Yoga Body: Singleton's Argument

Primary source

• Mark Singleton, 'Preface to the Serbian edition of Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice', 2015, Quoted at length in Matthew Remski, 'Mark Singleton Responds to Critics Who Didn't Want to Understand His Book', 1 November 2015 — the wording used here was read in that post, not in the preface itself.Singleton's own statement that it 'makes more sense to speak of adaptation, reframing, reinterpretation (and so on) rather than invention, insofar as these terms foreground the on-going processes of experimentation and bricolage that characterise the recent history of globalised yoga'.

Scholarship

• Mark Singleton, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice, 2010, New York: Oxford University Press; ch. 9, 'T. Krishnamacharya and the Mysore Āsana Revival' (pp. 175–210) — the Bukh comparison at pp. 199–202, the palace records at p. 180, the yogaśālā start date at ch. 9 n. 17; sūryanamaskār and Pant Pratinidhi at p. 124, in ch. 6, 'Yoga as Physical Culture I: Strength and Vigor'.That Niels Bukh (1880–1950) graded his Primary Gymnastics into six progressive series practised in a vigorous rhythm to generate heat, and that at least twenty-eight exercises in the 1925 first English edition are 'strikingly similar (often identical)' to postures in Pattabhi Jois's Ashtanga sequence or Iyengar's Light on Yoga (1966); Singleton's own disclaimer, 'I point out these similarities not to suggest that Krishnamacharya borrowed directly from Bukh'; that Krishnamacharya 'began work at the yogaśālā in late August 1933', on the authority of Krishnamacharya's own Yoga Makaranda, and that palace administrative reports categorise his classes as 'physical culture' or 'exercise'; the 1934–35 palace school report counting yogāsana and sūryanamaskār classes separately; and that for Bhawanrao Pant Pratinidhi, Rajah of Aundh — whom Singleton calls 'the creator of the modern sūryanamaskār system' — and for K. V. Iyer, sūryanamaskār 'was not yet considered a part of yoga'.
• James Mallinson, 'A Response to Mark Singleton's Yoga Body', 2011, Four pages, delivered at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion, San Francisco, 19 November 2011; posted by the author in December 2011Narrowly, that a Sanskritist of pre-modern yoga published a response to Yoga Body under that title, in that year, at that meeting. No wording of the entry rests on it: the text sits behind a login wall and was not read, and the substance of the pushback is taken from Roots of Yoga, which was.
• James Mallinson and Mark Singleton, Roots of Yoga, 2017, London: Penguin Classics; ch. 3, 'Āsana', introductory essay and note 17What the pre-modern corpus does contain: mayurāsana in the c. tenth-century Vimānārcanakalpa, the earliest non-seated āsana; one and two āsanas respectively in the c. thirteenth-century Dattātreyayogaśāstra and Vivekamārtaṇḍa; fifteen in the fifteenth-century Haṭhapradīpikā, eight of them non-seated and the first non-seated postures taught in a haṭha text; eighty-four first named in the seventeenth-century Haṭharatnāvalī and Yogacintāmaṇi; and 314 of the 964 verses of the 1737 Jogpradīpakā given to eighty-four āsanas. Also their note 17, that pre-modern practice lacks standing postures other than the simple upright kāyotsargāsana and vṛkṣāsana, and their observation that for traditional yogis it was usually enough to hold one posture for a long period rather than practise several in succession.
• Jason Birch and Mark Singleton, 'The Yoga of the Haṭhābhyāsapaddhati: Haṭhayoga on the Cusp of Modernity', Journal of Yoga Studies, vol. 2, 2019, pp. 3–70; the āsana count at p. 22 of the article's own pagination, the nineteen standing postures at utthāna 75–93, the Mysore manuscript at §2.3, Krishnamacharya at §13.1, rope postures at §13.3That the Haṭhābhyāsapaddhati, probably composed in eighteenth-century Maharashtra, 'contains descriptions of one hundred and twelve āsanas' in six groups — nineteen of them standing (utthāna 75–93), and including ten rope postures and jumping exercises — and stipulates that the postures be performed in sequence, while not calling those groups krama; that a manuscript of it is held in the Mysore Palace and fed the āsana section of the Śrītattvanidhi, which has 122 postures; that Krishnamacharya was employed by the Maharaja of Mysore through the 1930s and 1940s and during that period 'developed a method of linking postures into groups of dynamic sequences'; and that he may have been familiar with the Mysore manuscript.

The tradition itself

• Mark Singleton, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice, 2010 (record)The esoteric reading given on this entry

Further reading

• Elizabeth De Michelis, A History of Modern Yoga: Patañjali and Western Esotericism, 2004, London: ContinuumThe genealogy behind Singleton's starting point: that 'modern yoga' begins with Vivekananda's encounter with Western esotericism, New Thought and Transcendentalism, and that 'Rāja Yoga' is itself a modern category.

Linked entries

• CorrectsThe Yoga Sūtras of PatañjaliAttested

  Modern schools trace their authority to Patañjali, but the sūtras give āsana three lines (2.46–48) and describe no posture; the repertoire Singleton dates is not in that text to begin with.

• Set againstThe Chakra SystemA modern connection

  Two pictures of yoga that feel immemorial and have dated modern authors: the seven rainbow chakras are Leadbeater in 1927, the flowing posture sequence is Mysore in the 1930s.

• Set againstThe Medicine WheelA modern connection

  The same finding in two traditions: Singleton dates the standing postures of modern yoga to the 1920s and 1930s, and the four-colour wheel enters print in 1972 - both taught as immemorial.

• Set againstNeidanAttested

  Two practices whose claimed antiquity outruns the paper trail, and in each case a named scholar did the dating — Mark Singleton on modern postural yoga, Fabrizio Pregadio finding nothing that places neidan before the eighth century.

• Set againstOne Hundred and EightAttested

  A mālā of 108 sun salutations is an old count performed in new postures — Mark Singleton dates standing-āsana sequences to early twentieth-century physical culture, while the number they are counted in predates them by well over a thousand years.

• Set againstIsangoma and UkuthwasaA modern connection

  Mark Singleton dated the modern shape of postural yoga to the twentieth century; what is modern about ukuthwasa is not its movements but its paperwork — categories, accredited tutors and a register fixed by the 2007 Act.