Origins of Yoga

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Speaker 23 Hey guys, I hope you're doing well. Welcome to this latest episode of The Ancients.
I'm all good here. As you probably tell, I'm walking the dog.
I'm walking Gunner. He's doing good as well.

Speaker 23 Oh, no, here he comes right now. You might be able to hear the running of a spaniel any second now.
Berserk running. There he is.

Speaker 23 Anyway, enough of an insight into my life at the moment.

Speaker 23 Today we're going to ancient India and we're exploring the story of the origins of yoga. Now,

Speaker 23 as you're going to hear, yoga back then, it was very different to what we're used to today.

Speaker 9 Yeah, good boy.

Speaker 23 Forget yoga studios, forget wellness and being good to your body. You've got to think uncomfortable positions and hardcore ascetic practices linked to holy men.

Speaker 23 We're going to be talking about all things like the Indus Valley civilization, the Vedas, Nirvana, the Mahabharata, even Alexander the Great, all play their part in the story of early yoga with our guest, Dr.

Speaker 23 Jim Mallinson. Jim, he's the Bowdoin Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Oxford.
He came into our ancients' HQ to record this episode. He's a lovely man, and I really do hope you enjoy.

Speaker 23 Let's go.

Speaker 23 Warrior, Cobra, Downward Dog.

Speaker 23 If you do yoga today, those are poses you're surely aware of. Today, yoga has become one of the fastest growing wellness movements in the world.

Speaker 23 And its origins stretch back to ancient times, more than 3,000 years ago in fact.

Speaker 23 But, as you're going to hear, that yoga was very different to what we're used to today.

Speaker 23 So what do we know about the emergence of yoga in ancient India? Can we trace its origins all the way back to the Bronze Age, to the Indus Valley civilization? How did yoga develop?

Speaker 23 And who were these people who dedicated their lives to it? This is the story of the origins of yoga with our guest, Dr. Jim Mallinson.

Speaker 23 Jim, it is such a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.

Speaker 20 Well, thank you very much for inviting me on, Tristan.

Speaker 23 What a topic. The origins of yoga.
And yoga, its history stretches back thousands of years, back into ancient times.

Speaker 20 Yes, I think we can confidently say two and a half thousand and maybe three and a half. People will tell you a lot longer, but we could maybe talk about that.

Speaker 20 People will say 5,000, even 10,000, or obviously dawn of time.

Speaker 20 The time we can start saying it with some confidence is about 1500 BC.

Speaker 23 And given the... ever-growing popularity of yoga today, have you seen more and more interest from people wanting to learn more about yoga's origins?

Speaker 20 Yes, there is.

Speaker 20 I mean, the thing is, there are so many millions of people around the world who practice yoga that even if only a tiny percentage of them are interested in the history, then that's actually quite a significant number.

Speaker 20 And almost all the teacher training syllabi, they include a bit of history as well. So, and there are lots of yoga teachers out there, so they generally have all had to learn a bit of history as well.

Speaker 23 And a big question to kick it all off: was yoga back in ancient times, was it similar or the same as to how yoga is done today?

Speaker 20 Definitely not the same. Some bits are similar.
I mean, it depends what you... I mean, obviously, there are many different ways that yoga is done today.

Speaker 20 So it certainly wasn't the kind of gymnastic, health-oriented focus that we see today. That stuff doesn't really come in until about a thousand years ago.

Speaker 20 I think if you really want to do the original physical yoga practices, you're basically going to be harming your body. And we will get onto that.
But it's sort of, they were

Speaker 20 the preserve of ascetics, normally men, sometimes women who were doing kind of tough things to their body, like standing up for years on end or holding their arms up in the air.

Speaker 23 And what do we mean by ascetics?

Speaker 20 Ascetics, it's well, ascetic, the term itself, of course, comes from Greek. You probably know more about it than I do.

Speaker 20 But when it's used in an Indian context, it normally means people who have sort of turned their back on normal society and devoted themselves to religious practice.

Speaker 20 So, you know, the classic story that lots of people will know is the Buddha who, you know, was living his luxurious life as a prince and then went for the first time ever went out of the palace compound and saw someone who was ill, someone who was old, someone dying, and suddenly realized that there was suffering in the world and decided to give up all his luxurious trappings and go forth and try to stop suffering.

Speaker 20 So he became yes, it's a difficult term ascetic because it does imply some kind of body mortification in a way, but of course the Buddha, he tried those things, but then ultimately he rejects them.

Speaker 20 Although that's complicated as well, because in some versions of the story, in fact, they're seen as a step on his path, but he does leave them behind.

Speaker 20 And yeah, an ascetic is like a religious professional in a way, and normally means not married, you know, no job, no humdrum, daily, mundane existence, that you're just focused on achieving some kind of religious end.

Speaker 23 So does it seem, and we'll certainly explore this more as our chat goes on, that when exploring yoga in ancient India, usually it's not large groups of farmers or people in settlements or cities practicing yoga.

Speaker 23 It would be done by the select few individuals who'd chosen to pursue this pretty difficult, this hard life.

Speaker 20 Yes, absolutely. I mean, they would often, as today, they would normally gather around a teacher.
There'd be a guru with a load of disciples, but they would...

Speaker 20 have turned their backs on regular worldly existence. And it still goes on to this day in India.
We see the same system going on.

Speaker 20 You know, if you go to India, you see holy men and sometimes holy women, but again, the vast majority of men who have renounced normal life, you know, classically, you'll see them at these big religious festivals, perhaps.

Speaker 20 They often have dreadlocks, they're wearing saffron robes, or some of them are naked.

Speaker 20 And that is, in fact, the milieu where that first arose around probably the fifth century BCE, that kind of way of life that we can be sure of. There are sort of hints of it earlier on.

Speaker 20 But it was in that within that milieu that the ideas, the practices of yoga first developed, or first became systematized, at least.

Speaker 23 Well, we'll certainly get to that, but I must ask first off, as I almost always do, when approaching this topic, the origins of yoga, what types of sources do you have available to explore mentions of it from more than 2,000 years ago?

Speaker 20 Well, we have texts, we have the Vedic texts, so the oldest texts of Hinduism, the Vedas, there's four Vedas, the oldest of which is probably about 1500 BC, the Rig Veda.

Speaker 20 They're the first of a larger corpus which culminates in texts called the Upanishads, which are actually more relevant to

Speaker 20 the study of yoga, because the Vedas are hymns used in ritual, but there are hints of some yogic things in there, and we can get on to that.

