The Ancients - Origins of Yoga

Episode Date: October 30, 2025

Warrior, Cobra, Downward Dog. If you do Yoga today, those are poses you’re surely aware of. But where and when did Yoga originate?In this episode of The Ancients, Tristan Hughes is joined by Dr Jim Mallinson to uncover the ancient roots of yoga - a tradition stretching back over 3,000 years. From the meditative practices of the Indus Valley Civilisation to the spiritual seekers of early India, they discover how yoga evolved from a path of divine discipline and self-realisation into one of the world’s most influential philosophies and practices.The Origins of BuddhismThe Chinese ZodiacPresented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic SoundsThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hey guys, I hope you're doing well. Welcome to this latest episode of the ancients. And we're good here, as you'll 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 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've 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, Malinson. Jim, he's the Bowden Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Oxford. He came into our Ancient HQ to record this episode. He's a lovely man and I really do hope you enjoy. Let's go. 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. Jim, it is such a pleasure to have you on the podcast today. Well, thank you very much for inviting me on, Tristan.

What a topic, the origins of yoga, and yoga, its history stretches back thousands of years, back into ancient times. 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 1,500 BC. 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?

Yes, there is. I mean, the thing is that 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. And there are lots of yoga teachers out of there, so they generally have all had to learn a bit of history as well.

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? It definitely not the same. Some bits are similar. I mean, it depends what you, I mean, obviously there are many different ways that yoga's 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. I mean, we'll get on to 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. And what do we mean by ascetics? Aesthetics, it's, 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, you know, was living his luxury. 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 ascetic 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. And yeah, an aesthetic is like a religious professional in a way, and normally means not married, you know, no job,

no humdrum, daily mundane existence, that you're just focused on achieving some kind of religious end. So does it seem, and we'll certainly explore this more, as our chat goes on. Now, when exploring yoga in ancient India, Usually it's not large groups of farmers or people in settlements or cities practicing yoga. It would be done by the select few individuals who chose to pursue this pretty difficult, this hard life. 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. You 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 can be sure of. There are sort of hints of it earlier on, but it was in that, within that milieu that the ideas, the practices of yoga first developed, or first became systematized, at least. Well, we 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? Well, we have texts. They have the Vedic texts, so the oldest texts of Hinduism. The Vedas,

there's four Vedas, the oldest of which is probably about 1,500 BC, the Riga-Veda. they're the first of a larger corpus which culminates in text 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 onto that but the Upanashads are much more about kind of introspection

and philosophical reflection and that's where we first see within the Hindu tradition this idea of freedom from suffering and liberation and so forth And are all of these texts? I shouldn't have just consigned you to more than 2,000 years ago. I apologise there because actually I want to ask also, so is it these Sanskrit texts that are key for learning about the history of this practice? Yes, the early material that we have is predominantly Sanskrit.

We do also have the Parley texts, or the Parley canon, the early Buddhist texts. 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 called Hinduism, but Buddhism, Jainism, they've certainly fed into it and continued to feed into it over its 2,500 or more years of development. And in regards to Hinduism back in ancient times, because we got words like the Vedics and

Brahmanism as well, so were there different strands as well? There's four types of Vedic texts as the Vedas, the Brahmanas, the Aranans, the Aranis. and the Upanishads, but the Brahmannas, then also the priests are called Brahmers, they're brahmins, what we now call Brahmins. So sometimes people talk about Brahmanism 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. And do we know much about Sanskrit as a language? What is Sanskrit? 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 Parnini, 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 five, the fifth century BCE, Sanskrit has been fixed. If it doesn't follow the rules of Parnany, it's not Sanskrit. So it's just unlike any other classical languages that continue evolving

and so forth. So there are other languages. So Pali, what the Buddhist texts are written in, is kind of like 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 second 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 porcity 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 two big leaps in doing so. And the Indus Valley civilization. So that's Bronze Age. Is that

more than 4,000 years ago? Yeah. So there's kind of high point of it. So it's in sort of, you know, Pakistan and northwest India. High point was 2,600 to 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 northwestern units. The Indo-Europeans, effectively, had spread out of the steps, isn't it, of Central Asia. And they're always travelling, 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. So we just got to kind of infer it from the material remains. So even things like, you know, there's a big bath. There's obviously something that was used as a big bath. And people obviously, you know, want to read into it later practices of Hinduism, which is big on bathing, you know, but ritual bathing is big in Hinduism. So they see that thing. Oh, you know, maybe this is a forerunner of Hindu traditions. But the linguistic and now paleogenic evidence shows that the Indo-Europeans, who were the precursors of Hinduism, came in significantly after the Indus Valley

