The Vedas and the Upanishads

The word yoga is older than the pose library on this site. In early Sanskrit it belongs to the verb for yoking, the way a horse is yoked to a chariot. That meaning is not a secret code for Downward-Facing Dog. It is the ordinary word. Later religious uses grow out of it: yoking the mind, yoking attention, a discipline you take on. Mallinson and Singleton’s Roots of Yoga starts from those texts rather than from a modern class plan. Their 2017 Penguin Classics collection includes passages from the early Upanishads and the Mahabharata, among other traditions.

The Vedas are the oldest layer of that literature. The Rigveda is a collection of hymns. Specialists argue about the century. A careful sentence is: the hymns are ancient, and a single year stamped on them would be a guess. This article does not pick one. What matters for a beginner is the kind of text. Hymns, ritual, and myth are not step-by-step posture instructions.

The Upanishads sit later in the Vedic world. They turn toward questions of self, breath, and what remains when ritual is not the whole point. Several of them, including the Katha, the Shvetashvatara, and the Maitri, use yoga language for discipline and for stilling the mind. Their individual dates are also argued. Many scholars place principal Upanishads in the first millennium BCE and disagree about which century belongs to which text. “About the Upanishads” is fair. “Written in the year X” is not, unless a particular edition is in front of you and says so.

The Bhagavad Gita, inside the Mahabharata, is the dialogue people meet next. It talks about more than one yoga: the yoga of action, the yoga of knowledge, and the yoga of devotion, alongside meditation. Dating the Gita is its own dispute. Proposals cluster around the last centuries BCE and the early centuries CE, and they are proposals. The Gita is not a list of standing poses. It is a teaching about how to act, see, and worship. A class that calls every sequence “from the Gita” is using the title as a mood, not as a table of contents.

Two cautions keep this useful. First, “Vedic” in a studio brochure can mean almost anything. The texts are specific. If a claim names a hymn or an Upanishad, you can ask which one. Second, Buddhist and Jaina writings also discuss discipline, breath, and meditation. Roots of Yoga includes those traditions on purpose. A history that draws a straight line from the Rigveda to one modern brand has skipped the branches.

On this site, Sanskrit names such as Tadasana for Mountain Pose and Savasana for Corpse Pose are labels for shapes we teach in English. They are not evidence that the Rigveda contains those shapes. The glossary defines asana as a physical posture and pranayama as breathing practice. Those definitions match how the words are used in class. They are younger and narrower than the full history of the word yoga.

Two passages worth knowing

Two Upanishad passages come up again and again in histories of yoga, and they are worth reading in a translation for yourself. The Katha Upanishad describes yoga as the steady holding of the senses, so that the mind is not pulled outward. It frames this through a teaching dialogue between a boy, Nachiketas, and Yama, the lord of death. The Shvetashvatara Upanishad goes further into method. It describes sitting with the body upright, the chest, neck and head held straight, and regulating the breath, in a quiet and clean place.

Neither passage describes a pose sequence. They are instructions for sitting still and turning attention inward, which is much closer to meditation than to a modern class. That is why this site separates its history pages from its pose pages. The sitting described in the Shvetashvatara is the ancestor of Easy Seat more than of anything standing.

Four Vedas, then a turn inward

The Vedic layer is not one book. The Rigveda is a collection of hymns. The Yajurveda is ritual formulas. The Samaveda is chant. The Atharvaveda includes hymns that deal with healing and daily life. Encyclopaedia Britannica’s article on the Vedas is a public map of that division, and it does not turn any of the four into a pose list. Dates stay disputed, so this page will not stamp a year on the Rigveda.

The Upanishads are the later turn inside that world. Besides the sitting instructions already mentioned in the Katha and the Shvetashvatara, the Maitri (also called Maitrayaniya) Upanishad is often cited for a six-part yoga of breath control, withdrawing the senses, meditation, concentration, inquiry, and absorption. That list is not Patanjali’s eight, and it is still not a standing sequence. Roots of Yoga prints passages from these texts so a reader can see the wording in translation instead of trusting a studio timeline.

If a class calls itself Vedic, ask which Veda, which hymn or Upanishad, and which verse. A name without a passage is a mood. The Sanskrit pose names on this site, such as Tadasana for Mountain Pose, are labels we print next to the English. They are not quotations from the Rigveda, and the glossary says so in fewer words.

Sources

• James Mallinson and Mark Singleton, Roots of Yoga (Penguin Classics, 2017). Publisher page.
• The pose names used above are the ones printed on this site’s pose pages, not quotations from the Vedas.
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, Upanishad, for the place of the Katha and Shvetashvatara among the principal Upanishads.
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, Veda, for the division into Rigveda, Yajurveda, Samaveda, and Atharvaveda.