Speaker 20 But the Upanishads are much more about kind of introspection and philosophical reflection and trying to that that's where we first see within the Hindu tradition this idea of freedom from suffering and liberation and so forth.

Speaker 23 And are all of these texts I shouldn't have just consigned you to more than 2,000 years ago, I apologize there, because actually I I want to ask also,

Speaker 23 so is it these Sanskrit texts that are key for learning about the history of this practice?

Speaker 20 Yes, the early material that we have is predominantly Sanskrit. We do also have the Pali texts, so the Pali Canon, the early Buddhist texts.

Speaker 20 And there's a lot of interesting, useful material in there also for learning about yoga. I mean, key to make the point that from the start.

Speaker 20 really yoga hasn't been the preserve of one particular religious tradition and elements have come into it.

Speaker 20 I mean obviously the biggest, the mainstream religious tradition of India is what we now call Hinduism.

Speaker 20 But Buddhism, Jainism, they've certainly fed into it and continued to feed into it over its two and a half thousand or more years of development.

Speaker 23 And in regards to Hinduism back in ancient times, because we've got words like that, the Vedics and Brahmanism as well. So were there different strands as well?

Speaker 20 There's four types of Vedic texts: the Vedas, the Brahmanas, the Aranyakas, and the Upanishads. But the Brahmanas, then also the priests are called Brahmanas, the Brahmins, what we now call Brahmins.

Speaker 20 So sometimes people talk about Brahmanism as a religion, because that's the more kind of elite orthodox Sanskritic tradition. And of course, Hinduism has always encompassed far more than that.

Speaker 20 So if people talk about Brahmanism, they'd be talking about kind of, yeah, as I say, the Sanskritic form of Hinduism.

Speaker 23 And do we know much about Sanskrit as a language? I mean, what is Sanskrit?

Speaker 20 So the Vedas were composed in Sanskrit. They weren't written down for a long time.

Speaker 20 And the wonderful thing about the Vedas is that they were passed on orally using these amazing mnemonic practices, which meant that they were perfectly preserved over millennia before being written down.

Speaker 20 But then, one of the particularly special features of Sanskrit is that in the fifth century BC, there was a scholar called Panini who, in this incredibly complex system of what are called sutras, there's 4,000 of them.

Speaker 20 They're very short, they're like code, and he completely codified the language. And since then, so since

Speaker 20 the fifth century BCE, Sanskrit has been fixed.

Speaker 20 if you don't if it doesn't follow the rules of panini it's not sanskrit so it's just about unlike any other classical languages that continue evolving and so forth so there but there are other languages so pali what the the buddhist texts are written in is kind of like a a more you know vernacular form of of sanskrit but those are our main sources we do have material sources as well i mean

Speaker 20 sculptural sources from about the second century bc particularly from buddhist sites the indus valley is sometimes cited

Speaker 20 as the earliest evidence of yoga, but I think we need to push back against that.

Speaker 20 The problem with this sort of relative paucity of sources really is that it becomes quite easy and tempting to read back into those sources or read back into that material what we know about yoga now.

Speaker 20 And often that people take two big leaps in doing so.

Speaker 23 And the Indus Valley civilization, so that's Bronze Age, is that more than 4,000 years ago?

Speaker 20 Yeah, so there's kind of a high high point of it. So it's in sort of, you know, Pakistan, what's now Pakistan and Northwest India.
High point was 2,600 to 1900 BC.

Speaker 20 And it's the sort of, in terms of academic source, it's like the opposite of the Vedas, in that the Vedas, all we have are the texts.

Speaker 20 And we've got almost nothing in the way of material remains that go with that Vedic civilization, which came in from northwest Indian.

Speaker 20 the Indo-Europeans effectively had spread out of the of the steppes, isn't it, of Central Asia.

Speaker 20 And

Speaker 20 they're always travelling, so they didn't really leave much behind. Whereas Indus Valley, we've got amazing material remains all over a vast area and a script of sorts, which has never been decoded.

Speaker 20 So we don't have any text telling us what was going on there. So we've just got to kind of infer it from the material remains.
So even

Speaker 20 things like, you know, there's a big bath. There's obviously something that was used as a big bath.
And people

Speaker 20 obviously, you know, want to read into it later practices practices of Hinduism which is big on bathing you know ritual bathing is big in Hinduism so they see that thing oh you know maybe this is a a forerunner of Hindu traditions but

Speaker 20 the linguistic and now paleogenetic evidence shows that the Indo-Europeans who were the the precursors of Hinduism came in significantly after the Indus Valley civilization so it seems likely that the Indus Valley civilization was not part of of that stream of culture and where yoga comes comes into this is that, so in, it was in the 1920s, I think, that Sir John Marshall sort of first started digging up the Indus Valley Civilization at Mohenjo-daro.

Speaker 20 And they found among hundreds, thousands of objects, they found these lots of these tiny little seals. And a few of them had this seated figure that looks like he probably,

Speaker 20 in fact, it was thought to be ithiphallic.

Speaker 20 Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Just to explain what that means.

Speaker 23 Yes, it's the depiction of a deity with a rather erect thallus.

Speaker 20 Exactly. Exactly.
So and he's kind of sitting in this cross-legged position.

Speaker 20 It's not totally clear what the feet are doing, but it may be that the feet are kind of joined at the groin and the legs, the thighs and the shins are going out at right angles.

Speaker 20 You can see one of these in the British Museum. There's one also in the Ashmolean in Oxford.
And then the head sort of looks like maybe it's got three faces on it.

Speaker 20 Okay, and then there are animals round about. These are tiny little seals, but you can see the animals also.

Speaker 20 And so one of Marshall's colleagues, I think he's called Ram Prasad Chandra, something like that, he said, this must be the god Shiva, the Hindu god Shiva, who is known, one of his many names is Pashupati, the Lord of the Beasts.

Speaker 20 And he's also known as the kind of first teacher of yoga. So it became known as the Pashupati seal, which was just, as I said, is a name of the Hindu god Shiva.

Speaker 20 And people have understood the posture to be a yogic posture. But it's, you know, now now people have studied it in a more kind of sober light in recent years.

Speaker 20 And in fact, it bears a great deal of similarity with iconography from what's known as the Trans-Elamite culture of southeastern Iran and western Balochistan, where you get these kind of buffalo-headed deities.

Speaker 20 And in fact, what looks like three heads seem to be the ears of a bit, the ones on the side seem to be the ears of a big buffalo, and the phallus of the Ithi phallicness is probably a belt hanging down.