civilisation. 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 first started digging up the Indus Valley civilization at Mohanjadaro. 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, there was thought to be ethifalic. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. To explain what that means. Yes, it's the depiction of a deity with a rather erect phallus. Exactly, exactly. So, 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, shins are going 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 Marshall'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 Beast. And he's also known as the kind of first teacher of yoga.

So it became known as the Paschupati seal, which is, as I said, is the name of the Hindu god Shiva, and people have understood the posture to be a yogic posture. But it's, you know, 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-elemite culture of southeastern Iran and Western Balochistan, 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 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 also, you know, 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 techs 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. 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. Yeah, that's flimsy. I mean, so 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 BC? And then the Indo-Europeans who bring the Vedic texts with them into India don't really arrive until about 1,500, maybe 1,700, 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. 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 text we have then and how they describe yoga by that time. I must ask first, the word yoga, do we know what it means? 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 pages. 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, Yudge, which means, has two meanings, which complicates the meaning of yoga a little bit already. So I talked about Parnany, the grammarian, in his list of the roots from which you can form Sanskrit words, Yudj 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, you know, 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 through yoking it to you and that sense does kind of carry on into later yoga. It's 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, whatever you want to praise it. So there's that sense of yoke there. We do also in the Vedas, there's a famous hymn called the Kachin him. and Keishin, 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-colored 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 Vedas. And then he's communing with the gods. He's having some kind of mystical experience. And so he is seen as a foreruner of these ascetic. that I was talking about earlier, who, as I met you see them still today, in India, they might be wearing ochre robes. It might go naked, like the Cachian in the hymn.

Nowadays, well, they might drink, bung, cannabis drink, but they'd also sort of smoking chilums 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's seen as the kind of yoga practitioners par excellence. So people, you can read into that, may be 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, which becomes key to yoga practice later on, so harnessing, 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 text of the Rig Veda, the one called the Jiamenir Brahman Up Upanishad. It's the complicated because it's a Brahman Up Upanishad, so it comes before. Anyway, it's probably about nine. It's old. It's about 900 BC. And that talks about, you know, meditating with Ohm whilst controlling the breath and so forth. And then just, yeah, to finish with the Vedas, the most recent of them, still very old, the Atara Veda, which was probably composed around a thousand BCE. And it's 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 text. But it also mentions this intriguing band of young men called the Vratias, 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 the practices that become associated with the sort of hardcore ascetics from the 5th, 4th century BC onwards. And you find them today. Nowadays they call them Karisuri Sadis, and you'll find Sadis in India, men have been standing up for 20 years.

Yeah, these days almost always men. Actually, fun 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. I kind of look at my classicist colleagues in Oxford and elsewhere studying a dead civilization, whereas in India we can study this material and it's still there, it's still going on today. 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, do we think roughly from each other? And yet, although it feels that this isn't concrete evidence that it is yoga, I mean, they're linked to these ascetics 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. 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 to apply to that sort of set of practices. But 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 Qatar Upanishad. And that's the first one that uses yoga in a sense that we would understand it. And the breath is controlled and it's to do with. harnessing the senses. But the Upanishads, or the later ones, the dating of Sanskrit text is

really impossible, really difficult. Well, before we go into the Upanishads, I do have also in my notes like the date 500 BC and a group called the Schramanas. Is it important to do them first? Or you are the experts, so I don't want to interrupt too much. Well, yeah, that's why. So the dating's tricky because there's arguments about who came first, the Shromanas or the early Upanishads. I think there was a kind of... 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 north-east, 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 he calls Greater Magadha, which is a kind of big, important kingdom. the 5th century BC is when these shramana traditions appear and they're very 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 but so it's it's where buddhism appears it's where the buddha he was in part ali put through wasn't it he went out and you know that's when he went out of the palace and that's in the ganges area is it yeah exactly in the sort of eastern ganges area and also the jane religion develops there at the same time as buddhism various other we got a few you know scant references we haven't got a lot of materials one called the arjivikas and then there are lots of other you know weird little ascetic traditions that we get references to but what the sort of key thing that happens there if one follows bronchor's theory which i tend tend to is that so the buddha sees all this suffering and basically

