Hatha Yoga

Say the words hatha yoga today and a picture arrives on its own: a mat, a stretch, a body folded into a shape. Ramacharaka, writing in 1904, would not have recognised that as the heart of the thing.

For him hatha yoga is one branch of a larger philosophy, standing beside Raja, Karma and Gnani Yoga, and its territory is plain: the care of the physical body. Its health, its strength, its well-being, and everything that keeps it in its natural and normal state.

That is a far wider field than exercise. It takes in how you eat, drink, breathe, rest and bathe. It is also far humbler than the word yoga suggests to most people. There are no feats in it, only the question of how a body is meant to live.

He opens by borrowing a slogan the West was already shouting in his day, "Let us get back to Nature", and then correcting it. The yogi, he says, does not have to get back. He never left.

Fashion and social ambition have not reached him. He smiles at them the way a grown-up smiles at children's games of pretend, and he stays close to nature as to a good mother who has always fed, warmed and protected him.

Out of that picture comes the sentence the book rests on: "Hatha Yoga is first, nature; second, nature, and last, nature." It sounds like a flourish. Read it again as an instruction and it becomes a rule for making choices: whenever there is a decision about the body, nature gets the first vote, the second and the last.

A touchstone was the dark stone a goldsmith rubbed metal against to tell real gold from fake. Ramacharaka gives his reader one in the form of a question: "Which is the natural way?"

When you face competing methods, plans or theories about health, you put each of them to that question and choose the one that comes nearest to nature. He meant it for a specific problem. The Western world, he complained, was being flooded with health "fads", each arriving with its own confident explanation.

The question does not require you to know physiology or to out-argue the inventor of the fad. It asks something anyone can check. Does this fit the way a living body was plainly meant to live, or does it need a gadget, a fear and a theory to hold it up?

Faced with a new theory about health, what does Ramacharaka tell his students to do first?

• Ask which way is the natural one, and choose what comes nearest to nature✓Correct answer
• Ask whether it comes from an old Eastern tradition, and trust it if it does
• Try it for a month, and keep it if the body feels any better
• Ask whether it is new and scientific, and prefer it to older habits

His touchstone is the question "Which is the natural way?", put to every method before anything else. Age, Eastern origin or scientific polish earn a theory nothing on their own; what counts is how closely it follows nature.

His example is a fad of his own time. Some teachers warned that the earth drains a person's "magnetism", and advised rubber soles and heels on the shoes and beds standing on glass feet, so that mother Earth could not suck back what she had just given.

Ramacharaka does not argue with the theory. He runs it past the touchstone. Could nature's plan have contemplated rubber soles and glass bed feet? Do strong, vital men and the most vigorous peoples insulate themselves like this? Does lying on the grass leave you drained? Is it not every child's impulse to run barefoot, and does it not refresh your feet to take your shoes off?

Look at what those checks are made of: ordinary observation, open to anyone with a patch of grass and a pair of feet.

Nature's answers, he concludes, point the other way. The earth is a battery charged with magnetism, always willing to give its strength to man, its child, and nothing to be dreaded. Then he adds a dry aside: the next latter-day prophets will be teaching that the air draws prana out of people.

A modern reader may shrug at "magnetism" and "battery", and that is fine. Ramacharaka says outright that he has no wish to waste time on the merits of rubber soles. The example is there for the method.

What he wants you to keep is the habit behind it. When a theory asks you to be afraid of something as ordinary as the ground, the grass or the open air, it is the theory that has to explain itself, not nature.