The Science of Yoga: The Risks and the Rewards

by William J Broad

  He wrote that the inversions still achieved the goal of “getting a richer blood supply” to undernourished parts of the body despite the “comparatively low rise” in pressure and the modest physical effort. Not that muscles were neglected. “We have ample evidence,” Gune boasted, that the poses represent “an unrivalled set of exercises even for the towers of strength!”

  Throughout his career, Gune showed a fondness for the zing of exaggeration. He was, after all, part showman. With the implied authority of his white lab coat, Gune worked hard to advance not only the substance of science but its style. He wanted to cultivate the idea that science had endorsed yoga—to demonstrate its approval and borrow some of its repute and progressive energy as a means of giving the discipline a new air of respectability. He desperately wanted yoga to project a new image.

  But Gune also exhibited real depth. Surprisingly, given his raw political objectives and lack of formal scientific training, he repeatedly displayed a love of rigor. He even managed to disprove one of yoga’s central tenets.

  Yogis of his day (and ours) were happy to appear scientific by declaring that deep breathing had hidden powers of rejuvenation because it flooded the lungs and bloodstream with oxygen, refreshing body, mind, and spirit. They taught that students who did intense yoga breathing could feel the body tingle and vibrate with waves of healthful oxygen.

  Not so, Gune countered after doing a pioneering set of measurements. Instead, he found that fast breathing did little to change the amount of oxygen that the bloodstream would absorb and determined that such vigorous efforts actually made their biggest impact by blowing off clouds of carbon dioxide.

  “The idea that an individual absorbs larger quantities of oxygen during Pranayama is a myth,” he wrote, referring to the yogic name for breathing exercises. Gune’s finding might have been counterintuitive and contrary to the wisdom of the day. But it was stubbornly honest—and, as it turns out, scientifically correct.

  A smart fund-raiser, Gune sent free copies of Yoga Mimansa to the maharajahs of India. These rich men presided over a patchwork of princely states exempt from direct British rule. Many patronized the indigenous arts and culture as part of the Hindu revival, and some had a lively interest in yoga.

  His influence rose so fast and to such a degree that he quickly became a hero of the nationalist intelligentsia. By 1927—just three years after the ashram’s founding—the former unemployed schoolteacher was advising Gandhi, arguably the most famous Indian since the Buddha and the most visible leader of India’s fight for independence.

  The issue was the pandit’s health. Gandhi had had serious bouts of illness and fatigue often aggravated by his long fasts, as well as a fascination with natural cures and a disdain for Western medicine. He complained of high blood pressure. Gune recommended the calming effect of the Shoulder Stand. “In your case,” he wrote in one letter, the pose “should certainly help.” Gune noted that his own practice of the inversion left his blood pressure at a relaxed 120 millimeters of mercury.

  Gune often promoted specific poses for particular ills and health benefits, pioneering an approach that many yogis would adopt over the decades. And he promulgated other innovations. Soon after founding the ashram, Gune, drawing on the inspiration of a martial arts mentor, established a policy of teaching yoga in classes of mass instruction. The lessons, moreover, were free.

  Another novelty centered on women. At first, the ashram took in only male students. But that policy soon changed. By 1926, Gune was calling his reformulated yoga “peculiarly fitted for the females.” His observation was farsighted, given the traditional male chauvinism of Hindu society and yoga’s eventual popularity with women.

  To say that Gune was pivotal understates the case. Even so, he remains virtually unknown in the West except among scholars. Joseph S. Alter, a medical anthropologist at the University of Pittsburgh and author of Yoga in Modern India, argues that he “probably had a more profound impact on the practice of modern yoga than anyone else.”

  Of Gune’s many admirers, one of the most politically astute was the Wodeyar clan of Mysore, a city and state of southern India rich in silk and incense, coffee and sandalwood. The benevolent rajahs ruled over a realm about the size of Scotland, their ornate palace dominating the capital. Mysore was the most progressive of India’s princely states, and historians say the ruling family played a skillful role in the politics of Hindu nationalism, including the promotion of yoga as a way to build an Indian national identity.

