From the late 19th century appearance of a young Hindu monk at an interfaith conference in Chicago to the creation of a uniquely American system for certifying teachers, even a cursory survey of yoga’s arrival in the West is full of overlapping chapters swimming inside a mosaic of personalities and events. Yoga did not appear in the United States without some controversy and confusion, but its prodigious growth over the past 100-plus years testifies to the enterprising courage of the scholars, seekers, teachers, students, and swamis who introduced an Eastern metaphysical practice to a country principally populated with Christian immigrants.

Although yoga’s advent in the West has been accompanied by some airbrushing of its spiritual dimensions, its core message nevertheless thrives, thanks to the creativity and passion of dedicated teachers who recognize that a comprehensive yoga experience that does not disregard the non-physical elements of the practice remains as relevant as ever.

1893. Benjamin Harrison is US president, Henry Ford builds his first car, Mae West is born in Brooklyn, a run on gold supplies sparks economic panic in US markets, Katharine Lee Bates writes “America the Beautiful,” and the first Ferris Wheel is on display at the just-opened Chicago World’s Fair.

On a late summer morning that same year, a young monk from Calcutta stepped into a crowded conference hall at the Art Palace on the Chicago shores of Lake Michigan at the first “World’s Parliament on Religions.” He had arrived in the US two years earlier, persuaded by friends in Chennai (formerly Madras) during his post-university travels across the Indian subcontinent that sharing Hinduism’s message with the West might help bring meaningful relief to India’s poor, begin to redress the imbalances in Indian society, and generate the national rejuvenation he believed his country thirsted for.

Nervous, and without prepared remarks for the opening ceremony introductions, the 30-year old Hindu offered an impromptu speech in what would be the first of six lectures at the unprecedented 17-day event. The brainchild of Charles Carroll Bonney — a layman in the Swedenborgian church and president of the World’s Congress Auxiliary who appointed John Henry Barrows to establish a dialogue between representatives of religions and denominations worldwide — the 6,000-plus gathering was dominated by English-speaking Christian representatives, who delivered 152 of the 194 papers.

Subsequent accounts would later mark Vivekananda’s opening remarks as the beginning of the interfaith movement in America. The New York Herald covered the event and called him “undoubtedly the greatest figure” there, adding, “After hearing him, we feel foolish to send missionaries to this learned nation."

Born to an upper middle class family as Narendranath Dutta, and later adopting the monastic name Swami Vivekananda, he spoke to the 11 September gathering about his pride in his faith’s acceptance of all religions as true and of his delight in being part of an interfaith gathering that he said vindicated the doctrine in the Bhagavad Gita: “Whoever comes to me, through whatever form, I reach him; all men are struggling through paths which in the end lead to me.”

Over the coming weeks, the Hindu monk’s talks would touch on broad themes including the common ground among the world’s great religions, Vedic teachings’ relationship to Hinduism, the omnipresence of pure consciousness, his extreme displeasure with Christianity’s efforts to spread religion (rather than food) to the impoverished in his homeland, the reasons for Buddhism’s failure in India, and his conviction that “holiness, purity, and charity are not the exclusive possessions of any church in the world.”

While he never uttered the word ‘yoga’ in any of his public Chicago presentations, more than a handful of scholars would later come to regard Vivekananda’s appearance there as a decisive spark lighting first small fire that would eventually popularize yoga in the West. By most accounts, Vivekananda was well received at the Chicago conference, and his teachings to Western audiences were subsequently hailed as marking the beginning of western interest in Hinduism and eastern mysticism. Romain Rolland, a Nobel Prize winning French writer and lifelong pacifist, described Vivekananda’s writings as “stirring rhythms like the march of Handel Choruses. I cannot touch these sayings of his . . . without a receiving a thrill through my body like an electric shock.”

Over the next few years, Vivekananda opened Vedantic centers in New York and London, nurturing the surge of interest in Hinduism with lectures at US universities. But his intense criticism of Christian missionaries and time in the United States would nonetheless draw enmity from some religious circles in the West and East. While generally revered as a hero in India for his success in sharing Hindu principles abroad, some orthodox Hindus held his travel to the “impure” West in low regard, questioning whether his sudden fame compromised his monastic commitments.

