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The origin of hatha yog

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The origin of hatha yoga I recently read that one western teacher of hatha yoga found out that hatha yoga is Scandinavian gymnastics, which came to India in 20 years and was overgrown with Indian terms. And then Indian teachers brought her to Europe. These are the types of collisions.

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Basic Google search will tell you that Krishnamacharya is the father of modern yoga, who created a moving series of asanas called vinyasa. He taught in the 1930s India, and his students included Pattabhi Jois, whose creation in the 1960s of Ashtanga yoga has in the past 30 years been modified for westerners and is typically taught in gyms under the name of 'power yoga'.

 

Krishnamacharya of course had many teachers of yoga asana, some of which no doubt date back hundreds if not thousands of years.

 

Not sure where you're getting your facts from, but thanks for the laugh this morning.

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10 hours ago, Vajra Fist said:

Basic Google search will tell you that Krishnamacharya is the father of modern yoga, who created a moving series of asanas called vinyasa. He taught in the 1930s India, and his students included Pattabhi Jois, whose creation in the 1960s of Ashtanga yoga has in the past 30 years been modified for westerners and is typically taught in gyms under the name of 'power yoga'.

 

Krishnamacharya of course had many teachers of yoga asana, some of which no doubt date back hundreds if not thousands of years.

 

Not sure where you're getting your facts from, but thanks for the laugh this morning.

 

 

The Lois Files .

 

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On 11/5/2020 at 5:42 PM, Lois said:

The origin of hatha yoga I recently read that one western teacher of hatha yoga found out that hatha yoga is Scandinavian gymnastics, which came to India in 20 years and was overgrown with Indian terms. And then Indian teachers brought her to Europe. These are the types of collisions.

 

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25 minutes ago, old3bob said:

 

should that be a red check mark?

 

If Lois says it's true that's good enough.

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1 hour ago, Apech said:

 

If Lois says it's true that's good enough.

 

On 06/11/2020 at 4:42 AM, Lois said:

... These are the types of  collisions.

 

 

 

 

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On 11/5/2020 at 12:42 PM, Lois said:

The origin of hatha yoga I recently read that one western teacher of hatha yoga found out that hatha yoga is Scandinavian gymnastics, which came to India in 20 years and was overgrown with Indian terms. And then Indian teachers brought her to Europe. These are the types of collisions.

 

Not quite accurate but not as far fetched as some suggest. Here is an interesting discussion of the origins of modern yoga in the West.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.yogajournal.com/.amp/yoga-101/yoga-s-greater-truth

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On 11/5/2020 at 11:42 AM, Lois said:

The origin of hatha yoga I recently read that one western teacher of hatha yoga found out that hatha yoga is Scandinavian gymnastics, which came to India in 20 years and was overgrown with Indian terms. And then Indian teachers brought her to Europe. These are the types of collisions.

I would love to see the original source of this claim.  I have seen it attributed to Mark Singleton, but as steve's link shows, this is not at all Singleton's thesis. 

 

The fact that there were Western "spiritual gymnastics" movements is a very interesting fact, as is Singleton's very plausible claim that Hatha Yoga went from frowned upon by the upper castes in the late 19th century to being popular in the early 20th due to the pressures of colonialism: "Christian athleticism" became popular in the Anglosphere and touted as a sign of cultural superiority, and Hatha Yoga provided an Indian alternative to counterbalance this, but to serve this purpose was modified for mass consumption (no khecari mudra, vajroli mudra, kundalini awakening, etc.)

 

Now,  Jim Mallinson has done some very fine research into the various streams of dharma that converged into hatha yoga and found three: Many key hatha techniques originally come from Vajrayana and were originally to control bindu, the kundalini paradigm comes from Tantric Shaivism, and also, somewhat surprisingly, many of the more gymnastic asanas are first attested to in Tantric Vaishnavism and were used as a form of tapas - austerities.  So from this perspective, Krishnamacarya's style of teaching that taught many challenging gymnastics-like asana but left out the techniques for manipulation of Kundalini and bindu are actually reflected in an ancient Vaishnava tradition (note that Krishnamacarya was a Sri Vaishnava).  This is speculative, but makes a lot of sense to me.

Edited by Creation
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Thanks for the correction here, and for the link which made fascinating reading.  My apologies to Lois for the quick dismissal.

