Gems from Wendy: yoga belongs to white christists

jan 12th, 2011

just like they stole the winter solstice, and now are stealing all sorts of other hindu cultural artifacts.

for instance, do you know there is a college in bangalore called 'dharmaram college'? guess what, it is part of 'christ university'. what does xtism have to do with dharma? nothing. they are just stealing the word.

anyway, this argument sounds a lot like what that other charlatan deepak chopra has been making. 

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Harish

Dear Rajeev,

I had the email address wrong and it was undelivered. However today they seem to have pulled that post. But the cache still has reference to the garbage :

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:BaQ6K6OB8gEJ:www.christianpost.com/article/20101230/is-yoga-a-form-of-hinduism-is-hinduism-a-form-of-yoga/+christian+post+wendy+doniger+yoga&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a>

thanks,
-Harish

----- Forwarded Message ----
From: Mail Delivery System <MAILER-DAEMON@mail.christianpost.com>
To:
Sent: Tue, January 11, 2011 2:32:03 AM
Subject: Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender

Note: Forwarded message is attached.

This is the mail system at host mail.christianpost.com.

I'm sorry to have to inform you that your message could not
be delivered to one or more recipients. It's attached below.

For further assistance, please send mail to postmaster.

If you do so, please include this problem report. You can
delete your own text from the attached returned message.

                  The mail system

<rajeev2004@yahoo.com>: host e.mx.mail.yahoo.com[67.195.168.230] said: 554
    delivery error: dd Sorry your message to rajeev2004@yahoo.com cannot be
    delivered. This account has been disabled or discontinued [#102]. -
    mta1039.mail.ac4.yahoo.com (in reply to end of DATA command)
Reporting-MTA: dns; mail.christianpost.com
X-Postfix-Queue-ID: 7FCD28D803A
X-Postfix-Sender: rfc822;
Arrival-Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2011 00:32:00 -0800 (PST)

Final-Recipient: rfc822; rajeev2004@yahoo.com
Original-Recipient: rfc822;rajeev2004@yahoo.com
Action: failed
Status: 5.0.0
Remote-MTA: dns; e.mx.mail.yahoo.com
Diagnostic-Code: smtp; 554 delivery error: dd Sorry your message to
    rajeev2004@yahoo.com cannot be delivered. This account has been disabled or
    discontinued [#102]. - mta1039.mail.ac4.yahoo.com

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: 
Date: Tue, 11 Jan 2011 00:31:57 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Is Yoga a Form of Hinduism? Is Hinduism a Form of Yoga?
Too many Potatoes for Dinner perhaps ?

Is Yoga a Form of Hinduism? Is Hinduism a Form of Yoga?

http://www.christianpost.com/article/20101230/is-yoga-a-form-of-hinduism-is-hinduism-a-form-of-yoga/

Debates about these questions have been making headlines lately. Some American Hindus have argued that American yoga is not Hindu enough, that Hindus should "Take Back Yoga" (the label of a campaign by the Hindu American Foundation). Other Americans agree that the Hindus should take back yoga-but because yoga is too Hindu: R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, advises Christians to abandon yoga if they value their (Christian) souls, for "yoga, as a spiritual practice, runs directly counter to the spiritual counsel of the Bible." The problem should not have been breaking news; a spoof in 20 03, "Yoga: A Religion for Sex Addicts," depicted a Christian minister who was asked, "Should Christians practice Yoga?" He replied, "Are we going to have to bring this whole thing up about Yoga again? I thought our Sunday school curriculum included lessons about the evils of everything Oriental, including Yoga!"

But the issues involved are not trivial. Is yoga, in fact, "a spiritual practice"? More particularly, is it a Hindu spiritual practice? The word "yoga" originally meant "yoking" horses to chariots or draft animals to plows or wagons (the Sanskrit and English words are cognate). Though many yoga practitioners, particularly but not only Hindus, insist that their practice can be traced back to the Upanishads (c. 600 BCE) and Patanjali (c. 200 CE), the word "yoga" in these texts designates a spiritual praxis of meditation conjoined with breath-control, "yoking" the senses in order to control the spirit, and then "yoking" the mind in order to obtain immortality.

Buddhist sources in this same period also speak of techniques of disciplining the mind and the body, and the word "yoga," owing as much to Buddhism as to Hinduism, soon came to mean any mental and physical praxis of this sort. (Similar disciplines arose in ancient Greece and, later, in Christianity, a subject on which Pierre Hadot and Michel Foucault had a great deal to say). This is the general sense in which the word "yoga" is used in the Bhagavad Gita, a few centuries later, to denote each of three different religious paths (the yoga of action, the yoga of meditation, and the yoga of devotion). But these texts say nothing about the physical "positions" or "postures" that distinguish contemporary yoga. The postures developed much later, some from medieval Hatha Yoga and Tantra, but more from nineteenth-century European traditions such as Swedish gymnastics, British body-building, Christian Science, and the YMCA, and still o thers devised by twentieth-century Hindus such as T. Krishnamacharya and B. K. S. Iyengar, reacting against those non-Indian influences.

So there is an ancient Indian yoga, but it is not the source of most of what people do in today's yoga classes. Contemporary yoga traditions are a far cry both from the Upanishads and from Hatha Yoga. Most twenty-first century American yoga practitioners have more in common with a jogger than with a meditating sage; they want to relax after a hard day at the office, tighten up their abs, and reduce their cholesterol and their blood pressure; their yoga of relaxation and stretching may also involve regular enemas, a cure for back pain, a beauty regime, a vegetarian diet with a lot of yogurt (which is not etymologically related to "yoga")--oh yes, and a route to God.

Is yoga, then, for the mind or for the body? Is it like going to church or like going to the gym? Is it a spiritual praxis or an exercise routine? To all these questions, the answer is: yes. For some people (both in India and in America) it has been one, for others, the other, and for many, both.

In his online column and elsewhere, the Reverend Mohler has objected to the frequent citation by yoga teachers of "the idea that the body is a vehicle for reaching consciousness with the divine," which he says is "just not Christianity." But yoga is "not just Hinduism"; as we have seen, it has rich European (and Christian!) elements. Despite this historical evidence, however, many Hindus, such as those in the Hindu American Foundation, insist that meditational yoga-rather than temple rituals, the worship of images of the gods, or other, more passionate and communal forms of religion-has always been, and remains, the essence of Hinduism, their religion. Christians for whom a yoga class is simply physical exercise may offend such Hindus but should pose no problem for Mohler; and Christians who take the philosophical doctrines of yoga seriously should be no problem for a more ecumenical, not to say multi-cultural, pastor.

References

Landover Baptist Church, "Yoga: A Religion for Sex Addicts," March 2003.

Dylan Lovan, "Southern Baptist Leader on Yoga: Not Christianity," Associated Press, October 7, 2010.

R. Albert Mohler, Jr., "Yahoo, Yoga, and Yours Truly," AlbertMohler.com, October 7, 2010.

Paul Vitrello, "Hindu Group Stirs a Debate Over Yoga's Soul," New York Times, November 27, 2010.