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- [00:01]
Scott Hanson
I'm Scott Hanson, host of NFL Red Zone. Lowe's Nose Sundays are for football. That's why we're here to help you get your next DIY project done. Even when the clock isn't on your side. Whether that's a new Filtreat filter or Bosch and Cobalt power tools, Lowe's has everything you need to feel like the MVP of diy. So get it done and earn your Sunday Shop now in store and online. Lowe's official Partner of the NFL Banking.
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- [00:58]
Scott Hanson
MSNBC presents season two of the Blueprint, hosted by Jen Psaki. Each week she talks to leading Democrats about how they plan to win again, including Texas Congressman Greg Cassar, who chairs the Progressive caucus, Congresswoman Sarah McBride of Delaware, the first openly trans person elected to Congress, and more who are helping to shape the future of the party. The Blueprint with Jen Psaki Season 2 Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts.
- [01:30]
Tristan
Hey guys, I hope you're doing well. Welcome to this latest episode of the Ancients. I'm all good here. As you probably tell, I'm walking the dog. I'm walking Gunner. He's doing good as well. Oh no, here he comes right now. You might be able to hear the running of a spaniel any second now. Berserk running. There he is. Anyway, enough of an insight into my life at the moment. Today we're going to to ancient India and we're exploring the story of the origins of yoga. Now, as you're going to hear yoga back then it was very different to what we're used to today. Yeah, good boy. Forget yoga studios, forget wellness and being good to your body. You got to think uncomfortable positions and hardcore ascetic practices linked to holy men. We're going to be talking about all things like the Indus Valley civilization, the Vedas, Nirvana, the Mahabharata, even Alexander the Great all play their part in the story of early yoga with our guest, Dr. Jim Mallinson. Jim, he's the Bowdoin professor of Sanskrit at the University of Oxford. He came into our Ancients HQ to record this episode. He's a lovely man and I really do hope you enjoy.
- [02:40]
Dr. Jim Mallinson
Let's go.
- [02:52]
Tristan
Warrior Cobra. Downward dog. If you do yoga today, those are poses you're surely aware of today. Yoga has become one of the fastest growing wellness movements in the world. And its origins stretch back to ancient times, more than 3,000 years ago, in fact. But as you're going to hear that yoga was very different to what we're used to today. So what do we know about the emergence of yoga in ancient India? Can we trace its origins all the way back to the Bronze Age, to the Indus Valley civilization? How did yoga develop and who were these people who dedicated their lives to it? This is the story of the origins of yoga with our guest, Dr. Jim Mallinson.
- [03:44]
Interviewer (possibly co-host or host)
Jim, it is such a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.
- [03:47]
Dr. Jim Mallinson
Well, thank you very much for inviting me on, Tristan.
- [03:49]
Interviewer (possibly co-host or host)
What a topic. The origins of yoga and yoga. Its history stretches back thousands of years back into ancient times.
- [03:58]
Dr. Jim Mallinson
Yes, I think we can confidently say two and a half thousand and maybe three and a half. People will tell you a lot longer, but we could maybe talk about that. People will say 5,000, even 10,000 or obviously dawn of time. The time we can start saying it with some confidence is about 1500 BC.
- [04:13]
Interviewer (possibly co-host or host)
And given the ever growing popularity of yoga today, have you seen more and more interest from people wanting to learn more about yoga's origins?
- [04:22]
Dr. Jim Mallinson
Yes, there is. I mean, the thing is, there are so many millions of people around the world who practice yoga that even if only a tiny percentage of them are interested in the history, then that's actually quite a significant number. And almost all the teacher training syllabi, they include a bit of history as well. So. And there are lots of yoga teachers out there, so they generally have all had to learn a bit of history as well.
- [04:45]
Interviewer (possibly co-host or host)
And a big question to kick it all off, was yoga back in ancient times, was it similar or the same as to how yoga is done today?
- [04:55]
Dr. Jim Mallinson
It's definitely not the same. Some bits are similar. I mean, it depends what you. I mean, obviously there are many different ways that yoga is done today, so it certainly wasn't the kind of gymnastic, health oriented focus that we see today. That stuff doesn't really come in until about a thousand years ago. I think if you really want to do the original physical yoga practices, you're basically going to be harming your body. And we will get onto that. But it's sort of. They were the preserve of ascetics, normally men, sometimes women who are doing kind of tough things to their body, like standing up for years on End or holding their arms up in the air.
- [05:32]
Interviewer (possibly co-host or host)
And what do we mean by aesthetics?
- [05:34]
Dr. Jim Mallinson
Ascetics? Well, ascetic, the term itself, of course, comes from Greek. You probably know more about it than I do. But when it's used in an Indian context, it normally means people who have sort of turned their back on normal society and devoted themselves to religious practice. So the classic story that lots of people will know is the Buddha who was living his luxurious life as a prince and then went for the first time ever, went out of the palace compound and saw someone who was ill, someone who was old, someone dying, and suddenly realized that there was suffering in the world and decided to give up all his luxurious trappings and go forth and try to stop suffering. So he became. Yes, it's a difficult term to say it because it does imply some kind of body mortification in a way. But of course, the Buddha, he tried those things, but then ultimately he rejects them. Although if that's complicated as well, because in some versions of the story, in fact, they're seen as a step on his path, but he does leave them behind. But, yeah, an ascetic is like a religious professional in a way, and normally means not married, no job, no humdrum, daily mundane existence, that you're just focused on achieving some kind of religious end.
- [06:45]
Interviewer (possibly co-host or host)
So does it seem, and we'll certainly explore this more as our chat goes on, that when exploring yoga in ancient India, usually it's not large groups of farmers or people in settlements and or cities practicing yoga. It would be done by the select few individuals who'd chosen to pursue this pretty difficult. This hard life.
- [07:05]
Dr. Jim Mallinson
Yes, absolutely. I mean, they would often, as today, they would normally gather around a teacher, there'd be a guru with a load of disciples, but they would have turned their backs on regular worldly existence. And it still goes on to this day. In India, we see the same system going on. You know, if you go to India, you see holy men and sometimes holy women. Again, vast majority of men who have renounced normal life, you know, classically, you'll see them at these big religious festivals, perhaps they often have dreadlocks, they're wearing saffron robes, or some of them are naked. And that is, in fact, the milieu where that first arose around probably the 5th century BCE, that kind of way of life that we could be sure of. There are sort of hints of it earlier on, but it was within that milieu that the ideas, the practices of yoga first developed or first became systematized, at least.