Speaker 20 Okay, so, but this is the problem.

Speaker 20 People want to read, and what I would add is also, you know, one of my specialist areas of research is tracing the history of the postures, and we get no evidence for a similar posture for about 3,000 years.

Speaker 20 Okay, so you've got to, you know, how do you explain this huge gap? We get plenty of yoga texts in between.

Speaker 20 So it's on the basis of these seals and nothing else that people will tell you that yoga is 5,000 years old and was practiced in the Indus Valley civilization.

Speaker 20 And of course, it's not impossible, but I don't, you know, I think it's pretty flimsy evidence.

Speaker 23 But it's a good place for us to start the chat.

Speaker 23 As you say, if it's regularly said that yoga may have its origins back with the Indus Valley civilization, if that's out there today, it's good to point out straight away, not impossible, but the evidence that we have, it's far from concrete evidence.

Speaker 23 So it's still good to highlight something.

Speaker 20 Yeah, that's flimsy. I mean, so it's not until...
not until we get to the Vedas. And as I say, there's a gap.
So the Indus Valley civilization seems to fizzle out quite quickly.

Speaker 20 No one's quite sure why. Was it environmental reasons or whatever? In about 1900 BCE.

Speaker 20 And then the Indo-Europeans who bring the Vedic texts with them into India don't really arrive until about 1500, maybe 1700, but there's a gap.

Speaker 20 But within those Vedic texts, that's where we first start seeing some elements of what later comes to be understood as yoga.

Speaker 20 The word yoga is in there, but there's definitely no systematized practice of yoga in the Vedic texts. As I said, they're kind of hymns to various different kinds of deities.

Speaker 23 Well, let's go through it now almost chronologically. This sounds a really great way to do it.

Speaker 23 So we'll start with those earliest texts, the Vedic texts, and what the mentions of yoga are in those, and then work our way through antiquity until we reach the end of the ancient period and see what texts we have then and how they describe yoga by that time.

Speaker 23 I must ask first, the word yoga, do we know what it means?

Speaker 20 Yes. I hesitate because it's one of the most

Speaker 20 polysemic words in Sanskrit. You know, like if you look up the word set in the English dictionary, you'll get a a few pages.
If you look up yoga

Speaker 20 in the Sanskrit dictionary, you'll get possibly hundreds, definitely dozens of definitions. But it's actually cognate with the English word yoke.
And it comes from the Sanskrit root yuj,

Speaker 20 which means to, has two meanings, which complicates the meaning of yoga a little bit already. So I talked about Panani, the grammarian.

Speaker 20 in his list of the roots from which you can form Sanskrit words, yuj is there, and it can either mean to join two things together, hence it's cognate. So, yoga is then cognate with English yoke.

Speaker 20 So, when you yoke an animal to a you know, hitch it up to a chariot or something, it can also mean concentration as well, so it has that sense of you know, meditation concentration.

Speaker 20 But normally, more commonly, you'll see it understood when we're talking about the sort of yoga that we're talking about in the sense of joining things together, and we get that

Speaker 20 sense in the Vedas. It's used to

Speaker 20 yoga is a kind of way of taking control of something else okay

Speaker 20 through yoking it to you okay so and that sense does kind of carry on into later yoga it's one of the earliest metaphors when we really can see that we're talking about yoga yoga is of harnessing the senses you've got to rein in the senses kind of bring them into yourself and it's only by going introverting that you can then really develop your own inner spirituality or however you want to phrase it So there's that sense of yoke there.

Speaker 20 We do also in the Vedas, there's a famous hymn called the Keshin hymn. And Keshin, Keshi, means hairy, basically.
It's a hairy man. And it talks about this hairy guy flying through the air.

Speaker 20 He's kind of naked, or sometimes he's wearing sort of tawny-coloured rags. He's got long hair, obviously.
He's said to have drunk some kind of poison.

Speaker 20 So people understand that to mean some kind of drug, maybe soma, which is key to the Vedas. And then he's communing with the gods.
He's having some kind of mystical experience.

Speaker 20 And so he is seen as a forerunner of these ascetics that I was talking about earlier, who, as I meant, you see them still today. In India, they might be wearing ochre robes.

Speaker 20 They might go naked, like the Caishin in the hymn. Nowadays, well, they might drink bhang, a cannabis drink, but they're also sort of smoking chilams and whatever.

Speaker 20 So that, you know, this idea of kind of taking substances to bring about some kind of ecstatic experience.

Speaker 20 And it's the same people today who are practicing yo, who's seen as the kind of yoga practitioners par excellence. So people, you can read into that, maybe a forerunner of yogic traditions.

Speaker 20 It's the in the Rig Veda as well, the earliest of the four Vedas, we get references to prana, which is the breath, you know, which becomes key to yoga practice later on. So harnessing and

Speaker 20 using the breath. Although that's not using it, harnessing the breath, I don't think is mentioned in the Vedas.

Speaker 20 But in some of the slightly later derivative texts of the Rig Veda there's a one called the Jaimaniya Brahman Upanishad. It's complicated because it's a Brahmana Upanishad, so it comes before the

Speaker 20 900 BCE. And that talks about meditating with Aum whilst controlling the breath and so forth.

Speaker 20 And then just to finish with the Vedas, the most recent of them, still very old, the Atharvava Veda, which was probably composed around 1000 BCE and is very different from the others.

Speaker 20 That mentions more breaths. It mentions a system of five breaths in the body, which becomes very prominent in later yoga texts.

Speaker 20 But it also mentions this intriguing band of young men called the Vratyas, who are like ascetics in some way.

Speaker 20 They kind of remove themselves from society, normally just for a year, but then they do, I think they engage in breath control. And they also said to stand up for long periods.

Speaker 20 I think I said earlier that this is one of the practices that become associated with the sort of hardcore ascetics from the fifth, fourth century BCE onwards. And you find them today.

Speaker 20 Nowadays they call them Kariswari sadhus and you'll find sadhus in India. Men have been standing up for 20 years.

Speaker 20 Yeah, these days almost always men. Actually, funnily enough we get Mughal miniatures showing women.
But yeah, so this body of ascetic practice is quite well developed by about the fifth century.

Speaker 20 BCE and it still goes on today. That's the wonderful thing.

Speaker 20 I kind of look at my classicist colleagues in Oxford and elsewhere,

Speaker 20 studying a dead civilization, whereas in India we can study this material and it's still there. It's still going on today.

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Speaker 3 Tonight, fill a shaker with water.

