Early modern yoga
Early modern yoga was the form of
Krishnamacharya
, which was predominantly physical, consisting mainly or entirely of asanas.
Yoga for the Western world
Early modern yoga was created and presented to the Western world in different forms by
Madame Blavatsky, and others in the late 19th century. It embodied the period's distaste for yoga postures and hatha yoga more generally, as practised by the despised Nath yogins, by not mentioning them.[1]
Blavatsky, who co-founded the
raja yoga, which "incorporates the main features of all the others", to be the royal road to self-realisation as "a divine immortal being identical with the universal Divine Life."[4]
In the 1890s, Vivekananda taught a mixture of yoga breathwork (
yogins in contempt for practising dramatic asanas in return for money. His attitude was reinforced by the equally ancient distaste of Western visitors to India, including both scholars and colonial officers, for such street people and any postures they were seen to practice.[5]
Successor
A few decades later, a very different form of yoga, the prevailing
References
- ^ Singleton 2010, pp. 4–7.
- ^ Meade 1980, p. 8.
- ^ Singleton 2010, pp. 76–77.
- ^ a b "Yoga: A Theosophical Perspective". Theosophical Society. 2018. Retrieved 19 May 2019.
- ^ a b Singleton, Mark (16 April 2018). "The Ancient & Modern Roots of Yoga". Yoga Journal.
Sources
- ISBN 978-0-399-12376-4.
- OCLC 318191988.
