USA: Hinduism peddlers push for ownership of yoga / and others try to give it s religious twist

The New York Times
Published: November 27, 2010

Hindu Group Stirs a Debate Over Yoga’s Soul

“Nobody owns yoga,” says Debbie Desmond, an instructor.

By PAUL VITELLO

Yoga is practiced by about 15 million people in the United States, for reasons almost as numerous — from the physical benefits mapped in brain scans to the less tangible rewards that New Age journals call spiritual centering. Religion, for the most part, has nothing to do with it.

Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times

A yoga class being held at Saraswathi Hall in Flushing, Queens, across the street from Hindu Temple Society of North America.


But a group of Indian-Americans has ignited a surprisingly fierce debate in the gentle world of yoga by mounting a campaign to acquaint Westerners with the faith that it says underlies every single yoga style followed in gyms, ashrams and spas: Hinduism.

The campaign, labeled “Take Back Yoga,” does not ask yoga devotees to become Hindu, or instructors to teach more about Hinduism. The small but increasingly influential group behind it, the Hindu American Foundation, suggests only that people become more aware of yoga’s debt to the faith’s ancient traditions.

That suggestion, modest though it may seem, has drawn a flurry of strong reactions from figures far apart on the religious spectrum. Dr. Deepak Chopra, the New Age writer, has dismissed the campaign as a jumble of faulty history and Hindu nationalism. R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has said he agrees that yoga is Hindu — and cited that as evidence that the practice imperiled the souls of Christians who engage in it.

The question at the core of the debate — who owns yoga? — has become an enduring topic of chatter in yoga Web forums, Hindu American newspapers and journals catering to the many consumers of what is now a multibillion-dollar yoga industry.

In June, it even prompted the Indian government to begin making digital copies of ancient drawings showing the provenance of more than 4,000 yoga poses, to discourage further claims by entrepreneurs like Bikram Choudhury, an Indian-born yoga instructor to the stars who is based in Los Angeles. Mr. Choudhury nettled Indian officials in 2007 when he copyrighted his personal style of 26 yoga poses as “Bikram Yoga.”

Organizers of the Take Back Yoga effort point out that the philosophy of yoga was first described in Hinduism’s seminal texts and remains at the core of Hindu teaching. Yet, because the religion has been stereotyped in the West as a polytheistic faith of “castes, cows and curry,” they say, most Americans prefer to see yoga as the legacy of a more timeless, spiritual “Indian wisdom.”

“In a way,” said Dr. Aseem Shukla, the foundation’s co-founder, “our issue is that yoga has thrived, but Hinduism has lost control of the brand.”

For many practitioners, including Debbie Desmond, 27, a yoga instructor in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the talk of branding and ownership is bewildering.

“Nobody owns yoga,” she said, sitting cross-legged in her studio, Namaste Yoga, and tilting her head as if the notion sketched an impossible yoga position she had never seen. “Yoga is not a religion. It is a way of life, a method of becoming. We were taught that the roots of yoga go back further than Hinduism itself.”

Like Dr. Chopra and some religious historians, Ms. Desmond believes that yoga originated in the Vedic culture of Indo-Europeans who settled in India in the third millennium B.C., long before the tradition now called Hinduism emerged. Other historians trace the first written description of yoga to the Bhagavad Gita, the sacred Hindu scripture believed to have been written between the fifth and second centuries B.C.

The effort to “take back” yoga began quietly enough, with a scholarly essay posted in January on the Web site of the Hindu American Foundation, a Minneapolis-based group that promotes human rights for Hindu minorities worldwide. The essay lamented a perceived snub in modern yoga culture, saying that yoga magazines and studios had assiduously decoupled the practice “from the Hinduism that gave forth this immense contribution to humanity.”

Dr. Shukla put a sharper point on his case a few months later in a column on the On Faith blog of The Washington Post. Hinduism, he wrote, had become a victim of “overt intellectual property theft,” made possible by generations of Hindu yoga teachers who had “offered up a religion’s spiritual wealth at the altar of crass commercialism.”

That drew the attention of Dr. Chopra, an Indian-American who has done much to popularize Indian traditions like alternative medicine and yoga. He posted a reply saying that Hinduism was too “tribal” and “self-enclosed” to claim ownership of yoga.

The fight went viral — or as viral as things can get in a narrow Web corridor frequented by yoga enthusiasts, Hindu Americans and religion scholars.

Loriliai Biernacki, a professor of Indian religions at the University of Colorado, said the debate had raised important issues about a spectrum of Hindu concepts permeating American culture, including meditation, belief in karma and reincarnation, and even cremation.

“All these ideas are Hindu in origin, and they are spreading,” she said. “But they are doing it in a way that leaves behind the proper name, the box that classifies them as ‘Hinduism.’ ”

The debate has also secured the standing of the Hindu American Foundation as the pre-eminent voice for the country’s two million Hindus, said Diana L. Eck, a professor of comparative religion and Indian studies at Harvard. Other groups represent Indian-Americans’ interests in business and politics, but the foundation has emerged as “the first major national advocacy group looking at Hindu identity,” she said.

Dr. Shukla said reaction to the yoga campaign had far exceeded his expectations.

“We started this, really, for our kids,” said Dr. Shukla, a urologist and a second-generation Indian-American. “When our kids go to school and say they are Hindu, nobody says, ‘Oh, yeah, Hindus gave the world yoga.’ They say, ‘What caste are you?’ Or ‘Do you pray to a monkey god?’ Because that’s all Americans know about Hinduism.”

With its tiny budget, the foundation has pressed its campaign largely by generating buzz through letters and Web postings to academic journals and yoga magazines. The September issue of Yoga Journal, which has the largest circulation in the field, alluded to the campaign, if fleetingly, in an article calling yoga’s “true history a mystery.”