  Like Gune at his ashram, the Mysore palace sponsored a version of the ancient discipline that was far removed from the world of Tantra and eroticism. It was quite unmystical. For decades, members of the family had practiced an eclectic style that drew on Indian martial arts and wrestling as well as Western gymnastics and physical fitness techniques, including those of the British. It aimed at promoting martial culture, hardening the body, and producing feelings of pleasurable fitness.

  In 1933—a decade after Gune had turned to the scientific study of yoga—the palace hired a teacher to run its yoga hall. This short man of quick temper and considerable erudition, Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, had spent his early life learning Sanskrit, Indian medicine, and other classical disciplines as part of the Hindu revival. He now developed a style that drew on the palace’s gymnastic ethos.

  Krishnamacharya refined postures, sequenced them with logical rigor, and combined them with deep breathing to create a fluid experience.

  None of this would matter very much except that Krishnamacharya (1888–1989) produced a number of gifted students who eventually made him history’s most influential figure in Hatha’s modern rise. His passion and ideas about pose development led to the emergence of the Sun Salutation and eventually other flowing poses and styles, including Ashtanga and Vinyasa, Power and Viniyoga.

  The Mysore palace sent Krishnamacharya on tours around India to publicize yoga, with the participants openly referring to the trips as “propaganda work.” In 1934, the maharajah asked Krishnamacharya to visit Gune’s famous ashram up north and study its methods. Krishnamacharya did so, traveling by train.

  The following year, the palace guru adopted the theme of therapeutic benefits in his own book, Yoga Makaranda (Honey of Yoga), which the maharajah published. This sequel to Gune’s therapeutic efforts was even more tenacious. For instance, it hailed the benefits of Utthita Parsvakonasana—a triangular pose known as the Extended Side Angle. The student bends one leg and keeps the other ramrod straight, lifting one arm over the head and bringing the other down to the floor. As a result, “pains in the abdomen, urinary infections, fevers and other diseases will be cured,” the book declared with no hint of qualification, or proof.

  Extended Side Angle, Utthita Parsvakonasana

  Krishnamacharya may have been stubborn, gruff, and domineering but he trained a student who proved to be particularly important to the spread of Hatha yoga—his brother-in-law, B. K. S. Iyengar (1918– ). The young man had been sickly all his life, and at first the yoga sessions in Mysore went poorly. Krishnamacharya soon lost interest in his new student. But Iyengar kept at it and eventually became healthy. Increasingly, like his guru, he looked to yoga for its restorative powers. He began touring India with Krishnamacharya and displaying his newfound skills, effortlessly tying his body in knots.

  Iyengar, a young man of eighteen, at this point began to draw on the insights of medicine. It helped him ground his approach more deeply in the modern view of the body. His strategy was similar to what Gune and his colleagues had done—but in miniature.

  The immersion began in 1936 when a surgeon by the name of V. B. Gokhale watched in astonishment as Iyengar gave a yoga demonstration and afterward helped facilitate Iyengar’s relocation to the large city of Pune, which became Iyengar’s home for the rest of his life. The physician became a friend, a supporter, and a knowledgeable liaison to the world of human anatomy.

  Intimate knowledge of the human body—such as how its more than two hundred bones fit
together and fall into conflict—let Iyengar refine the poses. The Triangle was a good example. His method avoided subtle misalignments that could restrict movement. The beginner’s pose, known formally as Trikonasana, began in a standing position as the student spread arms and legs far apart and bent the torso to one side, reaching up with one arm and down with the other. The pose was then repeated on the opposite side. The potential conflict centered on the thigh bone and a large knob at its upper end known as the greater trochanter, a spot where muscles attached. As the student bent over, the pelvis could easily strike the knobby protrusion, which stopped all downward movement. The solution was simple. It called for the student to turn the foot ninety degrees so it pointed outward. That rotated the overall leg and turned the greater trochanter backward so that the pelvis and torso were free to sweep downward. The result was a deeper thrust and a better stretch.

