How Yoga Science Came to America

A little more than a hundred years ago, a stranger from India wearing red silk robes and a saffron turban mingled with the crowds at the 1893 World Exposition in Chicago. He carried a speech to give to a religious congress, but his enduring gift was a spiritual discipline called…Yoga.

Today, with over 15 million Americans practicing some form of yoga – including many public figures from former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor to the musician Sting – it is hard to imagine a time when virtually no one in America had even heard of yoga. Yet such was the landscape that met Swami Vivekananda, who brought along this 5,000 year old system when he came to America in 1893 to address the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago. Vivekananda electrified his audience of over 7,000, not with amazing feats of physical control and strength, but with timeless and universal truths. He concluded with an ancient scripture learned in his boyhood: “As the different streams having their sources in different places all mingle their water in the sea, sources in different tendencies, various though they appear, crooked or straight, all lead to thee.” Like the other Hindu swamis(teachers) who followed him, Vivekananda came not to teach us how to sculpt our bodies, but rather, how to illuminate our souls. Yet as the eminent scholar Georg Feuerstein has asked, “Why do we hear so little about morality, meditation, and enlightenment in yogic circles today? What happened between then and now?”

The Fertile Ground of American Soil.

For decades before Vivekananda’s arrival here, the yoga teachings of India had been percolating in the minds of many influential Western writers and spiritual figures. Their first contact with India’s scriptures came through the Upanishads and the Bhagavad-Gita, considered by historians the world’s oldest surviving holy books. Around 1815, a friend and fellow scholar gave the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer translations of these two sacred texts. Schopenhauer was intrigued. He incorporated his understanding of these yoga teachings into his groundbreaking philosophical treatise, The World as Will and Idea. In the preface, he wrote, “'I believe that the influence of the Sanskrit literature will penetrate not less deeply than did the revival of Greek literature in the fifteenth century.” He made the startling prediction that the scriptures of India “... are destined sooner or later to become the faith of the people.” The influence of Schopenhauer among Western intellectuals was vast. Through him, philosophers, writers, and composers such as Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Tolstoy, Mann, Wagner, and Jung were introduced to Indian philosophy.

Among the first Americans to embrace Indian philosophy with its “supreme task of transformation” were Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, the co-founders of American Transcendentalism. In 1836, Emerson wrote an essay that probably included the first reference to the Bhagavad-Gita in a book published in America. In 1854, Thoreau, in Walden, one of the most beloved of all American essays, wrote, “In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Gita, in comparison with which ou rmodern world and its literature seem puny and trivial.” Through the efforts of Emerson, Thoreau and others, the fertile ground of American soil had been well tilled and fertilized in preparation for the arrival of the first yogis in the West. Among this group was Swami Rama Tirtha, a student of Vivekananda’s, who, following the advice of his teacher, was the next yogi to land in America. He arrived in San Francisco in 1902-1903, and lived and lectured there for about 18 months before returning to India.

During this time, Rama Tirtha gained a sizeable local following and started several yoga societies. Not until 1919, when Yogendra Mastanami arrived in New York, did another sage of India come to America. Mastanami stayed for three years, and taught his system of yoga postures to Benedict Lust, the founder of naturopathy. Lust, in turn, was among the first to champion this early version of hatha yoga as an alternative healing technique, rather than a purely spiritual science, as it was originally conceived by the rishis, or ancient yoga masters of India. The visits to American shores by Vivekananda, Rama Tirtha, and Mastanami were true historic events; yet they stayed here for only brief periods. None expressed that their primary mission was to live and teach in the West. That remained the destiny of one who is arguably the most honored and influential of all Yoga masters to arrive here before or since.

“A Great Soul Comes on Earth ”

In 1920, a young yoga master born at the foot of the Himalayas received an invitation from the American Unitarian Association to serve as India’s delegate to the International Congress of Religious Liberals meeting that year in Boston. A disciple of the legendary Sri Yukteswar, and ordained in the 1,200-year-old swami order founded by Shankara himself in the ninth century, he was given the name Paramhansa Yogananda. In Sanskrit param is defined as “highest,” and hansa as “swan.” The sacred white swan is a symbol of spiritual discrimination. Yogananda means literally, “One who achieves bliss (ananda) through the practice of yoga.” Yogananda arrived in Boston, in August of 1920, and on the sixth of October, presented his first speech in America as planned. He later told of an intense inward vision “which contained a vast panorama of Western faces,” and wrote: “I am going forth to discover America, like Columbus. He thought he had discovered India – surely there must be a karmic link between our two lands.”

“I Care Not What My Religion ”

For the next four years Yogananda stayed in Boston, giving public lectures, teaching classes, and writing. He then embarked on a national speaking tour encompassing every major city in America. He filled auditoriums to capacity everywhere he spoke, revealing the science of yoga to seekers from Salt Lake City to Cincinnati. In 1925 The Los Angeles Times reported “thousands being turned away” from the 3,000 seat Philharmonic Auditorium, stating: “Swami Yogananda is the attraction. A Hindu invading the United States to bring God in the midst of a Christian community, preaching the essence of Christian doctrine.”

After completing his standing-room-only lecture tour, Yogananda decided to stay in California, where in 1925 he established an American headquarters in Los Angeles. Except for a pilgrimage home to India in 1935, Yogananda resided in America for the rest of his life. At the time of his passing in 1952, he was mourned by millions who had embraced his yogic teachings, his emphasis on the unity of all religions, his shunning of religious dogma, and his unwavering call for every individual to self-realize the call of God within. As Yogananda wrote, “Let me be Christian, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, Moslem or Sufi: I care not what my religion, my race, my creed, or my color be, if only I can win my way to Thee! Let me travel the royal road of realization which leads to Thee. I care not what bypaths of religion I follow, if at last I can travel by the one highway of common realization, which straightway leads to Thee.”

“As soon as possible, I plan to open a Yoga Institute here. The blessed role of Kriya Yoga in the West has hardly more than just begun. May all men come to know that there is a definite, scientific technique of self-realization for the overcoming of all human misery! “Far into the night my dear friend – the first Kriya Yogi in America – discussed with me the need for world colonies founded on a spiritual basis. The ills attributed to an anthropomorphic abstraction called ‘society’ maybe laid more realistically at the door of Everyman. Utopia must spring in the private bosom before it can flower in civic virtue. Man is a soul, not an institution; his inner reforms alone can lend permanence to outer ones. By stress on spiritual values, self-realization, a colony exemplifying world brotherhood is empowered to send inspiring vibrations far beyond its locale.”
— Excerpt from Autobiography of a Yogi, 1946 edition

© 2004 Ananda Sangha

Ananda Center of Sacramento
10450 Coloma Road
Rancho Cordova, California 95670
(916) 361-0891
Sign up to receive email news of events and classes
Center@AnandaSacramento.org

Webmaster: for problems with the web site

Home  |  Top of Page  |  Contact/Directions

© 2008 Ananda