Mythbusting in Yoga: Are Sun Salutations an Ancient Practice?
A strange situation exists in the yoga world, where the Indian Government and many Yoga schools and teachers around the world state confidently that Surya Namaskar or sun salutations are an ancient practice, whereas in the academic world, there is a near scholarly consensus that they are a modern invention. This contradiction can be difficult for a student of yoga to navigate. How did we get these divergent opinions? And is there evidence there to decide what the truth is?
Attention has been drawn to this strange rift by scholar Christopher Tompkins, who for over ten years has been researching the history of Surya namaskar and vinyasa practices. Here is an example of two contrasting statements from his research:
“Surya Kriya (i.e. Namaskāra) is of great antiquity… it is a breathing sequence which accompanies the physical postures. It develops mental clarity and focus, and removes weakness in the body” — Swami Sadhguru, spokesperson for the U.N.’s ‘Haṭha Yoga’ Program.
“The emergence of postural yoga that we take for granted in modern yoga…such as the Sun Salutation or Surya Namaskar are neither millennia-old nor rooted in ancient texts but a relatively recent vintage.” — Mark Singleton, Yoga Body (a rewritten version of his academic thesis for popular audiences)
The common acceptance of the latter statement is a big deal, as it has resulted in widespread academic scorn for the ‘deluded’ claims of yoga teachers, who, the academics’ story goes, just want to make up ancient roots to validate themselves. It’s also validated thousands of western teachers who were making things up anyway, and who now feel justified to think that “oh well, all yoga is just making things up, so I can just keep doing that” — a sense of ownership characteristic of the colonial mind when it comes to traditions from other cultures.
So we have something of a stand-off, of academics versus practitioners, the mind versus the body. How to heal this rift?
Western culture tends to privilege the academic mind as a pinnacle source of reliable information, over and above what the yoga traditions from India itself say, and so the narrative from these scholars has been very influential. But is it accurate? If not, what does that teach us about this cultural habit? Conversely, Indian traditions often have a habit of automatically claiming ancient lineage as part of the mass business of spirituality-for-sale.
The History of a Mythology
The confusion can be traced back to several key texts. In listing these, I rely on the scholarship of Christopher Tompkins and am indebted to his ground-breaking work, described by Yoga teacher Shiva Rea as a “pioneering retrieval and translation of many lost texts” and by author and teacher Sally Kempton as “key to an understanding of the connections between the ancient and modern yoga tradition.” (1)
The story that all postural practice is a modern invention was first asserted by writer Norman Sjoman in his odd and aggressive book, Yoga of the Mysore Palace (1996) and was built upon and referenced in Mark Singleton’s popular book Yoga Body: Origins of Modern Postural Practice. These writers look back to the Hathapradīpikā, a key 15th-century yoga text, and notice that there is little to no āsana mentioned. Therefore, they conclude, the Yoga that later was taught by teachers such as T. Krishnamacharya, known as the grandfather of modern yoga, must have been mostly made up.
Sjoman states, for example, that in Krishnamacharya’s teaching, there is a “total absence of connection between the traditional sources and modern traditions.”
“There is no continuous tradition of practice that can be traced back to the texts on yoga,” he concludes.
The problem is that Sjoman did not read all “traditional sources”, or even the ones actually listed by Krishnamacharya in his bibliography. The Haṭhapradīpika is only one of the 27 texts referenced by Krishnamacharya as textual sources. Six others, which between them comprise the bulk of the source material referenced, are in fact earlier than the Haṭhapradīpika, and Tompkins reports they are full of references to Surya Namaskāra, vinyasa, flowing devotional movements, and diverse āsana.
Disproving Sjoman’s claim, Christopher Tompkins notes in an interview that his research has “uncovered evidence that these six Tantras [referenced in K’s Makaranda bibliography] contained the specialized and now largely lost ‘Vinyasa-Krama’ that Krishnamacharya attempted to revive.”
For example, one of Krishnamacharya’s cited texts, the Nāradīya Tantra, includes the following passage, obviously completely consistent with his Yoga teaching: “The following are the 30 āsanas engaged as Kāranas (moving postures) in this highest Yoga Sādhana of our revelation (śāstra)… at the juncture of dawn, the aṣṭāṅga praṇāma is to be physically engaged within the circumambulation of the maṇḍala. The Yogin is to perform the namaskāra lowering to the earth in the shape of a staff (= caturanga daṇḍāsana). With his head, chest, and knees in a straight line, and with great devotional focus, he falls to the earth engaging the eight-part prostration (aṣṭāṅga praṇāma), led with his head first….” (translated by C. Tompkins).