then decides that you know the life is suffering and we all It's also within this milieu that we first see the notion of rebirth, because we don't get a formulae, you know, well-formed doctrine of rebirth of, you know, reincarnation in the Vedas. People, again, you know, wants 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, shramanus. So aesthetic, if I use the word ascetic, that could include Hindu-Vedic traditions, but shramaners, that is used to refer really to the non-Vadic 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, you know, 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. You know, he says he's fasted for as long as is possible without dying and got no benefit from that. And he says he's held his breath for as long as, you know, 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 mudjum and the kai of the parley 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 the the sort of the best accepted version of the story is that he then decides that all this hardcore asceticism is points. 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 Jane renounces Jain ascetics. You'll see them in India sometimes. You'll see them walking down the, the side of the motorway, start naked. Often, or sometimes they might have a cloth over their mouths

and they're sweeping the part of 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 don't know, they think they may harm tiny little living organisms. You know, they're the kind of most extreme non-violence of these traditions. And in fact of this, so the theory that they developed about karma, you know, this idea that they basically decided that all action is bad,

but you also have to get, so you, 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 acquire a crew 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 jam every now. It becomes quite a lot of fanfare.

Some monk will say, right, that's it. And they call it Salik. And so the Buddha was kind of, he said, okay, these guys are too much. And I don't think it's doing them any good. And he chooses his part. But it's in that kind of milieu, so this idea of Ahn-Sah non-violence,

which then, of course, manifests in vegetarianism. So all these things that we now associate closely with Hinduism, the kind of receive wisdom these days is that they developed in that milieu. Now that's not to say that Vedic aesthetics, Vedic renouncers, were not involved in all of this as well. They would have been mixing.

And so the Upanishads are like the first text 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, they're not, you know, it's not sitting around a fire, throwing things in and chanting hymns and 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 of meditation and breath control and then posture in terms of sort of what's in Sanskrit is the sort of forerunner of the gymnastic postures we see today, although that kind of body positive body cultivation thing doesn't come into much later, probably about a thousand years ago. So posture in the

early days just means sitting down cross-legged in a good posture for meditation and breath control. So the Apanishads are when they actually mention yoga as a discipline. They've made yoga the name. The word yoga has now got the association of this. It 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 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, you know, whether you envisage it out as the union of your individual self with the universal self or with, or just

becoming one with God or something like that. So it doesn't mean the practice. You see what I mean? 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 Kato Upanishad, which I said, it's probably around the 3rd century BC. It's the first time we see it used in that way, and it seems to denote a practice involving breadth of control and meditation. And is it defined by this chariot's story that we hear about?

Yeah, that metaphor keeps cropping up. So can you explain this metaphor and how it's used to describe yoga at that time? Yeah, I'll have to try and remember the different parts of it. I think the artman, 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. Oh, sorry, the horses are the senses. And you've got to pull them in and that's seen as yoking. And then so by 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 the earth. 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 tradition,

it's 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, 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, you know, 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'll attain final emancipation and liberation. 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 in 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?

Yes, so we're already, by the... We've got to the 3rd century BC, and that's the 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... It can be kings, not just regular aesthetics,

or announcers 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 the 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 austerity, they might often do it with a specific worldly end in mind. So you get your stories of people going and like Raban, and they acquired as 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, you know, maybe standing up for years or then. 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 managers have seduced the ascetic and he shows 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. It's interesting links to 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 the aesthetic life of those earliest monks. So you can see potential links there between the monks of Christianity and the aesthetics that you mentioned. Yeah, sure. And also makes me think

of visit life of Brian Monty Python when you've got it. Suddenly he gets, you know, tricked out of his 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 yet. 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, you know, some kind of power that you're after. So we have that, yeah, 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 you're being on Alexander, we get a reference in Strabo.

