Response to "Yoga Gymnastique"

Mid-Sept. 2010 Newsletter from Srivatsa Ramaswami--Mr Mark Singleton's Book, Yoga body

Last week I posted Ramaswami's Newsletter Yoga Gymnastique in full. This morning Ramaswami posted a mid month newsletter with a response by Mark Singleton, writer of Yoga Body, a book I've been recommending to anyone who'll listen all year. It seemed appropriate to post his response in full also.

Hello Friends: This is an out of turn letter. I thought I should share

the lucid and informative letter with you which I received from Mr

Mark Singleton and is pasted below. Thank you and with best wishes

Sicerely Srivatsa Rama

Dear Mr. Ramaswami,

Thank you for your recent article "Yoga Gymnastique". I am not a

subscriber to your newsletter, but several people have forwarded it on

to me since the article appears to be talking about my book, Yoga

Body, The Origins of Modern Posture Practice. Neither I nor the book

are mentioned by name, so it's possible that I (and they) are

mistaken. But it seems obvious enough that you are engaging on some

level with my material and not somebody else's. That said, there is

something very puzzling about the article: in general it is very clear

that your responses are not in any way a pertinent critique of my

thesis. I therefore have to wonder whether you yourself have had the

chance to read the book yet. In other words, there is little doubt in

my mind that you generally have missed the point of my argument, and I

therefore have to surmise that it has been represented to you in

accurately or out of context.

Actually, I believe that we find ourselves in agreement on most of the

points you raise. I would therefore like to take a few moments to

address some of the ways that my arguments are misrepresented in your

article. Now it could be (since you don't name me) that you are

talking about a different "research scholar". If that is the case,

please forgive my presumption. However, it seemed obvious to everyone

who forwarded the newsletter on to me that you were in fact critiquing

Yoga Body. I greatly admire your work and trust your judgement on

matters of yoga. Because of this, I'm particularly concerned about how

you appear to have misunderstood my thesis, and that as a result of

this newsletter your students will also form a negative and ill-

informed notion of it. I fear that the result will be a lost

opportunity for discussion. So I hope you will allow me a few

thoughts.

I am intrigued by your opening anecdote about the Texas yoga

conference that you attended some years ago. At that conference, you

relate, a well known teacher wondered at what you might have been

doing with Sri T. Krishnamacharya for thirty years-his hasty

conclusion was that you must have been doing a daily practice of the

six series (presumably of Ashtanga Vinyasa as taught by the late Sri

K. Pattabhi Jois). You use this example as a prelude to an explanation

of the immense and multi-faceted learning of T. Krishnamacharya, of

which this particular high profile teacher was oblivious.

This kind of encounter is precisely where my book's inquiry begins.

How is it possible that such misunderstanding can occur? How is it

that this American teacher (and, presumably, thousands of other

teachers and practitioners like him) can have such a narrow vision of

the totality of yoga on the one hand, and of the vast learning of T.

Krishnamacharya on the other? How can this teacher assume that these

six series represent the sum of Krishnamacharya's yoga legacy over his

sixty year teaching career? I'm not entirely sure of the meaning of

this anecdote in relation to the whole article, but I presume you are

suggesting that I am making the same mistake as this American

teacher.

The fact is that such misunderstandings do occur on a very regular and

widespread basis. My book is an attempt to explain why this is so.

Just to be clear, I am *not* making an argument about the relative age

of asanas, nor whether they came before or after physical culture

exercises: I agree with you completely that such a genealogy is futile

and beside the point. Rather, I am interested in showing how certain

meanings become attached to physical practice, whether it be yoga or

gymnastics, and how these accreted meanings inevitably change the way

people approach these disciplines. In sum, my investigation aims to

show how modern understandings have altered the meaning of yoga

practice for many people. It is not an attack on the venerability of

yoga as such, but on how yoga has been taken and shaped by modern

ideas.

Let me take an example. You write, "The head stand, the sarvangasana,

padmasana are distinctly different from gymnastics and each one of

them has scores of vinyasas that are uniquely yogic and no other

system seems to have anything like that." While that is true in one

sense, it is also true that "gymnastic" systems from the early

twentieth century did in fact routinely use positions such as the ones

you mention. Physical culture journals are full of representations of

these postural shapes. However, it should be clear that the meaning is

quite different in the modern, non-yogic context. To take one

instance: a shape very much like sarvangasana was the emblem of the

British Women's League of Health and Beauty during the 1920s. It was

not associated with yoga, but rather had its own characteristic set of

meanings. It helped one to stay young, trimmed fat around the waist

and so on. Obviously, this cosmetic reading of the posture makes it

something wholly other than the meaning of the posture in a medieval

hatha yoga context (notwithstanding some overlaps). My study is really

about how these other meanings come to attach themselves to yoga. It

investigates how modern, scientific, physical culture-oriented

understandings are read back into the original yoga posture, and how

they thus alter the original meaning of that posture.

