Over at aeon, Erik Davis has posted a fantastic piece that attempts to answer the slippery question: Is yoga a religion? On its face, the question appears simple and an ahistorical answer readily suggests itself: No. This is not, however, a simple question and simple answers won’t do. Davis understands this and does a nice job addressing the various complexities.
Davis’ story reminds me of a conversation I had with a close friend back in 2003. She had discovered yoga in its American commercial-secular form and was quite enthusiastic about it. As she was extolling the myriad mind-body benefits, I observed that yoga was embedded in a spiritual or religious tradition and that delving deeply into the discipline would might eventually lead her to this tradition. She vehemently rejected this suggestion and told me I was nuts. She was neither spiritual nor religious. For her, yoga was nothing more than exercise.
Within a few years, she had become a yoga instructor and was devoting nearly all her time to yoga retreats, teaching, and study. She eventually traveled to India and spent time at an ashram. Upon her return, she changed her name and openly declared her new spiritual or religious affiliation. The transformation was total.
Davis deftly notes that yoga can work this way and that physiologic discourse can easily give way to metaphysical discourse. In the historical tradition in which yoga is embedded, the latter undergirds the former. Present-day practitioners who inquire or wish to learn more will almost invariably encounter, through reading or instruction, the underlying metaphysical matrix which provides the ultimate explanation or justification for yoga as practice, action, or discipline.
This brings me to the only quibble I have with Davis’ article, prompted by this passage:
[I]n a sense the key to the Christian evangelists’ fear of yoga goes beyond religious discourse entirely. [They claim] that the Encinitas yoga curriculum advances Hindu and American metaphysical religion ‘whether or not these practices are taught using religious or Hindu language’. In other words, the spiritual power — and threat — does not lie within the discourse packaging the moves, but in the moves themselves.
Davis suspects this idea is wrong. Emile Durkheim would disagree. Durkehim’s intellectual predecessors (and successors) all rejected purely doctrinal approaches to religion and emphasized the primacy of practice. For them, ritual activity comes first — ideas and doctrines are secondary. The former is paramount and leads naturally to the latter.
Because Protestants (and intellectuals) tend to be focused on words, ideas, writings, and doctrines, they often overlook this ritually embodied aspect of religion. While I have little or no sympathy for the evangelical parents that Davis describes in his story, they have some legitimate cause for concern. Kids who practice yoga today may really like it, decide to explore, inquire more deeply, and find themselves sliding down the slope toward a metaphysics that horrifies their intolerant parents.
Here is the photo that accompanies Davis’ article; it shows the California kids at issue practicing their yoga:
While this may just be exercise or action, it may also be something more:
This is one of those issues that can’t be resolved in any definitive way. Everyone involved will have their own personal view of what yoga is or isn’t, and that perspective will drive the debate. In fact, the judge in the case has already announced that he practices yoga and (for him at least) there is nothing “spiritual or religious” about it. It sounds to me like he has pre-judged the issue in a rather simplistic way (which may be grounds for recusal). I heard the same statement from my friend back in 2003; she is now a shimmering white spiritual lotus.