- [07:54]
Interviewer (possibly co-host or host)
Well, we'll certainly get to that. But I must ask first off, as I almost always do when approaching this topic, the origins of yoga, what types of sources do you have available to explore mentions of it from more than 2,000 years ago?
- [08:09]
Dr. Jim Mallinson
Well, we have texts. We have the Vedic texts, so the oldest texts of Hinduism, The Vedas, there's four Vedas, the oldest of which is probably about 1500 BCE, the Riga Veda. They're the first of a larger corpus which culminates in texts called the Upanishads, which are actually more relevant to the study of yoga because the Vedas are hymns used in ritual. But there are hints of some yogic things in there, and we can get on to that. But the Upanishads are much more about kind of introspection and philosophical reflection and trying to. That's where we first see, within the Hindu tradition, this idea of freedom from suffering and liberation and so forth.
- [08:48]
Interviewer (possibly co-host or host)
And are all of these texts. I shouldn't have just consigned you to more than 2,000 years ago. I apologize there, because actually, I wanted to ask also, is it. So is it these, these Sanskrit texts that are key for learning about the history of this practice?
- [09:01]
Dr. Jim Mallinson
Yes, the early material that we have is predominantly Sanskrit. We do also have the Pali text or the Pali canon, the early Buddhist text. And there's a lot of interesting, useful material in there also for learning about yoga. I mean, key to make the point that from the start, really, yoga hasn't been the preserve of one particular religious tradition, and elements have come into it. I mean, obviously the biggest, the mainstream religious tradition of India is what we now call Hinduism. But Buddhism, Jainism, they've certainly fed into it and continued to feed into it over its two and a half thousand or more years of development.
- [09:35]
Interviewer (possibly co-host or host)
And in regards to Hinduism back in ancient times, because we got words like the Vedic and Brahmanism as well. So were there different strands as well?
- [09:42]
Dr. Jim Mallinson
There's four types of Vedic texts. There's the Vedas, the Brahmanas, the Aranyakas, and the Upanishads. But the Brahmanas, then also the priests are called Brahmanas, the Brahmins, what we now call Brahmins. So sometimes people talk about Brahminism as a religion because that's the more kind of elite, orthodox Sanskritic tradition. And of course, Hinduism has always encompassed far more than that. So if people talk about Brahmanism, they'd be talking about kind of, yeah, as I say, the Sanskritic form of Hinduism.
- [10:10]
Interviewer (possibly co-host or host)
And do we know much about Sanskrit as a language? What is Sanskrit?
- [10:15]
Dr. Jim Mallinson
So the Vedas were composed in Sanskrit. They weren't written down for a long time. And one other thing about the Vedas is that they were passed on orally using these amazing mnemonic practices, which meant that they were perfectly preserved over millennia before being written down. But then one of the particularly special features of Sanskrit is that in the 5th century BC, there was a scholar called Panini, who, in this incredibly complex system of what are called sutras, there's 4,000 of them. They're very short, they're like code. And he completely codified the language. And since then. So since the 5th century BCE, Sanskrit has been fixed. If it doesn't follow the rules of Panini, it's not Sanskrit. So it's just about unlike any other classical languages that continue evolving and so forth. But there are other languages. So Pali, what the Buddhist texts are written in is kind of like a. A more vernacular form of Sanskrit. But those are our main sources. We do have material sources as well. I mean, sculptural sources from about the 2nd century BC, particularly from Buddhist sites. Indus Valley is sometimes cited as the earliest evidence of yoga. But I think we need to push back against that. The problem with this sort of relative paucity of sources really, is that it becomes quite easy and tempting to read back into those sources or read back into that material. What we know about yoga now, and often that people take too big leaps in doing so.
- [11:47]
Interviewer (possibly co-host or host)
And the Indus Valley civilization, so that's Bronze Age, is that more than 4,000 years ago?
- [11:53]
Dr. Jim Mallinson
Yeah. So there's kind of high point of it. So it's into, you know, Pakistan, what's now Pakistan and northwest India, High Point was 2600-1900 BC, and it's the sort of, in terms of academic source, it's like the opposite of the Vedas in that the Vedas, all we have are the texts. We've got almost nothing in the way of material remains that go with that Vedic civilization which came in from northwest India. And the Indo Europeans effectively had spread out of the steppes, isn't it, of Central Asia. And they're always traveling, so they didn't really leave much behind. Whereas Indus Valley, we've got amazing material remains all over a vast area, and a script of sorts which has never been decoded. So we don't have any text telling us what was going on there. So we just got to kind of infer it from the material remains. So even things like, you know, there's a big bath is obviously something that was used as a big bath. And people obviously want to read into it later practices of Hinduism, which is big on bathing. You know, ritual bathing is big in Hinduism. So they see that thing. Oh, maybe this is a, a forerunner of Hindu traditions. But the linguistic and now paleogenetic evidence shows that the Indo Europeans, who were the precursors of Hinduism, came in significantly after the Indus Valley civilization. So it seems likely that the Indus Valley civilization was not part of that stream of culture. And where yoga comes into this is that. So it was in the 1920s, I think, that Sir John Marshall. So first started digging up the Indus Valley civilization at Mohenjo Daro. And they found, among hundreds, thousands of objects, they found lots of these tiny little seals. And a few of them had this seated figure that looks like he probably in fact. Yeah, it was thought to be ithyphallic.
- [13:47]
Interviewer (possibly co-host or host)
Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [13:49]
Dr. Jim Mallinson
Best to explain what that means.
- [13:50]
Interviewer (possibly co-host or host)
Yes, it's the depiction of a deity with a rather erect phallus.
