India’s Supreme Court is considering whether or not yoga, a Hindu practice, should be part of the secular country’s public school curriculum. Mark Movsesian explains that in traditional yoga, religious and secular elements of the practice are inseparable:
In traditional understanding, yoga is itself a religious act. The postures themselves lead the practitioner to God, whether the practitioner intends this or not. In traditional understanding, in other words, one can’t separate the religious and secular aspects of yoga and one really shouldn’t try. Indeed, some American Hindus object to the way our popular culture treats yoga as a designer gym routine. Much as many American Christians seek to “Keep Christ in Christmas,” the Hindu American Foundation has mounted a campaign to “Take Back Yoga” for the faith.
Dreher says he’s “with the Hindus on this”:
I don’t see how it is possible to separate yoga from religious practice — and as a practicing Christian, I would not participate in it, nor would I allow my children to participate in it. To do so would be a violation of conscience. I have friends who are either Christian or secular who practice yoga, and don’t believe there is any spiritual content to it. I respect that. But I disagree.
In Orthodox Christianity, there are some prayer rules that involve the Jesus Prayer, and many prostrations. That is, they involve the meditative use of the phrase “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me,” or some version thereof, along with making the sign of the cross, and bending and moving in ways that look like calisthenics. You could claim, I suppose, that following such a prayer rule is not really religious, if you just use the Jesus Prayer as a kind of contentless mantra. The idea would be not that the words are an actual petition to Jesus, who may or may not exist (the argument would go), but that these words were simply used as a way to calm and focus the mind.
A commenter on Rod’s blog adds:
Most Hindus I know have no resentment towards westerners using Yoga exercises for health or ordinary forms of contentment. They don’t consider that the same as genuine Yogic practice, but neither is there something sacred about the poses and exercises themselves, which are only a small and relatively superficial aspect of Yoga. In fact, part of the history of modern Hatha yoga as practiced in the west is that it’s very much a hybrid created in large part by the British in India over recent centuries, incorporating aspects of British calisthenics and other exercise regimens with traditional Yoga.
My recommendation would be to take an open-minded approach, and use whatever aspects of yoga are helpful to one’s health, and to one’s spiritual practice, whatever one’s religion might be. … It would be a mistake to impose upon these basic physical practices some sort of sacred character or unbending theological significance that they just don’t have, even in the traditional sense.
The Dish 