Meanwhile, Vivekananda’s unrelenting critique of the impact of missionaries in India triggered indignation from some Christian circles. In one speech in the United States, Vivekananda said:

“Part of the Sunday School education for children here consists in teaching them to hate everybody who is not a Christian, and the Hindus especially, so that, from their very childhood they may subscribe their pennies to the missions . . . What is meant by those pictures in the school books for children where the Hindu mother is painted as throwing her children to the crocodiles in the Ganga? The mother is black, but the baby is painted white, to arouse more sympathy and get more money. What is meant by those pictures which paint a man burning his own wife at a stake with his own hands, so that she may become a ghost and torment the husband's enemy? .... If all India stands up, and takes all the mud that is at the bottom of the Indian Ocean and throws it up against the Western countries, it will not be doing an infinitesimal part of that which you are doing to us.”

Vivekanada’s appraisal of the Indian missionary movement would resonate sourly in some Christian circles for decades, but his overriding message of interfaith understanding and self-proclaimed respect and wonder for the teachings of Christ kept the doors open for subsequent travels in the US and Europe, and, by some accounts, created fertile ground to kindle India’s spiritual renaissance in the early part of the 20th century. Only three years after his appearance in Chicago, a small US publishing house published several of Vivekananda’s works, including Raja Yoga, containing his own exhaustive discussion of Patanjali’s Yogasutras. The New York Vedanta Society that he established in 1899 remains active today, dedicated to four branches of yoga practice that Vivekananda spoke and wrote about extensively: bhakti (devotion); karma (service); jnana (knowledge); and raja (Patanjali’s eight-limbed path).

If Vivekananda’s appearance on the American stage lit the spark for yoga’s launch in the West, the mosaic of late 19th and early 20th century European scholars who translated and dissected ancient Indian texts into European languages acted as bellows to fan yoga’s slowly growing popularity in Europe and the United States.

German scholar Friedrich Max Mueller, regarded as the creator of the modern academic discipline of comparative religions, began his study of Sanskrit decades before Vivekananda’s US and European lecture circuit. Along with a handful of colleagues studying the relationship between European and Asian languages to discover “root language,” Mueller devoted his career to interpreting the Rig Veda and emerged as one of the leading Western commentators on Indian culture. Mueller translated and published scores of ancient Indian texts, including the Upanishads (1879) and the Rig Veda (1892) and was midwife to a number of European translations of other Indian classics until his death in 1900.

Like Vivekananda, Mueller’s work was not without controversy, drawing fierce censure from Christian and even some Hindu circles. The former characterized his work as cover for diluting the teachings of Christ, while the latter sometimes interpreted Mueller’s emphasis on the value of focusing on original Vedic teachings — rather than subsequent Hindu interpretations — as Western theistic colonization.

Indian critics of Mueller continue today to accuse his scholarship of undermining Hinduism and encouraging Christian missionary work, but during his lifetime he faced accusations from Christian circles that viewed his teaching of comparative religion as “pantheistic” and subversive. Glasgow Roman Catholic bishop Monsignor Munro, a contemporary of Mueller’s, said that the scholar’s 1888 lectures on the science of religion amounted to a “crusade against divine revelation, against Jesus Christ and Christianity.” To this day, meanwhile, Hindu critics of Mueller cite the contents of a letter he wrote to his wife as proof of his “covert intention to undermine Hinduism.” Mueller wrote his wife in 1886: “The translation of the Veda will hereafter tell to a great extent on the fate of India and on the growth of millions of souls in that country. It is the root of their religion, and to show them what the root is, I feel sure, is the only way of uprooting all that has sprung from it during the last 3,000 years.”

Mueller, by most accounts, remained a devout Lutheran throughout his life and indeed advocated reformation within Hinduism. He wrote, “If there is one thing which a comparative study of religions places in the clearest light, it is the inevitable decay to which every religion is exposed. Whenever we can trace back a religion to its first beginnings, we find it free from many blemishes that affected it in its later states.”