Speaker 2 Add one scoop of early bird and put it on your nightstand.

Speaker 4 When your alarm screams at 5 a.m., drink it first.

Speaker 5 What happens next will shock you.

Speaker 6 Your brain doesn't gradually wake up, it switches on. The fog vanishes.

Speaker 3 You're not surviving your morning. You're conquering it.

Speaker 1 This blood-orange mimosa ritual turned more than a thousand night owls into morning warriors this week alone. Get yours at clubberlybird.com and use code NEVERSNOOSE for 20% off.

Speaker 8 Hi folks, it's Mark Bittman from the podcast Food with Mark Bittman.

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Speaker 23 But it's interesting what you mentioned there about those mentions of the word yoga and also from those particular Vedas, so the oldest one, the Rig Veda, and also the youngest one, which is like some 500 years apart, we think, roughly from each other.

Speaker 23 And yet, although it feels that this isn't concrete evidence that it is yoga, I mean, the link to these aesthetics and these practices that become associated with yoga as time goes on, it does start, at least for me from the outside, it feels quite convincing that they are talking about a form of yoga.

Speaker 23 Maybe that is the earliest textual evidence we have for this.

Speaker 20 Yes, absolutely. I mean, there are these elements, but it's not formalized at all.
And the word yoga is not quite yet used in the way, you know, to apply to that sort of set of practices.

Speaker 20 For that, we have to wait till about 300 BC in one of the Upanishads, so like the latest texts I mentioned earlier of the whole Vedic corpus. There's one called the Katha Upanishad.

Speaker 20 And that's the first one that uses yoga in a sense that we would understand it. And they're very much, you know, the breath is controlled and it's to do with harnessing the senses.

Speaker 20 But the Upanishads or the later ones,

Speaker 20 the dating of Sanskrit texts is really impossible, really difficult.

Speaker 23 Well, before we go into the Upanishads, I do have also in my notes about the date 500 BC and a group called the Sramanas.

Speaker 23 Well, is it important to do them first, or you are the expert, so I don't want to interrupt too much.

Speaker 20 Well, yeah, that's why the dating is tricky because there's arguments about who came first, the Shramanas or the early Upanishads.

Speaker 20 I think there was a kind of milieu, there was a certain amount of interaction, but in fact, one of the most prominent scholars who very sadly died about three months ago, I think, Johannes Brockhorst, who he developed a very convincing to me argument that it was in the regions kind of to the northeast, so to the south of the eastern part of Nepal.

Speaker 20 So kind of east of where the Ganges and Yamuna rivers meet, this area that he calls Greater Magadha, which is a kind of big, important kingdom.

Speaker 20 and in around the fifth century bce is when these shramana traditions appear and they're very they're separate from the vedic traditions that we've been talking about and it's a real kind of fascinating melting pot and a crucible for new ideas new kind of spiritual practices and what happens there but so it's it's where buddhism appears it's where the buddha you know he was in partaliputra wasn't he he went out and you know that's when he went out of the palace that's in the ganges area, is it?

Speaker 20 Yeah, exactly, in the sort of eastern Ganges area. And also, the Jain religion develops there at the same time as Buddhism.
Various other, we've got a few scant references.

Speaker 20 We haven't got a lot of material. There's one called the Arjivakas, and then there are lots of other weird little ascetic traditions that we get references to.

Speaker 20 But what the sort of key thing that happens there, if one follows Broncor's theory, which I tend to, is that the Buddha sees all this suffering and basically then decides that the life is suffering and we all it's also within this milieu that we first see the notion of rebirth okay because we don't get a formula you know well formed doctrine of rebirth of you know reincarnation in the Vedas people again you know want to find them there but it's not well developed it's only in this period that we find it for the first time so the idea develops that we are all perpetually getting reincarnated into this life of suffering and it's thanks to our karma our actions they determine how we get reborn and how much suffering and what happens to us.

Speaker 20 And the logical sort of answer to dealing with this is get off this cycle. And so people develop,

Speaker 20 you've got all these groups of ascetics, shramanas.

Speaker 20 So ascetic, if I use the word ascetic, that could include Hindu-Vedic traditions. But shramanas, that is used to refer really to the non-Vedic traditions that appear in Maggada.

Speaker 20 And they're going around doing all kinds of, you know, to us can seem crazy stuff. So the Buddha, one of the best ways of understanding this is to think that the Buddha,

Speaker 20 he sees suffering, he wants to deal with it. And so he goes out, you know, renounces his

Speaker 20 royal life and goes out and hangs out in all these groups, just going, so what's this guy saying? I'm going to try that and I'll try this and I'll try that.

Speaker 20 And so he does go for some quite extreme practices. You know, he says he's fasted for longer, for as long as is possible without dying and got no benefit from that.

Speaker 20 He says he's held his breath for as long as, you know, until he's fast and holds his breath until it feels like his whole stomach's on fire and he can feel wind blowing his head and it's getting terrible headaches and everything.

Speaker 20 And he says, this is not getting me anywhere. And in fact, there's one reference, because I'm always, you know, I particularly focus on the physical stuff.

Speaker 20 He does say in one text of the Majjhama Nikaya of the Pali Canon that he stood up for, you know, months or something, stood up for long periods and then sat down for long periods. But the

Speaker 20 sort of... the best accepted version of the story is that he then decides that all this hardcore asceticism is pointless.

Speaker 20 And he goes and sits sits under the bodhi tree and just meditates for 40 days takes the the middle path what he calls the middle path and so he's engaging with these various other traditions one of the so only really buddhism and jainism survive to this day and the jains to this day are kind of really hardcore ascetics still so jain renounces jain ascetics you'll see them in india sometimes they've

Speaker 20 you'll see them walking down the the side of the motorway stark naked often or and sometimes

Speaker 20 they might have a cloth over their mouths and they're sweeping

Speaker 20 the part of the road as they go because they don't want to tread on any insects. They don't want to breathe anything in.
They pluck their hair out rather than shave it, because

Speaker 20 they think they might harm tiny little living organisms. They're the kind of most extreme non-violence of these traditions.
And in fact,

Speaker 20 so the theory that they developed about karma, you know, this idea that they basically just decided that all action is bad, but you also have to get so you,

Speaker 20 but your past action is always going to be affecting what happens to you now, and that you can get rid of that by burning it up through these extreme practices, and that burns up the residues of your old karma.

Speaker 20 And also, you don't want to acquire accrue any more karma, so the best thing to do is just to sit down and not move until you die. And that still happens as well.