Many passages such as this clearly indicate a continuous tradition of practice between traditional sources/cultures and modern traditions. So why is this so fervently denied?
How the Haṭha-yoga texts confused us all
The confusion has been escalated by the significant emphasis and research that has been done on the so-called haṭha-yoga texts of the 15th century onward, most famously the Haṭhapradīpika.
What a comparison with older texts shows is that the Haṭhapradīpika represents a particular post-tantric (fifteenth century onward) trend towards less embodied practices, less women and householder practitioners, more focus on renunciant, meditative and male transcendent practices, and the erasure of the goddess culture context of the source texts for the Haṭhapradīpika.
For example, much of the Haṭhapradīpika draws on the Varahi Tantra, “a medieval Goddess-based Tantra [sacred text] which presents Haṭhayoga as a devotional practice prescribed for householders, women and all social classes – features later removed or distorted in the Haṭhapradīpika, which sought to transform into a male renunciant practice focused on preserving the seminal power of male practitioners.” (Tompkins, Vira Vinyasa, https://www.yogaalchemy.com/courses/christopher-tompkins-varahi-tantra-vira-vinyasa)
Tompkins notes that:
“Western scholarship in particular has simply skipped over” [‘the fundamental and critical place of Yoga in the thousand year long tradition of Tantra’], and has chosen to look at the reference manuals [i.e. Haṭhapradīpikā] which are devoid of the Vinyasa within which these practices were originally applied.”
He points out that while the shorter texts on Krishnamacharya’s reference list such as the Haṭhapradīpika may have been more accessible, scholars have ignored or not had access to the crucial matter of the Tantras referenced by Krishnamacharya and belonging to “the Vaishnava Tantric lineage known as the ‘Pancha Ratra… [which] contain a semblance of the vinyasa yoga that he taught.”
[Note that Krishnamacharya used the word vinyasa more like it is used in these ancient texts, i.e. to refer to “the choreographing of mantra, āsana, praṇāyāmā and mudra,” “ritualized Yoga [that] derives from ancient Shastras,” not merely to a sequence of linked physical poses as used today, or in its most reduced sense, “take a vinyasa”. The former meaning is the sense in which Krishnamacharya’s long-term student Srivatsa Ramaswami uses the term, and the way in which teacher Mark Whitwell and others recall Krishnamacharya and his son T.K.V. Desikachar employing the term.]
What this means is that scholars and practitioners alike have been looking at compilation texts of a small misogynistic sect, which developed out of and simplified more inclusive, earlier Tantric traditions, and assuming that these are the authority on yoga. And because that sect stripped nearly all the embodied devotional movement out of the yoga, it has then been stated confidently in our own time that it was never there.
Haṭha-yoga texts have been taken as a ground zero for postural practice, when it seems a flowing Sūrya Namaskāra had been practiced for hundreds of years prior, as we shall see.
Ignoring Indigenous Sources
Krishnamacharya explicitly referenced earlier Tantric texts in his own bibliography, and so the dismissal of his continuity with ancient practice is not just a problem of a “lost past” or not enough research, but wilfully overlooks the clearly given sources of this Indian indigenous scholar, by two white male scholars who preferred to impose their own narrative. Many have followed along, taking the authority of Sjoman and Singleton et al over Krishnamacharya himself without looking more deeply into the matter or examining their bias. We cannot ignore the strange eagerness to believe postural yoga has been made up. Perhaps it is because so many teachers have made up things and called them yoga, including, significantly, the yoga teacher of both Sjoman and Singleton, B.K.S. Iyengar (not insulting him, this is by his own proud admission). The power of projection cannot be underestimated.
Sjoman’s seemingly deliberate denial of Krishnamacharya’s sources is curious. He describes Krishnamacharya’s reference list in ruthless terms as “a padded academic bibliography with works referred to that have nothing to do with the tradition he is teaching in. He has included material on yogic practices from the academic sources in his text without knowing an actual tradition of teaching connected with the practice” (Sjoman 66, my emphasis).
It is now obvious that Sjoman did not look into the works sufficiently to make his conclusion valid. If we are being charitable, we could say he may have suffered understandable disbelief at the depth and breadth of Krishnamacharya’s scholarship — Krishnamacharya had an extraordinary mind, the equivalent of 6 modern PhDs, I have heard it said. His student R. Sriram said it simply: “he was not normal.” We cannot help but suspect, however, that Sjoman had some kind of negative bias or prejudice to produce such unsubstantiated vehemence.
