This is an extract from the upcoming book Yoga — A Journey from Confusion to Fusion co-authored by Swami Sarveshwarananda with a number of other Indian monks and scholars, soon to be published by SHREYAS.

Born in the pristine Himalayas through the refined understanding and pure minds of great rishis (seers), the heavenly gift of Yoga, like the mighty Ganga river, came down to the plains and cities of mundane existence, sweeping the entire Indian subcontinent to reach even the distant shores of Western consciousness as early as at least the time of Plato. Yoga as an art of living and science of soul has left its indelible mark wherever it went, and today over one billion people take a grateful dip in this refreshing river.

And just as the Ganga is only able to absorb so much human contact and pass through so many muddy fields before becoming sullied herself, similarly yoga has gradually lost much of its original power and purity in its endless journey throughout the multi-faceted landscape of human consciousness. Since the 1960s in particular, its growing popularity (an estimated $320 billion industry in the world today) has also contributed to its marked impoverishment through a dual movement of mass commercialization on the one side, and fundamentalist rigidity on the other.

Regarding mass commercialization, conventional wisdom maintains that this is not such a bad thing – even a degenerated form of yoga is better than nothing in the spiritually-starved West, and that serious seekers will eventually find their way to the source of pure yoga. There is some truth to this; part of the divine game is indeed to earn spiritual teachings through trial and error, and in the process to develop viveka (spiritual discrimination). But looking back over the development of yoga in the last 40 years, one cannot help being more than a little alarmed at the skeletal yoga taught in many places today, both East and West, almost totally expurgated from its wisdom, vision, and spiritual principles. If we live in a neighborhood with only fast-food joints at every street corner and never have the opportunity to venture outside this perimeter, how would we ever find out about what real food tastes like? Similarly, if all we know is “McYoga”, how are we to even suspect the depth and majesty of the yogic teachings to lift us from mortality to immortality?

At the other extreme, religious fundamentalism has also crept into the field of yoga, interestingly enough. For quite some time the message of the Vatican and of certain fundamentalist Christian groups has been to urge all good Christians not to practice a technique of “union with demonic entities” as some of their pamphlets put it (a nice twist on the meaning of yoga as union, I must say). This has become quite a quandary for genuine Christians who love the teachings of Christ, but also love the centering, pacifying and uplifting effect of yoga. What is a God-loving soul to do?
American ingenuity, like the fabled cavalry, came to the rescue—“Christian yoga” has started to be offered as a safer alternative for those who just won’t give up their hatha yoga routine—with promises to replace unsavory Sanskrit names of poses such as shavasana (“corpse pose”) with more life-affirming, family-oriented terms such as “praise moves”. Everybody is happy.

Well, not exactly everybody. Hindu fundamentalists are getting restless too. Deeply concerned at the West’s apparently unstoppable greed to appropriate everything Indian throughout history – from spices to philosophy to grey matter – they are now vehemently claiming that “all yoga is Hinduism” and that every yoga teacher is, whether he acknowledges it or not, a “covert Hindu missionary.” Which would certainly come as a surprise to your regular yoga teacher at the mall, to say the least.

Faced with such extreme opinions and media distortions, one is bound to be more than a little confused about yoga.

The purpose of our modest effort is to try to return to the original roots of classic yoga, free from dogma and exaggerations, and present a reasonable, scientific, and scripturally sanctioned approach to this timeless wisdom. For starters, reviewing how yoga came to the West would go a long way towards clarifying many doubts, and understanding what has become of yoga today.