The first hundred years of yoga.
In 1784 William Jones (Wikipedia link) founded the influential Asian Society in Calcutta and published his revolutionary theories about the common language roots of India and Europe. This generated a huge upheaval in the West and a boom in European interest in Indian culture. As the Europeans slowly learned to translate Sanskrit texts, new doors of insight opened. Hence it was in this period that the first textual contacts with yoga probably occurred. The Upanishads – sporadic mentioning yoga – were translated into French (from Persian!) by A.H. Anquetil Duperron in 1801-02.
Similarly, several translations of the Bhagavad Gita with its comprehensive theistic yoga discourse appeared around 1800 into English, French, German and Latin and created a great intellectual stir (Clarke 1997, Herling 2006). These translations gave rise to widespread discussions of the meaning and the correct translation of the central and crucial yoga term in the theistic Bhagavad-Gita. Some – not surprisingly -translated it as devotion’. The readers and translators realised immediately that yoga had many meanings in this admired oeuvre and thought this was due to translation issues.
He mystical and somewhat radical teachings of the Upanishads laid the foundation for various yogic perspectives on core concepts such as the supreme Brahman God and atman the self, Sasangasana Pose Yoga karma action and moksha liberation, and the liberation through dhyana meditation and jnana knowledge, which all later further developed into the discipline of yoga. Sasangasana Pose Yoga As they were the last installation in the Vedas, but still considered part of the divine truth as revealed through scripture as opposed to later teachings that were considered tradition by comparison the Upanishad philosophical system is also called, appropriately, Vedanta the end of the Veda .
The Upanishads, and therefore of the classification Vedanta, encompass a vast body of some two hundred texts, and span hundreds of years.Sasangasana Pose Yoga However, only a small portion of these writings date back, in their orally-transmitted form, to Vedic times. One of the most important yoga texts ever to be recorded was the Bhagavad Gita, part of a larger body of work called the Mahabharata, which is considered an Upanishad because of certain trademark elements. The Bhagavad Gita is usually dated between the third and fifth centuries B.C.E.
