Yoga and Ayurveda: Wellness with Deep Roots

Reference library · 1055 words

Yoga and Ayurveda are frequently spoken of in the same breath, and they do share a common intellectual world, but they are not the same thing and never were. Yoga is a discipline of body, breath and mind aimed at a particular kind of mental state. Ayurveda is a system of medicine concerned with health, diet, disease and treatment. Both are old, both have changed enormously over their history, and both are now global commercial phenomena whose modern forms differ considerably from what the classical texts describe. Separating the history from the marketing is worth doing, because the honest account is more interesting than either the reverent version or the dismissive one.

The word yoga appears in the Upanishads, and the foundational systematic text is the Yoga Sutras attributed to Patanjali, usually dated to roughly the early centuries of the common era. It is a compact work of fewer than two hundred aphorisms, and its subject is overwhelmingly mental. It defines yoga as the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind and sets out an eight limbed path: ethical restraints, personal observances, posture, breath regulation, withdrawal of the senses, concentration, meditation and absorption. Posture, asana, is one limb of eight, and Patanjali says almost nothing about specific postures beyond requiring a seat that is steady and comfortable. The elaborate physical postures familiar today come mostly from the later hatha yoga tradition, texts such as the Hatha Yoga Pradipika of around the fifteenth century, and from developments considerably closer to the present.

How modern postural yoga was assembled

This is where careful scholarship has changed the picture. Historians of yoga, including Mark Singleton and Elizabeth De Michelis, have traced how the physical practice recognisable in a contemporary studio took shape in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through an exchange between Indian traditions and the international physical culture movement, which included Scandinavian gymnastics, wrestling and bodybuilding regimens. The central figure is Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, who taught in the 1930s at the Jaganmohan Palace in Mysore under the patronage of the Maharaja of Mysore, and whose students included B. K. S. Iyengar, K. Pattabhi Jois and Indra Devi. Iyengar's precise, alignment focused method and his book Light on Yoga, published in 1966, and Jois's vigorous flowing Ashtanga sequence, became the two dominant strands from which most modern styles descend. Swami Vivekananda's lectures in the United States in the 1890s and his book Raja Yoga had earlier prepared a Western audience for yoga as philosophy.

None of this makes modern yoga fake. Traditions change, and a practice assembled in the twentieth century from older materials is still a real practice with real effects. It does mean that claims about five thousand year old postures are not historically supportable, and reputable Indian scholars say so. The evidence base for yoga's health effects is meanwhile substantial in some areas and thin in others: clinical research supports benefits for flexibility, balance, chronic low back pain, and measures of stress and mood, while claims that it treats specific diseases are much weaker. Trials are often small and hard to blind, which limits what can be concluded.

Ayurveda: the classical system and the modern industry

Ayurveda, meaning roughly the knowledge of long life, rests on a set of classical Sanskrit compendia: the Charaka Samhita, concerned mainly with internal medicine, the Sushruta Samhita, notable for its detailed surgical content including procedures for cataract couching and for reconstructing a nose using a flap of skin from the forehead, and the later Ashtanga Hridayam of Vagbhata. The surgical descriptions in Sushruta are historically significant, and the forehead flap technique was reported to European surgeons at the end of the eighteenth century and influenced the development of reconstructive surgery in Britain.

The theoretical core is the doctrine of three doshas, vata, pitta and kapha, understood as functional principles whose balance determines health, alongside a scheme of seven bodily tissues and a strong emphasis on digestion, daily and seasonal routine, and individual constitution. Treatment combines diet, herbal preparations, oil therapies, and the purificatory regimen known as panchakarma. It is important to be clear that this framework is not equivalent to modern physiology and does not map onto it, and that Ayurvedic and biomedical explanations of disease are different systems rather than two descriptions of the same mechanism.

In India, Ayurveda is not fringe. It is regulated by the state, taught in colleges awarding a recognised degree, and administered by a dedicated central ministry, the Ministry of Ayush, created in 2014 from an earlier department, covering Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homoeopathy. Practitioners are registered, and Ayurvedic products are manufactured at industrial scale by companies of considerable size. The World Health Organization established a Global Centre for Traditional Medicine at Jamnagar in Gujarat, with the Government of India, in an agreement announced in 2020.

The serious criticisms are specific rather than blanket. Quality control of herbal products is a genuine problem: peer reviewed studies published in the United States, including work led by Robert Saper and colleagues, found lead, mercury and arsenic in a proportion of Ayurvedic products purchased over the counter, sometimes at levels of clinical concern, and heavy metal poisoning cases traced to such products have been reported by health authorities in several countries. Some of this is contamination and some reflects rasashastra, a traditional branch that deliberately incorporates processed metals. A second concern is delay in seeking effective treatment for serious conditions. A third is the quality of the clinical evidence: some Ayurvedic interventions have been tested in reasonable trials, and a few show promise, but a great deal of what is marketed has not been tested to any standard that would satisfy a regulator elsewhere.

Both practices have also become instruments of national policy and soft power. The United Nations designated 21 June as International Day of Yoga in 2014 following an Indian proposal, and mass public yoga events are now held annually. UNESCO inscribed yoga on its list of intangible cultural heritage of humanity in 2016. That success has generated its own argument, about appropriation, about the commercialisation of a spiritual discipline, and within India about whether state promotion of particular traditions is appropriate in a secular republic. These are live disputes, and readers are better served knowing they exist than being given a settled version that does not.

Back to the library