What is Hatha Yoga?

A great deal of the world now does yoga, and almost none of it knows where the postures came from or what they were for. They came, in large part, from a body of medieval texts that would barely recognise a modern class. Those texts were not interested in flexibility or calm or a strong core. They were interested in liberation, and they had arrived at an audacious idea: that the body, the very thing the older ascetics had tried to starve and transcend, could be turned into the engine of the soul’s freedom.

That idea is Hatha Yoga, and it is one of the boldest moves in the history of Indian spirituality. To understand it is to see the studio posture restored to its original and far stranger purpose.

The yoga of force

The name itself tells the first part of the story, and it is usually mistranslated. Hatha in Sanskrit means force, or effort. The Sanskritist James Mallinson, himself an initiate of the tradition, argues that the medieval yogis never bothered to explain the word, and that its likeliest sense is simply that this was a forceful, strenuous yoga whose results came only through hard practice, and whose central act, the raising of the kundalini energy, is itself a kind of forcing, a breaking through.

There is a second, beloved reading that the tradition itself offers, and it is worth giving alongside the first without confusing the two. In this symbolic gloss, ha is the sun and tha is the moon, and Hatha Yoga is the union of the solar and lunar energies in the body, the joining of the two breath-currents, prana and apana, that run in the side-channels ida and pingala. This is what the tradition makes of the word, and it is theologically rich. It is not what the word originally meant. A careful account holds both: force is the philology, the union of sun and moon is the meditation.

A staircase to stillness

Hatha Yoga did not set itself against the older yoga of the mind. It set itself beneath it, as a foundation. Patanjali’s classical yoga, the raja yoga of the Yoga Sutras, works directly on the mind, stilling its movements through concentration and absorption. Hatha works from the other end, from the body up. It purifies the physical vessel and seizes control of the breath and the life-force, so that the mind, deprived of the agitation that the restless breath feeds it, grows quiet almost of itself.

The relationship is stated at the very opening of the central manual. The Hatha Yoga Pradipika, the “Light on Hatha Yoga,” composed by Svatmarama in the fifteenth century, begins with a bow to Shiva and a clear declaration of purpose, in Pancham Sinh’s translation of 1914:

“Salutation to Adinatha (Shiva) who expounded the knowledge of Hatha Yoga, which like a staircase leads the aspirant to the high pinnacled Raja Yoga.”

A few verses later Svatmarama names his own task as well, the clearing of confusion:

“Owing to the darkness arising from the multiplicity of opinions people are unable to know the Raja Yoga. Compassionate Swatmarama composes the Hatha Yoga Pradipika like a torch to dispel it.”

A staircase and a torch. The whole of Hatha Yoga is in those two images. It is the climb that brings you to the threshold of stillness, and the light that shows you the way up.

The texts and the lineage

Hatha Yoga is a tradition of manuals rather than a single book, and four of them matter most. The earliest layer is the Goraksha Shataka and the related texts ascribed to Gorakhnath, perhaps of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. The most authoritative is Svatmarama’s Hatha Yoga Pradipika of the fifteenth century, which gathered the older sources into four chapters. Alongside them stand the Shiva Samhita and the late-seventeenth-century Gheranda Samhita, which calls its method ghatastha yoga, the yoga of the pot, taking the body itself as the earthen vessel to be fired and perfected.

Behind these texts stands a lineage and a legend. The tradition traces Hatha to Shiva himself, passed to Matsyendranath and then to his disciple Gorakhnath, the founders of the Nath order of yogis. Modern scholarship places the formative texts among these Nath and tantric Shaiva and Buddhist siddhas of the early second millennium, and a source-faithful account should say so plainly. Hatha Yoga grew out of a cross-traditional world of tantric adepts, not from the Vedic mainstream, and that mixed parentage is part of its history.

What the practice actually was

Here the gap between the medieval texts and the modern class is widest, and most instructive. The Hatha Yoga Pradipika names eighty-four asanas as taught by Shiva but describes only fifteen in detail, most of them seated postures for meditation rather than the standing flows of a modern studio. Posture was one part of a larger and stranger discipline, and the texts lay out its parts in order.

First come the shatkarmas, the six cleansings, frankly physical purifications of the body’s passages, with names like neti, dhauti and nauli. Then asana, the steady posture. Then pranayama, the regulation of the breath, and above all kumbhaka, its retention, the holding of the breath that is the real heart of Hatha practice. Then the mudras and bandhas, the seals and locks, such as the mula bandha at the root of the body, by which the yogi traps the life-force and turns it inward and upward. The aim of all of it is to awaken the coiled energy the tradition calls kundalini and draw it up the central channel, the sushumna, of the subtle body to the crown. When it arrives there, the texts say, the breath stops, the mind dissolves, and samadhi dawns. The work on the body was always in the service of that final stillness, the absorption that Patanjali’s inner limbs also seek.

The body as vehicle, not enemy

The deepest thing to understand about Hatha Yoga is the reversal at its core. Much of the older Indian tradition, the renouncer’s path and a good deal of Vedanta, treated the body as a burden, a heap of impurity to be disciplined and ultimately escaped on the way to liberation. Hatha Yoga made a different wager. It took the same body and treated it as the precise instrument through which liberation could be won, a thing to be purified, strengthened, and tuned until it became fit to carry the rising energy without breaking.

This is the move that makes Hatha what it is, and it never fully resolves its own tension. The body is perfected, and yet the final aim is still to pass beyond its ordinary condition into absorption. The yogi polishes the vessel in order, at the last, to pour out what it holds. But the dignity Hatha gave the body, as the field where the highest work is done rather than the obstacle to it, changed the whole texture of Indian practice and prepared the ground, centuries later, for yoga’s journey around the world.

From the cremation-ground to the studio

That journey has to be told honestly, because it is so widely misunderstood. The yoga practised today in tens of thousands of studios, asana after asana flowing to the breath, descends from Hatha Yoga, but it is not the same thing. The historian Mark Singleton, in his study Yoga Body, has shown that modern postural yoga is largely a twentieth-century creation, which kept the asanas, multiplied and rearranged them, dropped almost everything else, exchanged liberation for health, and absorbed along the way the gymnastics and physical culture of its era, taking much of its present shape in the Mysore school of Krishnamacharya in the nineteen-thirties and forties.

This is not said to diminish the modern practice, which has brought real good to many lives. It is said so that the older thing is not lost behind it. Classical Hatha Yoga was a soteriology, a path to the end of suffering, severe and strange and aimed entirely at the freedom beyond the body. The modern descendant is something gentler and different, sharing the postures and much of the ancestry while pursuing another goal. Different aims, one bloodline.

The forceful path

Set the cleansings and the held breath and the rising fire side by side and Hatha Yoga comes whole. It is the yoga that dared to make the body the engine of the soul’s freedom, that turned posture and breath into a staircase and lit a torch at the bottom of it. The flexibility and calm that the modern world prizes are real, and they are the foothills. The texts were always looking at the summit.

The staircase still stands. Most who climb the first step no longer know how high it was built to go.