Controversies aside, Mueller’s scholarly leadership in field of ancient Sanskrit writings made scores of Eastern manuscripts accessible to Western audiences on a quantitatively new scale, supplying the academic foundation for a Western slant on the exploration of yoga that would take shape in the century after his death. In the early half of the 20th century, English, German, Swedish, French, Italian, and Dutch scholars would build on Mueller’s work, publishing fresh translations of the Yogasutras, yoga histories, and works on topics ranging from tantric practices to the psychological aspects of meditation.

Yogis Come West, Seekers Go East

The physical and psychological benefits of yoga practice gained fresh attention in the early 20th century, thanks in part to a bevy of swamis coming west.

Born in 1893, Indian yogi Mukunda Lal Ghosh spent his youth seeking out India’s Hindu sages, meeting up with the swami who would become his guru, Yukteswar Giri, at age 17. Traveling to Boston in 1920 under his monastic name Paramahansa Yogananda and heeding his guru’s instruction to spread spiritual understanding in the West, he later founded the Self Realization Fellowship in Los Angeles. His book, Autobiography of a Yogi, penned in 1946, offered an interpretation of his spiritual evolution and its relationship with Western tradition. It emerged as a centerpiece of yoga studies in the West.

The arrival of gurus and swamis from the East came to a near halt following passage of the US Immigration Act of 1924. The Act reduced quotas for immigrants, and while assigned quotas for Great Britain, Germany, and Ireland remained generous, practically all Asians were barred from entering the United States.

American students instead traveled to India, some spurred by the writings of London-born Paul Brunton, a journalist who left his career to live among India’s yogis and mystics and wrote several books including his acclaimed 1936 narrative, A Search in Secret India. The book detailed his Indian experiences and introduced American readers to Ramana Maharshi, a Hindu adept who taught a method of self-inquiry in which the seeker focuses steady attention on “I” to ferret out its source. Ramana Maharshi’s work with scores of Western spiritual authors, such as Brunton, paved the way for his teaching style to find its way into the hands of US and other Western readers.

Using his own experience with self-realization at an early age following an extended meditative experience, Ramana Maharshi taught a form of inquiry that repeatedly focuses on the question, “Who am I?” The goal of his method, according to scholar Georg Feuerstein and numerous accounts of the adept’s teachings, was to eventually penetrate the many “false identities obscuring the real Self beyond the ego personality.”

The 1930s also witnessed Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti attracting large numbers of followers, many of them from the West. His status as a uniquely original and eloquent philosopher — he claimed allegiance to no nationality, caste, or theology — drew students attracted to his theme that authority, in any form, hindered the search for truth. Krishnamurti insisted that man must be his own guru to realize transformation. “Truth,” he said, “is a pathless land. If you follow someone, you cease to follow the truth.” Scores of seekers sought his counsel for decades. British novelist and critic Aldous Huxley befriended Krishnamurti in the late 1930s, and commented decades later after attending one of his talks, “it was like listening to a discourse of the Buddha. Such power, such intrinsic authority. . .”

Krishnamurti’s strong interest in yoga asanas (poses) led him to spend time in Switzerland with yoga master B.K.S. Iyengar and, later, with T.K.V. Desikachar — two of the more prolific and renowned Indian yogis whose influence in the West would reverberate strongly in the latter half of the 20th century and beyond.

Krishnamurti’s blend of skeptical philosophy, fascination with asana, and adopted home in California’s Ojai Valley attracted an eclectic mix of American seekers as diverse as Jackson Pollack, Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, and quantum physicist David Bohm. In 1969, he assisted in forming the Krishnamurti Foundation of America, one of a group of organizations he would establish worldwide. At Krishnamurti’s insistence, his foundations steer clear of any interpretation or analysis of his teachings. Krishnamurti died in Ojai, California in 1986 after making a pilgrimage to the pepper tree under which, by his own account, he achieved enlightenment in 1922.

