Tantra and Yoga

Yoga is ordinary in Japan in a way tantra is not. It has chains and studios by the station, morning classes before work, and several million people who have been to one. So the question arrives constantly and in both directions: is what I do at my studio related to any of this, and should I mind?

The honest answer is inconvenient to both industries, which is probably why nobody gives it. Your class owes more to tantra than you have been told, and less in exactly the way you would assume. And the yoga most people mean when they say yoga philosophy — the respectable, ancient, Patañjali kind — is the least tantric thing in the building.

Before the two projects, the word itself. योग, yoga, comes from a root meaning to yoke or harness — to join things, or to bring something under control, the way one yokes an animal to a cart. Nothing in it points at the body.

And across most of Indian literature it names a discipline rather than an activity. The Bhagavad Gītā, one of the most widely read texts in the tradition, sets out several yogas and not one of them is postural: the yoga of action, performed by doing your work without grasping at its results; the yoga of devotion; the yoga of knowledge. A person could practise any of those for a lifetime, at their desk or in a field, and never once assume a shape.

Which is worth knowing mainly because of what it does to one common worry. Readers sometimes ask whether they are doing a shallow version of something deep — whether a class that is about hips and hamstrings is a diminished form of the real thing. It is not a diminished version of the real thing. It is a different thing that shares a name, in a tradition where that name has always been shared out among several different things, most of which were never about bodies at all.

Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras, compiled somewhere around the fourth or fifth century, is the text people reach for when they want yoga to have a philosophy. It is pre-tantric, it works from the dualist metaphysics of Sāṃkhya, and its goal is kaivalya — the isolation of consciousness from nature.

Sit with what that means, because it is the opposite of what a modern class implies. In that framework the body and the whole material world are what consciousness is entangled in and must be extricated from. The practice is a disentanglement. The body is not the site of the work; it is the thing the work is working free of.

Tantra, arriving later and developing across both Hindu and Buddhist traditions, is broadly non-dual and takes the opposite position: the body is the site, this world is not an error, and the material is where the work happens. This chamber’s essay on 密教 puts the Japanese version of that claim at its sharpest — 即身成仏, buddhahood in this very body — and a claim like that is unavailable inside Patañjali’s framework.

So these are not a tradition and its subset. They are two answers to the same question that point in different directions — and the habit of citing Patañjali to lend depth to a practice whose whole appeal is embodiment is citing the side that disagrees.

The line that actually connects them runs through haṭha yoga, which developed later, out of the tantric milieu, and which is where postural practice comes from.

And the inheritance is not vague. The body that haṭha yoga operates on is the tantric subtle body: channels, breath moving through them, centres where they meet, a power described as coiled at the base. When an instructor asks you to direct the breath somewhere, to feel something at the base of the spine, to imagine energy moving upward, she is using a tantric map — one whose provenance this chamber traces in its essay on the subtle body, including why the seven-colour version on the studio wall is about a century old and was assembled in English.

So the answer to is my yoga class related to tantra is yes, genealogically, through a route nobody in the room is likely to mention — and the connection is in the invisible parts rather than in anything anybody would be embarrassed about.

The part people assume is ancient is the part that is not. The Haṭhayogapradīpikā, the fifteenth-century text that is the main premodern source for this material, describes something on the order of fifteen postures, most of them seated. Earlier sources have fewer. The vast standing repertoire of a modern class — the sequences, the sun salutations as they are now performed, the flow from one shape to the next — does not come from there.

Mark Singleton’s Yoga Body, published by Oxford in 2010, is the standard account of where it does come from, and it is a genuinely surprising book. Modern postural yoga was assembled in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries out of several streams at once: European and Scandinavian physical culture and gymnastics, which reached India through colonial education and the YMCA; an Indian nationalist body-building movement concerned with physical regeneration; and the work of Krishnamacharya at the Mysore palace in the 1930s, whose students Iyengar, Pattabhi Jois and Indra Devi took it to the world.

Which produces the sentence this section exists for: in a good many Japanese studios, the postures being practised are more recent than the building they are practised in.

One more detail from Patañjali, because it is small and it rearranges the whole picture.

Āsana is one of the eight limbs, and the Yoga Sūtras give it two words: sthira sukham āsanam — the posture is steady and comfortable. That is very nearly the whole instruction. No list of shapes, no sequence, no repertoire. The word means a seat, and what is being described is the problem of sitting still long enough to do the other seven limbs without your knee or your back becoming the only thing you can think about.

Which makes the modern arrangement almost exactly inverted. In the source text, posture is a minor preparatory limb serving concentration. In a contemporary class, posture is the entire activity and concentration is a benefit sometimes mentioned at the end. That is not a scandal — practices are allowed to change, and the change made yoga available to millions of people who would never have sat still for the other seven. It only becomes dishonest at the moment somebody cites the source text as the authority for a practice the source text spends two words on.

A fact that belongs in a chamber written for women and is almost never placed beside the history. Modern yoga is practised overwhelmingly by women — in Japan, in the studios by the station, in the morning classes, the large majority in most rooms. The premodern traditions it descends from were almost entirely male.

The haṭha texts were composed by and addressed to male ascetics. The renunciate lives they assume — leaving a household, long periods of solitary practice, a body with no other claims on it — were not available to most women, and several currents restricted or excluded them outright. The maithuna material this chamber writes about elsewhere was recorded entirely by men, and what the women in it understood themselves to be doing is simply not in the sources.