This is the ‘scholarship’ on which many of our stories about the roots of modern Yoga rests. Thus far, most academics have overlooked the ancient roots of yoga in the medieval Tantric period. If you go on Wikipedia today or open nearly any history of Yoga book, this is the ‘authoritative’ narrative on Krishnamacharya and postural yoga you will encounter. For example, Alistair Shearer writes, in The Story of Yoga: From Ancient India to the Modern West: “ The influence of Western gymnastics in the Mysore palace tradition is, on its own, enough evidence to undermine the claim that all postural practice has a hallowed indigenous origin” (p335). Renowned haṭha-yoga scholar Jason Birch states more humbly that “As far as we are aware, there is no evidence for a medieval Sūrya Namaskāra.”
Evidence of Medieval Sūrya Namaskāra
It’s true that the gymnastics taught in modern fitness spinoff styles bear little to no resemblance to the ancient practices. And there’s little doubt that the Sūrya Namaskāra practice many Indians begin their day with now is purely a physical exercise regime. But there remain a few teachers in India and around the world sharing a Sūrya Namaskāra that is more explicitly devotional, energetic, esoteric and tantric. Does this have ancient roots? What were medieval Tantric householders doing in their relationship with the sun, and are there traces of this today?
One student of Srivatsa Ramswami, a lifelong student of Krishnamacharya, shares the following:
Surya namaskar can perhaps be traced back to the epic The Ramayana (4th C BC?), where the hero Rama, wearied from shooting fruitless arrows at the demon king Ravena, was approached by the Sage/rishi Agastya who chanted a hymn/mantra/prayer to the sun god Suya which had the effect of removing Ravena's defences, allowing Rama to finally defeat him (see Appendix).
A tradition developed where a prostration and later a salutation would be introduced after each verse of the hymn. I actually practiced this with my teacher Ramaswami one Sunday on his teacher training course, the chant took two hours and we practiced 54 prostrations or sun salutations.
— http://grimmly1997.blogspot.com/p/the-ashtanga-key-surya-namaskar-pdf.html
This is poetic, but a little speculatory for the academic. Is it possible to lose the “perhaps”?
Christopher Tompkins looks to the classical surya namaskar sequence, as it is commonly practiced today (picture below).
This image comes from the Bihar school, and is almost identical to the series featured on a 2016 Indian governmental stamp series. It is very close to what was taught by Krishnamacharya to his students, as still taught by his students Srivatsa Ramaswami and A.G. Mohan. It also was taught in this way by Krishnamacharya’s son Desikachar, according to what is now taught by his students R. Sriram, Mark Whitwell, Leslie Kaminoff, Gary Kraftstow, and many others. In both cases, the postures were combined with solar seed mantras: HRĀM, HRĪM HRŪM, HRAIM, HRAUM, and HRAḤ (see image below).
I first came across these mantras sequenced with the movements while studying with Mark. For the first time, after many years of yoga, I felt like I was actually in relationship with the sun, the real sun. I realised that before, my attention had been on myself, on an abstract idea of ‘sun’ that lived inside my brain, or on my own body. Now it was actually a devotional flow, in relationship with the sun. Not monitoring my body for correct alignment and improvement, but laying my body down on the ground in graceful movements of gratitude for the gift that is our sun, the giver of life. How sad that this relationship, these mantras has fallen out of practice! How sad that surya namaskar had become something for physical self-improvement only.
We should note that Srivatsa Ramaswami, A.G. Mohan, and others have all noted that Krishnamacharya would vary the exact postures within the 12-part flow. Showing again that āsana themselves, that modern obsession, were not the primary focus, but rather it was the overall devotional occasion and the movement of the spine.
