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The Critical Religion Association

~ Critical Approaches to the Study of Religion

The Critical Religion Association

Tag Archives: Buddhist

Contextualizing yoga: modern practices in a western world

03 Monday Feb 2014

Posted by Sihaya in Critical Religion, Erasmus University of Rotterdam

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Buddhist, Critical Religion, Hindu, religion, spiritualities, yoga

For many people across the world yoga is a way of ensuring a healthy life away from sedentary habits, a way of decreasing stress and increasing general wellbeing. However, the religious or spiritual element present in the practice of yoga may scare people who are concerned about religious purity or the integrity of their beliefs. Some might believe that yoga contradicts their religion, others might think of it as devil’s work. But is modern yoga a form of spiritual or religious practice?

Yoga as encountered in the West, is foremost based on Hatha Yoga and as such places emphasis foremost on bodily postures, breathing exercises and meditation. Indeed ‘yoga, as it appears today, is a recent interpretation of an ancient practice’ (Hoyez 2007: 114) which originates from the Indian subcontinent. Because of its origins yoga has often been thought as ‘hindu’, a term that is in itself very broad.

Mik365

Image © M.T. Vaczi

Yoga stems from the Vedas, the holy texts composed around 1900BC, which also form the basis of three major religions: Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism. Patanjali’s ‘Yoga Sutras’, dating from approximately 2000 years ago is considered the first text that distinguishes Yoga from other systems of thought and religious practice. In his book Patanjali advocates a complete and complex way of life and not only a set of physical exercises. His ‘eight limbs’ of yoga, which still inform practice today, include abstentions (development of compassion), observances (awareness of ourselves and others), bodily postures (chanelling energy), breathing practices (controlling life force), abstraction (managing the senses), concentration (focusing) and meditation (total absorption) (Alter 2005). Each school of Yoga builds upon these elements, combining and interpreting them in a specific manner.

Often thought as an elaborate form of gymnastics, modern western yoga has lost most of its original philosophical underpinnings and has taken distance from most of its religious roots. Yoga has become a western practice whose popularity has been made possible by the process of individualization and its formation of ‘new-age’ spirituality, but also by the commodification of urban wellbeing. After becoming global, yoga has become increasingly decentralized and the Indian influence has been gradually lost. We live in a time of ‘indigenous yogas’ with a baffling diversity of styles and types, often adapted to specific local circumstances (Hoyez 2007) that highlight foremost wellbeing, health and internal peace. Furthermore, emphasis is placed foremost on its physical aspects while its spiritual or religious parts are contrived, if present at all. The specific combination of these factors makes modern yoga resemble more a therapeutic practice (Hoyez 2007) than a spiritual or religious one.

However, modern yoga is a therapeutic system of bodily exercises that also voices philosophical, cultural or political concerns. Furthermore, it is experienced as an active form of changing one’s life to the better. It emphasizes on self-realization (Alter 2004, De Michelis 2004). As such, modern yoga has constructed an alternative form of being religious or spiritual which creatively picks up and repackages a few elements of the Indian traditions while combining them with specific global and local concerns. For example, in yoga discourse, the consumption of raw- and super-foods is connected as much to the formation of a healthy body, to maintaining a good world energy, contributing to fair trade and to sustaining ecological system. These concerns are both extremely varied and tailored to specific audiences: yoga games targeting children require players to perform postures imitating animals while yoga for older adults yoga will make use of props for attaining some bodily postures (Patel el al. 2011). While children yoga will ‘play’ with the ‘inner child’, older adult yoga allows one to ‘find the right energetic balance’ and ‘age youthfully’. Furthermore, yoga can be practiced as a form of union with the ‘universe’, ‘God’, ‘nature’ or ‘oneself’, depending on the inclinations and beliefs of its practitioners. Some yoga classes use a borrowed religious imaginary: the yoga mat becomes a prayer mat while some postures recall prayer. Some classes include the chanting of Hindu sutras, others refer to a ‘life force’ or ‘energy’. A session may include a greeting of ‘namaste’ or a gesture of prayer. There might be a moment of meditation or time for chanting the ‘Om’ considered as the primordial sound by both Hindus and Buddhists. While these might be considered spiritual activities, they do not come to the fore in every yoga practice. Some classes and schools of yoga may make no overt reference to spirituality at all.

