A short history of yoga

Yoga has a long history and a short memory. The postures most people practise today are, in their current form, surprisingly recent. The philosophy is older, the mythology older still, and the connection between the two is more complicated than most class introductions suggest.

What follows is a brief, honest sketch. Where historians disagree, it says so.

Before the texts

The earliest evidence is fragmentary. Seals from the Indus Valley civilisation (roughly 2500–1500 BCE) show figures in what some scholars interpret as seated postures. Whether these depict yogis is genuinely uncertain — the script has never been deciphered, and the interpretation relies heavily on later material. Treat the claim with caution.

More secure are the ideas in the Upaniṣads (composed from roughly 800 BCE onward), which explore the relationship between the self, the breath and the absolute. The Kaṭha Upaniṣad, for instance, describes the senses as horses and the mind as reins — a metaphor that still works.

The Bhagavad Gita

The Bhagavad Gītā, part of the Mahābhārata and generally dated somewhere between the fifth and second centuries BCE, gives yoga one of its most influential definitions: yogaḥ karmasu kauśalam — yoga is skill in action.

The Gita’s yoga is not primarily postural. It is about how to act without being consumed by the results. Karma yoga, devotion, and knowledge are all paths. The physical practice is barely mentioned.

Patanjali

The Yoga Sutras are the text that most modern yoga philosophy leans on. They are terse to the point of ambiguity: 196 aphorisms, arranged in four chapters, with centuries of commentary required to make sense of them. Dating is debated, but most scholars place the compilation between the second and fourth centuries CE, with the text drawing on older traditions.

Patanjali’s contribution is a rigorous map of the mind and a practical method for settling it. His definition of asana — steady and comfortable — is famously minimal. The elaborate postural systems came much later.

Hatha yoga

The Haṭha Yoga Pradīpikā, compiled in the fifteenth century, is the most famous of the medieval hatha texts. It describes postures, breath retention, locks, cleansing practices and meditation. Some of its practices are austere; others are still recognisable in modern classes.

This is the period in which the body becomes central to liberation rather than a distraction from it. Hatha’s aim was not fitness. It was transformation, pursued through the body.

The modern period

The postural yoga familiar today took shape in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, through a tangle of Indian revivalism, global exchange, physical culture movements and the work of teachers such as Tirumalai Krishnamacharya and his students — B. K. S. Iyengar, K. Pattabhi Jois, Indra Devi and T. K. V. Desikachar among them.

Their systems were genuinely innovative. They drew on older texts, but also on gymnastics, wrestling and the physical education of the era. This does not make modern yoga inauthentic. It makes it a living tradition, which is what traditions do.

What this means for practice

Two conclusions are worth holding together.

First, the philosophy is not decoration. The yamas, the breath, the study of the mind — these are older than the postures and remain the reason the practice exists.

Second, the postures are not ancient relics. They were refined, systematised and globalised within living memory. That is liberating: it means you do not have to treat every instruction as sacred. You can ask what a shape is for, adapt it to your body, and keep what helps.

Further reading: The eight limbs of yoga and The Yoga Sutras in plain English.