Excerpts from Suhag's and my pieces are include below. Happy reading!
Sincerely,
Sheetal Shah
Senior Director
As a Hindu, the answer to "Is yoga a Hindu practice?" is obvious, and demands a more important question: Why are we even having this debate? I offer three reasons: 1) The $6 billion yoga industry's cater-to-the-masses, bottom-line delinking of yoga from Hinduism has significantly secularized, plagiarized or mutated yoga, almost beyond recognition; 2) many of the Hindu yoga gurus who have traveled to America, over-emphasized the "universal" and de-emphasized the "Hindu," in their hopes of sharing, and perhaps making more palatable for Westerners, their own profound experiences of Self-realization and the systems by which anyone could strive for the same; and 3) our American tendency to "reduce, reuse, recycle" combined with cafeteria-style spirituality and an unhealthy serving of religious illiteracy has played its part as well in muddying the waters unnecessarily. With that out of the way, onto my offering to this debate's question.
Yoga is a Hindu practice and how one arrives at this conclusion depends a great deal on how one defines yoga. I've said here before, yoga is the practice of preparing oneself to yoke, unite or experience the Divine within (i.e. Consciousness). Yoga is about attaining chitta-vritti-nirodha (cessation of mental fluctuations), and ultimately, moksha, or liberation from worldly suffering and the cycle of birth and rebirth. Yoga is a combination of both physical and spiritual discipline, the key word being "combination," with an emphasis on the spiritual. The popular understanding of yoga, however, too often begins and ends withasana (physical posture). The truth is that asana accounts for only a small sliver of yoga. Nonetheless, asanas, named as they are after the many avatars of the Hindu pantheon and with their tremendous psycho-physiological and psycho-spiritual effects, have proven to be the gateway for millions into the heart of yoga, which is a seeker-lifestyle defined by a specific philosophy and purpose.
The inter-connected, metaphysical principles that form the core of yoga are the core of Hinduism. While these principles have informed other Dharma traditions, they are quite different from the central principles of the Abrahamic traditions. First, karma, a universal law of cause and effect, is the mechanism by which we create karmic debits and credits through our actions (thoughts, words, deeds). Some may argue, "Well, every tradition has this 'do unto others' type Golden Rule." One of the key difference for the law of karma is that one's karmic balance sheet is zeroed out over many lifetimes.
Integral to the belief and understanding of karma then is the second principle of samsara, or reincarnation. Hindus believe that the immortal soul or Consciousness evolves by experiencing varied lives through a process wherein the soul takes on different physical bodies through cycles of birth and death. Any notions of eternal hells, heavens or salvation do not fit in this transcendental equation...Please click here to continue reading the piece.
The Huffington Post is currently featuring a debate entitled "Is Yoga a Hindu Practice?" On one side, it features Suhag Shukla, Managing Director/Legal Counsel of the Hindu American Foundation (HAF), who argues that yoga is absolutely rooted in Hindu philosophy. Suhag is pitted again Tara Stiles, a well-known yoga teacher here in NYC who has become even more famous thanks to her student, Deepak Chopra, who ironically enough has made his millions by repackaging Hindu philosophy and selling it as anything and everything, but Hinduism.
As one would expect of a lawyer, Suhag provides solid, logical arguments to prove her point. And since she has done such a nice job of this, I see no reason to rehash the myriad of reasons she uses to explain why yoga is rooted in Hindu thought.
Tara, on the other hand, just seems to miss the point altogether, and in the process, misrepresents what I said during last year's yoga panel at Princeton. First, the debate is not and never was about who owns yoga - no one person, no one group, no one religion owns yoga. I said the same thing during the panel discussion at Princeton. So, for Tara to continue to twist the debate into "who owns yoga" is quite frankly, the easy way out because everyone seems to agree on the answer.
Second, the debate, on the Huffington Post and at the Princeton panel, is and has always been about the origins and roots of yoga, and one which Tara consistently fails to address. Instead, we're offered a stream of consciousness that includes stories about bottling water and a "super tall dude" with great energy. We are told that I'm looking for "respect" and "ownership" of yoga. I'm unclear as to why that was her takeaway from the panel, but my goal at Princeton was not to demand respect nor ownership; rather it was to understand that yoga is rooted in Hindu thought. And ironically, instead of countering my and Suhag's points, Tara, somewhere in the midst of wondering why "yoga people" are crazy, unknowingly makes some beautiful allusions to Hindu philosophy. Please click here to continue reading this piece.
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