History of Yoga and Tantra

Yoga Is So Much More

Most of us were taught that Patañjali wrote the definitive text on yoga philosophy. The Yoga Sūtras as source, foundation, and final authority. It’s a tidy story, and while not entirely wrong, it leaves out an enormous amount.

Patañjali composed his sūtras around the 4th or 5th century CE, synthesising practices and concepts that had been developing through Buddhist and Jain traditions for centuries before him. He did this brilliantly. But the Upaniṣads span a period from well before Patañjali to well after. The Ṛg Veda is older still, presenting yoga in the language of chariots and divine ascension. And tantra, which would eventually give us the cakras, kuṇḍalinī, haṭha yoga, and most of what we now associate with embodied practice, was yet to come.

Tova Olsson’s course on yoga and tantra history presents this fuller picture clearly and without apology. Her book Yoga and Tantra: History, Philosophy and Mythology does the same, and for anyone who suspects there’s more to yoga than the default narrative suggests, both are essential.

Modern yoga is tantric in origin, and this is usually not spoken of, largely because of the widespread misconception around what tantra actually is. But the āsana, prāṇāyāma, subtle body maps, and the project of weaving embodiment together with transcendence all flow from tantric traditions. Before tantra’s influence, the body occupied a very different place in the spiritual imagination. The Upaniṣads describe it in terms of decay and repulsion. Patañjali goes further, holding that a practitioner should feel disgust toward their own body and the bodies of others. For those characters, liberation meant getting out, and the sooner the better.

Tova traces the arc of transformation from early sects who renounced action entirely, attempting to leave the body through the brahma grantha at the crown of the head, through to the tantric practitioners who flipped the desk. They introduced jīvan mukti, liberation while living, and in doing so reimagined the body and the world as manifestations of divine energy rather than inconvenient obstacles. “With tantra comes this new concept of what liberation could be,” she says, “and that we could actually be liberated in this body, in this life.”

Treating Patañjali as yoga’s sole philosophical authority reduces this inheritance, omitting cakra, kuṇḍalinī, the much of the subtle architecture. These concepts belong to tantric traditions that arrived centuries later, building deliberately and expansively on what came before.

You are that which witnesses all of this, the awareness in which thoughts and sensations appear and disappear. And that awareness, properly understood, is tangible to the individual and yet shimmering, adjacent, interpenetrating, the fabric of existence itself. Ātman is Brahman. The individual self, when correctly apprehended, is recognised as universal consciousness. This is a confronting proposition, implying a kind of responsibility that many would rather avoid, and to Western ears trained by centuries of monotheism it could sound like megalomania or blasphemy. Yet it is the consistent testimony of yoga‘s deepest practitioners across millennia.

The well known “no-self” teaching is useful for dismantling false identification, but the danger lies in stopping there, mistaking a preliminary clearing-away for the final destination. What remains when false identification ceases is not nothing so much as everything, a paradoxically pregnant void.

The Course Itself

I loved watching Tova present. It’s gripping. As someone who has studied Sanskrit, practised daily, and sat with these questions for fifteen years, I was inspired by the enthusiasm and precision she brings to material that too often gets either dumbed down or rendered inaccessible by academic jargon. She traces the various movements, epochs, styles and influences that make yoga something that slips through our fingers the moment we attempt to slice it, brand it, make a dollar from it.

I think this course should be compulsory for every yoga teacher and serious student in Australia. We owe it to the traditions from which we draw to understand them as fully as we can, to keep pressing through inherited limitations, to recognise that there is so much more than any of us were taught.

Yoga and Tantra: History, Philosophy and Mythology is now available as a CPD course through Yoga Australia. The course is based on Tova Olsson’s book of the same name, available through Motilal Banarsidass and major booksellers.