“Take my yoke upon you… for my yoke is easy”
from The Gospel According To Saint Matthew
Chapter 11 Verse 29 & 30
Twice during my career as a seafarer I ended up on missile and satellite tracking (spy) ships in the Far East. I wish I could say that these jobs were as exciting as a James Bond movie. Unfortunately for me, this was not the case. The boredom was unbearable. It was so bad that I turned to Alan Watts to ease my pain. My brother dumped dozens of lectures on an ipod and I started listening to long hours of these lectures. We were also going into port in Japan every few weeks, and, sometimes, other neighboring nations. These lectures were useful for my casual attempt to learn the history and culture of Japan, and Asia in general.
At the beginning of the lecture titled “Intellectual Yoga” (recorded at the Unitarian Church, San Francisco in 1972) Alan Watts says something that really stuck out to me at the time. The exact quote goes like this:
“The word yoga, as most of you doubtless know, is the same as our word yoke, Y – O – K – E, and the Latin word jungere, to join. Join, junction, yoke, union; all these words are basically from the same root. And so, likewise, when Jesus said, ‘My yoke is easy,’ He was saying really, ‘My yoga is easy.’ And the word, therefore, basically denotes the state that would be the opposite of what our psychiatrists call alienation. Or what Buddhists call ‘si kia drishni sp?’ the view of separateness, the feeling of separateness. The feeling of being cut-off from being.”
Alan Watts goes on to give a very basic explanation of yoga and one type of yoga in particular, called Bhakti Yoga. He says that Christianity is basically just a form of Bhakti Yoga. This was fascinating to me and got me thinking.
So what exactly is yoga?
To be honest, I do not know exactly what yoga is. I am still trying to figure it out in my amateur way. My attempt to understand yoga seems productive and I feel like I’m learning something. So I’m going to try to organize my thoughts here.
According to Alan Watts, yoga means yoke. So yoga is the yoke metaphor. Every ancient empire used this metaphor. We know this metaphor in “western” civilization through both the Bible and the Roman Empire.
Anyone familiar with Hollywood movies, or occasionally showed up to a religious service as a child, has a vague awareness of the children of Israel as slaves and Moses leading his people out of Egypt and to freedom. Older people might have a Charlton Heston image of Moses and younger people might see Christian Bale as Moses, or maybe some other artistic picture representation pops into mind. I’m sure at least a few hundred million people (if not a few billion) are somewhat aware of this story.
The King James Authorized Version of the Bible (1611) starts to use the word “yoke” in Genesis (The First Book of Moses) chapter 27. This is the chapter in which Isaac, the son of Abraham, was getting old and started thinking he might die soon and wanted to give his final blessing to his oldest son. The oldest son happened to be Esau. Isaac’s wife, Rebekah, preferred Jacob. So they tricked Isaac, and Jacob got the blessing. When Esau arrived to get the blessing he thought he was going to get, Isaac and Esau realize that they had been deceived by Rebekah and Jacob. Esau “lifted up his voice and wept” and begged for a blessing also. So Isaac gives him this blessing in verse 40: “and by thy sword shalt thou live, and shalt serve thy brother; and it shall come to pass when thou shalt have the dominion, that thou shalt break his yoke from off thy neck.”
The Bible goes on to talk about the yoke metaphor relationship.
- Leviticus (26:13 – “I am the Lord your God, which brought you forth out of the Land of Egypt, that ye should not be their bondmen; and I have broken the bands of your yoke, and made you go upright.”)
- Deuteronomy (28:48 – Therefore shalt thou serve thine enemies which the Lord shall send against thee, in hunger, and in thirst, and in nakedness, and in want of all things: and he shall put a yoke of iron upon thy neck, until he have destroyed thee.”)
- 1 Kings (12:4 – “Thy father made our yoke grievous: now therefore make thou the grievous service of thy father, and his heavy yoke which he put upon us, lighter, and we will serve thee.”)