- [13:55]
Dr. Jim Mallinson
Exactly, exactly. So, and, and he's kind of sitting in this cross legged position. It's not totally clear what the feet are doing, but it may be that the feet are kind of joined at the groin and the legs, the thighs and the shins are going right at right angles. You can see one of these in the British Museum. There's one also in the Ashmolean in Oxford. And then the head sort of looks like maybe it's got three faces on it. Okay. And then there are animals round about. These are tiny little seals, but you can see the animals also. And so one of Marshal's colleagues, I think he's called Ramprasad Chandra, something like that, he said, this must be the God Shiva. The Hindu God Shiva, who is known. One of his many names is Pashupati, the lord of the beasts. And he's also known as the kind of first teacher of yoga. So it became known as the Pashupati seal, which, as I said, is a name of the Hindu God Shiva. And people have understood the posture to be a yogic posture, but now people have studied it in a more kind of sober light in recent years. And in fact it bears a great deal of similarity with iconography from what's known as the Trans Elamite culture of southeastern Iran and western Baluchistan, where you get these kind of buffalo headed deities. And in fact, what looks like three heads seem to be the ears of a bit. The ones on the side seem to be the ears of a big buffalo. And the phallus of the, of the Ithy phallicness is probably a belt hanging down okay, so, but this is the problem. You know, people want to read. And what I would add is one of my specialist areas of research is tracing the history of the postures. And we get no evidence for a similar posture for about 3,000 years. Okay, so you've got to, you know, how do you explain this huge gap? We get plenty of yoga texts in between. So it's on the basis of these seals and nothing else that people will tell you that yoga is 5,000 years old and was practiced in the Indus Valley civilization. And of course, it's not impossible. But I don't, you know, I think it's pretty flimsy evidence.
- [15:55]
Interviewer (possibly co-host or host)
But it's a good place for us to start the chat, as you say, if it's regularly said that yoga may have its origins back with the Indus Valley civilization, if that's out there today, it's good to point out straight away, not impossible, but the evidence that we have, it's far from concrete evidence. So it's still good to highlight something.
- [16:12]
Dr. Jim Mallinson
Yeah, that's flimsy. I mean, it's not until we get to the Vedas. And as I say, there's a gap. So the Indus Valley civilization seems to fizzle out quite quickly. No one's quite sure why. Was it environmental reasons or whatever in about 1900 BCE and then the Indo Europeans who bring the Vedic texts with them into India don't really arrive until about 1500, maybe 1700. But there's a gap. But within those Vedic texts, that's where we first start seeing some elements of what later comes to be understood as yoga. The word yoga is in there, but there's definitely no systematized practice of yoga in the Vedic text. As I said, they're kind of hymns to various different kinds of deities.
- [16:51]
Interviewer (possibly co-host or host)
Well, let's go through it now almost chronologically. This sounds a really great way to do it. So we'll start with those earliest texts, the Vedic texts, and what the mentions of yoga are in those, and then work our way through antiquity until we reach the end of the ancient period and see what texts we have then and how they describe yoga. And by that time, I must ask first, the word yoga, do we know what it means?
- [17:16]
Dr. Jim Mallinson
Yes. I hesitate because it's one of the most. What's the word? Polysemic words in Sanskrit. You know, like, if you look up the word set in the English dictionary, you'll get a few patents. If you look up yoga in the Sanskrit dictionary, you'll get possibly hundreds, definitely dozens of definitions, but it's actually cognate with the English word yoke. And it comes from the Sanskrit root yuji, which means to has two meanings, which complicates the meaning of yoga a little bit already. So in I talked about Panini, the grammarian, in his list of the roots from which you can form Sanskrit words, Yuj is there and it can either mean to join two things together, hence it's cognate. So yoga is then cognate with English yoke. So when you yoke an animal to hitch it up to a chariot or something, it can also mean concentration as well. So it has that sense of meditation, concentration. But normally, more commonly, you'll see it understood when we're talking about the sort of yoga that we're talking about in the sense of joining things together. And we get that sense in the Vedas, it's used to. Yoga is a kind of way of taking control of something else. Okay. Through yoking it to you. Okay. So. And that sense does kind of carry on into later yoga. One of the earliest metaphors when we really can see that we're talking about yoga. Yoga is of harnessing the senses. You've got to rein in the senses, kind of bring them into yourself. And it's only by going introverting that you can then really develop your own inner spirituality or however you want to phrase it. So there's that sense of yoke there. We do. Also in the Vedas there's a famous hymn called the Kaishin Hymn and Kaishin keishi means hairy. Basically it's a hairy man and it talks about this hairy guy flying through the air. He's kind of naked or sometimes he's wearing sort of tawny coloured rags. He's got long hair, obviously he's said to have drunk some kind of poison. So people understand that to mean some kind of drug, maybe soma, which is key to the. The Vedas. And then he's communing with the gods, he's having some kind of mystical experience. And so he is seen as a forerunner of these ascetics that I was talking about earlier, who as I met. You see them still today in India. They might be wearing ochre robes, they might go naked like the cation in the hymn nowadays. Well, they might drink bhang, cannabis drink, but they're also sort of smoking chilims and whatever, so that, you know, this idea of kind of taking substances to bring about some kind of ecstatic experience. And it's the same people today who are practicing, who are seen as the kind of yoga practitioners par excellence. So People you can read into that maybe a forerunner of yogic traditions. It's the. In the Rig Vedas or the earliest of the four Vedas, we get references to prana, which is the breath, you know, which becomes key to yoga practice later on. So harnessing and using, using the breath, although that's not using it. Harnessing the breath I don't think is mentioned in the Vedas, but in some of the slightly later derivative texts of the Rig Veda, there's one called the Jaimanya Brahman Upanishad. It's complicated because it's a Brahmana Upanishad, so it comes before the. It's probably about nine, it's old, it's about 900 BCE and that talks about, you know, meditating with Om whilst controlling the breath and so forth. And then just yet to finish with the Vedas, the most recent of them still very old, the Atarava Veda, which was probably composed around 1000 BCE and is very different from the others that mentions more breaths. It mentions a system of five breaths in the body which becomes very prominent in later yoga texts. But it also mentions this intriguing band of young men called the Vratyas, who are like ascetics in some way. They kind of remove themselves from society normally just for a year, but then they do, I think they engage in breath control and they also said to stand up for long periods. I think I said earlier that this is one of the practices that become associated with the sort of hardcore ascetics from the 5th, 4th century BCE onwards. And you find them today, nowadays they call them Karesuri sadhus. And you'll find sadhus in India. Men have been standing up for 20 years. Yeah. These days almost always men actually. Funnily enough we get Mughal miniatures showing women. But yeah, so this body of ascetic practice is quite well developed by about the 5th century BCE and it still goes on today. That's the wonderful thing. You know, I kind of look at my classicist colleagues in Oxford and elsewhere, you know, studying a dead civilization. Whereas in India we can study this material. It's still there, it's still going on today. Foreign.
