A brief history of yoga before it came to North America for beginner yoga students.
Yoga may be new to your neck of the world, but it has existed now for centuries. It is found in the Rig Veda, the oldest known written text in the world, which dates back to approximately four thousand years ago. Directly translated as the “Knowledge of Praise”, the Rig Veda is a compilation of 1,028 songs which were supposedly passed down through oral traditions before it was written down.
As well, Indian sculptures dating back to approximately three thousand years ago show yoga poses, and five hundred years later Hindu scriptures called the Vedas described yoga in great detail. Another five hundred years later saw the birth of the Bhagivad Gita, the epic poem (and religious text for those of the Hindu faith) with even more yogic details shared.
The first entire system completely devoted to the study of yoga, however, was written by Patanjali and called the Yoga Sutras. It was written in approximately 200 B.C. and is still referred to regularly today.
Pantanjali, an Indian doctor and sage, offered the Yoga Sutras as an accessible and easier way of understanding yoga for those who didn’t have the oral traditions from which to draw upon. For this reason, he is considered to be the ‘father of yoga’. In many yoga classes, instructors will refer to his teachings or quote passages from the Yoga Sutras to start the class.
