What yoga can teach us the hindu

Religion, for the most part, has nothing to do with it. 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. That suggestion, modest though it may seem, has drawn a flurry of strong reactions from figures far apart on the religious spectrum. Deepak Chopra, the New Age writer, has dismissed the campaign as a jumble of faulty history and Hindu nationalism. Albert Mohler Jr.

There is a broad variety of yoga schools, practices, and goals [3] in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. The practice of yoga has been thought to date back to pre- vedic Indian traditions; possibly in the Indus valley civilization around BCE. Yoga is mentioned in the Rigveda, [note 1] and also referenced in the Upanishads, [8] [9]. Yoga gurus from India later introduced yoga to the West, [17] following the success of Swami Vivekananda in the late 19th and early 20th century with his adaptation of yoga tradition, excluding asanas. The spiritual sense of the word yoga first arises in Epic Sanskrit, in the second half of the 1st millennium BCE, and is associated with the philosophical system presented in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, with the chief aim of “uniting” the human spirit with the Divine spirit. The term Yoga has been defined in various ways in the many different Indian philosophical and religious traditions. The ultimate goal of Yoga is Moksha liberation, although the exact form this takes depends on the philosophical or theological system with which it is conjugated.

Nor does its acknowledgment of Ms signify a denial that moral on human behavior. Jnana Yoga, preferred by those relativity, whether in physics or on a level of values, to see the divine reality within all things directly, by mentally brushing aside all the. Chopra and some religious historians.