It is as if one were to take two pieces of tracing paper and on the

first draw a yogi in sarvangasana. On the other, one draws the emblem

of the Women's League. Placed one on top of the other, these figures

appear identical-and yet they carry vastly different meanings. But

what happens as yoga begins to enter the modern gymnastic-dominated

world is that these two meanings compete and sometimes merge. The

sarvangasana that many people know today (especially in "gym yoga"

contexts) incorporates some mix of both. This is what is interesting

about how yoga has developed, for better or worse, in the West. One

might well lament this as a degradation of the integrity of

sarvangasana (or whichever posture is in question), but it seems to me

that this describes quite well the actual process of yoga's

transformation in modern Western society, as it is reflected in the

understandings (and misunderstandings) of its practitioners.

When one makes this process the primary focus of study, it then makes

little sense to argue about whether gymnastics or yoga came first, or

to squabble about the relative age of asanas. This is a false debate,

and it is largely irrelevant to my project. It seems to me that you

have wrongly assumed that this is what I'm up to, which is why I have

to assume that you haven't yet had chance to read the book thoroughly.

Of course there are postures that date back a long time. I, for one,

would certainly not want to assert otherwise. And of course yoga is

not just gymnastics: as I argue consistently in Yoga Body, this is a

spurious claim-often made by those that want to denigrate yoga,

particularly hatha yoga. That said, I do think that a lot of the body

practices that we see emerging in the modern period reflect a very

particular zeitgeist, and that many people (in India and elsewhere)

were innovating new, radically adapted physical practices in the name

of "yoga". Let me be clear: I am not judging one way or another on the

desirability and integrity of these experiments, but merely presenting

the facts as I see them. This period of experimentation is a

historical fact. It also seems incontrovertible that many of these

systems were in some sense new, insofar as they incorporated modern

understandings into yogic knowledge. Regardless of whether you

consider these experiments as lamentable betrayals of yoga per se, or

as developments of tradition, there is no doubt (historically

speaking) that things were changing very quickly in the early years of

the twentieth century. We only have to look at the self-consciously

gymnastic experiments in yoga of the likes of B. C. Ghosh, Prof.

Sundaram, Shri Yogendra, Swami Kuvalayananda and others to see that

this is the case.

But it is also important to note the narrowing of the term

"gymnastics" from the 1960s onwards, such that when people hear the

word today, the immediate association is with televised displays such

as those of the Olympics. This is clearly also your primary

association. But it is inadequate. The term used to carry a much

wider, richer meaning that has far less to do with Nadia Comăneci and

her ilk than most people today assume. Imagine that Bikram Choudhury's

attempt to make yoga an Olympic event is successful: millions of

people around the world will begin to associate yoga primarily (and

probably uniquely) with a particular kind of asana display. This would

be as narrow and skewed an understanding of "yoga" as is our

contemporary understanding of "gymnastics". As well as being ways to

stay fit and healthy, early modern gymnastics traditions were often

deeply spiritually oriented-they were understood as methods of using

the body to access the divine. In many ways, they match the

predominant understanding today of the practices and function of yoga

itself. This is no accident. You write:

"We do not find deep movement, synchronized breathing, and the

significantly profound exercises like the bandhas-- which are an

integral part of Sri Krishnamacharya's asana practice-- in other forms

of physical exercises, especially gymnastics."

Well, the fact is that we do find all these things (or close

approximations of them) in early modern, non-Indian gymnastics

traditions. Deep movement is usually a cornerstone of the gymnastic

traditions I investigate, and it is often assumed that such movement

must always be accompanied by synchronized breathing (termed "rhythmic

breathing" in the parlance of the time). Surprisingly, exercises that

appear-at least in form-to be identical with the mula, uddiyana and

jalandhara bandhas also crop up in these early gymnastic practices. So

"gymnastics" is historically a tradition that is much richer, and

structurally closer to Sri Krishnamacharya's method, than you are

giving it credit for.