Speaker 20 You still get the odd chain every now and then. It becomes quite a lot of fanfare.
You know, some monk will say, right, that's it, and and they call it salika nana

Speaker 20 so the buddha was kind of he said okay these guys are too much and then i don't think it's doing them any good and he chooses his path but it's in that kind of milia so this idea of ahinsa non-violence which then of course manifests in vegetarianism so all these things that we now associate it associate closely with hinduism that kind of receive wisdom these days is that they developed in that milia.

Speaker 20 Now that's not to say that Vedic ascetics, Vedic renouncers, were not involved in all of this as well. You know, they would have been mixing.
And so the Upanishads are like

Speaker 20 the first texts that were produced in that milieu by the Vedic traditions. So it's the first time, like I said, it's the first time we see within those texts, they're not talking about ritual.

Speaker 20 It's not sitting around a fire throwing things in and chanting hymns in order to make it rain or whatever or to get a sun.

Speaker 20 It's looking inwards and saying, how am I going to get off this cycle of rebirth and suffering? And

Speaker 20 an answer to that, again, is the practices of yoga as well. So the Buddha meditates.
And in fact, early on in yoga, the key practice, well, the key practices are meditation and breath control.

Speaker 20 And then posture, in terms of sort of what's in Sanskrit, is called asana, and is the sort of forerunner of the gymnastic postures we see today.

Speaker 20 Although that kind of body positive, body cultivation thing doesn't come in until much later, probably about a thousand years ago.

Speaker 20 But so posture in the early days just means sitting down cross-legged in a good posture for meditation and breath control.

Speaker 23 So the Upanishads are when they actually mention yoga as a discipline. They've made yoga the name.
The word yoga has now got

Speaker 23 the association of

Speaker 20 it. It comes to sort of determine a system.
Again, yoga, the word itself is...

Speaker 20 funny enough i've been working on this much later medieval text and i've been the last week or two i've been pondering what does the word yoga mean because one of the problems of understanding is that it can mean, most of the time, actually, it means a state.

Speaker 20 It means the final goal. It means the union, you know, whether you envisage that as the union of your individual self with the universal self or

Speaker 20 just becoming one with God or something like that. So it doesn't mean the practice.
Do you see what I mean? When we say we're going to go and do yoga, we don't say, I'm going to.

Speaker 20 join with the universal self. That doesn't necessarily what one means when one's going to the yoga studio down the road.
But also, it does kind of stray into into that meaning of practice.

Speaker 20 And so in this Kathok Upanishad, which I said is probably around the third century BC, it's the first time we see it used in that way.

Speaker 20 And it seems to denote a practice involving breath control and meditation.

Speaker 23 And is it defined by this chariot story that we hear about?

Speaker 20 Yeah, that metaphor keeps cropping up.

Speaker 23 So can you explain this metaphor and how it's used to describe yoga at that time?

Speaker 20 Yeah, I'll have to try and remember the different parts of it. I think the Atman, so the self is the charioteer, the body is the chariot, the reins are the senses, and you've got to kind of pull them.

Speaker 20 Oh, maybe, sorry, the horses are the senses, and you've got to pull them in, and that's seen as yoking. And then, so by as I

Speaker 20 by bringing, turning the senses inwards in a way, calming the horses, that's when you can then

Speaker 20 look at what's going on internally and kind of cultivate a spiritual life and turn away from the external world, and then, in theory, become enlightened.

Speaker 20 So,

Speaker 20 key to all of this as well, as I said, this these ideas that come in of rebirth and then liberation, getting off this cycle.

Speaker 20 So, this idea of what you know, famously in the Buddhist traditions called Nirvana, but we find the same word in Hindu traditions as well. That's kind of seen as extinction.
It is really

Speaker 20 seen as you

Speaker 20 it's understood that you can't really become, you know, you only become fully enlightened at death. Okay, that you do later on beyond the

Speaker 20 ancient period, beyond the classical period, you do start getting an idea of kind of living liberation where you're walking around like some sort of superman who's got all the powers going in the universe.

Speaker 20 But at this period, liberation comes at death.

Speaker 20 And in fact, yoga is often associated with dying in that you really want to do the practices at the time of death because that will ensure that you get off the cycle and you will attain final emancipation and liberation.

Speaker 23 So, from these earlier texts, I mean, do we yet have any evidence from that material of more extreme methods for yoga at that time? Or is that information not yet available?

Speaker 23 Because you mentioned that there was like the breath control stuff in the Rig Veda or potential links to it, but also with the links to asceticism and a more hard way of living from the text that we've already covered.

Speaker 23 Are there mentions yet? of more extreme ways to do yoga for them as almost, you know, a hard, arduous task?

Speaker 20 Yes, so we're already by, you know, we've got to the third century bc and that's sort of early parts of the mahabharata so india's great epic you know i think it's ten times as long as the odyssey and the iliad combined and that's got all kinds of stories in it as you can imagine and often we get stories of can be kings not just regular ascetics renouncers who will undergo great hardship so they or in the ramayana which is the other great epic famously ravana who's the the villain of the piece he goes and stands on his stands on one leg on top of a mountain i think it is for years on end to attain great power and weapons.

Speaker 20 So the idea is you do these things, not necessarily, so this is another sort of aspect of yoga and these practices, they're not always done just for enlightenment.

Speaker 20 You can get special powers along the way. And so the same people who will be doing these austerities, they will might often do it with a specific worldly end in mind.

Speaker 20 So you get these stories of people going and like Ravana and they acquired as this word tapas. Tapas is the word, it comes from a root tap, meaning to get hot.

Speaker 20 And the idea is that by doing these austerities, you generate this kind of spiritual heat. It's like charging up a spiritual battery.
And tapas is seen.

Speaker 20 When yoga gets formulated in various texts, tapas is seen as one of the kind of prerequisites or part of the practice.

Speaker 20 And so, yeah, you'll get stories of ascetics doing these things, maybe standing up for years on end.

Speaker 20 And they acquire, they generate so much of this power that the gods start getting worried about what they're going to do with it. They're kind of challenging the power of the gods.

Speaker 20 And the sort of classic thing they do is they'll send a beautiful maiden, maiden because it's nearly always men and if if they if the maiden managers have seduced the ascetic and he sheds his seed that's all his power is gone but if not if they can't kind of you know the other thing is to trick them into cursing someone it's interesting links to like the early monks in egypt isn't it and the attempts i think there's also stories of you know trying to be seduced by women and like to to go away from that ascetic life of those earliest monks so you can see potential links there between the monks of um christianity and the ascetics that you mentioned.