- [22:09]
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- [24:21]
Interviewer (possibly co-host or host)
But it's interesting what you mentioned there about those mentions of the word yoga and also from those particular Vedas. So the oldest one, the Rig Veda, and also the youngest one, which is like some 500 years apart, we think roughly from each other.
- [24:33]
Dr. Jim Mallinson
Yeah.
- [24:33]
Interviewer (possibly co-host or host)
And yet, although it feels that this isn't concrete evidence that it is yoga, I mean the link to these aesthetics and these practices that become associated with yoga as time goes on, it does start, at least for me, from the outside. It feels quite convincing that they are talking about a form of yoga. Maybe that is the earliest textual evidence we have for this.
- [24:56]
Dr. Jim Mallinson
Yes, absolutely. I mean, there are these elements, but it's not formalized at all. And the word yoga is not quite yet used in the way, you know, to apply to that sort of set of practices. For that we have to wait till about 300 BC in one of the Upanishads. So like the latest text I mentioned earlier, of the whole Vedic corpus, there's one called the Katha Upanishad, and that's the first one that uses yoga in a sense that we would understand it. And they're very much. The breath is controlled and it's to do with harnessing the senses. But the Upanishads or the later ones, the dating of Sanskrit texts is really impossible, really difficult.
- [25:32]
Interviewer (possibly co-host or host)
Well, before we go into the Upanishads, I do have also in my notes, like the date 500 BC and a group called the Sramanas. Well, is it important to do them first or. You are the expert. So I don't want to interrupt too much.
- [25:43]
Dr. Jim Mallinson
Well, yeah, that's why I said the dating's tricky because there's arguments about who came first, the Tramanas or the early Upanishads. I think there was a kind of milieu, there was a certain amount of interaction. But in fact, one of the most prominent scholars who very sadly died about three months ago, I think Johannes Brockhorst, who, he developed a very convincing, to me argument that it was in the regions kind of to the northeast, so to the south of the eastern part of Nepal, so kind of east of where the Ganges and Yamuna rivers meet. This area that equals greater Magadha, which is a kind of big important kingdom, and in around the 5th century BC is when these Shramana traditions appear. And they're separate from the Vedic traditions that we've been talking about. And it's a real kind of fascinating melting pot and a crucible for new ideas, new kind of spiritual practices and what happens there. So it's where Buddhism appears. It's where the Buddha, you know, he was in Partaliputra, wasn't it? He went out and, you know, that's when he went out of the palace.
- [26:50]
Interviewer (possibly co-host or host)
That's in the Ganges area, is it?
- [26:52]
Dr. Jim Mallinson
Yeah, exactly. In the sort of eastern Ganges area. And also the Jain religion develops there at the same time as Buddhism. Various other. We got a few scant references. We haven't got a lot of material. There's one called the Arjivakas, and then there are lots of other weird little ascetic traditions that we get references to. But the sort of key thing that happens there, if one follows Bronkhorst theory, which I tend to, is that so the Buddha sees all this suffering and basically then decides that life is suffering. And it's also within this milieu that we first see the notion of rebirth. Because we don't get a well formed doctrine of rebirth, of reincarnation in the Vedas. People, again, want to find them there, but it's not well developed. It's only in this period that we find it for the first time. So the idea develops that we are all perpetually getting reincarnated into this life of suffering. And it's thanks to our karma, our actions, they determine how we get reborn and how much suffering and what happens to us. And the logical sort of answer to dealing with this is get off this cycle. And so people develop. You've got all these groups of ascetics, shramana, so the, so ascetic, if I use the word ascetic, that could include Hindu Vedic traditions, but shramanas, that is used to refer really to the non Vedic traditions that appear in Magadha. And they're going around doing all kinds of, you know, to us can seem crazy stuff. So the Buddha, one of the best ways of understanding this is to think that the Buddha, he sees suffering, he wants to deal with it. And so he goes out, renounces his royal life and goes out and hangs out in all these groups just going, so what's this guy saying? I'm going to try that and I'll try this and I'll try that. And so he does go for some quite extreme practices. He says he's fasted for as long as is possible without dying and got no benefit from that. He says he's held his breath for as long as, until he's fast and holds his breath until it feels like his whole stomach's on fire and you can feel wind blowing his head and it's getting terrible headaches and everything. And he says this is not getting me anywhere. And in fact there's one reference because I'm always, you know, I particularly focus on the physical stuff. He does say in one text of the Majhima Nikya of the Pali canon that he stood up for, you know, months or something, stood up for long periods and then sat down for long periods. But the sort of, the best accepted version of the story is that he then decides that all this hardcore asceticism is pointless and he goes and sits under the Bodhi tree and just meditates for 40 days, takes the middle path, what he calls the middle path. And so he's engaging with these various other traditions. One of the. So only really Buddhism and Jainism survive to this day. And the Jains to this day are kind of really hardcore ascetics still. So Jain renounces Jain ascetics. You'll see them in India sometimes. You'll see them walking down the side of the motorway, start naked often. And sometimes they might have a cloth over their mouths and they're sweeping the part, the road as they go because they don't want to tread on any insects, they don't want to breathe anything in. They pluck their hair out rather than shave it because they think they might harm tiny little living organisms. They're the kind of most extreme non violence of these traditions. And in fact, so the theory that they developed about karma, you know, this idea that they basically just decided that all action is bad, but you also have to get. But your past action is always going to be affecting what happens to you now. And that you can get rid of that by burning it up through these extreme practices. And that burns up the residues of your old karma. And also you don't want to accrue any more karma. So the best thing to do is just to sit down and not move until you die. And that still happens as well. You still get the odd J. Every now and then it becomes quite a lot of fanfare. You know, some monk will say, right, that's it. And they call it Salika nana. So the Buddha was kind of, he said, okay, these guys are too much. And then I don't think it's doing them any good. And he chooses his path. But it's in that kind of milieu. So this idea of ahinsa, non violence, which then of course manifests in vegetarianism, so all these things that we now associate closely with Hinduism that kind of receive wisdom these days as they developed in that milieu. Now that's not to say that Vedic ascetics, Vedic renouncers were not involved in all of this as well. You know, they would have been mixing. And so the Upanishads are like the first, the first texts that were produced in that milieu by the Vedic traditions. So it's the first time, like I said, it's the first time we see within those texts they're not talking about ritual. It's not sitting around a fire, throwing things in and chanting hymns in order to make it rain or whatever or to get a sun. It's looking inwards and saying, how am I going to get off this cycle of rebirth and suffering? And an answer to that again is the practices of yoga as well. So the Buddha meditates and in fact, early on in yoga, the key practices, well, the key practices are meditation and breath control and then posture in terms of sort of what in Sanskrit is called asana and is the sort of forerunner of the gymnastic postures we see today. Although that kind of body, positive body cultivation thing doesn't come in until much later, probably about a thousand years ago. But so posture in the early days just means sitting down, cross legged in a good posture for meditation and breath control.
