You’ve heard it countless times: “Yoga is a 5,000-year-old practice.”
It sounds impressive, mystical, and reassuringly ancient. It also happens to be wrong.
Some philosophical ideas that later fed into yoga are indeed old. The oldest textual references that explicitly discuss yoga as a philosophical system (most famously the Yoga Sūtrasare) are generally dated somewhere between the last centuries BCE and the early centuries CE. And even there, yoga is primarily about mental discipline, not stretching on a mat. But by this definition any ancient philosophy anwhere could be callled yoga. (But then why call it yoga if we can just call it philosophy?)
What most people today call yoga, a sequence of physical postures, combined with some breathing and a dash of meditation—is not ancient at all.
The systematic use of āsanas (postures) as a central practice appears much later, mainly in Hatha Yoga texts from roughly the 11th to 15th centuries. Even then, the postures were relatively few, often uncomfortable, and aimed at ascetic or alchemical goals—not wellness, fitness, or stress relief.
The familiar, flowing, posture-heavy yoga taught in studios today took shape even later, influenced by:
- medieval Hatha Yoga,
- Hindu religious traditions,
- and, crucially, 19th–20th century physical culture, including European gymnastics and Indian nationalist reform movements.
In other words:
your vinyasa class is closer in spirit to the early modern period than to the Indus Valley Civilization.
The Hindu Connection
Also yoga is historically linked to Hinduism. No matter how much yoga schools try to erase the hindu aspect to expand to islamic countries (not so succesful) or spiritual-wokists, who look down on religion. (very succesful). These wokists who look down on religion are happy to be chanting to Krishna. Oh well.
This doesn’t mean every yogi must be religious, nor that yoga “belongs” exclusively to one faith. But attempts by some modern yoga schools to strip yoga of its Hindu roots entirely are historically dishonest.
Yoga marketing ends up rewriting history altogether. Sanskrit terms are kept, deities are removed.
You Can Like Yoga Without Believing the Myth
None of this is an argument against yoga.
Yoga can be a genuinely beneficial practice—for strength, mobility, attention, and even mental health. You don’t need it to be 5,000 years old for it to work. You don’t need to deny its Hindu origins to enjoy it. And you don’t need historical exaggeration to justify why people find meaning in it today.
