Get those yoga mats out!
The twenty-first of June is, to say the least, a rather different ‘day’. It’s not just one of those (*sigh* or *yawn*) ‘Everything has a day these days’ days.
It’s the International Day of Yoga as officially endorsed by the United Nations (UN). It was none other than the Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, who in 2014 first proposed this day to celebrate one of India’s greatest contributions to world culture. His proposal was enthusiastically taken up by the UN and the first International Day of Yoga took place the following year.
The day is celebrated with slightly mind-boggling mass yoga demonstrations in various sites in India as well as round the world; images include one of Modi sitting in the (half) lotus pose ((ardha) padmāsana) – I wish I could manage even that – at the head of a phalanx of practitioners doing the full monty.
According to one site, more than 300 million people practise yoga worldwide. The same site also claims that one in three US inhabitants has tried yoga at some point, which I can quite believe. However, that 300 million could sound like an underestimate when supposedly over 40 per cent of people in India practise yoga – and the population of India is 1.4 billion plus. So, ‘do the maths’, and the worldwide total must be higher.
Yoga is possibly the most visible gift to humanity of the world’s largest democracy, but what exactly does yoga mean?
Collins splits it into two meanings, each of which hits its nail on the head. On one hand, yoga is ‘a Hindu system of philosophy aiming at the mystical union of the self with the Supreme Being in a state of complete awareness and tranquillity through certain physical and mental exercises’. Wow! There’s no easy route to permanent bliss.
But for most people in the West, it’s fair to say it’s not that but instead the unbracketed part of the following definition: ‘(any method by which such awareness and tranquillity are attained, esp[ecially]) a course of related exercises and postures designed to promote physical and spiritual wellbeing’. The word yoga comes from the Sanskrit root yuj, meaning ‘to yoke’, ‘to join’, referring to uniting mind and body, individual consciousness with universal consciousness, and so forth.
Some yoga terms
People who practise yoga in the West are bound to know the term asana, which refers to the postures or positions in a yoga exercise or sequence, and probably pranayama, harmonising the breath through controlled inhalation and exhalation to link the material body to the spiritual dimension and harness the life force and cosmic energy of prana (the ayama part means ‘distribution’ in Sanskrit).
But when it comes to the spiritual aspect of yoga, asanas and pranayama are only two of the eight ‘limbs’ of yoga, which give as(h)tanga yoga its name – from Sanskrit ashṭaṅga, ‘having eight parts’, from ashtán, ‘eight’. They are the third and fourth steps on a spiritual journey which in classical yoga culminates in samadhi – you might like to peruse the three definitions on the Collins site to get an insight into the awe-inspiring nature of this concept.
The practice and teaching of yoga in the West dates only from the end of the nineteenth century, with a massive expansion from the 1970s onwards. In India, however, it dates back several millennia, and the word is first mentioned in the Rig-Veda about 2,000 bc. S(h)iva, one of the chief deities of the Hindu pantheon, is often regarded as the first yogi.
Around the second century ad Maharishi Patanjali organised existing knowledge into 195/196 sutras or aphorisms about the nature of yoga. This is still a foundational text. Sutras are literally ‘threads’, hence texts threaded together, and the word is important in Buddhism for a collection of key texts, including the famous Lotus Sutra.
I mentioned earlier that asana, meaning ‘seat’, that is, the basis of all the poses, is a key word. The various poses – one site claims there are sixty-six – generally have two names, one English, one Sanskrit: the ‘lotus pose’ is padmāsana, as mentioned, combining āsana with padma, ‘lotus’. One common standing pose is trikonasana, the ‘triangle pose’, from trikona, ‘triangle’ or ‘three corners’ plus āsana.
Now, that name includes the little word tri, ‘three’. It’s easy to see that it doesn’t look light years away from English three, isn’t it?
This is no fluke (as often happens with words that look the same across languages but aren’t related at all). There is a real, historical similarity, which derives from English and Sanskrit belonging to the same vast family grouping of languages, Indo-European, which includes tongues as disparate as Icelandic and Lithuanian, Slovene and Bangla.