Speaker 20 Yeah, sure. It also makes me think of life of Brian Monte Park when you've got it.

Speaker 20 Somebody gets, you know, tricked out of this vow of silence.

Speaker 20 Yeah, because silence is often part of these things, you know. And so, yeah,

Speaker 20 if you can kind of enrage one of these ascetics enough that they will then curse someone, that also loses the power. Yeah.

Speaker 20 But if not, if they hold on to it, then the gods will say, right, what do you want? You know, we'll give you whatever weapon, whatever boon it is, or you know, some kind of power that you're after.

Speaker 20 So we have that, yeah, the interplay between asceticism and yoga, or the fact that asceticism, tapas, is part of yoga. We find that in early texts.

Speaker 20 We also, interestingly for you, because I know you're being on Alexander, we get a reference in Strabo. See, I'm probably one mispronouncing now.

Speaker 20 And I know that Strabo is a bit later, isn't it, a bit after the...

Speaker 23 He is. He's a geographer writing a little bit later.
But he adds some interesting...

Speaker 23 The thing with Alexander the Great going to India, I mean, it's just as much interest to academics later because they're receiving accounts from the people who went with Alexander documenting what they saw going down the Indus River Valley and stuff.

Speaker 23 So they're fascinated by that.

Speaker 20 Right. Well, in there, because I haven't read much of it, but of course I've sort of zoomed in on the bits of relevance to my work.
And

Speaker 20 he has a couple of meetings with Indian holy men who... So this would have been up on the sort of, like I said, near Taxila, somewhere like that, up near the Indus River, northwest, yeah.

Speaker 20 And these Indian holy men,

Speaker 20 I i think it's two in the first story and then maybe a bunch of them in the second one but they're they're holding kind of extremely uncomfortable postures in the midday sun they don't not do it for years on end as some of them might do these days but they i think he says they come out of the village and then just stand there in the sun some one of them's holding a plank up like

Speaker 20 in front of him it sounds very uncomfortable and then they go back to the village and in the day so this is a kind of thing that's part and parcel of this whole system of ascetic practices.

Speaker 20 So yeah, the point I want to make is, I think I've already said it, but but we associate yoga today with kind of wellness and being good to your body and cultivating the body and making it healthy.

Speaker 20 They had a rather opposite view in those days.

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Speaker 23 You did mention earlier that next key text that we're going to explore, this key Indian epic, the Mahabharata.

Speaker 23 I didn't realize it was so much longer than the Odyssey and the Iliad combined, but it takes several centuries to complete, doesn't it?

Speaker 20 Yes, again, you know, some people would argue against that, but the general received opinion is it sort of takes 600, you know, from about the third century BC to the third century CE before it attains its final form.

Speaker 20 And of course, it's probably telling stories that are way older than that as well.

Speaker 23 And the stories that it tells, so do ascetics take quite a prime role or do we see them appear time and time again in the Mahabharata?

Speaker 23 And because of that, do you then see potential mentions of yoga in the Mahabharata too?

Speaker 20 We do. I mean, ascetics don't play a big role in the Mahabharata.

Speaker 20 Often it's kings sort of doing ascetic practices again, you know, to get a special weapon to defeat their enemy or something like that. There is a section

Speaker 20 in the twelfth book, which is called the Shanti Parvan, there's 18 books, and the end of that is called the Moksha Dharma Parvan. And there, someone giving instructions, who is it?

Speaker 20 Hishma's dying and getting instructions on, you know, on liberation at death and using methods of yoga. Like I said earlier, yoga is often associated with death.

Speaker 20 And

Speaker 20 there,

Speaker 20 again, breath control comes up a lot, but also the primary method of yoga is meditation.

Speaker 20 So just reiterate that in those days, early days, it was breath control and meditation while seated in a lotus posture or something like that. But also part of the Mahabharata is the Bhagavad Gita.

Speaker 20 Yes.

Speaker 23 What is this? Because this seems really, really interesting in regards to the development of yoga.

Speaker 20 Absolutely.

Speaker 20 And this is where the sort of chink comes in to the whole ascetic kind of fortress that's been built around yoga, where it seemed to be the preserve of kind of more hardcore religious practitioners.

Speaker 23 Weirder people, it sounds like.

Speaker 20 And what one, you know, if one looks at the bigger picture, one can see that this, you know, people running off to the forest or taking themselves outside of the city.

Speaker 20 Because in fact, one of the theories for why these ideas of reincarnation and suffering in particular appear in the fifth century BCE is because of the second wave of urbanization in India and then sort of disease and so forth appears.

Speaker 20 And, you know, life gets a bit tough.

Speaker 23 They're trying to seek answers for it. Are we being punished or something?

Speaker 20 Yeah.

Speaker 20 Yeah, so and so people then look at ways of to deal with that.

Speaker 20 But if you get these renouncer groups, you know these monastic groups who then start to attract patronage which they do obviously the buddha you know very early on starts to attract lots of patronage and these jain saints and so forth and then maybe also within the hindu traditions that's a challenge to the mainstream you know the mainstream vedic priests who kind of you know they work for the kings they say that we've got to keep doing our rituals and that's what matters in order to keep the kingdom flourishing.

Speaker 20 But then maybe the king, you know, takes a fancy to these charismatic yogis on the edge of town who are a bit more fun to hang out with than the stayed old Brahmins.

Speaker 20 So you can see kind of it's a challenge to the Brahmanical hold on religious traditions. So what's the very clever thing that happens in the Bhagavad Gita?

Speaker 20 So the frame of the story is that we're about to have the mother of all battles. These two

Speaker 20 warring tribes, the Pandavas and the Kauravas, are facing each other.

Speaker 20 And Arjuna is one of the Pandava brothers for for reasons that have will take too long to explain but the god Krishna is his charioteer he's he's you know on the battlefield he says I can't do this I can't go kill my because they're related they're related as well he says I can't go kill my cousins

Speaker 20 and so the Bhagavad Gita means the song the Gita of the Lord Bhagavata which means so it's Krishna's teaching and basically the whole point of it is Krishna telling Arjuna no you've got to fight you know this is your duty it's your it's your birth given duty.

Speaker 20 You shouldn't renounce. So, you know, Arjuna wants to say, I don't want to do this.
I want to go

Speaker 20 become a holy man in the forest and give up on all this nonsense.

