Yoga Beyond Belief: Insights to Awaken and Deepen Your Practice

authority? Can we truly know exactly what was taught and practiced in the past? Is there any actuality to the concept of “pure teachings” from the past?
    I first realized the importance of these questions at a lecture series in the early seventies on one of the foundation texts of yoga,
The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali
. The lecturer was my great friend and mentor, Swami Venkates (1921–1982), a much-loved and respected yogi and Sanskrit scholar from India. 1 He explained that very little is actually known with much certainty about Patanjali, whom many consider one of the early codifiers, if not the father, of yoga. I use Patanjali as an example because his yoga sutras are used by many teachers as the touchstone of yoga, yet the text can be interpreted in widely differing manners. My swami friend emphasized that any translation or commentary on any text always involves someone’s point of view. In fact, the translation process itself is interpretation. Even if we read or listen to a text in its original language, we must acknowledge that a large amount of personal interpretation still goes on in the way we receive it.
    Language usage, meaning, and circumstance change over time. We have heard the story in Psychology 101 of the man who runs menacingly into and out of a classroom with a banana and the students are asked to write a report. Nearly everyone describes having witnessed the man doing different things; some saw the banana as a gun, a flashlight, or a telephone. What does this case of multiple interpretations of a single event imply about the possible purity of subtle teachings handed down over thousands of years? What should we learn about the limits of tradition and authority from our observation of the phenomenon of every major religion and tradition breaking down into dozens of sects and subgroups with conflicting opinions, often with each one asserting that only its members have the actual truth? Even secular laws written in contemporary times with clear intent are prone to conflicting interpretations. Carefully written laws can be stretched, interpreted, and argued in different directions. Spiritual concepts and teachings, especially from the ancient past, are far more vulnerable. Spirituality is not an exact science to be laid out in narrowly defined paths.

Tradition and Interpretation
    An adept scholar can find many different, often contradictory, meanings in the ancient texts. There are many examples in every tradition where, in order to support various philosophical positions, the same texts are translated in different ways. For example, some teachers believe Patanjali was an advocate, if not one of the originators, of Hatha yoga, while others assert that Patanjali’s sutras do not support the practice of physical yoga at all. When I first started teaching, I mentioned in a class that I was taught that the sutras were the foundation of Hatha yoga. A few days later a well-known elder swami from another organization called me and angrily chastised me, asserting that Patanjali was not at all an advocate of physical yoga. He stated that Patanjali’smention of
asana
and
pranayama
, posture and breathing, only referred to sitting quietly and stilling the breath for meditation. The swami said spending time and energy to cultivate the body would lead to attachment, body consciousness, and would detract one from the true spiritual path. This opinion is the antithesis of what most modern, Western yoga students believe.
    Another example of differing opinions in the yoga sutras is the word
brahmacharya
. Usually translated as celibacy and abstinence, brahmacharya has also been reinterpreted by some teachers in modern times to mean responsible sexuality or spiritual sexuality aimed toward God. This shows how the same text can be assumed to have opposite meanings. There are texts that prescribe renunciation in order to attain god-hood and those that say indulgence is the path. Some ancient scriptures say the doors of heaven are only open to vegetarians and others that say the opposite. I remember Swami Venkates pointing out that yogic texts and teachings are so vast and so complex that we can find traditional support and authority for almost anything we want to do. In spite of these limitations, students and teachers often spend great energy in debate to try to bolster an edict or find an exact meaning of a Sanskrit sutra in English. This quest may ever elude them. How can truth or the immensity of life and