Sanskrit is the ancient language of Hindu scriptures and an official language of India, despite being used only in religious ceremonies. Several modern Indian languages such as Hindi and Bangla are descended from it, and it’s estimated that about 75 per cent of the Indian population speak Sanskrit-descended languages.
The similarity between tri and three exists not because English is somehow descended from Sanskrit but because both languages ultimately derive from a hypothetical common ancestor, Proto-Indo-European. It was Sir William Jones, an orientalist scholar and judge at Fort William in Bengal, who in 1786 first proposed on the basis of systematic similarities he’d observed that Sanskrit must be related not only to Latin and Greek but also to Gothic, Celtic languages and even Persian. His insight sparked off further research that eventually led to a set of rules, including Grimm’s Law, that, for instance, enable us to link Sanskrit mātár, Latin māter, Old English mōdor and Modern English mother.
‘It’s karma’
All the yoga words mentioned so far – asana, pranayama, prana, samadhi, sutra, etc. – are from Sanskrit, as is the word yoga itself. Scores of Sanskrit words have come into English, many not directly from Sanskrit but via Hindi. One such that has passed into general use in English is guru. It’s come down in the world a bit, from meaning an exalted spiritual guide or teacher, often to a yogi – the Sanskrit means ‘weighty’ – to just any common-or-garden expert, sometimes ironically. What follows is a selection from the dozens and dozens of words of Sanskrit origin in English.
Mantra, which comes directly from Sanskrit from a verb meaning ‘to think’, is a mystical chant, incantation or prayer in Hinduism and Buddhism, but now just denotes nothing more than a (slightly tired) slogan or call to action. Tantra, the esoteric Hindu and Buddhist yogic tradition, has attracted attention in the past through association with the rock god Sting. Finally under this heading, karma is another illustration of the trend for once specialist terms to become part of general language with a watered-down meaning: from the philosophical belief that your actions in your current incarnation determine your reincarnations to a synonym for fate or destiny, or sometimes simply an expression of spiteful schadenfreude.
Another religious word that’s transitioned spectacularly is avatar in its familiar sense of an image standing in for you in cyberspace, as opposed to a manifestation of the divine in the form of people or animals. And what about juggernaut? Apart from being a huge lorry or an unstoppable organisation, it is in origin an image of the god Jagannath, a name for Krishna or S(h)iva, wheeled on a gigantic chariot under the wheels of which devotees were once supposed to have thrown themselves.
There’s probably something about the shape of those words that tells us immediately they’re loanwords, that they somehow don’t conform to standard English spelling patterns – though I wonder if people ever associate juggernauts with astronauts and similar nauts.
But lots of words hide in plain sight, as it were: via Hindi, for instance, we have cheetah, chintz, chit, cot, jackal, jute and, which surprised me, ganja and bandanna. The last in particular I had assumed must be Romance because of the –a ending, but no, ultimately it’s from Sanskrit bandhnāti, ‘he ties’.
While for Westerners the swastika is a symbol of dread, in India it’s generally a good luck sign, from Sanskrit svastika, from svasti prosperity. And if you think a toddy, which often involves whisky, is adapted from a Gaelic word, think again. Its origins lie in the sap of the Palmyra palm as a beverage, from the Hindi tārī, juice of the palmyra palm, from tār, palmyra palm, from Sanskrit tāra, probably of Dravidian origin.
Finally, as you’re reading this, I’ll assume you’re interested in where words come from, so you might like to look at these five, which come very ‘ultimately’ from Sanskrit and illustrate some of the tortuous journeys loanwords have to make to reach English: aubergine, baksheesh, emerald, ginger and shaman.
As we started with the International Day of Yoga, I’ll finish with this yogic phrase: ‘Like the lotus, a yogi lives in the midst of samsara and blooms.’ Samsara, a key concept in Buddhism, denotes this unsatisfactory and fleeting worldly existence.
By Jeremy Butterfield
Jeremy Butterfield is the former Editor-in-Chief of Collins Dictionaries, and editor of the fourth, revised edition of Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage.
All opinions expressed on this blog are those of the individual writers, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or policies of Collins, or its parent company, HarperCollins.