- [32:26]
Interviewer (possibly co-host or host)
So the Upanishads are, when they actually mention yoga as a discipline, they made yoga the name. The word yoga has now got the.
- [32:36]
Dr. Jim Mallinson
The association of this comes to sort of determine a system. Again, yoga, the word itself is funny enough, I've been working on this much later medieval text and I've been the last week or two, I've been pondering what does the word yoga mean? Because one of the problems of understanding is that it can mean most of the time actually it means a state. It means the final goal. It means the union, whether you envisage that as the union of your individual self with the universal self or just becoming one with God or something like that. So it doesn't mean the practice. Do you see what I mean? When we say we're going to go and do yoga, we don't say I'm going to join with the universal self. That doesn't necessarily what one means when one's going to the yoga studio down the road. But also it does kind of stray into that meaning of practice. And so in this Karta Upanishad, which I said is probably around the third century bce, it's the first time we see it used in that way. And it seems to denote a practice involving breath control and meditation.
- [33:33]
Interviewer (possibly co-host or host)
And is it defined by this chariot story that we hear about?
- [33:37]
Dr. Jim Mallinson
Yeah, that metaphor keeps cropping up.
- [33:39]
Interviewer (possibly co-host or host)
So can you explain this metaphor and how it's used to describe yoga at that time?
- [33:44]
Dr. Jim Mallinson
Yeah, I'll have to try and remember the different parts of it, I think the Atman. So the self is the charioteer, the body is the chariot, the reins are the senses. And you've got to kind of pull them, or maybe, sorry, the horses of the senses and you've got to pull them in. And that's seen as yoking and then so by, as a, by bringing, turning the senses inwards in a way calming the horses. That's when you can then look at what's going on internally and kind of cultivate a spiritual life and turn away from the external world and then in theory become enlightened with. Yeah, because there's so key to all of this as well, as I said, these ideas that come in of rebirth and then liberation, getting off this cycle. So this idea of what, you know, famously in the Buddhist traditions called nirvana, but we find the same word in Hindu traditions as well, that's kind of seen as extinction. It is really. It's seen as you. It's understood that you can't really become, you know, you only become fully enlightened at death. Okay. That you do. Later on, beyond the ancient period, beyond the classical period, you do start getting an idea of kind of living liberation where you're walking around like some sort of superman who's got all the powers going in the universe. But at this period, liberation comes at death. And in fact, yoga is often associated with dying in that you really want to do the practices at the time of death because that will ensure that you get off the cycle and you will attain final emancipation and liberation.
- [35:14]
Interviewer (possibly co-host or host)
So from these earlier texts, I mean, do we yet have any evidence from that material of more extreme methods for yoga at that time? Or is that information not yet available? Because you mentioned that there was like the breath control stuff in the Rig Veda, or potential links to it, but also with the links to asceticism and a more hard way of living. From the text that we've already covered, are there mentions yet of more extreme ways to do yoga for them as almost a hard, arduous task?
- [35:47]
Dr. Jim Mallinson
Yes. So we're already by. We've got to the third century B.C. and that's sort of early parts of the Mahabharata. So India's great epic, I think it's 10 times as long as the Odyssey and the Iliad combined. And that's got all kinds of stories in it, as you can imagine. And often we get stories of can be kings, not just regular ascetics, renouncers who will undergo great hardship. So in the Ramayana, which is the other great epic, famously Ravana, who's the villain of the piece, he goes and stands on his. Stands on one leg on top of a mountain. I think it is for years on end to attain great power and weapons. So the idea is you do these things. Not necessarily. So this is another sort of aspect of yoga. And these practices, they're not always done just for enlightenment. You can get special powers along the way. And so the same people who will be doing these austerities, they might often do it with a specific worldly end in mind. So you get these stories of people going, and like Ravana, they acquire. There's this word tapas. Tapas is the word. It comes from a root, tap, meaning to get hot. And the idea is that by doing these austerities, you generate this kind of spiritual heat. It's like charging up a spiritual battery. And tapas is seen when yoga Gets formulated in various texts. Tapas is seen as one of the kind of prerequisites or part of the practice. And so, yeah, you'll get stories of ascetics doing these things, maybe standing up for years on end. And they acquire, they generate so much of this power that the gods start getting worried about what they're going to do with it. They're kind of challenging the power of the gods. And the sort of classic thing to do is they'll send a beautiful maiden because it's nearly always men. And if the maiden manages to seduce the ascetic and he sheds his seed, that's all. His power is gone. But if not, if they can't kind of, you know, the other thing is to trick them into cursing someone.
- [37:36]
Interviewer (possibly co-host or host)
It's interesting links to like the early monks in Egypt, isn't it? And the attempts. I think there's also stories of, you know, trying to be seduced by women and like to go away from that ascetic life of those earliest monks. So you can see potential links there between the monks of Christianity and the ascetics that you mentioned.
- [37:53]
Dr. Jim Mallinson
Yeah, sure. And also makes me think of, is it Life of Brian, Monty Python, when you've got. He gets, you know, tricked out of this vow of silence. Yes. Because silence is often part of these things, you know. And so, yeah, if you can kind of enrage one of these ascetics enough that they will then curse someone, that also loses the power. Yeah. But if not, if they hold onto it, then the gods will say, right, what do you want? You know, we'll give you whatever weapon, whatever boon it is, or some kind of power that you're after. So we have that. The interplay between asceticism and yoga, or the fact that asceticism, tapas is part of yoga, we find that in early texts. We also, interestingly for you, because I know your opinion on Alexander, we get a reference in Strabo. See, I'm probably the one mispronouncing that. And I know that Strabo's a bit later, isn't he? A bit after the last. He is.