While Krishnamurti was making his mark in Western circles in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, a steady stream of Western students supplied written accounts of their own treks to India, chronicling the burgeoning American enthrallment with the physical elements of yoga practice. Arizona-born religious scholar Theos Bernard, who narrowly survived a near fatal illness in his early college years in the middle 1930s and sought out a yogi from India during his convalescence, would eventually write what came to be regarded as one of the first US guidebooks on yoga asanas, Hatha Yoga: The Report of a Personal Experience. A flurry of ‘how to’ manuals followed, including Indra Devi’s Yoga for Americans, which passed on the teachings she absorbed after gaining notoriety as the first Western woman accepted into an Indian ashram. Beginning in the 1930s and up until her death in 2002, the Latvian-raised Devi shared with students in the United States, China, India, and Mexico the fruits of her studies at Tirumalai Krishnamacharya’s ashram, then based in Mysore.

Although he never traveled to the United States, Krishnamacharya emerged as a potent force in yoga worldwide, strongly influencing a generation of Indian teachers who, in turn, would leave a lasting imprint on yoga’s fabric in the West. In 1933, he took his sickly teenage brother-in-law under his wing. His young relative — B.K.S. Iyengar — would mature into an iconic yoga figure in India, later catapulting into international fame following a meeting in 1952 with American violinist Yehudi Menuhin who arranged for him to teach in Europe. His copiously illustrated flagship book, Light on Yoga, was published in 1966 and eventually translated into 17 languages.

Named by Time magazine in 2004 as one of the 100 most influential people in the world, Iyengar’s signature style — with its strong emphasis on precise alignment in poses for specific therapeutic purposes — would give birth to a strain of yoga practice named after him and enthuse a new generation of teachers. His 2005 Light on Life tour — named for his book synthesizing lessons learned from 70 years of practice — brought the 87-year old yoga master to the United States where he was enthusiastically greeted by crowds of teachers and students at oversold events in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, New York, Washington DC, and Estes Park, Colorado.

Other students of Krishnamacharya would make equally strong marks on the yoga in the West. His son, T.K.V. Desikachar, began his career as a civil engineer and later became an avid student of his father in the 1960s. In 1976 he established the Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram (KYM), a public charitable trust recognized internationally as a leading institute of yoga studies based in Chennai. Together with his son, Kausthub Desikachar, T.K.V. Desikachar now splits his time between KYM and appearances at conventions, conferences, and yoga workshops worldwide, advocating a methodology that combines asana, pranayama (breath practice), meditation, chanting, and other tools as appropriate for each individual student. The primary focus of KYM, according to its literature, is adapting yoga “to suit the needs of each individual, so that anyone who wants to can practice yoga and experience its multiple benefits.”

At the age of 12, young Pattabhi Jois began a student-teacher relationship with Krishnamacharya that would span three decades. Legend has it that Jois ran away from home in 1929 to study Sanskrit. He began teaching in 1937, and today thousands of students travel to Mysore to study at his institute, where he teaches a form of intensely physical and athletic yoga. Thanks to Jois, “Ashtanga Yoga” — which literally describes the eight-limbed path of yoga outlined in Patanjali’s Yogasutras — has come to be equated in the West with the precise series of sequential poses linked with breath that are his trademark. In the years following Jois’ first visit to the United States in 1975, his style has been adopted — and adapted — by innumerable yoga studios, gyms, and fitness centers offering vigorous asana classes, sometimes referred to colloquially as “power yoga.”

Yoga Hits Bookshelves, Airwaves

By the 1960s, the paths of multiple Indian and Western yogis would begin to cross-fertilize and merge with American culture to find its way into popular media. In 1950, Richard Hittleman, a New York disciple of Ramana Maharshi who first learned asanas from his parent’s Hindu maintenance man at a getaway called “Utopia” in the Catskills, returned from India and brought yoga to American television. Described as “very much a spiritual yogi,” Hittelman presented a conspicuously non-spiritual form of yoga that emphasized its physical benefits. In his lifetime, Hittleman sold over 8 million books. The PBS television series that began in 1970 by Lilias Folan brought yoga into still more homes. In 1998, according to Yoga Journal, Goswami Kriyananda acknowledged Folan's contribution to yoga by bestowing her the title Swami Kavitananda ("one who knows bliss through energy”).