See, I'm probably one mispronagnet now. And I know that Strabo is a bit later, isn't it, a bit after the answer? He is. 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 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. stuff. So they're fascinated by that. Right. Well, in there, because I haven't read much of it, but of course I've 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 I say, near Taksila, somewhere like that, up near the Indus River. North question. And these Indian

holy men is a, I think it'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 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 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 as part and parts of this whole system of facetic 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. You did mention earlier that next key text that we're going to explore, this key Indian epic, the Mahabarata, didn't realize it was so much longer than the Oedasy and the Iliad combined. But it takes several centuries to complete, isn't it? Yes. Again, you know, some people would argue against that, but the general received opinion is it sort of takes 600, you know, from about 3rd century BC to the 3rd century C

before it obtains its final form. And of course it's probably telling stories that are way older than that as 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 Mahabarata? And because of that, do you then see potential mentions of yoga in the Mahabarata too? 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 Paravan. There's 18 books. And the end of that's called the Mokshedharamaparaban. And there, someone giving instructions who is it, Hishma's dying and getting instructions on liberation at death and using methods of yoga, like I said earlier. Yoga is often associated with depth.

And there, again, breath control comes up a lot, but also the primary method of yoga is meditation. So I just reiterate that in those days, early days, it was breath control and meditation whilst seated in a, you know, like lotus posture or something like that. But also part of the Mahamharata is the Bhagwagata. Yes. What is this?

Because this seems really, really interesting in regards to the development of yoga. Absolutely. And this is where the sort of chink comes in to the whole assessment. kind of fortress that's been built around yoga, where it's seen to be the preserve of kind of, you know, more hardcore. Yes. Weirder people, it sounds like. And what one, you know, if one looks at the bigger picture,

one can see that this, you know, 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 urbanisation in India and then sort of disease and so forth appears. Life gets a bit tough. So they're trying to see cancers for it. Are we being punished or something?

Yeah. And so people then look at ways to deal with that. But if you get these renancer groups, you know, 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 jane saints and so forth. And then maybe also within the Hindu traditions, that's a challenge. that's a challenge to the mainstream, you know, the mainstream Vedic priests who kind of, you know, 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, you know, takes a fancy to these charismatic yogis on the edge of town who are a bit more fun to hang out with than the state old Brahmins. So you can see kind of, 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 Karovas, are facing each other. And Arjuna, who's one of the Pandava brothers, for reasons that will take too long to explain, but the God Krishna is his charioteer. He's, you know, on the battlefield, he says, I can't do this. I can't go and kill my, because they're related. So I said, I can't go and kill my cousin. And so the Bhagavad Gita means the song, the Gita of the Lord Bhagavat, which means so it's Krishna's teaching.

And basically the whole point of it is Krishna telling Arjuna, no, you've got to fight. You know, this is your duty. It's your birth-given duty. You shouldn't renounce you. So, you know, Arrida wants to say, I don't want to do this. I want to go and, you know, become a holy man in the forest and give up on all this nonsense. And so Krishna very cleverly reworks, you know, 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, you're sitting down to meditate and do breath control. Krishna gives these teachings. But it's hard to make full sense of it. He's teaching that that practice gives you the equanimity

that will enable you to carry, 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's saying that through doing that you can still get liberation. And how does that then allow people from then on. Now, yoga becoming more accepted that people can do who aren't ascetics, who don't have to start this difficult life.

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're just going to do what you're, you know, you've been put on earth to do. That through doing that, you can get the same reward or that better reward than if you go off to the forest

and hang out with his... So you don't need to do all of that stuff. Yeah. Yeah, you don't need... And he specifically says you don't need to do these extreme practices that are mortifying the body and so forth. And then it 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 the... It's a fantastic part of the Bhagavaita. And, you know, he says key to this practice

is devotion to him as well. You know, you've got to be completely yet devoted to Krishna as the godhead. 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? 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-athetics, non-professionals doing yoga. I mean, it may be that people read the Bhaghita 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. You're not going to carve sort of statues of the cobbler who's quickly sitting doing a bit of breath control or something like that.

But it doesn't seem to become particularly widespread, no. But it does mean that it is opened up to everyone. 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 Yogukara Buddha's. Oh, Yogachara. Yorgachara. See, you're helping with me, the pronunciation so much.

