Something feels wrong with "Ancient Yoga"

Pashupati Seal - Proof(?) of yoga over 5000 years ago.

Context: This was supposed to be my second assignment from the Yoga Alliance professional teacher training course entitled "History of yoga leading to the modern world". It's supposed to be 1000 words and unfortunately, I hit the word cap without getting out of ancient yoga, so I kind of made it into its own thing... I think I may yet submit it anyway, but it's got nothing to do with modern yoga.

Disclaimer: This is not an opinion piece; I am in a phase of learning. This is a journey through discovery, not a finally formed opinion. You're reading mid learning ramblings.

Balance in all things – Part 1(?)

Preface: I am new to group practice and, more so, to group learning and research. I have not been in school since I was 16 when I dropped out due to the allure of snogging Caz when we were 16, this far outranked the need for GCSE’s. This, that you’re about to read, is how I solve problems and how I learn. It can look accusatory and argumentative, and I am, unfortunately, a walking contradiction, but I love to be proved wrong; I will always happily change my mind and am always the first person to say I was wrong if I feel that I was. Please read this in the mindset of a conversation with myself, not a letter to you. Thanks!

I’m struggling with the historical timeline of yoga, as a historian and from a factual point of view. Here’s why:

So I've been told that yoga is 5000 years old many times, and linked to that, I have been told that yoga predates many of the religions that utilise it, which feels like a really important piece of information to me. After today's class my timeline looked like the following: Yoga > Hindu > Buddhism > everything else.

So here's my definitive findings: Yoga was first discovered in ancient India; this is a fact. The practice is explicitly talked about in the Upanishads in approximately 800BC BC.

Here's my problem: We have pictorial evidence in the form of iconography that looks very similar to yoga, dating back over 5000 years. The issue, historically, is that we’re dealing with pre-history and proto-history, so honestly, I feel uncomfortable saying yoga *is* categorically and factually 5000 years old at all. I think it's very likely these images are linked to yoga or meditation, neither directly nor indirectly, but without written evidence, it is not a fact.

We have evidence of the use of the word yoga from the Vedic period 1500 BC, but the problem here is that the word Yoga is being predominantly used in linguistic form,ot explicitly concerning yoga as a practice (in any way, with or without movement). I think I went through the instances where it was used, a few are about literally yoking horses, and then there are a few references where yoga is used linguistically in sentences related to Idra, the Vedic god of… well everything loud, war, rain, storms and thunder, but these seem inherently spiritual as they are about and attaining to literal gods of the age. There are references to the word being used to describe joining people and god, the joining of the meaning with musical and poetic verse, and unions of… well, more horses, but never with regards to meditation, enlightenment or practice. I've looked, and I’m not seeing Yoga in the Vedic texts beyond it being linguistically used to describe unions and things coming together. There are spiritual implications, but it’s spiritual scripture; it's inherently spiritual. It feels far-reaching to me to assume the word yoga being used implies a practice separate from the religion the scripture is about.

There are two things at play here: a personal mistake on my part, and I think a little misleading use of the evidence on the part of the information as it is known. I think my mistake is this: when people say Yoga goes back up to 5000 years, I assume they mean Yoga as a practice, the mindfulness, the meditation, and then much later (much later) the movement. I assumed, possibly incorrectly, that the history of yoga referred to yoga in spirituality, not just a Sanskrit word used long before the first solid evidence of yoga as a practice. I think the misleading part is this; When yoga practitioners or teachers state that yoga goes back 5000 years, and even when its explicitly stated that’s “it’s not as we know it now with poses, it was about meditation and enlightenment” they’re still talking about the Upanishads, we know them to be 800BC, that’s 2,825 years ago. This links to the important part for me - I have been told and it seems to be common knowledge that Yoga predates Buddhism and Hinduism, but Vedic religion is thought to be the founding religion of Hinduism, part of the proto-Hindu chain that lead to Hinduism and it is in these texts that we’re scrambling to find the word yoga being used for more than hitching horses and combining ideas.

Look, I love yoga, and I also heartily agree it's not a religion, and even if we take the Upanishads as the first solid fact that yoga existed, that’s dated up to 200 years before Buddha was even said to be alive. So Buddhism, yeah, smashed it mate, but Hinduism, I’m not so sure, I'll have to do a lot more reading till I feel I have a better understanding, or I would love to be presented with some facts to make the timeline feel more bulletproof.

In summary, on ancient history, I'll say it’s all still really subjective. 5000 years ago is our first archaeological finds of potential yoga, and whereas we can’t link these uses of the word yoga to yogic practice (is that a word), that is also not evidence of a *lack* of a link. Unfortunately, as the name states, prehistory is as far back as our human history goes, and anything before that is currently and probably will always be lost to us. So, the ramblings of an avid historian aside, I’m very happy to say that yoga is very old. Almost 3000 years for certain, potentially double or even triple that, but I don’t know if we can prove this, or say with certainty that yoga predates Hinduism, though I'm very happy to say it potentially pre-dates Hinduism.

It's exciting too, if it did predate Hinduism, it would be one of the oldest forms of still practised spirituality known to man, which is mad.

Ok, so I fucked up, we’re at 1083 words and all I have covered is questioning ancient history, I might just send you this absolute brain fart and sit down and rewrite the actual assignment you asked for… which is not this.

Or, or I could just write part 1 at the top, and it looks like we’re in for an epic ride.