- [38:43]
Interviewer (possibly co-host or host)
He's a geographer writing a little bit later. But he adds some interesting. The thing with Alexander the Great going to India, I mean, it's just as in as much interest to academics later because they're receiving accounts from the people who went with Alexander, documenting what they saw going down the Indus river valley and stuff. So they're fascinated by that.
- [39:01]
Dr. Jim Mallinson
Right, well, in there, because I haven't read much of it. But of course, I sort of zoomed in on the bits of relevance to my work. And he has a couple of meetings with Indian holy men who. So this would have been up on the. Sort of, like you say, near Taxila, somewhere like that, up near the Indus river, northwest here. And these Indian holy men, there's. I think there's two in the first story and then maybe a bunch of them in the second one. But they're holding kind of extremely uncomfortable postures in the midday sun. They're not doing it for years on end, as some of them might do these days. But I think he says they come out of the village and then just stand there in the sun. One of them's holding a plank up, like in front of him. It sounds very uncomfortable. And then they go back to the village in the day. So this is a kind of thing that's part and parcel of this whole system of ascetic practices. So, yeah, the point we want to make is. I think I've already said it, but we associate yoga today with kind of wellness and being good to your body and cultivating the body and making it healthy. They had a rather opposite view in those days.
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- [41:19]
Interviewer (possibly co-host or host)
You did mention earlier that next key text that we're going to explore this key Indian epic, the Mahabharata. Didn't realise it was so much longer than the Odyssey and the Iliad combined. But it takes several centuries to complete, doesn't it?
- [41:33]
Dr. Jim Mallinson
Yes. Again, some people would argue against that, but the general received opinion is it sort of takes 600 from about 3rd century BCE to the 3rd century CE before it attains its final form. And of course, it's probably telling stories that are way older than that as.
- [41:48]
Interviewer (possibly co-host or host)
Well, and the stories that it tells. So do ascetics take quite a prime role or do we see them appear time and time again in the Mahabharata? And because of that, do you then see potential mentions of yoga in the Mahabharata too?
- [42:01]
Dr. Jim Mallinson
We do. I mean, ascetics don't play a big role in the Mahabharata. Often it's kings sort of doing ascetic practices again to get a special weapon to defeat their enemy or something like that. There is a section in the 12th book which is called the Shanti Parva. There's 18 books and the end of that's called the Moksha Dharma Parva. And there someone giving instructions. Who is it? Bhishma's dying and getting instructions on liberation at death and using methods of yoga. Like I said earlier, yoga is often associated with death. And there again, breath control comes up a lot. But also the primary method of yoga is meditation. So just reiterate that in those days, early days, it was breath control and meditation whilst seated in a lotus posture or something like that. But also part of the Mahabharata is the Bhagavad Gita. Yes.
- [42:53]
Interviewer (possibly co-host or host)
What is this? Because this seems really, really interesting in regards to the development of yoga.
- [42:57]
Dr. Jim Mallinson
Absolutely. And this is where the sort of chink comes in to the whole ascetic kind of fortress that's been built around yoga, where it seemed to be the preserve of kind of more hardcore practitioners.
- [43:09]
Interviewer (possibly co-host or host)
Weirder people, it sounds like.
- [43:10]
Dr. Jim Mallinson
Yes. And if one looks at the bigger picture, one can see that this people running off to the forest or taking themselves outside of the city. Because in fact, one of the theories for why these ideas of reincarnation and suffering in particular appear in the 5th century BCE is because of it's the second wave of urbanization in India. And then sort of disease and so forth appears and life gets a bit tough.
- [43:36]
Interviewer (possibly co-host or host)
They're trying to seek answers for it. Are we being punished or something?
- [43:39]
Dr. Jim Mallinson
And so people then look at ways to deal with that. But if you get these renouncer groups, these monastic groups who then start to attract patronage, which they do, obviously the Buddha very early on starts to attract lots of patronage and these Jain saints and so forth. And then maybe also within the Hindu traditions, that's a challenge to the mainstream, the mainstream Vedic priests who kind of, they work for the kings, they say that we've got to keep doing our Rituals, and that's what matters in order to keep the kingdom flourishing. But then maybe the king takes a fancy to these charismatic yogis on the edge of town who are a bit more fun to hang out with than the staid old Brahmins. So it's a challenge to the Brahmanical hold on religious traditions. So what's the very clever thing that happens in the Bhagavad Gita? So the frame of the story is that we're about to have the mother of all battles. These two warring tribes, the Pandavas and the Kauravas, are facing each other. And Arjuna is one of the Pandava brothers, for reasons that will take too long to explain. But the God Krishna is his charioteer. He's on the battlefield, he says, I can't do this. I can't go and kill my. Because they're related. So he says, I can't go and kill my cousins. And so the Bhagavad Gita means the song, the Gita of the Lord Bhagavata, which means. So it's Krishna's teaching. Basically the whole point of it is Krishna telling Arjuna, no, you've got to fight. This is your duty. It's your birth given duty, you shouldn't renounce. So you know, Arjuna wants to say, I don't want to do this, I want to go become a holy man in the forest and give up on all this nonsense. So Krishna very cleverly reworks. He makes it possible for Arjuna to fight the battle and still be doing yoga at the same time. Okay, so he says that the ultimate form of doing Yoga is to do your birth given duty without regard to what happens, what the reward is. So you can see what I mean, it's kind of, it's a very society cohesive teaching. And where yoga comes and you do get teachings on the practice sitting down to meditate and do breath control. Krishna gives these teachings, but it's hard to make full sense of it. But he's teaching that that practice gives you the equanimity that will enable you to go through with carrying out your duty, even if it's horrific and you're killing your cousins and so forth. And he's saying that through doing that, Krishna is saying through doing that you can still get liberation.
- [46:21]
Interviewer (possibly co-host or host)
And how does that then allow people from then on, yoga becoming more accepted, that people can do who aren't ascetics, who don't have to start this, this difficult life?
- [46:33]
Dr. Jim Mallinson
Well, exactly. So the message that Krishna is giving is that if you do your birth given duty without any kind of self interest, without regard to the reward that you're going to get for it. You just got to do what you've been put on earth to do that through doing that you can get the same reward or in fact better reward than if you go off to the forest and hang out with these.
