Yoga: A Historical Perspective

"To remain ignorant of what happened before one was born is to remain ever a child."

-- Cicero, The Orator

Yoga has a fascinating and storied history. Serious devotees of any discipline or field of endeavor are always interested in understanding what came before; the historical perspective enlarges one’s appreciation of that discipline. The history of the yogic tradition is immense, reaching back thousands of years. It could easily fill volumes; in this article and the one to follow, I intend only to adumbrate it. This article will provide a sketch of Vedic and Preclassical Yoga; in the one to come, we'll take a brief look at its Classical and Postclassical forms.


About 5,000 years ago, yoga emerged as a spiritual pursuit among the itinerant gurus of the Indus-Sarasvati civilization. It is named for its emergence at the intersection of two great rivers in what is now India and part of Pakistan. In the early 20th century, archaeologists discovered the ruins of this ancient (but by no means primitive) culture. The discovery challenged the then-conventional wisdom that yoga was the province of Gautauma Buddha and his early Buddhist disciples hundreds of years later. The archaeological digs in the ancient cities of Harappa and Mohenjo Daro revealed a great many engraved figures of the earliest yogis. The continuity between the Indus civilization and the later Indian Hindu tradition also became evident at that time.

There has been considerable disagreement among scholars as to whether yoga was an invention of the Indus people themselves, that of Aryan invaders from the North, or one of the many cultural fusions of the two civilizations. What is clear is that the Indus people had a thriving maritime economy and prosperous, well-developed urban centers that provided its people with sufficient leisure time to create a variety of artistic, literary and spiritual traditions.

The Rig Veda, an ancient religious text written in proto-Sanskrit, is the source of what are considered the earliest yoga “scriptures.” The word translates loosely to our word “yoke,” and implies the fusing of the spiritual and the physical. As yoga practitioners, we are part of a centuries-old tradition from the longest continuing civilizations in the world: that of India. This part of the world gave us not only the incredibly rich legacy of the Hindu tradition, but also the earliest Buddhist and Jain movements.

A brief sketch of Classical and Postclassical yoga to follow!



Copyright Ⓒ 2013 by William K. Ferro
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