- Isaiah (9:4 – “For thou hast broken the yoke of his burden, and the staff of his shoulder, the rod of his oppressor, as in the day of Midian.” & 10:27 – “And it shall come to pass in that day, that his burden shall be taken away from off thy shoulder, and his yoke from off thy neck, and the yoke shall be destroyed because of the anointing.” & 14:25 – “That I will break the Assyrian in my land, and upon my mountains tread him under foot: then shall his yoke depart from off them, and his burden depart from off their shoulders.” & 58:6 – “Is not this the fast that I have chosen? to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke?”)
- Ezekiel (34:27 – “And the tree of the field shall yield her fruit, and the earth shall yield her increase, and they shall be safe in their land, and shall know that I am the Lord, when I have broken the bands of their yoke…”)
- Etc.
I am not an expert on ancient history. All I can say is that agriculture is said to have started about 11,000 years ago. Warfare and urbanization started up around 5,500 years ago. The process we call technological progress started rolling. This is what we call civilization.
Some of the oldest locations of human civilization are:
- Karaca Dağ and Çatalhöyük and Göbekli Tepe, Turkey
- Luxor, Egypt
- Jericho and Jerusalem
- Damascus and Aleppo, Syria
- Argos and Athens, Greece
- Ur, Mesopotamia
- Susa, Iran
- Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, Indus River Valley, Pakistan
Like I said, I am no expert on how these little pockets of early humanity interacted with each other. Personally, I think there was more communication going on back in the day then we generally give them credit for now. And, I think, they communicated in metaphors that were (/are) easily understood and universal to human psychology. (Joseph Campbell is an influence on my thinking.)
So the yoga/yoke metaphor is as old as the first domesticated cow or ox or buffalo or horse. As soon as a person figured out a way to get a horse or cow to pull a plow or a bundle of food or some dirt or something like that, yoga was invented.
And then, as the kings became more powerful, and urbanization continued, the master and slave relationship became more institutionalized. People started to become the beast of burden. The yoke was not only on a horse or ox. The yoke was placed on the necks and shoulders of humans under the command of the king and his military.
Before I get bogged down in the quagmire of ancient history, let me fast forward a little. When these city-states developed into empires, the kings often set up some sort of system of linking themselves with (a) god. The Babylonian king Hammurabi carved a very famous picture of himself in stone having a friendly chat with an undetermined god, probably Marduk or Shamash, which set up an early legal system called the Code of Hammurabi. Various mythologies told stories of gods falling in love with humans and getting them pregnant, and the descendants of these half-gods would conveniently happen to become kings. Then the kings would be outright considered gods and the people would be forced to worship them.
This is well known and I apologize for my clumsy and unprofessional writing style. If there is any question about this or further interest in studying it, there is plenty of documented history on the subject. Sorry to reference Wikipedia, but there is a Wikipedia article on it, and it is probably as good a place to start as any.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_who_have_been_considered_deities
In “western” culture, the path was a direct flow from the Roman Empire. In “eastern” culture, the story is a little more vast. And this is what I am trying to wrap my head around, as are many other people. First of all, trying to penetrate through the language barrier alone is very difficult. However, we have the benefit of 300 years of “orientalism” and now the internet to help us. So we should be able to make some headway at this point.