- [46:54]
Interviewer (possibly co-host or host)
You don't need to do all of that stuff.
- [46:57]
Dr. Jim Mallinson
And he specifically says you don't need to do these extreme practices that have more mortifying the body so forth. And then also throws in the kind of key development here is what's called Bhakti Yoga. I mean, you hear lots of different types of yoga, but bhakti is devotion. So Krishna reveals himself as the Godhead halfway through. It's a fantastic part of the Bhagavad Gita. And he says key to this practice is devotion to him as well. You've got to be completely yet devoted to Krishna as the Godhead.
- [47:28]
Interviewer (possibly co-host or host)
So can we presume there was an explosion, there was a great increase in the popularity of yoga once the Bhagavad Gita becomes widespread across India?
- [47:37]
Dr. Jim Mallinson
No, no, no. It doesn't seem really to happen. To be honest. That's something I've always wondered about. I mean, it kind of makes it possible because it's almost like the. Well, because as I say, yoga can be understood quite broadly. Prior to the modern era. We have almost no evidence of non ascetics, non professionals doing yoga. I mean, it may be that people read the Bhagavad Gita early on and went about their regular duties and maybe did a little bit of meditating and yoga, but it's kind of, I guess we probably wouldn't even know that if that was true because it's not such an interesting story. No one, you know, you're not going to, you're not going to carve sort of statues of the cobbler who's quickly sitting and doing a bit of breath control or something like that. But, but it doesn't seem to become particularly widespread. No, but it does mean that it is opened up to everyone.
- [48:23]
Interviewer (possibly co-host or host)
So let's move on to the next key ancient text that we should cover in this story, which is the Yoga Kara. Well, it's not even a text, is it? It's Yoga Kara.
- [48:31]
Dr. Jim Mallinson
Buddhism, Yogacra, Yogachra.
- [48:33]
Interviewer (possibly co-host or host)
See, you're helping with me the pronunciation so much.
- [48:36]
Dr. Jim Mallinson
Well, it's tricky because there's a special system of transliterating Sanskrit words which you need to be initiated into to be able to pronounce. Them, if you do, once you've been initiated, can pronounce anything, it's much easier than English. But yogacra, Buddhism, Yeah, that's an early form of Buddhism, the yogacra. I'm not an expert on this particularly, but it means the practitioner, it's not been studied that much. There's lots of fascinating texts. I've looked into it a bit. In fact, it's got one of the first mentions of Hatha yoga, which is kind of the more physical oriented, more body cultivating practices that we get a bit later on. But the prime practices in it are a meditation, as one would expect from Buddhist tradition, and it feeds very strongly into probably the other text that we should talk about here. Probably the kind of cut off of the classical period, written in about 400 CE. Now that sort of mouthful, Patanjala yoga shastra means that the yoga text, the yoga shastra of Patanjali and Patanjala is the adjective from Patanjali. So the. So there's 195 short sutras on yoga written by Patanjali, but then there's a commentary that goes with it. Again, there's a lot of scholarly debate, but the general consensus these days there's good arguments against it, but the consensus seems to be that the commentary and the sutras were written together. Okay, which is why we have to say this. You can't just say Patanjali's yoga sutras, you have to say the whole lot because it means the sutras and then the auto commentary. This is a thing that Sanskrit authors did a lot is they would write a kind of really pithy, difficult short text and then comment on it themselves to elucidate the meaning of the text themselves.
- [50:18]
Interviewer (possibly co-host or host)
And is the Patanjali yoga sutra, is that Hindu or is that.
- [50:22]
Dr. Jim Mallinson
Well, it becomes really key to Hinduism. Not until much later. So nowadays often the kind of. One of the defining features of Hindu philosophy is six schools, six darshanas they call, of which one of them is yoga. The root text of yoga is this Patanjali's text. But that's rather complicated. One must remember that in fact there were lots of other philosophical traditions doing yoga who did not adhere to what Patanjali taught.
- [50:50]
Interviewer (possibly co-host or host)
Like Yogicra Buddhism, for example.
- [50:51]
Dr. Jim Mallinson
Exactly, exactly. And in fact, so I did this with my colleague Mark Singleton, we did this book, Roots of Yoga, full of translations of lots of different texts, I think more than 150 texts on yoga. Bits and pieces here and there. Much the hardest was Patanjali when we were translating that because it's full of terms that I didn't recognize at all. I realized after a while that the best place to look for them was in the Buddhist Sanskrit dictionaries, because Patanjali was taking very complicated technical terms about the workings of the mind and because the bulk of the text is about meditative practice and in fact, seeking to stop the mind from functioning whatsoever. But he's taking those terms from Yogacra Buddhism. He also takes sort of ethical ideas from Jain traditions. So he's magpie, he's a collector, bringing lots of different traditions in there, all the kind of male ascetics, but for him, for Brahmins. So it's definitely a Hindu text, although there's debate about whether it's theistic or not. And there are mentions of God, but which God is not specified. So it kind of has, like a lot of these texts, they often like to make themselves sort of usable by lots of different people. But that becomes the foundational text of yoga.
- [52:02]
Interviewer (possibly co-host or host)
Well, I was going to say. So he collates all these different practices from different, you know, kind of groups into this text. And this is almost, as you say, the foundational text. Is this like the first official manual of yoga that we have surviving then?
- [52:17]
Dr. Jim Mallinson
Well, I wouldn't say it's the first because actually in the Mahabharata we get these short teachings on yoga. Yogacra is a bit older as well, but it becomes the locus classicus, really, particularly within the Hindu tradition. And even to this day you'll find it, you know, in yoga studios. And these yoga teacher trainings I mentioned earlier, they usually have to study Patanjali, for which I pity them greatly because it's extremely difficult. Like I said, it's probably the hardest yoga text out there. The technical terms in it are really, really complex. It has very little to do with what is practiced in yoga studios today. It mentions postures, but again, only seated postures for meditation, breath controls in there. But yeah.
- [52:54]
Interviewer (possibly co-host or host)
So what are the key practices that they talk about then, in this?
