History of Modern Yoga: Patanjali and Western Esotericism [Paperback]

I highly recommend this book. It is clearly written, the scholarship is in depth and any serious scholar of modern Indian religions should read it. She clearly demonstrates that eastern and western ideas were fusing in India (particularly in Bengal)during the British Raj, and she shows how this contributed to the development of modern yoga movements. Included are profiles of some of the most influential thinkers and religious leaders in yoga (Vivekananda, Keshab Chandra Sen, Ramakrishna etc.) and detailed analysis of their contributions and influences. This book is a veritable gold mine of information for the religious scholar. Unfortunately, even such a great book has a flaw and I would be remiss not to point it out. She oversetimated the influence that western esotericism had on the formation of the modern yoga traditions and underestimates the influence that already existing Indian philosophies had on the development of yoga. What I think she failed to see was that western esoteric ideas were not transposed onto exisiting Indian religions, but were points of articulation with almost identical strands of mystical thinking in the indigenouse yoga traditions and the philosophy of advaita vedanta. They contained many elements in common, as most mystical traditions do. The crossover of ideas was an act of translation of perspectives between cultures at a level that there were already almost identical metaphysical ideas, namely in the mystical traditions of both. Other than this overstimation, the work is brilliant and should be read by anyone attempting to understand the roots of not only modern yoga, but of new age spirituality and modern Hinduism.

Yoga history is often written by those with strong ties to a particular guru or yogic system. Only recently has truly scholarly attention been focused on this subject. Elizabeth De Michelis has done a meticulous job of presenting her thesis. She shows how a typical Modern Postural Yoga class, her terminology to differentiate modern yoga from classical yoga, is a type of healing ritual of modern secular religion. We gain historical insight in to the development of yoga in the West that explains why many are more interested in postural yoga as an end in itself. I recommend this book as essential to anyone interested in the history of modern yoga.

I was disappointed with this book - to my mind it is written for a much more academic audience. I am familiar with yoga - I've read a couple of other books which I enjoyed, including yoga body and origins of yoga and tantra - but this one just seemed to require much more knowledge. I understand that this is the academic style, you don't spend time writing what someone else has written, but it's jarring to constantly be told, to find out what this guru thought, check on some out-of-print book from 1976. I understood the differences between Vivekenanda and his gurus and what was borrowed east-to-west, but never really understood how that differed from classic hindu/vedic belief, and how what yoga might have meant in the time of Patanjali. The writing is also in a more academic style - e.g., not a lot of emphasis on style or telling things as a story, more emphasis on constructing a analytic argument for researchers.
Also, most of the sanskrit terms are not translated or given enough explanation.

What would have been good for me is the same material with more background, written in an intelligent but more popular style. I think people who get the most out of this book are those who really know the base material well and are looking specifically to understand how Vivekananda developed his ideas and teachings.

Here's an excerpt, p. 154:
"Raja Yoga follows Samkhya-Yoga cosmology in postulating an original duality of purusa and prakrti. A sentient but actionless purusa casues by his mysterious influence the manifestation of all the forms implicit in prakrti, the dynamic and creative matrix of all manifestation. Beyond this point however,Raja Yoga's cosmology becomes quite different from the Samkhya-Yoga one. The latter is well known (footnote: a good summary is found in Michael (1980)) and will only be briefly summarized here, Samkhya Yoga postulates the existence of three gunas (literally "threads", meaning primodial qualities) as composing prakrti. It is the perfect equilibrium of these that the purusa disturbs by way of its mysterious influence, thereby initiating a cycle of manifestation. Difference combinations of these three gunas are found throughout the resulting emanational chain...

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