Well, it's tricky because there's a special system of transliterating Sanskrit words, which you need to be initiated in there. You need to be able to pronounce them. If you do, once you've been initiated, you can pronounce anything. It's much easier than English. But Yoga-Chara Buddhism, yeah. So that's an early form of Buddhism. The Yogachara, 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 Hata 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 Partangula Yoga Shastra means that the yoga text, the yoga shastra of Patanjali, and Partangula is the adjective from Patanjali. So there's a 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, which is why we have to say this. You can't just say the Tanjali's Yoga Sutras, you have to say the whole lot because it means the sutras and then the auto-commentary. There's a thing that from 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. And is the Patangeli Yoga Sutra? Is that Hindu or is that... 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. Well, it's, one must remember that in fact there were lots of other philosophical traditions, doing yoga, who did not hear to what Petunjali taught. Like Yogachara Buddhism, for example. Exactly. Exactly. And in fact, so I did this with my colleague Mark Singleton, we did this book, Routes 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 Patangeli when we were translating that. Because it's full of terms that I didn't recognize at all, and I realized after a while that the best place to look for them was in the Buddhist Sanskrit Diction. because Potanjali 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 yoghachara buddism he also takes sort of ethical ideas from jane tradition so he's magpie is a collector bringing lots of different traditions in there all the kind of male ascetics but for him for brahmins you know so he's it's definitely a

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's 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. Well, I was going to say, so he collects all these different practices from different, you know, kind of groups into this text, and is this almost, as you say, the foundational text, is this like the first official manual of yoga? that we have surviving then. Well, I wouldn't say it's the first,

because actually in the Mahabharata, we get these short teachings on yoga. Yoga Chara's 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, in these yoga teacher trainings I mentioned earlier,

they usually have to study Patanjali, for which I pity them greatly. It's extremely difficult. Like I said, probably the hardest yoga text out there. The technical terms in it are 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 control is in there.

So what are the key practices that they talk about then in this? Well, the key, again, it's a bit of a layered text. It's very difficult to make sense of, but to make it completely coherent. Maybe one of the core teachings for which it becomes most famous is the Ashtanga yoga practice. And Ashta Unger means eight. limbs, some people don't like the word limb but it's a yoga practice with eight parts to eight limbs. So you've got the yamas and the niomas

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 our Hinsai is 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 Arsena, then Pranayama, breath control, which is basically holding the breath, you know, sort of control, breathing, and then holding the breath. Then Pratiyahara, 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, you're just functioning with what's within your person. So not withdrawal from the world, like, as a person. That's not what that means, but the text is definitely geared at Brahmin male renounces. Okay, so that, however we got to Pratiahara. 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 on sort of meditation proper. Dharana has been sort of fixation. So you fix your attention on a single point. Then Dhyana, which is a kind of... form of Dharana of the fixation. And you can have an object, the yana,

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, and 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, shiturritin, the rhoda, 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. So have the more harsh parts of yoga, have they kind of gone then by this time?

You know, as you said, the raising of a plank above your head. Well, no, actually. I mean, in Patangeli, so within the Niamas, I think, it is always getting confused between the Yamas and the Niamas, 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 extreme, so hot and cold and so forth. And then one of the things is actually Starnasana, which means standing and sitting,

which later commentators understand meaning standing up for long periods, sitting down for long periods. So, no, it's still kind of seen as a prerequisite of success in yoga. 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 picturing yoga by that time? I would say it's still the reserve of professionals, you know, there's a 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 practices, 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 eight hundred years. And so yoga develops also within that tradition. get a spicing up of what's going on. I mean, Tantra, obviously, in the kind of collective understanding

that, it's 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 Tantra traditions. And we still got quite a way to go before we get to anything quite similar to that, which resembles modern yoga today, I'm guessing. With the next big turning point, it's 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 from three or four centuries and then becomes fairly steady state. And then the 20th century, everything goes crazy. I don't know what time to talk about that. Well, Jim, I'm very grateful for you going a bit out of your comfort zone then to kind of 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 on. 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 think we'll ever find one and that's such a fascinating thing to study. There's always been development, hasn't there, and many different strands, Hindu, Buddhists and so on and so indeed, yeah. 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. Thank you, Tristan. It's a pleasure. Well, there you go. There was Professor Jim Mallinson talking you through the origins of yoga and its roots in ancient India. I hope you enjoyed the episode. Thank you for listening. Please follow the ancients on Spotify or wherever you get to your podcasts. That really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. 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 at free, and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at history hit.com slash subscribe. That's enough from me. I'll see you in the next episode.