Ashrams, Studios, and Study Centers Dot the Landscape

A mid-1960s revision in US immigration law reopened the door to a second wave of teachers from the East, many of whom would establish ashrams and yoga study centers across the United States. Amrit Desai founded the Kripalu Yoga Ashram in Pennsylvania’s Berkshires in 1966, and in 1979, through a gift from folk singer Carole King, 600 acres of woodlands in rural Virginia became home to Swami Satchidananda’s Yogaville ashram.

But America’s experiment transplanting the Indian ashram experience to its own soil would meet with mixed success. Scandal enveloped the Kripalu ashram in 1994 following Desai’s admission to having sexual affairs with five followers. The strong sense of students’ betrayal and the upheaval that ensued — Desai was ousted from Kripalu — ultimately convinced the remaining leadership at Pennsylvania facility to abandon decisively the “guru prototype.” Today, the “Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health” notes in its literature that it is the “first traditional yoga ashram founded on the guru-disciple model to transition to a new paradigm of spiritual education.”

The Holistic Life Foundation — founded in 1975 — would later evolve into the Feathered Pipe Foundation, a Montana-based nonprofit running the Feathered Pipe Ranch, one of the premier yoga retreat centers in the United States. Today, the Ranch offers workshops with some of the country’s most experienced and revered yoga teachers, most of whom come from the United States but at some point likely trained extensively with one or more of the leading teachers from India such as Desikachar or Iyengar. As the founder of Feathered Pipe recounts, in 1975, in association with the California Yoga Teachers Association, the Holistic Life Foundation established the Yoga Journal, “on Janis Paulsen Silver’s $500 credit card limit”; a small group of founders printed and distributed 300 typewritten copies. The magazine marked its 31st anniversary in 2006, and currently boasts a paid circulation of 310,000 and more than one million readers bimonthly.

Counterculture Meets Mainstream

Harvard professor Richard Alpert, the son of a prominent Boston lawyer, was dismissed from his position at the prestigious university in 1963 for giving psychedelic mushrooms to an undergraduate. Eventually parting ways with his one-time sidekick Timothy Leary, Alpert traveled to India, was schooled in Raja Yoga by his guru Neem Karoli Baba (Maharaji), assumed the name Ram Dass, and wrote what would become a counterculture classic for the 1970s, Be Here Now.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, yoga’s popularity soared in the United States as complementary and alternative medicine made steady, subtle inroads into the American medical system and documentary data on yoga’s therapeutic benefits for stress and pain relief appeared on the pages of medical and psychological professional journals. Growing numbers of classically schooled, American-born, teachers came into their own, and yoga’s reputation as the bailiwick of new age counterculturalists dramatically softened. Corporations, government agencies, and mainstream fitness centers began to include yoga offerings to employees and clients, and US-based teacher training programs began popping up around the country.

A Harris Poll study revealed that by 2004, 7.5 percent of U.S. adults, or 16.5 million people, practice yoga. The growing recognition among mainstream health practitioners of yoga’s benefits and the proliferation of studios persuaded a group of US yoga teachers in 1999 to draft the first national standards for their profession. Driven in part by the desire by health insurance companies and health clubs to determine what qualifies an individual to teach yoga, the Yoga Alliance today maintains a national registry of teachers certified to meet minimum standards of training in categories such as teaching techniques, philosophy, and anatomy. The Yoga Alliance is not without its critics; apprehension that insurance reimbursement will lead to outside regulation of the yoga field is cited by some as evidence that the “Americanization of yoga” threatens to blight the teacher-student relationship and risks diluting the spiritual dimensions of the ancient science.

Some classical yoga practitioners worry that the proliferation of “varieties and flavors” of yoga offerings in the West bear little apparent relationship to the eloquent system compiled by Patanjali. From under-qualified instructors “certified” to teach yoga in one weekend to peculiar fusions of yoga asana with fitness fads and pop culture, some say yoga has paid a steep price for merging with a culture which, at first glance, is so outwardly dissimilar to that from which it emerged.

Still, the connective tissue linking Patanjali’s system to 21st century Western life is durable, and scores of Western teachers successfully and faithfully convey the essence of the (roughly) 2000-year old system to today’s yogis. Their creativity and commitment lets uncorrupted yoga thrive and evolve in the West — an achievement that speaks volumes about the resilience and relevance of an exquisite metaphysical science.