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I must disagree...

 

Claiming that

" hatha yoga is Scandinavian gymnastics, which came to India in 20 years and was overgrown with Indian terms. "

is like claiming that Bruce Lee invented GongFu.

 

Firstly, the article is based on a single book of Scandinavian gymastic poses:

" In the hall full of silent scholars, I opened it and leafed through picture after picture of men and women in familiar postures. Here was Warrior Pose; there was Downward Dog. On this page the standing balance Utthita Padangusthasana; on the next pages Headstand, Handstand, Supta Virasana, and more—everything you might expect to find in a manual of yoga asana. But this was no yoga book. It was a text describing an early 20th-century Danish system of dynamic exercise called Primitive Gymnastics. Standing in front of my yoga students that evening, I reflected on my discovery. What did it mean that many of the poses I was teaching were identical to those developed by a Scandinavian gymnastics teacher less than a century ago? "

 

We see similarities because nothing is really new. 

 

In my rather extensive studies I have found that the Japanese Bear Cult is nearly identical to the Finnish Sami Bear Cult.

I found the Sami Bear rituals almost identical to the American Ute Bear rituals. I found Tibetan Buddhist scrivening virtually identical to Scandinavian Shaman "reading the bones" . The Japanese Ainu have almost identical rituals to the Pacific Northwest Tribes.

 

OMG Does this mean they originated somewhere else? Aha let us consult "Chariots of the GOds" for answers!

NO not really.

 

This means that there are certain basics that enlightened experts come upon independantly.

We all walk about the same way.

Many of us bend the same way.

Advamced practictioners have independantly learned how to do the same things.

Balancing is one

Arm locks, wrist bars, leg sweeps, etc, are all practiced by wrestlers all over the world, and they all came up

with them themselves.

 

 

snip----------------

The earliest references to hatha yoga are in Buddhist works dating from the eighth century.[192] The earliest definition of hatha yoga is found in the 11th century Buddhist text Vimalaprabha, which defines it in relation to the center channel, bindu etc.[193] Hatha yoga synthesizes elements of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras with posture and breathing exercises.[194] It marks the development of asanas (plural) into the full body 'postures' now in popular usage[179] and, along with its many modern variations, is the style that many people associate with the word yoga today.[195]

endsnip----------------

 

I submit that this predates Scandanivian gymansts by quite a few years.

And neither Eric Von Deniken nor some "omg lookj what i just doscovered" guy can change actual facts.

 

Occams razor is the best tool here.

 

Now, if we want to discuss "modern western yoga"

well, yah, it has evolved so far it is not really like the eigth century hatha yoga.

But what is?

That still doesn't mean that hatha yoga was invented in Nordic land.

 

https://www.yogabasics.com/learn/history-of-yoga/

 

facts, not conspiracy

shunka

 

Edited by shunka
added "modern"
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On 11/6/2020 at 9:22 AM, Vajra Fist said:

Basic Google search will tell you that Krishnamacharya is the father of modern yoga, who created a moving series of asanas called vinyasa. He taught in the 1930s India, and his students included Pattabhi Jois, whose creation in the 1960s of Ashtanga yoga has in the past 30 years been modified for westerners and is typically taught in gyms under the name of 'power yoga'.

 

Krishnamacharya of course had many teachers of yoga asana, some of which no doubt date back hundreds if not thousands of years.

 

Not sure where you're getting your facts from, but thanks for the laugh this morning.

Because Google never lies

ZDRhF3C.jpg
2ko34JX.jpg
 "Oh you photoshopped that!"
Try it yourself

Type these into google images and yandex to compare:



White man and white woman
American Inventors
White couple
White woman with children
European history people
European people art
Happy American couple

Happy white american man
Happy white american woman
Happy white american child



Relying on Google for your information, thanks for the laugh this morning.
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I agree. But why just stop at Google? How about all forms of public record and history? Why not replace everything with a big question mark?

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Other search engines are known to at least, lie less. Like Yandex or Duck Duck Go (but that is getting worse lately).

But it is correct, history is getting re-written. Acquire 3 history textbooks spaced 15-20 years apart and you can see the stark difference in "factual history" especially from oldest to newest.

 

This is actually why "first edition" books are so valuable. They haven't been re-written.

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