On the Eve of International Day of Yoga: A Few Questions About How Yoga's History is Being Told

 

 

The Rubin Museum recently published an article titled "Virūpa and the Cross-Religious History of Haṭha Yoga." The article makes several important observations and draws attention to the Amṛtasiddhi, a text that has rightly received considerable scholarly attention in recent years.

Reference: https://rubinmuseum.org/virupa-and-the-cross-religious-history-of-hatha-yoga/ 

 

Among its key assertions are that:

"Haṭha Yoga has a cross-religious history"

and that

"One of the earliest texts to teach Haṭha Yoga was the Buddhist Amṛtasiddhi."

These are significant claims and deserve careful consideration. Yet they also raise a number of methodological questions.

No serious student of Yoga would deny the existence of interaction between Buddhist, Śaiva, Nātha, and other ascetic traditions in medieval India. The history of Yoga is indeed a history of dialogue, exchange, adaptation, and innovation.

However, does acknowledging cross-sectarian interaction justify the broader narrative that many readers are likely to take away from the article?

The conceptual foundations of Haṭhayoga—prāṇa, nāḍī, bindu, tapas, subtle-body theories, and psycho-spiritual disciplines—did not suddenly appear with the Amṛtasiddhi. These ideas are deeply rooted in earlier Upaniṣadic, Śaiva, and Tantric sources. If a discussion begins with a medieval Buddhist text while giving relatively little attention to these earlier foundations, are we receiving the whole story or only a part of it?

A related methodological question also deserves attention.

Does the earliest surviving systematic text describing certain practices necessarily establish the origin of those practices? Historians routinely distinguish between the earliest surviving evidence and the actual beginnings of a tradition. The survival of a text and the origin of an idea are not always the same thing.

The article's repeated emphasis on a "cross-religious history" also invites reflection. Is this the most illuminating way to describe the historical reality? Buddhist siddhas, Śaiva yogins, Nātha practitioners, and custodians of Upaniṣadic traditions were all participating in a broader Indic intellectual and spiritual world. Why is the emphasis placed on religious separation rather than civilizational continuity?

The timing of the article raises further questions.

Why is a narrative emphasizing alternative lineages and cross-religious origins being prominently circulated precisely on the eve of the International Day of Yoga? The timing alone proves nothing, and one must be careful not to assume motives. Yet scholars are equally justified in asking whether timing, framing, and selective emphasis together contribute to the shaping of a particular public narrative.

Indeed, a larger question emerges.

Are we witnessing a broader tendency in contemporary scholarship whereby civilizational continuities are increasingly fragmented into competing identities and isolated lineages? Is there an emerging narrative that seeks to present Yoga primarily as a "shared" or "cross-religious" phenomenon while gradually weakening public awareness of its deep roots within the broader Indic civilizational matrix?

These questions deserve discussion—not because Buddhist contributions should be denied, but because all contributions should be situated within their proper historical context.

As someone engaged in Yoga textual studies, I believe the issue is larger than this one article.

For decades, Yoga academia in India has devoted immense energy to demonstrating that Yoga works. We have conducted clinical trials, measured biomarkers, published scientific papers, and established Yoga as a credible therapeutic discipline. This work is invaluable.

Yet while we have been busy validating Yoga scientifically, we have often paid far less attention to understanding, preserving, and articulating its textual and civilizational history.

If Indian scholars do not engage with manuscripts, commentaries, intellectual history, and questions of historiography, others will inevitably frame the narratives. And when narratives are repeatedly shaped through selective chronology, selective emphasis, and strategic framing, civilizational misappropriation can occur gradually—not through overt distortion, but through omission and repetition.

The answer is not outrage. Nor is it denial of genuine Buddhist contributions.

The answer is better scholarship.

The answer is a fuller history.

The answer is to insist that Yoga's story be told in its entirety—acknowledging the contributions of Buddhist traditions, while also recognizing the much older Upaniṣadic, Śaiva, and broader Indic foundations without which the later developments themselves cannot be adequately understood.

The Rubin Museum article deserves to be read.

It also deserves to be questioned.

That is not opposition to scholarship.

That is scholarship.