- [52:57]
Dr. Jim Mallinson
Well, the key, again, it's a bit of a layered text. It's very difficult to make sense of, but there are, you know, to make it completely coherent. We kind of. Maybe one of the core teachings for which it becomes most famous is the Ashtanga yoga practice. And ashta anga means eight limbs. Some people don't like the word limb, but it means. So it's a yoga practice with eight parts, the eight limbs. So you've got the yamas and the niyamas. So those are kind of rules and restrictions. So ethical principles basically. Often a lot of them seem to be taken from the Jain tradition, including ahimsa, said to be the most important. So that's non violence. Then you get was it yama niyama asana posture. Like I say, he just when it's elaborated in the commentary, just mentions a few seated postures for meditation because then the main practices come after that. So asana then pranayama, breath control, which is basically holding the breath, you know, sort of control breathing and then holding the breath. Then pratyahara, which means withdrawal. Okay, so this goes back to what I was saying about the charioteer and the horses and pulling the senses in. So the idea is that you withdraw your senses from external objects, then you know, then you're just functioning with what's within your person.
- [54:11]
Interviewer (possibly co-host or host)
So not withdrawal from the world like as a person.
- [54:14]
Dr. Jim Mallinson
That's not what that means. The text is definitely geared at Brahmin male renouncers. Okay, so that where we got to pratihara. So those are seen as the five external hungas. So they're kind of seen as external practices. And then you've got the three internal, which is dharana. So now you're onto meditation proper. Dharana means sort of fixation. So you fix your attention on a single point. Then Dhyana, which is a kind of heightened form of Dharana of the fixation. And you can have an object, Dhyana, you know, you can meditate on a deity or a candle or whatever and you become extremely good at that. And then once you've nailed that, then you move on to the final of the angas, which is called samadhi. And that hard to translate. I normally translate it as absorption. When you become fully expert in that, that's when you get. So the definition of yoga at the beginning of the text is yoga chitta vritti nirodha, which means yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind. So basically your mind just stops doing anything and that's seen as the ultimate goal.
- [55:18]
Interviewer (possibly co-host or host)
So have the more harsh parts of yoga, have they kind of gone then by this time the, you know, as you said, the raising of a plank above your head.
- [55:28]
Dr. Jim Mallinson
Well no, actually, I mean in, in Patanjali. So within the, the Niyamas I think it is always get confused between the Yamas and the Niyamas. But there's five, these five rules and regulations or whatever. One of them is tapas, which I mentioned earlier, which is the word for asceticism. And then in the commentary Tapas is explained as the overcoming of extremes. So hot and cold and so forth. And then one of the things is actually stanasana, which means standing and sitting, which later commentators understand to mean standing up for long periods, sitting down for long periods. So no, it's still kind of seen as a, a prerequisite of success in yoga.
- [56:08]
Interviewer (possibly co-host or host)
Now on the ancients, we can't go too far into the medieval world and then. But I appreciate that there are many more key developments in the story of yoga, aren't there, in the following centuries? But almost to kind of finish off this part of the chat, Jim, by the end of, let's say antiquities. So I normally like saying about 500 CE or AD how should we therefore be be picturing yoga by that time?
- [56:33]
Dr. Jim Mallinson
I would say it's still the reserve of professionals, you know, these ascetics or announcers, whatever we want to call them. But it's about to get a lot more colorful beyond these extreme religious practitioners, because around about the 5th century is when tantra arrives. Tantra arrives on the scene, and then you get wilder visualizations, wilder perhaps as wild religious rituals that become embroiled in yoga as well. And tantra becomes kind of the, the dominant religious tradition in India for the next seven or 800 years. And so yoga develops also within that tradition. So we get a spicing up of what's going on. I mean, tantra obviously in the kind of collective understanding of their associated with sort of sex practices and so forth, but it's not all that. But there's lots of, lots of interesting material going on. And I guess it opens up as well a bit more in terms of who's doing it. Women become more involved, I think, probably as a result of tantric traditions.
- [57:26]
Interviewer (possibly co-host or host)
And we still got quite a way to go before we get to anything quite similar to that which resembles modern yoga today.
- [57:32]
Dr. Jim Mallinson
I'm guessing with the next big turning point is kind of towards the tail end of tantra around the 11th century. And then the kind of body positive stuff arrives. That's what I work on most closely. And that kind of develops for three or four centuries and then becomes fairly steady state. And then the 20th century, everything goes crazy. Everyone, time to talk about that.
- [57:50]
Interviewer (possibly co-host or host)
Well, Jim, I'm very grateful for you going a bit out of your comfort zone then to go back into the ancient world with us and then to talk about yoga in India more than one and a half, 2,000 years ago. So really appreciate your time. Before we completely wrap up, is there anything else you'd like to leave with us to end this chat on about yoga and its origins that we should be thinking of.
- [58:12]
Dr. Jim Mallinson
Well, I just hope I've showed how it's been constantly evolving and it's still evolving, and that there's no need or point in trying to look for an original yoga, because I don't think we'll ever find one. And that's such a fascinating thing to study.
- [58:22]
Interviewer (possibly co-host or host)
There's always been development, hasn't there, and many different strands. Hindu, Buddhist and so on.
- [58:27]
Dr. Jim Mallinson
Indeed, indeed. Yeah.
- [58:28]
Interviewer (possibly co-host or host)
Well, Jim, this has been absolutely brilliant. It just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today.
- [58:33]
Dr. Jim Mallinson
Thank you, Tristan.
- [58:38]
Tristan
Well, there you go. That was Professor Jim Mallinson talking you through the origins of the Ocean yoga at its roots in ancient India.
- [58:45]
Interviewer (possibly co-host or host)
I hope you enjoyed the episode. Thank you for listening.
- [58:49]
Tristan
Please follow the ancients on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. That really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favor if you'd also be kind enough to leave us a rating where we'd really appreciate that. Now don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of History Hits podcasts ad free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you see subscribe@historyhit.com subscribe that's enough from me. I'll see you in the next episode.
- [59:25]
Capital One Bank Guy
Banking with Capital One helps you keep more money in your wallet with no fees or minimums on checking accounts and no overdraft fees. Just ask the Capital One Capital One Bank Guy. It's pretty much all he talks about in a good way. He'd also tell you that this podcast is his favorite podcast too. Ah, really? Thanks Capital One Bank Guy what's in your wallet? Term supply See capital1.com Bank Capital One NA Member FDIC.
- [59:54]
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