  Triangle, Utthita Trikonasana

  Drawing on such insights, Iyengar became a master of precision. Good alignment became his signature. He learned much about what was reasonable, what was ambitious, and what was dangerous.

  Gune, who had become chairman of the Board of Physical Education in the Bombay region, saw Iyengar perform around 1945 in a public demonstration. History gives no details of the encounter between the two men—two pioneers who sought to align Hatha yoga with modern science. It does note, however, that Gune arranged for the institution where Iyengar performed to receive a financial grant.

  In 1947, India won independence and the nation’s powerful no longer promoted yoga as a way to build Hindu pride. Patronage ended or fell dramatically. In the mountains south of Bombay, Gune’s ashram tightened its belt, uncertain of the future. In Mysore, politicians took over for the royal family.

  Coincident with this plunge in domestic support, Hatha yoga went global. The exports began with a gifted student who had studied with both Gune and Krishnamacharya. Like Iyengar, the neophyte had come to yoga for reasons of ill health and had become a fervent champion of its restorative powers. Moreover, the student was a vivacious woman. She helped turn Gune’s observations about yoga being “peculiarly fitted for the females” into multitudes of women devotees.

  Born of a Swedish bank director and a Russian noblewoman, Eugenie Peterson (1899–2002) was a rising Indian movie star with the stage name Indra Devi when she developed a serious heart condition. She met Gune and studied at his ashram, likening it to a health spa. Devi found herself in classes with other women and distraught at her poor flexibility. A woman instructor advised patience.

  The neophyte then sought to study with Krishnamacharya.

  He refused.

  “He said that he had no classes for women,” Devi recalled.

  She persisted.

  Eventually the guru relented.

  Devi learned well, moving to Hollywood in 1947 and teaching such celebrities as Gloria Swanson, Greta Garbo, and Marilyn Monroe. She became known as the first yoga teacher to the stars.

  Devi gathered her insights into a 1953 book, Forever Young, Forever Healthy. It became Hatha yoga’s first bestseller and the first to widely popularize the vision of ultimate health, quickly going through sixteen printings. It spoke especially to women, its tone intimate, its pages rich in fitness and beauty tips.

  As yoga soared in popularity, science dug into an aspect of the old agenda that had managed to endure—veneration of the miraculous. Big claims, despite a number of exposés, had grown more prominent.

  The star was Yogananda. The name of the charismatic swami meant “bliss through divine union.” His book, Autobiography of a Yogi, told of his personal experience with yogic supermen who could fly, change the weather, read minds, walk through walls, materialize jewels, and, of no small importance to meditators in the woods, make clouds of mosquitoes suddenly disappear. It was Aladdin come true. His book, translated into dozens of languages, awed and inspired a generation of seekers. “Control over death,” he declared in his writings, echoing the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, “comes when one can consciously direct the motion of the heart.” In his Super Advanced Course, Yogananda gave the ostensible secret: “Yogis know how to stop heart and lung action voluntarily but keep physically alive by retaining some Cosmic Energy in their bodies.”

  Into this supernatural blur came something entirely new in the world of yoga exposés—a defector, a true insider who knew the field’s secrets and personalities and perhaps its vulnerabilities.

  Basu Kumar Bagchi (1895–1977) had grown up in Bengal, like Paul, and had enjoyed a close friendship with Yogananda. The two men went to college together, took monastic vows together, ran a school together, came to America together, preached together, and published religious tracts together. Bagchi became the second-in-command of a rising spiritual enterprise that Yogananda founded in Los Angeles. The Self-Realization Fellowship came to own many costly properties, including more than a dozen lush acres of California coastline.

  The two eventually fell into bitter conflict, allegedly over Yogananda’s breaking his vow of celibacy with female devotees. Bagchi gave up his monastic vows and earned a doctorate in psychology. After a stint at Harvard, he took a post at the University of Michigan and became a pioneer in deciphering brain waves for the diagnosis and treatment of disease, including epilepsy. Bagchi wrote little or nothing about yoga during this period. It was his past, not his future.