The effort has been received most favorably by Indian-American community leaders like Dr. Uma V. Mysorekar, the president of the Hindu Temple Society of North America, in Flushing, Queens, which helps groups across the country build temples.

A naturalized immigrant, she said Take Back Yoga represented a coming-of-age for Indians in the United States. “My generation was too busy establishing itself in business and the professions,” she said. “Now, the second and third generation is looking around and finding its voice, saying, ‘Our civilization has made contributions to the world, and these should be acknowledged.’ ”

In the basement of the society’s Ganesha Temple, an hourlong yoga class ended one recent Sunday morning with a long exhalation of the sacred syllable “om.” Via the lung power of 60 students, it sounded as deeply as a blast from the organ at St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

After the session, which began and concluded with Hindu prayers, many students said they were practicing Hindus and in complete sympathy with the yoga campaign.

Not all were, though. Shweta Parmar, 35, a community organizer and project director for a health and meditation group, said she had grown up in a Hindu household. “Yoga is part of the tradition I come from,” she said.

But is yoga specifically Hindu? She paused to ponder. “My parents are Hindu,” she said. But in matters of yoga, “I don’t use that term.”


A version of this article appeared in print on November 28, 2010, on page A1 of the New York edition.

------


See Also

The New York Times
November 27, 2010, 7:30 pm

Stretch | Bending With a Holy Twist

By LIZETTE ALVAREZ

Silva Pillitteri attends yoga at the Church of St. Paul the Apostle in Manhattan.Michael Kirby Smith for The New York Times Silva Pillitteri attends yoga at the Church of St. Paul the Apostle in Manhattan.

Amy Russell has taught Christian yoga for three years.Michael Kirby Smith for The New York Times Amy Russell has taught Christian yoga for three years.

I SAT on my mat inside the parish center at St. Paul the Apostle, a Roman Catholic church just around the corner from Columbus Circle, and began the evening’s yoga class, not with a long “om” but with the simple words of St. Francis of Assisi.

“Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love. Where there is injury, pardon. Where there is doubt, faith.”

This was Christian yoga, where asanas, or poses, are taught with a twist of Jesus, and the Holy Trinity keeps you company. The teacher, Amy Russell, encouraged the class to quietly tap into our compassion, as St. Francis did.

“Can you find the peace in whatever movement you are in?” she asked. We moved into warrior pose, with our feet rooted firmly to the floor, and Ms. Russell asked, “Can you find the strength of being grounded in Christ through the center of your body?”

Nobody seems to know how many Christians practice yoga, or how many practice it in a Christian way, but the number of teachers, retreats, classes and DVDs geared toward Christians appear to be growing. Holy Yoga, which was founded by Brooke Boon in 2003 after she became a Christian, has released a series of DVDs and has trained 300 teachers. The Rev. Tom Ryan, one of the first to combine Christianity with yoga, has a network, Christians Practicing Yoga, that has trained teachers in spirituality based yoga techniques.
Beth O’Mara in a prayer posture.Michael Kirby Smith for The New York Times Beth O’Mara in a prayer posture.

But in recent weeks, an online brouhaha has erupted over whether Christianity and yoga, which is broadly associated with Hinduism, belong together. R. Albert Mohler Jr., a prominent evangelical leader, warned on his blog in September that the two were incompatible. “Christians are not called to empty the mind or to see the human body as a means of connecting to and coming to know the divine,” he said. “Believers are called to meditate upon the word of God.”

The press picked up on his words last month, and a furor ensued across the religious spectrum. Most of those who posted comments online seemed to disagree. The back-and-forth took another turn when the pastor of a Seattle megachurch called yoga “demonic.”

The ministers say they are worried that the Sanskrit chants and Hindu texts sometimes used in yoga classes will lead followers away from Jesus. But Christians who practice yoga say the opposite is true.

“One of the things that most Christians and most people don’t get is that yoga is not a religion,” Ms. Russell said.

“It does not belong to Hinduism anymore than it belongs to Christianity,” she said, adding that it “transcends religion.”

Some Christian yogis see the practice as intensifying their relationship with Jesus. Yoga can enhance meditation, gratitude and selflessness, making it easier to pray. Many yoga classes in New York do not linger on the Sanskrit chants and texts. But even if they did, there is a kind of universality to the teachings.

The Rev. Anthony Randazzo, pastor at Notre Dame Roman Catholic Church in North Caldwell, N.J., became a priest in 1986 and started yoga 10 years later. We’re talking serious yoga: hot vinyasa, Jivamukti, Bikram. (He recently attended the Bob Marley flow at Garden State Yoga in Bloomfield.) He brings his faith with him and powers it up.

“I am more deeply rooted in the Christian faith than ever,” said Father Randazzo, 50.

The Vatican frowns on this. In 1989, it issued a document stating that the practice of Eastern traditions like yoga “can degenerate into a cult of the body.” But Father Randazzo respectfully disagrees.

“I have been in many places with Sanskrit chants, and it has never led me to any other place than Christ,” he said. “It is a spiritual experience.”

He also teaches yoga at his church and in his community, and when he does, he often focuses on the Beatitudes — the blessings from Jesus. An entire class can be woven with prayers. “If yoga is giving me a sense of peace,” he said, “then I am able to somehow help people come to their own inner peace.”

As I leaned my own body into a triangle pose in Ms. Russell’s class at St. Paul’s, I harbored no doubts about the power of yoga to deepen faith: the peace, the discipline, even the occasional suffering help make room for gratitude, compassion and humility. It’s not just your body that feels lighter. It’s your soul.