That said, the meaning of the deep movement, the synchronized

breathing, the gymnastic "bandhas" is obviously different in this

context. Compare a gymnastic manual of the time with the Hatha

Pradipika and one sees in a moment how distinct the frames of

understanding are. However, this historical perspective is not

immediately available to practitioners of yoga. And the result, once

again, is that meanings start to merge. It's not hard to see why this

happens: the gymnastic frame of reference was likely to be more

familiar to modern audiences, and so the practices of yoga which

appear to overlap with gymnastics are interpreted and (mis-)

understood in that context, rather than in the unfamiliar, and

apparently arcane, context of classical yoga. The learning was just

not available, and besides, people were happy and comfortable with

their "gymnastic" understanding of yoga. Once again, this is not judge

this process for better or worse. My job has been to show how it came

about.

You focus particularly on the aspect of breathing as a distinguishing

feature of the yoga tradition. I have already mentioned the key role

that synchronized breathing played in many of the "spiritual"

gymnastics traditions of the time (there are more details in my book).

Further, you note that in yoga the respiration rate is often reduced

to 3-5 breaths per minute, as opposed to "contemporary aerobic

exercises including gymnastics and gym workouts". While this is very

true, a quick review of the audio CD of the Ashtanga Vinyasa primary

series by Sharat Rangaswamy (grandson of K. Pattabhi Jois), shows that

each full pose (not including entry and exit) takes about 20 seconds.

As you know, there are five breaths per pose, which makes about one

breath every four seconds, or one inhalation and one exhalation every

two seconds. This is, from my own experience, also roughly the speed

that the sequence, as taught to him by T. Krishnamacharya, used to be

counted through by Sri K. Pattabhi Jois (with the entire series often

being completed in just over and hour). These are just rough

estimates, but it seems clear that the Ashtanga system moves away from

the principles of breathing that you lay out as being in some senses

defining of "yoga", and particularly of the yoga of T.

Krishnamacharya. How do we explain this?

Well, you yourself have contextualized this particular aspect of

Krishnamacharya's teaching as srustikrama, a method of practice for

youngsters, and which was particularly suited to group situations.

Children like to move, and breathe, faster than adults, generally

speaking. T. K. V. Desikachar has expressed a similar opinion on more

than one occasion, and has added that during that period his father

was experimenting with the vinyasa forms that have become so familiar

to us through the Ashtanga Vinyasa of Sri K. Pattabhi Jois. What I

point out in chapter 9 of my book is that this particular method has

many similarities with the standard pedagogical gymnastics of the time

in India. Two of the closest relatives of this system, I propose, are

Swami Kuvalayananda's immensely popular and widespread regimens of

children's gymnastics ("yaugik sangh vyayam"), and a system innovated

by the Dane Niels Bukh called "Primary Gymnastics", which was the

second most popular system of physical exercise in India at the time.

If you read the book you will see that I am careful NOT to propose

that Krishnamacharya borrowed his system from either of these sources.

There is no way of knowing this apart from suggestive speculation.

Rather, I suggest that this teaching format appears to closely match

the wider zeitgeist of the time. If Krishnamacharya was innovating in

response to that zeitgeist (as Mr. Desikachar suggests he was), then

it seems reasonable that he would have come up with similar methods,

particularly in his capacity as a yoga teacher to the royal youth. It

also seems perfectly in accord with the principle of adaptation (to

constitution, age, country etc.) that is, to my understanding, central

to Krishnamacharya's teaching ethos. It seems reasonable to look to

this principle in order to understand the way Krishnamacharya taught

in that particular time and place.

And, incidentally, I do not suggest that his position at the Palace

compromised his teaching: merely that he had a job to do, and he used

all the available resources to do it to the best of his ability.

Please correct me if I am wrong about any of this. To say that I

portray Krishnamacharya as "a hata teacher who plagiarized some

exercises from gymnastics and called it yoga to make a living, and

nothing more" is very saddening to me. It is the cartoon version of my

research. It's very unfortunate that now your readership considers

that I am a disrespectful ignoramus who neither knows nor cares about

Krishnamacharya's vast learning and scholarship. For the record, that

is not the case.

Note also that I am very careful to point out in the book that this

innovation within tradition is perfectly consistent with standard,

orthodox procedures of knowledge transmission, as I understand them.