Nevertheless, modern yoga makes both physical and inner, ‘spiritual’ transformation possible, as yoga practitioners explained to me. Modern yoga, they highlighted, works through the effort of the body and ends in a general feeling of ‘feeling good about myself’. Yoga practices create an awareness of the self and a possibility of directly ‘improving’ one’s life. One realizes that ‘there is something bigger out there’. One ‘learns’ what are one’s possibilities, and through repeated exercise, learns also to ‘deal with that terrible pain’ and ‘overcome one’s limits’. Yoga offers its practitioners a permission to be happy ‘as I did the best I could for myself’ but also creates the feeling of ‘being in control’ and being in touch with ‘something bigger’. However, some of the practitioners I have been talking to have not described their experience as necessarily religious or spiritual, rather as an encounter with the ‘real self’ that requires no belief, but ‘just happens’.

This baffling inner diversity of practices points out that yoga is far from being a unitary phenomenon. Although most forms of yoga have their roots in the Indian subcontinent, each different school and group works with a specific interpretation of what yoga is, tailored to the more immediate concerns of western practitioners. The religious or spiritual content of yoga classes does not only depend on each yoga school’s approach, but also on the personal aspirations and capabilities of yoga practitioners. As such, western yoga practices have a different view of spirituality and make different use of religious elements then ‘Indian’ yoga, where the ultimate goal is moksha or liberation. Furthermore, western yoga can mainly be considered as a form of physical exercise that increases general wellbeing. In order to ensure and expand the state of wellbeing and relaxation, spiritual and religious practices may be used or hinted at. However, in the context of western modernity, yoga’s goal of ultimate liberation transforms foremost into the celebration and glorification of the self.

—–

Alter, J. S. 2005. Modern medical yoga: struggling with a history of magic, alchemy and sex. Leiden: Brill.

De Michelis, E. 2005. A history of modern yoga. London: Continuum.

Hoyez, A.-C. 2007. The ‘world of yoga’: The production and reproduction of therapeutic landscapes. Social Science & Medicine. 65 (1): 112-124.

Patel, N. K., S. Akkihebbalu, S. E. Espinoza, and L. K. Chiodo. 2011. Perceptions of a Community-Based Yoga Intervention for Older Adults. Activities, Adaptation & Aging. 35 (2): 151-163.

Strauss, S. 2005. Positioning yoga balancing acts across cultures. Oxford: Berg.

A polemic on the World Interfaith Harmony Week

28 Monday Mar 2011

Posted by Michael Marten in Critical Religion, University of Stirling

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Buddhist, Christian, Critical Religion, Hindu, interfaith dialogue, Jew, Muslim, religion, United Nations

On 26.10.2010, the United Nations General Assembly voted unanimously to create World Interfaith Harmony Week, a resolution first proposed by King Abdullah II of Jordan, who, together with his brother Prince Hassan, has long been a proponent of such things, partly also for domestic political reasons.  The first week of February has been designated as World Interfaith Harmony Week, to be marked around the world, with governments encouraged to support and promote the aims and objectives of this week.