Speaker 20 So, Krishna very cleverly reworks, you know, he makes it possible for Arjuna to

Speaker 20 fight the battle and still be doing yoga at the same time. Okay, so he says that the ultimate form of doing yoga is to do your birth-given duty without regard to what happens, what the reward is.

Speaker 20 So you can see what I mean? It's kind of, it's a very

Speaker 20 society cohesive teaching. And where yoga comes, and you do get teachings on the practice, you know, sitting down to meditate and do breath control, Krishna gives these teachings.
But

Speaker 20 it's hard to make full sense of it, but he's teaching that that practice gives you the equanimity.

Speaker 20 that will enable you to carry go through with carrying out your duty, even if it's horrific and you're killing your cousins and so forth.

Speaker 20 And he's saying that through doing that, Krishna is saying that through doing that, you can still get liberation.

Speaker 23 And how does that then allow

Speaker 23 people from then on, like yoga becoming more accepted, that people can do who aren't ascetics, who don't have to start this difficult life?

Speaker 20 Well, exactly.

Speaker 20 So the message that Krishna is giving is that if you do your birth-given duty without any kind of self-interest, without regard to the reward that you're going to get for it, you're just going to do what

Speaker 20 you've been put on earth to do. That through doing that, you can get the same reward, or in fact, better reward than if you go off to the forest and hang out with these.

Speaker 23 You don't need to do all of that stuff.

Speaker 20 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you don't, yeah, you don't need, and he specifically says you don't need to do these extreme practices that are mortifying the body and so forth.

Speaker 20 And then also throws in the kind of key development here is what's called bhakti yoga. I mean, you hear lots of different types of yoga, but bhakti is devotion.

Speaker 20 So Krishna reveals himself as the godhead halfway through the fantastic part of the Bhagavad Gita.

Speaker 20 And he says key to this practice is devotion to him as well. You've got to be completely devoted to Krishna as the Godhead.

Speaker 23 So can we presume there was an explosion, there was a great increase in the popularity of yoga once the Bhagavad Gita becomes widespread across India?

Speaker 20 No. No.
No, it doesn't seem really to happen, to be honest. That's something I've always wondered about.

Speaker 20 I mean, it kind of makes it possible because it's almost like the well because as i say yoga yoga can be understood quite broadly prior to the modern era we have almost no evidence of non-ascetics non-professionals doing yoga i mean it may be that people read the bhagavad gita early on and went about their regular duties and maybe did a little bit of meditating and yoga but it's kind of i guess we probably wouldn't even know that if that was true because it's not such an interesting story no one you know you're not going to you're not going to carve sort of statues of the cobbler who's quickly sitting and doing a bit of breath control or something like that but but it doesn't seem to become particularly widespread no but it does mean that it is opened up to everyone so let's move on to the next key ancient text that we should cover in this story which is the yogacara well it's not even a text is it it's yogacara buddha yogacara yogacara see you're you're helping with me with pronunciation so much well it's tricky yeah because i because the you know there's a special system of of transliterating sanskrit words which you need to be initiated into you need to be able to pronounce them If you do, once you've been initiated, you can pronounce anything.

Speaker 20 It's much easier than English. But Yogacara Buddhism, yeah, that's an early form of Buddhism.
The Yogacara, I'm not an expert on this particularly, but it means the practitioner.

Speaker 20 It's not been studied that much. There's lots of fascinating texts.
I've looked into it a bit. In fact,

Speaker 20 it's got one of the first mentions of Hatha Yoga, which is kind of the more physical-oriented, more body-cultivating practices that we get a bit later on.

Speaker 20 But the prime practices in it are meditation, as one would expect from Buddhist tradition.

Speaker 20 And it feeds very strongly into probably the other text that we should talk about here, probably the kind of cut-off of the classical period, written in about 400 CE.

Speaker 20 Now, that sort of mouthful, Patanjala Yoga Shastra, means the yoga text, the yoga shastra of Patanjali. And Patanjala is the adjective from Patanjali.

Speaker 20 So there's 195 short sutras on yoga written by Patanjali, but then there's a commentary that goes with it.

Speaker 20 And again, there's a lot of scholarly debate, but the general consensus these days, there's good arguments against it, but the consensus seems to be that the commentary and the sutras were written together,

Speaker 20 which is why we have to say this. You can't just say Patanjali's Yoga Sutras.
You have to say the whole lot, because it means the sutras and then the auto-commentary.

Speaker 20 There's a thing that the Sanskrit authors did a lot, is they would write a kind of really pithy, difficult, short text and then comment on it themselves to elucidate the meaning of the text themselves.

Speaker 23 And is the Patanjali Yoga Sutra, is that Hindu or is that

Speaker 20 becomes really key to Hinduism? Not until much later. So nowadays, often one of the defining features of Hindu philosophy is six schools, six darshanas they call, of which one of them is yoga.

Speaker 20 The root text of yoga is this Patanjali's text. But that's rather complicated.

Speaker 20 One must remember that in fact there were lots of other philosophical traditions doing yoga who did not adhere to what Patanjali taught.

Speaker 23 Like Yogacara Buddhism for the title.

Speaker 20 Exactly, exactly. And in fact, so I did this with my colleague Mark Singleton.
We did this book, Roots of Yoga, full of translations of lots of different texts.

Speaker 20 I think more than 150 texts on yoga, bits and pieces here and there. Much the hardest was Patanjali when we were translating that.
Because it's full of terms that I didn't recognise at all.

Speaker 20 And I realized after a while that the best place to look for them was in the Buddhist Sanskrit dictionaries, because Patanjali was taking very complicated technical terms about the workings of the mind.

Speaker 20 And because the bulk of the text is about meditative practice, and in fact, seeking to stop the mind from functioning whatsoever. But he's taking those terms from Yogacara Buddhism.

Speaker 20 He also takes sort of ethical ideas from Jain traditions. So he's magpie, he's eclectic, bringing lots of different traditions in there, all for kind of male ascetics, but for him for Brahmins.
So

Speaker 20 it's definitely definitely a Hindu text, although there's debate about whether it's theistic or not, and there are mentions of God, but which God is not specified.

Speaker 20 So it's kind of has, like a lot of these texts, they often like to make themselves sort of usable by lots of different people. But that becomes the foundational text of yoga.

Speaker 23 Well, I was going to say, so he collates all these different practices from different, you know, kind of groups into this text. And this is almost, as you say, the foundational text.

Speaker 23 Is this like the first official manual of yoga yoga that we have surviving then?