  Then Yogananda died. It happened in 1952 while the famous swami was giving a talk at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles. He suffered a heart attack and collapsed, his death reported on the front page of the Los Angeles Times. His demise at the age of fifty-nine seemed to kick the Self-Realization Fellowship into high gear. Yogananda became a departed saint. Hagiography flourished. The group released portraits of the departed yogi that fairly glowed with saintly radiance.

  Bagchi now dug in. Over the course of a decade, he investigated one of the most palpable of the miracles—stopping the heart.

  Bagchi recruited colleagues, won financial backing from the Rockefeller Foundation, bought the best equipment, traveled to India, visited Gune’s ashram, and studied some of the world’s most gifted yogis. To his delight, he eventually tracked down Krishnamacharya—the guru to the gurus who founded the main schools of modern yoga. The celebrated man had become a living testament to yogic wonders. To win converts, Krishnamacharya had taken to demonstrating what his devotees hailed as siddhis—suspending his pulse, stopping cars with his hands, lifting heavy objects with his bare teeth.

  When first approached to perform the siddhis, the yogi protested. He was sixty-seven and too old. Finally, he relented. Bagchi hooked up the electrodes as the venerated yogi closed his eyes and concentrated. Blip, blip, blip. The recording pens flew back and forth, catching the subtle cardiac rhythms no matter how hard Krishnamacharya tried. Yes, the heartbeat was diminished. But even a quick glace at the tracing paper showed that the beat was still there, even if reduced and too faint for a stethoscope to pick up. The heart was still thumping away inside, blip, blip, blip.

  In 1961, Bagchi and his colleagues published their findings in Circulation, the prestigious journal of the American Heart Association.

  “It was often reported that some yogis could stop the heart,” he later recalled. “Everybody including physicians thought that it was so. We discovered the truth.”

  Another insider joined in. He was no defector but rather a central authority in the world of yoga and one of its most respected elders.

  Gune at that point was approaching his eightieth birthday, white hair spilling down his neck in curls. The cardiac studies caught his attention. After all, some of his colleagues had participated. Bagchi had stayed at the ashram much longer than anywhere else in India—more than five weeks. What the foreign scientists had come to examine and—as it turned out, to rebut—was not some trifle but a central tenet of yoga and its legacy of superhuman achievement. It put the ashram in an awkward position.

  A lesser man might have denied the heart findings or disparag
ed them as flawed. Not Gune. Not the nationalist rebel who vowed to make no statement “without having scientific evidence to support it.” So he rallied his ashram. And—to his immense credit—he did so not with reluctance or diffidence, but boldly. It was as if he, late in life, became determined to enhance the reputation of his institution and mission. Bagchi and his team had focused on the heart. Gune would take on an even bigger challenge.

  Live burial was the most spectacular way that gurus and adepts had worked in public to reveal their otherworldly powers, as the Punjab yogi had demonstrated for the king.

  Gune put his team into creating a samadhi pit meant to mimic the earthen dens of the miracle workers. But it was designed to minimize the chance of extraneous variables—not to mention cheating. It was dug not in a field or in sand, as yogic supermen often did, but in the foundations of a laboratory, where gas flows would be easier to monitor and eliminate. It measured six feet long, four feet wide, and four feet deep, its floor plaster, its walls brick, and everything coated in thick paint. The team installed a seal around the door to make it airtight. The precautions produced a samadhi pit that was completely sealed off from the outside world—the first of its kind. No air could enter or exhalations leave.

  The ashram took volunteers from its own ranks and beyond. The most gifted turned out to be an itinerant showman of athletic build who had performed yogic feats at country fairs. He boasted of having endured live burials for up to a month. The showman, Ramandana Yogi, wore bangles on his wrists and trunks of tiger skin.

  Twice in 1962 he braved the pit. The first time he managed to withstand the chamber not for anything approaching forty days and forty nights—not even for a month or a week. He went eleven hours. His second try was better. He went eighteen hours before demanding to be let out, gasping for breath.