But I think there is a fundamental problem here: I don’t think there is or can be any such thing as interfaith (or interreligious) dialogue.  I do not, of course, have any objection to the creation of a week dedicated to greater harmony in the world.  Nobody could really deny the merits of increasing harmony between people and peoples on personal and global levels: after all, the problems of sexism, racism, war etc. are all around us, and indeed, often seem to overwhelm us.  The problem here lies with the ‘interfaith’ element.  Of course, there can be dialogue between individuals who might describe themselves in particular faith terms.  But whilst acknowledging that there are differences between the terms ‘faith’ and ‘religion’, and that what 10 or 20 years ago used to be ‘interreligious dialogue’ is now ‘interfaith dialogue’ (and I caricature only slightly here!), I want to argue that the premises of such dialogue as ‘interfaith dialogue’ do not stand up to substantial critical scrutiny.

Tracing the usage of the term ‘religion’ over the centuries, we can see it changing in different contexts.  For example, in the Catholic/Protestant West, we can point very broadly (and, admittedly, rather simplistically) to changes in understanding over recent centuries:

  1. initially seen as being Christian (having religion) OR being apostate (not having religion), this changed with colonialism to
  2. an understanding of religion predicated upon a different form of normativity and closely connected to racism: people were either religious (Christian or some other – generally ‘inferior’ – recognised form of belief that western Christians considered to be in some way similar to their understanding of Christianity; the ‘creation of Hinduism’ being a perfect example of this, as scholars such as Geoffrey Oddie have discussed), OR they were superstitious or heathen (their practices were not understood by western missionaries and colonialists; so-called ‘African traditional religions’ are a perfect example of this), on to
  3. a more contemporary ideological understanding of many religions, of which Christianity is but one amongst equals, alongside the so-called ‘other great religions of the world’.

The main problem with this understanding is that it equates an essentialised understanding of what Christian faith is with an essentialised understanding of what Muslim tradition, Jewish practice, Hindu belief etc. is.  In doing so, all of these traditions are divorced from the individuals who see themselves as adherents, practitioners, devotees etc. – even the description of what people do and are in these different contexts is problematic!

If we think about the term ‘faith’ we can point to similar problems: for example, what does faith mean for a Christian, and what does it mean for a Jew?  Firstly there is again the problem of essentialisation – ask one Christian or one Jew about their understanding, and their Christian or Jewish neighbour may well offer quite a different one.  But even if we could put this aside (and I don’t think we really can), we might say that a Christian would point to the centrality of salvific belief through the death and resurrection of Jesus for her ‘faith’, whilst a Jew would point to the centrality of grateful obedience and freedom in God’s law for his ‘faith’.  In other words, we are comparing almost entirely different understandings of belief and practice – whilst pretending that all these things can be described equally as ‘faith’ (or indeed, religion).

We can see these problems even on the WIHW website, which has the byline ‘Love of God & Love of the Neighbour, or Love of the Good & Love of the Neighbour’.  An ‘or’ clause is certainly one way of attempting to cover all bases: it is, after all, something of a cliché to ask who the ‘God’ is that a Buddhist might be directing their attention to (a Buddhist from Britain, India, Tibet…? again, essentialisation), but whether ‘the Good’ is an appropriate alternative universal truth comparable to any given individual’s understanding of God, has to be open to question.  The sentiment behind the creation of ‘Harmony Beads’ for use in prayer by Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and Catholics is another example of such muddled thinking.

So if neither faith nor religion can serve as useful comparative or relational concepts, it is perhaps intellectually more honest and practically more fruitful to abandon the pretence of ‘interfaith’ dialogue in favour of simple ‘interhuman’ dialogue.  It is, after all, in relationships that we discover ourselves and one another, rather than in monolithic ideological constructs founded on varying precepts.  If our theologies, principles, religious laws or injunctions hinder or prevent such relationships, then that is surely what we should be seeking to address and change.  After all, if dialogue between individuals can be centred around a demanding common task such as the creation of just economic systems and sustainable ecological environments, the overcoming of patriarchy or liberation from oppressive political regimes (the list could go on!), then these human connections will also lead to improved understanding of what moves and motivates engagement by each individual, whether they describe this as faith, religion, belief, practice, ritual… and that will be a more meaningful encounter than any World Interfaith Harmony Week can possibly lead to.

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