Speaker 20 Well, I wouldn't say it's the first because actually in the Mahabharata, we get these short teachings on yoga.

Speaker 20 Yogacara is a bit older as well, but it becomes the locus classicus, really, particularly within the Hindu tradition.

Speaker 20 And even to this day, you'll find that, you know, in yoga studios and these yoga teacher trainings I mentioned earlier, they usually have to study Patanjali, for which I pity them greatly because it's extremely difficult.

Speaker 20 Like I said, it's probably the hardest yoga text out there. The technical terms in it are really, really complex.
It has very little to do with what is practiced in yoga studios today.

Speaker 20 It mentions postures, but again, only seated postures for meditation. Breath controls in there.

Speaker 23 So, what are the key practices that they talk about then in this?

Speaker 20 Well, the key, again, it's a bit of a layered text. It's very difficult to make sense of, but

Speaker 20 to make it completely coherent,

Speaker 20 maybe one of the core teachings for which it becomes most famous is the Ashtanga yoga practice. And Ashta Anga means eight limbs.

Speaker 20 Some people don't like the word limb, limb but it means so it's a yoga practice with eight parts to eight limbs so you've got the yamas and the niyamas so those are kind of rules and restrictions so ethical principles basically often a lot of them seem to be taken from the jain tradition including ahinsa said to be the most important so that's non-violent then you get was it yama niyama asana posture like i say he just when it's elaborated in the commentary just mentions a few seated postures for meditation because then the main practices come after that so asana then pranayama, breath control, which is basically holding the breath, you know, sort of control breathing and then holding the breath.

Speaker 20 Then pratyahara, which means withdrawal. Okay, so this is goes back to what I was saying about the charioteer and the horses and pulling the senses in.

Speaker 20 So the idea is that you withdraw your senses from external objects, then you know you then you're you're just functioning with what's within your person.

Speaker 23 So not withdrawal from the world, like as a as a person, it's not that's not what that means.

Speaker 20 in the text is definitely geared at brahmin male renouncers okay so that we're got to pratyahara so those are seen as the five external angas so they're kind of seen as external practices and then you've got the three internal which is dharana so now you're onto meditation proper dharana is means sort of fixation so you fix your attention on a single point then dhyana which is a kind of

Speaker 20 heightened form of dharana of the fixation and you can have an object dhyana you know you can meditate on a deity or a candle or whatever and you become extremely good at that and then once you've nailed that then you move on to the final of the angas which is called samadhi

Speaker 20 and that hard to translate I normally translate it as absorption when you when you become fully expert in that that's when you get so the the definition of yoga at the beginning of the text is yoga shitratina rodeha which means yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind so basically your mind has stopped doing anything and that's seen as the ultimate goal.

Speaker 23 So have the more harsh parts of yoga have they kind of gone then by this time?

Speaker 23 As you said, the raising of a plank above your head?

Speaker 20 Well no actually. I mean in in Patanjali so within the niyamas I think it is always get confused between the yamas and the niyamas but there's five these five rules and regulations or whatever.

Speaker 20 One of them is tapas which I mentioned earlier which is the word for asceticism and then in the in the commentary, tapas is explained as the overcoming of extremes, so hot and cold and so forth.

Speaker 20 And then one of the things is actually stanasana, which means standing and sitting, which later commentators understand to mean standing up for long periods, sitting down for long periods.

Speaker 20 So, no, it's still kind of seen as a prerequisite of success in yoga.

Speaker 23 Now, on the ancients, we can't go too far into the medieval world and then, but I appreciate that there are many more key developments in the story of yoga, aren't there in the following centuries but almost to kind of finish off this part of the chat jim i mean by the end of let's say antiquity so i normally like say about 500 ce or ad

Speaker 20 how should we therefore be picturing yoga by that time i would say it's still the reserve of professionals you know these ascetics or announcers whatever we want to call them But it's about to get a lot more colourful beyond these extreme religious practitioners because around about the fifth century is when Tantra arrives, Tantra arrives on the scene.

Speaker 20 And then you get wilder visualizations, wilder practices, wild religious rituals that become embroiled in yoga as well.

Speaker 20 And Tantra becomes kind of the dominant religious tradition in India for the next seven or eight hundred years. And so yoga develops also within that tradition.

Speaker 20 So we get a spicing up of what's going on.

Speaker 20 I mean, Tantra, obviously, in the kind of collective understanding of there, it's associated with sort of sex practices and so forth, but it's not all that, but there's

Speaker 20 lots of interesting material going on. And I guess it opens up as well a bit more in terms of who's doing it.
Women become more involved, I think, probably, as a result of Tantra traditions.

Speaker 23 And we've still got quite a way to go before we get to anything quite similar to that, which resembles modern yoga today, I guess.

Speaker 20 The next big turning point is kind of towards the tail end of Tantra around the 11th century. And then the kind of body positive stuff arrives.
That's what I work on most closely.

Speaker 20 And that kind of develops for three or four centuries and then becomes fairly steady state. And then the 20th century, everything goes crazy.
We don't have a lot of time to talk about that.

Speaker 23 Well, Jim, I'm very grateful for you going a bit out of your comfort zone then to kind of back into the ancient world with us and then to talk about yoga in India more than one and a half, two thousand years ago.

Speaker 23 So really appreciate your time. Before we completely wrap up, is there anything else you'd like to leave with us to end this chat on about yoga and its origins that we should be thinking of?

Speaker 20 Well, I just hope I've showed how it's been constantly evolving and it's still evolving and that there's no need or point in trying to look for an original yoga because I don't think we'll ever find one and that's such a fascinating thing to study.

Speaker 23 There's always been development, hasn't there? And many different strands, Hindu, Buddhist, and so on and so on.

Speaker 20 Indeed, indeed, yeah.

Speaker 23 Well, Jim, this has been absolutely brilliant. It just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today.

Speaker 20 Thank you, Tristan. A pleasure.

Speaker 23 Well, there you go. That was Professor Jim Mallinson talking you through the origins of yoga and its roots in ancient India.
I hope you enjoyed the episode. Thank you for listening.

Speaker 23 Please follow the ancients on Spotify or wherever you get to your podcasts. That really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favor.

Speaker 23 If you'd also be kind enough to leave us a rating, well, we'd really appreciate that.

Speaker 23 Now, don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of History Hit's podcasts at free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com slash subscribe.

Speaker 20 That's enough from me. I'll see you in the next episode.

Speaker 8 Hi folks, it's Mark Bittman from the podcast Food with Mark Bittman.

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