Honoring The Origins of Yoga
Thousands of years ago, a movement of seekers emerged in the land that we now call India. Amid nascent cities, and in the midst of an increasingly rigid, stratified society, these rebels defied conventional norms. They walked away from their families and friends, out of the cities and into the forests and fields. Soaked by the monsoon rains and baked by the relentless sun, unprotected from venomous snakes, wild dogs and mountain cats, they gave themselves to a timeless quest for self-understanding. They traded comfort and safety for the adventure of hunting unadulterated truth.
In pilgrimage places throughout India today, you can find descendants of these seekers, smeared with sacred ash, calloused feet treading scorching asphalt streets and rocky forest paths. They carry all that they own, with the sky as their shelter and their hearts set on absolute liberation. Some mutter prayers and mantras as they walk, begging for food, traveling from sacred site to sacred site, tracing the steps of countless seekers before them. They live in caves and on riverbanks, by crematory grounds and abandoned shrines, seeking, striving, reaching for union with the absolute truth that has no opposite, no gradations.
India’s most ancient texts mention the luminous long haired munis, wearing dirt smeared garments and following the swirling path of the wind like the radiant ones before them (Rig Veda 10.136.1-2). The Rig Veda, the foundational text of many of India’s varied spiritual traditions, is a great symbolic song, and it paints an elaborate picture of a multidimensional cosmos populated by beings both seen and unseen. Some serve truth and harmony, and others obscure and divide. The Rig Veda tells us that there is more to reality, more to ourselves and our surroundings than what we can see and hear and touch and taste.
Ancient poet-seers received the timeless and eternal hymns of the Rig Veda. They called out to the stars and the sun, to the soul that embodies as rain and wind, to the source of inspiration and the divine lure that draws the human heart toward knowledge and understanding. And they drew forth a response, cultivated relationship. They lived in dialogue with an interactive universe, a cosmos that responds to our touch, that loves and nurtures us and draws us ever toward a wider and more encompassing reality.
These rishis, seers of the holy word, created a framework for living in this multidimensional cosmos. They illuminated the human condition, revealing the layers of our being, including the fundamental, undying, unharmable radiance that lures our conscious mind always toward truth, and the divine essence that pervades the universe like a sweet scent.
The first word of the Rig Veda is agnimīle. It means “I adore Agni”, “I adore the holy flame”. And the first phrase goes on to describe Agni as the priest, the officiant of the sacrifice, the one who stands as intermediary between the world of humans and the divine. Agni takes our offerings, transmutes them, and offers them upward to the divine beings who receive them. Agni is a warrior of the light, standing radiantly defiant in the face of darkness, a bastion of genuineness in a world of obscurity and falsehood. And what he radiates is the richness of divine reality, the untarnished jewel of truth.
The fire sacrifice, or yajña, is the central symbol or archetype of the Rig Veda. It offers a material framework for engaging with the responsive universe. But the form of the ritual itself is just the surface. The yajña shows us how to worship the Divine, not by proscribing a specific set of formulas, but by teaching us that we live in a relational cosmos: when we lean into it we are received and embraced. Every action, word, and thought ripples out and affects everything else. Our adoration for the stars and trees and oceans flows back to us, our offering of devotion produces the love that we ourselves long for.
The yajña teaches us how to understand ourselves as parts of a greater whole, like my eyes or hands or kidneys are parts of the whole that I call me, and how to relate to that greater whole. The ritual can be understood on the outer level as a physical offering of materials to the fire, on the emotional level as a way of asking the cosmos to meet our needs, on the mental level as a seeking for intelligence and clarity, or on the spiritual level as a communion and reflection of our true relationship to the multidimensional cosmos.
The Vedic yajña embodies layers and layers of richness and beauty. But over time, this living ritual was drained of its immediacy. The ceremonies were codified, and the depth of meaning was lost. A caste of priests increasingly used the Vedic framework to consolidate power, and the Vedic tradition congealed into a superstitious cult of influence and prestige. The priests stood between common people and the divine reality, using their self-defined position as intermediaries between the human and the divine to amass wealth and power at the expense of others. They severed the connection between ritual and meaning, leaving an empty shell that they used to manipulate the masses, who they locked out of the Divine embrace. The yajña became a disembodied framework for seeking ego-gratification, rather than an embodiment of the relationship between human and cosmos.
It was within this milieu, an increasingly calcified, stratified society orbiting around empty ritual, that the śramana movement began. The śramanas rejected the dry ceremonies and priestly manipulations. They walked away from their families and the tightening embrace of social rules and into the forests and fields and sought answers to some of the most fundamental human questions: Who am I? What is this body and this mind? How can life be purposeful in the shadow of death and pain?
The word śramana has the sense of exertion or hard work, and was also applied to manual laborers. But the work of these śramanas was not constructing buildings or roads. They strove to discover themselves, to understand the meaning of life. They sought the source of death and pain, and grappled with how to live and find fulfillment in the midst of suffering, decay, and dissolution. Philosophical theories and abstract ideas could not appease their hunger.
They walked away from civilization and dove within, conducting intensive physical, emotional, and psychological experiments on themselves. They were inner cosmonauts, reaching for direct experience to illuminate their understanding. The śramanas rebelled against the collective delusion of Vedic ritualism, and sought a throughline to the ancient truths of Vedic wisdom.
Sons and daughters, husbands and wives, fathers and mothers left their families to plumb the depths of inner reality in search of truth. The need for self-discovery overrode all other needs. Facing the looming specter of death and suffering around them, they didn’t turn away and hide, they leaned in, exploring the physical, emotional, and psychological dimensions of existence. They investigated embodiment and sought to understand the relationship between soul and form, some sects reaching exclusively for the formless self that is the source of all form, and some diving deeply into the body itself. Collectives of śramanas called aśrams strove together, compared notes, and conducted an incredible array of scientific experiments. They hypothesized and tested, using their own bodies, minds, and lives, and souls as the field of experimentation.
They discovered paths through pain to freedom, paths through limitation and suffering to the experience of the essential, eternal, unharmable self. They blazed trails from body to soul and back. The gleanings of the śramana movement have flowed through the ages in the form of texts and teaching traditions, and have recently poured into the consciousness of the modern west, mainly through the conduits of Yoga and Buddhism. They mingle the timeless reflections of Vedic wisdom with the undercurrents of human aspiration and the longing to understand.
We honor the śramanas and the gurus that have received and transmitted their wisdom through time, cultivating and protecting the teaching of yoga. We offer bows of reverence and gratitude for these teachings that are of great help as we navigate the challenges of our modern lives and this current moment of collective transformation.