Chapter 5

The Antiquity of Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga

Frequently I have been approached by students who were disturbed by modern scholars’ claims that Ashtanga Yoga is a modern invention. This brief chapter asserts that Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga is in fact an ancient practice and offers evidence supporting this conclusion. I consider this a vital point because to realize that your sadhana (practice) is handed down by a living ancient tradition and to energetically connect with this tradition will elevate the quality of your practice to a completely different level; that is, it will transform you not just physically but spiritually.

Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga has grown out of the fertile ground of the Vedas, which form a vast body of ancient knowledge. As noted in chapter 1, there are four main Vedic texts, the Rigveda, Samaveda,Yajurveda, and Atharvaveda. There are also four Upavedas (ancillary Vedas) addressing the subjects of medicine (Ayurveda), economy (Arthaveda), military science (Dhanurveda), and art (Gandharvaveda). The Vedas have six limbs called Vedangas, namely Sanskrit grammar (Vyakarana), astrology (Jyotisha), etymology (Nirukta), phonetics (Shiksha), meter (Chandas), and ritual duty (Kalpa). The Vedic teaching is divided into six systems of philosophy, called darshanas: logic (Nyaya), cosmology (Vaisheshika), creation (Samkhya), psychology (Yoga), Vedic ritual (Mimamsa), and ultimate reality (Vedanta).

Yoga, the ancient Vedic branch of psychology, does not compete with the other five darshanas but rather works in conjunction with them. Accordingly, Yoga uses the findings of the Samkhya darshana as its philosophy;¹ in this regard Yoga may be seen as the psychological branch of Samkhya. Yoga also uses the findings of the Nyaya darshana in regard to logic. All the other darshanas, however, look to the Yoga darshana as the authority on meditation.

Patanjali, the author of the Yoga Sutra, contributed to the Yoga darshana; he also contributed to the Vedic limb of Vyakarana (Sanskrit grammar) by writing his Great Commentary (Maha Bhashya) on Panini’s grammar. Furthermore, he compiled a treatise on one of the Upavedas, namely, the Ayurvedic text Charaka Samhita. Vyasa, the compiler of the Brahma Sutras, the authoritative text on Vedanta, also authored the most important commentary on Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra. Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra is the basic text accepted by all forms of Ashtanga Yoga. We thus find a thorough interweaving of yoga in general and Ashtanga Yoga in particular with the other branches of Vedic science.

What, however, is the origin of Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga? The vinyasa method is only one of the schools that come under the general name of Patanjali’s Ashtanga Yoga, and strictly speaking, the termsAshtanga Yoga and Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga are not identical. Some modern Western scholars have argued that Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga must be a recent invention because it has a multitude of asanas and because there appears to be no scriptural evidence indicating that it has ancient origins. Both of these arguments are invalid, as I explain below.

The Dwindling Number of Asanas

Some scholars who argue that Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga is a modern invention claim that asanas have accumulated over time. They base this claim on the fact that medieval texts such as the Gheranda Samhitaor the Hatha Yoga Pradipika mention relatively few postures, while our system today includes many. They argue that Ashtanga Yoga must therefore be a nineteenth-century invention, as it contains too manyasanas to be truly ancient. This argument is flawed. From the number of postures given in particular scriptures, it is not possible to gauge the antiquity of its system or lack thereof. The Hatha Yoga Pradipika, for example, does not give an exhaustive list of postures, and it was never its intention to do so. The Pradipika does not list all the asanas explicitly because they were to be learned through personal instruction from a teacher and not from merely reading a text.

In fact, the older the yoga system is, the more asanas you will find. Under the influence of entropy (disorder), over time we have lost not only more and more Sanskrit treatises and knowledge but also more and more asanas. The shastras state that originally there were 8,400,000 asanas, equaling the number of living species in the universe, which were known in their entirety only by the Supreme Being in the form of Lord Shiva.² This passage states that at the outset of time, we began with a virtually infinite number of asanas. The nineteenth- to twentieth-century yogi Ramamohan Brahmachary reportedly knew seven thousand asanas and taught three thousand of them to Shri T. Krishnamacharya.³ Most modern asana systems contain only a few dozen or in some cases in excess of one hundred postures. Over time, therefore, the numbers of asanas has decreased, not increased.

The Lack of Scriptural Evidence

Unfortunately, most yogic schools did not leave any scriptural evidence behind. Even the Vedas weren’t committed to paper until the nineteenth century. The traditional view was that a body of knowledge could be read and sullied if it was written down. Most yogic schools kept their teachings secret and confined to memory. Asanas were learned only through personal instruction from someone who had mastered them. Some Western scholars discount all aspects of Indian spirituality that were not recorded in books. This is often due to the fact that they see themselves merely as observers and do not want to get their feet dirty on the ground. But Indian spiritual traditions are mainly oral traditions. If you wanted to learn something, you needed to get the trust and acceptance of somebody who knew what you wanted to learn. Most knowledge that was confined to texts was considered so general that it was hardly usable. The mere absence of scriptural evidence, therefore, does not prove that Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga is not ancient or that a large number of postures came into existence only recently.

Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga as a Vedic Adjunct

The Ashtanga Vinyasa system, authored by the Vedic seer Vamana, is not a modern creation but follows the most ancient of Vedic designs. It is in fact a Vedic adjunct. The oldest of the systems of philosophy (darshanas) is probably the Mimamsa darshana. Mimamsa describes and analyzes Vedic rituals. The elaborate Vedic rituals are not senseless jumbles, as some Westerners have stated, but symbolic representations of the entire cosmos.

Although the practice of yoga does not include any traditional Vedic rituals, it is nevertheless closely connected to and influenced by them, as we can see from the following dialogue recorded in the Brhad Aranyaka Upanishad, the oldest of the philosophical portions of the Veda:⁴

Yajnavalkya, the foremost of the Upanishadic rishis, finds himself invited to a dialogue with the emperor Janaka. First, however, he has to undergo a cross-examination by nine learned court priests. The priests are hostile to this outsider from the forest, as they are worried that he might gain influence over the emperor, so they try to keep the upper hand in the dispute.

Yajnavalkya’s first opponent, Ashvala, erroneously assumes that Yajnavalkya has no deep understanding of ritual and asks him how a performer of the Vedic ritual attains mukti (emancipation, freedom). Yajnavalkya answers by noting what the four priests who officiate the ritual represent: fire and speech for the Hotr priest, the eye and the sun for the Adhvaryu priest, the wind and breath for the Udgatr priest, and mind and the moon for the Brahmana priest. Fire, sun, wind, and moon are represented by the Vedic deities Agni, Savitri, Vayu, and Soma, which partake of the ritual. Wind (vayu) is symbolic for the life force (prana), and the various forms of prana are called vayus. Yoga holds that the location of the sun in the body is the stomach and the location of the moon is the so-called soma chakra, located at the soft palate in the head. But fire, moon, and sun represent together the three main energy channels: ida (moon), pingala (sun), and sushumna (fire). Fire, moon, and sun also represent the six chakras: fire, themuladhara and svadhishthana chakras; sun, the manipuraka and anahata chakras; and moon, the vishuddha and ajna chakras.

In this way, Yajnavalkya interprets the offices of the four priests as having the functions of speech/sound, sight, breath, and mind. Through those four powers, the performer of the Vedic ritual attains freedom, he says. Significantly, sound, sight, breath, and mind are the defining factors in Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga.

Producing the Ujjayi sound and listening to it represents sound. Keeping one’s focus on drishti (focal points) represents sight. Breath, anatomical and pranic, is the permanent core focus of the practice (correct practice is to let movement follow breath rather than vice versa). When all these are bound together through bandha (bandh means “to bind”), then the mind is stilled. The stilling of the mind eventually reveals consciousness, since the mind is what veils consciousness in the first place because of its clouded, opaque nature. As the Brahmana is the chief priest of the four in the Vedic ritual, so is the mind the chief ingredient in Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga. We can thus see from Yajnavalkya’s ancient discourse that Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga is an exact application of the esoteric principles of the Vedic ritual. Even today we can perform our daily Vedic ritual by means of the Ashtanga Vinyasa method, giving us the opportunity to invoke the wisdom and might of the ancient Vedic sages, who lived as long ago as ten millennia before our time.

While practicing Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga, many of us have intuitively felt that we were partaking in a truly ancient practice, but we never knew its exact origins. The Yajnavalkya discourse shows that its principles were conceived at the dawn of time.

For modern practitioners it is important to realize that Ashtanga Yoga is not just the latest exercise craze, newly developed just to get your body into shape. When you practice this yoga, you become part of an ancient tradition that has weathered many a storm. Connect with this age-old wisdom and honor its founders and many contributors. Know that when this practice was conceived, many concepts and ideas that make up our life and society today did not exist. And this tradition will still exist when many of these ideas are gone. In the meantime, continue your practice mindfully and respectfully of the ancients and don’t worry too much what modern scholars, who barely dip their toes into the ocean of yoga, have to say about it.

1 The findings of the Samkhya consist of its analysis that the phenomena of the world can be grouped into twenty-five categories. This has led to the term Samkhya often being translated as “categorization.” Patanjali subscribed to Samkhya’s twenty-five categories but added a twenty-sixth: Ishvara — God.

2 The Gheranda Samhita II.1, trans. R. Chandra Vasu (Delhi: Sri Satguru Publications), p. 12.

3 T. K. V. Desikachar, Health, Healing and Beyond (New York: Aperture Foundation, 1998), p. 43.

4 Brhad Aranyaka Upanishad III.1. 3–6.