Krishnamacharya reportedly referred to the sequence as a “danda samarpanam”, an offering of dands, a word that literally means stick, but which has a long history of being used to mean postures in a sequence. For example, D.C. Mujumdar in his Encyclopedia of Indian Physical Culture (1950) calls postures in a Namaskāra sequence ‘dands’. “After noting the influence of Sūrya Namaskāra on the evolution of Indian gymnastics, Mujumdar affirms that “Namaskāras were meant for worshipping the Sun…and is even today viewed as a religious practice.” He further relates that Sūrya Namaskāra had been particularly popular in Maharashtra, and experienced a resurgence there in the 17th century under Samartha Ramadas and his disciple, Shivaji, finally noting that the practice waned in the 19th century due to neglect.” (Tompkins)
The reference has been dismissed by scholars, however, who did not follow this lead. If they had, they would have discovered a book called Ten-Point Way to Health (1928) by Balasahib Pratinidhi Pant, which also featured the sūrya namaskāra sequence with the accompanying mantras. This union of postures and mantras is a vital clue to older traditions, as “there is no instance outside of this tradition in which Sūrya Namaskāra is taught as a postural practice led by mantras.” (Tompkins)
Therefore we can look back into the texts and discover the evidence of Sūrya Namaskāra sequences in medieval Tantric literature in the last 1500 years. What qualifies it to be called Sūrya Namaskāra ? The following features together:
A posture-based practice
Postures referred to as dands, danda or bending poses, or the whole thing as a dandavat
Presence of solar seed mantras leading the sequence
Starts and finishes standing
Core prostration pose of “Ashtanga Namaskāra” where eight body parts touch the earth
Considered as a yoga
Tompkins, having reviewed thousands of Sanskrit texts, concludes that: “a Namaskāra practice featuring these core tenets is prescribed in innumerable source texts representing some 10 lineages found in three major branches of the medieval Tantric tradition… These lineages include the Śaiva-based ‘Path of Mantras’ (Mantramārga), the Goddess-based Kaula Tantras, and those of the Pāñcarātra, the Vaishnava-based movement of Tantrism to which Krishnamacharya’s lineage belongs.” (Source)
Above: An example of the solar seed mantras in an ancient text. Source: C Tompkins.
In one of these texts dating back to some time between 1350 and 1450 CE, Sūrya Namaskāra is most beautifully described as the body postures being the physical expression of the mantra sounds.
From Devotional Ritual to Modern Exercise
There is no doubt that these early references are speaking about surya namaskar (or dandavat, as they most commonly refer to it as) as a devotional prostration ritual. This means that the scholars are partially right: there is certainly something very sadly missing from the modern, purely physical sequences, something no amount of adding on beautiful music or nice outfits or readings from ancient texts can replace: the precision of practice as a devotional ritual, handed from teacher to student. I feel sad that they themselves were taught a yoga lacking all the essential transformative ingredients, leading them to suspect the whole thing of being made up.
To be fair, what is not shown is a connection between ancient times and the purely physical gymnastic āsana practice popularised by teachers such as BKS Iyengar and his western students. In referring to a homogenous ‘Mysore Palace Tradition’, it seems that Sjoman, and Singleton in turn, make the mistake of assuming Krishnamacharya’s Yoga to be the same as that of his famous pupil Iyengar (whom happens to be acknowledged as the teacher of both Sjoman and Singleton!).
And yet, they are wrong that surya namaskar is a modern invention, as we have seen. Mostly it may be a shadow of its former self, but it does exist here and there in forms remarkably akin to ancient text in certain schools, namely the Bihar school, and a few of the long-term students of Krishnamacharya — only partially Pattabhi Jois it seems, and not at all Iyengar (the latter of whom admits that "he (Krishnamacharya) only taught me for about ten or fifteen days” total (see interview). It is sad to see how quick western scholars have been to dismiss India’s own clearly stated knowledge of its own tradition, and sad too to see the dismissive superiority that suggests that although the British Raj may have finished, colonial attitudes may still be floating around.
TO conclude, the story that Sūrya Namaskāra is a modern invention is a myth, of dubious provenance, and yet it is true that modern practices are almost completely dissociated from their own powerful history.
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Gratitude to all the scholars working hard to understand the roots of Yoga, and gratitude to every sincere practitioner who can feel for themselves whether a practice is legitimate, and engages with scholarly research for pleasure, not for validation.
I mean no disrespect to all those out there practicing fitness and stretching under the name of Yoga, and experiencing some benefits. My goal is to illuminate a myth about Yoga that disrespects Indian traditions and prevents access to the traces of holistic practice that remain, and not to throw any shade on you. Everyone is doing their best with the information they have available!
A final note: We perhaps have to be careful here, and be aware of how info on the ancient roots can be seized upon by fascist nationalistic far-right Hindutva ideologues, who like all religious extremists, are eager to prove the purity, eternal nature, literalness and supremacy of their religion. The difference between medieval Śaivite or Vaiśnava devotional Tantric ritual and modern Hindutva fundamentalism is jarring and disturbing. Modi’s followers are all too keen to use terms like “cultural appropriation” in order to lay claim to a commodified physical Yoga. Caution is required. I recommend reading Arundhati Roy’s fierce essays in her new book Azadi [Freedom] for a clearer picture of the politics.