So a woman in a Tokyo studio is not a latecomer to somebody else’s tradition, quietly out of place in it. She is part of the population that made the modern practice what it is. The twentieth-century transmission ran substantially through women — Indra Devi, a student of Krishnamacharya at Mysore, taught and wrote her way into a Western audience from the 1940s and 50s, and the millions of women who took the practice up afterwards shaped what it became far more than any text did.

Which is the reason this section is here rather than in a footnote. The habit of treating antiquity as authority quietly puts every woman in the room in the position of a guest in something older and more serious than herself — and on this particular history, that hierarchy is backwards. The part of yoga that is demonstrably working, in a room full of women on a Tuesday morning in Saitama, is the part they built.

A page that stopped at the previous section would have done the cheap thing, so let this one be unambiguous: none of that makes your class worse, and if you love your Tuesday evening you are not loving a fake.

Age is not a quality measure, and the assumption that it is — that older means truer — is imported baggage rather than an argument. Modern postural yoga demonstrably does things: it improves strength, balance and flexibility, it is one of very few activities in which adults attend to their own bodies without a performance metric, and it has carried a great many people through difficult years. Every one of those is true regardless of whether the shape was codified in 1934 or 1434.

There is even a case that the modern version is the more honest inheritor of one thing the old texts cared about. Haṭha yoga was interested in what a disciplined relationship with your own body makes possible. A person who turns up at six in the morning twice a week for four years, through a divorce and a bad winter, has that relationship — built out of repetition and inconvenience rather than out of doctrine, which is roughly how every serious practice has ever been built.

The only thing the history actually disallows is a particular sales move: claiming that a sequence works because it is five thousand years old. That claim was never load-bearing. Remove it and everything the practice genuinely does is still standing.

Almost certainly not, and the worry underneath the question is usually the sexual one, so let it be answered directly. A hot yoga class at a chain near the station has no connection to the sexual material this word carries in the popular imagination, and the instructor is not teaching anything adjacent to it.

The accurate description is layered and undramatic. Your class is a modern physical practice, assembled in the twentieth century, which inherited its breath work and its interior body map from haṭha yoga, which in turn drew them from a tantric milieu — and which almost never says so, partly because few instructors were taught this history and partly because the word does not help anybody sell a morning class.

One place to be a little more alert: a studio or retreat that does invoke the word, particularly alongside offers of individual attention, initiation or advanced work. Not because the word is disqualifying — it has a real history, set out across this chamber — but because it is the vocabulary a certain structure travels in. The relevant checks are on this chamber’s pages about teachers and about intensive practice, and they are structural rather than a matter of judging anybody’s sincerity.

Japanese yoga is framed as fitness and beauty to a degree that surprises people who learned it elsewhere. Hot yoga in particular is sold on sweating, on 美容 and ダイエット, on posture and 冷え性, and a great many Japanese studios avoid the spiritual vocabulary almost entirely. That is usually read as commercial blandness. It has a more specific cause.

The group responsible for the 1995 attack began as a yoga circle, and yoga instruction was among the ways it drew people in. The aftermath was long, and the market that rebuilt from the 2000s onward rebuilt deliberately: as exercise, as beauty, as a chain with a locker room and a monthly plan, with the interior vocabulary left at the door.

Knowing that is worth something in both directions. It explains why a Japanese studio’s silence about any of this is caution rather than ignorance, and it means a reader’s own wariness when a class starts talking about energy is not superstition or narrow-mindedness — it is a reasonable instinct with a documented local history behind it. This chamber’s page on intensive practice gives that instinct something better than avoidance to work with: a short list of structural questions that can be answered from outside, without having to decide whether anybody is sincere.

Moonlight does not teach yoga, does not offer postures, and is not an alternative to a class. That is worth stating because the two things get shelved together in people’s minds and they are not competitors — one is an activity you do, the other is an hour in which somebody attends to you, and a person can sensibly want both or neither.

Where they genuinely touch is narrow and worth knowing. Both work on the same faculty — the capacity to notice what is happening inside you, which this library calls interoception and which is a skill rather than a fixed trait. A regular practice builds it steadily and by yourself. An attended hour works it differently, because somebody else is asking and you are not managing anything. Neither replaces the other, and a woman with a steady practice will usually get more out of the second, not less.

And if your instructor does use the interior vocabulary — energy, centres, the base of the spine — that is not a warning sign in itself, and this page would be doing you a disservice if it left you newly suspicious of a teacher you like. It is inherited language, most of it arriving through English, and in a studio it is almost always being used the way this library recommends using it: as a way of naming where something is. The line to watch is the one drawn on this chamber’s page about myths, and it is not about vocabulary at all. It is about whether anybody claims to know your inside better than you do.

So: the philosophy people cite to make yoga sound ancient is pre-tantric and treats the body as what must be escaped. The interior map your instructor uses without naming it is tantric. The postures are largely twentieth century and owe a real debt to Scandinavian gymnastics. And your studio is not doing tantra in any sense that ought to worry anybody.

The through-line worth keeping is the one this whole chamber keeps arriving at. Nothing here needs to be ancient to be worth doing, and the claim of antiquity is almost always doing work that the practice itself could do unaided. A sequence that makes your back feel better on a Wednesday has earned its place on Wednesday’s evidence. That is a smaller warrant than five thousand years, and it is the one that will still be true next week.