The Most Cited and Least Read Yoga Text

Few premodern works are invoked as often in modern yoga and consulted as rarely. The book is routinely named as the classical authority behind contemporary postural practice, and the relationship is much thinner than that suggests: the postures it describes are few, most of them seated, and the great majority of the shapes taught in a modern class have no antecedent in it or in any other premodern hatha text.

Historians of modern yoga have traced those shapes to a twentieth century synthesis instead. What the book does supply to modern practice is vocabulary and legitimacy. Terms for breath retention, for the locks, for the channels and for the cleansing procedures come down from this literature, and the appeal to a fifteenth century Sanskrit authority does work in a field where the actual lineage is recent. Reading it directly is disconcerting for that reason. The proportions are wrong for modern expectations, the aims are stated in terms of internal alchemy rather than health, and the text repeatedly subordinates the whole discipline to a goal outside itself. The atlas records the book as it is rather than as the ancestor modern practice has needed it to be, which is not a criticism of either.