I want to focus completely and totally on India and the yoga of South Asia. Before I do that, let me include one more quote. This quote demonstrates the path of the “west” and our relationship with the yoke metaphor. Simon Schama, in his book “The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age,” around pages 66 – 67, Schama explains:
“There were, of course, no coronations in the Dutch Republic, nor elaborate formal audiences. The Netherlandish version of the royal progress, the joyeuse entree, went back to the Burgundian late Middle Ages, and was periodically revived to greet visiting royalty, and, on occasion, to acclaim a triumphant stadholderian retinue. It was, however, no slavish prostration before a crypto-monarchical conqueror. Built into its ceremonies was a formalized recognition by the visiting magnate of the rights and privileges embodied in town charters and customary law. The symbolic connotation of the triumphal arch, then, had been cunningly reversed from its origins under Augustus, Trajan and Hadrian. Instead of an acceptance of Caesarism, it signified the barrier through which military power passed in order to regain access to — literally — civilized society. In so doing, the victor who once paraded his spoils now accepted the conditions imposed on his “sovereignty.” This ritual was respected by royal dignitaries, even in the captive south, where successive Habsburg viceroys in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries appreciated the need to make tactful concessions to civic amour propre in Brussels, Ghent and Antwerp. The Emperor Joseph II, who treated such antics with contempt as an obscure relic of a dysfunctional past, brought down a violent revolt on himself when he attempted their suppression. In the Dutch Republic, the acclaim that greeted a Stadholder was an even more emphatic resistance to Caesarism. So that in wartime the Stadholder existed in an uneasy capacity, part warlord, part commissioned officer; in peacetime his role was even more presidential-patriarchal, rather than royal-governmental. Whether the House of Orange-Nassau took an active or a passive role in politics, though, it was inconceivable that the Republic should take shape as a mere emanation of the dynasty, much as Muscovy turned into Russia through the formative hegemony of the tsars’ hegemony or the Holy Roman Empire in the seventeenth century became dissolved within the proprietary realm of the Habsburg dynasty.”
Like I said, I’m trying to get to India, but first, let me attempt to briefly explain that Europe sort of rejected the old ways of doing things. I’m trying to avoid too much history and there are plenty of other writings about all of this. Luthernism and Calvinism threw a wrench in the works of the old ways of putting “yokes” on conquered peoples. The English Civil War and other Protestant wars, which led up to the French Revolution and American Independence, created more sophisticated and nuanced ways of forming governments (and yokes.) Also, some people, like George Washington, were offered the opportunity to be kings, or at least, president for life, and rejected it. It is arguable, but there does seem to be a trend away from yokes and toward non-yoke situations, if that makes any sense. Even while rejecting the opportunity to be a king, people still took the opportunity to build the old Roman yoke regardless, king or no king, and constructed a beautiful triumphal arch in “Washington Square Park” just for the fun of it, apparently. I guess it makes people feel good. In the same way that the Parisians made sure that they got their Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile on the Champs-Élysées, regardless of Napoleon and everything that followed him.
Anyway, while Europe was transforming itself, some of the Europeans were, of course, exploring. The Portuguese, under Henry the Navigator, figured out how to sail south and go around Africa, avoiding the Middle East completely, and sailing into the Indian Ocean. The Dutch were quick to follow. And the English were jumping on the band wagon not much later.
As early as 1583 there was a Jesuit missionary in Goa, happened to be English, named Thomas Stephens and he was writing letters back to England mentioning that there was something going on between Sanskrit and Greek and Latin.
Around the same time an Italian merchant named Filippo Sassetti pointed out that there were words in Sanskrit that seemed connected to Italian words with the same meaning. The word for god is devah in Sanskrit and dio in Italian. Serpent is sarpah in Sanskrit and serpe in Italian.
Later, in 1647, Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn, happened to be Dutch, started developing a linguistic theory around the connection between certain words in languages. He put forward the idea that there was an ancient source language that the Indo-European languages descended from. He wasn’t widely known and he didn’t start much of a following, but it shows that a few people were starting to take an interest.
Scholarly research picked up the pace significantly when Sir William Jones started lecturing on the subject in 1786. Two years before he founded the “Asiatic Society” (15 Jan 1784) in Calcutta. He talked and wrote extensively about the simularities between Latin and Greek and Sanskrit.
The Vedas were studied. As well as all things ancient and from the orient, from Hindu astronomy to law and music, all thoroughly examined. 10 years produced unprecedented documentation of knowledge on India.
A Baptist missionary named William Ward published a book which started the process of popularizing the religion of India. “A View of the History, Literature, and Religion of the Hindoos: Including a Minute Description of Their Manners and Customs, and Translations from their Principle Works” published in 1811.