. And I know from my studies, that when the ancient scriptures, such as the Yoga Sutras, refer to “asana,” the poses pictured here are more likely to be what they referred to than the Downward-Facing Dogs, Triangle poses, and Sun Salutations that many of us now consider essential yoga poses. (For further information, see The Yoga Tradition of the Mysore Palace by N.E. Sjoman.) I was quite excited to be able to view these images, which were in some ways what I imagined ancient yoga to be and in other ways completely different than what I’d imagined (such as the dancer-like positions of the torsos in some of the seated poses)

I may write about this more in the future, but for now I just wanted to share this dramatic illustration with you. For you can see at a glance how much yoga has changed in just a few hundred years.

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