The fact that Sri Krishnamacharya was adapting and innovating is not,

as far as I can see, inconsistent with his status as the most learned

and influential yoga teacher of the modern age, nor with his being

steeped in and faithful to tradition. You yourself write that

"dandals" were "outside the pale of yogasanas". However, we see their

entry into the popular yoga lexicon in the early twentieth century via

the system of suryanamaskar. Around this time, Sri Yogendra is

complaining that suryanamaskar has been mixed up with yoga by the

uninformed: it was, in other words, a new addition to the standard

body of practices as he understood it. This is a fact whose

implications are often misunderstood. I am not claiming, as your

article seems to imply, that there are not ancient traditions of

prostration to the sun. Of course there are. I recognize this

explicitly in the book, and I have recently commented on the same

topic in Yoga Journal. Again, this is to take the mistaken view that I

am primarily interested in showing which practices are old and which

are new, presumably with the aim of debunking the new ones (?). No.

No. What I am interested in is how innovators like the Raja of Aundh

revived suryanamaskar in the context of vyayama, and how it was

initially promoted as an Indian alternative to Sandow bodybuilding. I

am also interested in how (to Sri Yogendra's chagrin) it was

subsequently incorporated by others into physical culture-oriented

yoga practices.

You ask, "Are these physical drills, yoga exercises or devotional

practices? Which came first? God knows, Lord Ganesa knows". Well, the

answer is that it depends entirely on context. In modern times the

context can often be radically different. For example, into which

category should we place a mass drill-type practice of suryanamaskar

for children led by the Raja of Aundh circa 1935? Certainly he did not

categorize it as yoga himself. It would have looked to many like a

standard drill gymnastics of the time, and was to some extent

conceived by the Raja as a replacement for this. And yet he clearly

also recognized the "traditional" meaning of sun prostration. So how

one answers your question depends on which aspect is foregrounded.

Modern yoga practice, in its popular form, is usually a similar kind

of mix of meanings. Once again, to protest that sun worship in India

is ancient, and to believe one has said something counter to my

thesis, is to entirely miss the point of my inquiry. What is far more

interesting to me (given that the age of sun worship is not at all in

question) is how divergent meanings become attached and harmonized in

modern expressions of yoga.

To sum up: I am not particularly interested in judging the relative

value of these experiments in yoga, but rather in describing how a

particular set of historical factors contributed to the creation of a

distinctly modern form of practice. One may wish, in some cases, to

judge these innovations as modern "misunderstandings" of the yoga

tradition. But my job has been simply to document them. No doubt on

account of a lack of such outspoken condemnation on my part, some

people superficially read my book as an attack on yoga itself.

It could be that yoga has been handed down whole and entire from time

immemorial. It could be that all expressions of yoga are traditional

and immune from the historical forces of modernity. But this seems

hugely unlikely to me. To assert that yoga adapts to the conditions it

finds itself in does not seem like a contentious assertion. Nor does

it necessarily impugn the "authenticity" of the teachings. I believe

that modern Western practitioners today sorely need tools to navigate

through the bewildering, and often crass, market place of yoga. Such

practitioners do not, in general, have access to truly qualified

traditional teachers, nor are they born and bred in places where there

are adequate societal frameworks for understanding yoga practice. This

problem becomes increasingly acute with the sheer volume of

misinformation about yoga on the internet and in books. Being aware of

the recent history of yoga, and how it has changed, adapted and

diversified in response to modern and global concerns can help

practitioners to understand where they are coming from, and spur them

to go deeper into their inquiry into yoga traditions.

I hope that my study goes some way to aiding yoga practitioners in

this process. I have already seen it happening in response to the

book, which is heartening. But if Yoga Body is misrepresented simply

as an attack on the authenticity of yoga, then I have utterly failed

to get my message across. The tired old debate of whether yoga is old

or not is a boring and fruitless one. Practitioners squabble over this

in yoga studios all over the world. It's not surprising, then, that

some of them instantly assume that my book is part of the same

squabble. I am disappointed that your article tends in a similar

direction.

I hope you will receive this in the spirit is intended. I am a yoga

practitioner and teacher (in the Iyengar system) as well as a devoted

practitioner. I have given the last fifteen years to deepening my

understanding of yoga, through my sadhana and through my research. I

remain committed to the practice and study of yoga. Your books have

been very helpful in my understanding over the years, and for that I

humbly thank you. However, I do think that you have missed the point

of my work, for reasons that I can only speculate about. I hope you

don't mind me trying to set the record straight here.

I would be happy to talk about any of this further, perhaps in person

one day. I will be visiting Loyola Marymount University in the near

future (for possible collaboration with Chris Chapple), so perhaps if

you are around we can meet and get to know each other a little. I

would also be interested in perhaps recording a conversation with you,

perhaps for publication somewhere, if that seemed appropriate. In the

mean time, you are welcome to reproduce any or all of this letter,

should you wish. And I would be happy to send you a copy of my book.

Yours Sincerely,

Mark SIngleton