Ernest Wood: Great Systems of Yoga

THERE are many people in America and Europe who want to know what yoga is, and they say, “Do not tell us about the yoga of one particular school; we want a concise survey of the whole field.”

This need I have tried to fill in the present small volume. In doing so I have endeavored to preserve the perfect authenticity and clearness of the original teachings of ten different well-known Oriental schools of yoga teaching and practice. This I am doing mainly direct from the original texts and with an extensive knowledge of their actual operation, acquired largely during my thirty-eight-years residence in the East. Read more

Patanjali’s Raja Yoga

FOREMOST among the Yoga teachings of India comes that of Patanjali dating back, according to popular tradition, to at least 300 B.C. His Yoga Sūtras give definitions and instructions which are accepted by all teachers, even when they also make additions in minor matters. He begins with a description of yoga as “Chitta vritti nirodha.” Read more

Shri Krishna’s Gita Yoga

WE HAVE used the new term Gītā-Yoga here because it sums up the titles of all the eighteen chapters of the Bhagavad Gītā, each of which is called a yoga, such as “The Yoga of Knowledge,” “The Yoga of Action,” etc. Read more

Shankaracharya’s Gnyana Yoga

THIS Teacher, who founded monasteries in India for the study of Vedānta philosophy, is believed by many of his followers to have lived several centuries before Christ, though other scholars place him much later. The date does not matter to us today, but his philosophy does, for it is regarded by some millions of people, and especially by the intellectuals, as the very pinnacle of Aryan thought. It was not that he originated a new philosophy, though he did propound a self-culture or discipline necessary to the understanding of it. Read more

Hatha Yoga

THE practice of hatha-yoga is composed chiefly of prānāyāma, which is regulation of breath, āsanā, the practice of various postures, and a set of six bandhas or body-purifications. Although the writer of these words holds to the opinion that these physical practices cannot develop the mind at all, or contribute to its yogic or occult experience, he agrees that when the hatha-yoga exercises are properly done they are very beneficial to the body. As long as people have bodies they should treat them if possible as prize animals, but if that is too much to ask they should at least give them good exercise as well as good rest and good food. In this sense only one should understand the well-known maxim: “No rāja without hatha; no hatha without rāja.” Read more

Laya Yoga

We come now to another school of yoga called the laya yoga. Laya means “latent” or “in suspense.” The especial features of this yoga are its study and practice of kundalinī and the chakras. Kundalinī is described as a force lying in three and a half coils like a sleeping serpent, in a cavity near the base of the spine. This is regarded as a goddess or power, “luminous as lightning,” who, even though sleeping, maintains all living creatures. She lies there with her head blocking a fine channel which goes straight up the spine and is known as the sushumnā. Some, to link this up with modern thought, have called it the fount of bodily electricity. Read more

Bhakti Yoga

BHAKTI, or devotion, arises from the appreciation of goodness. There will be no devotional feeling towards what is not good. If some persons were to worship or rather propitiate a dangerous deity it would not be devotion. So devotion implies goodness and is towards goodness. It is a form of love, but essentially love of something or some person who is “good.”
Merchants, who speak of goods, not of mere things or articles, are in this particular excellent psychologists. Goods are things which are good for us, or we might better put it, good to us. We go further as our intelligence or knowledge increases and recognize that some things which are not good to us are good to others. “The farmer prays for rain, the washerman for sun,” says the Japanese proverb. On this basis, everything is seen to be good because everything is good to some being. Read more

Mantra Yoga

The use of mantras constitutes another very definite department of occult practices, known in India from the oldest times. Mantras are charms, spells, magical formulas, incantations. Mantra-yoga is the employment of words so arranged as to produce these effects. It is not usually considered that ordinary people are qualified to make mantras, but that the mantra-yogī is a person who knows the mantras which have been made by great mantra-kāras (mantra-makers) in the past. Read more