The Eight Limbs of Yoga (Part 4)

So now, as promised, I’ll return to the first two limbs: Yama (Restraint), and Niyama (Responsibility). Each of these limbs is composed of five sub-limbs — as noted in The Eight Limbs of Yoga (Part 2) — which suggest ways of life and belief that extend outside of your practice. Various books dedicate a fair amount of page-space to discussing and explaining these, and the gurus don’t really like to admit that they were developed in a pre-modern context in ancient India. So you see various degrees of obfuscation and dancing around the issue when you read about these limbs, as well as a fair amount of dogmatism or mysticism. Especially because they come at the beginning of any discussion of the 8LoY, I think they serve to obscure some of the more relevant issues.

However (and once again) the practice of yoga that we know and love was indeed developed under this lifestyle and ideology, so I think it’s important to consider and understand those values, even, or perhaps especially, where they don’t match our own. Yoga, like Buddhism or Jainism, was first developed to complement the practices and morality of the people who practice it — not as a new, comprehensive code of ethics or religion. Thus, by looking at these, we should be able to see what practices and values might be important to our practice. But these injunctions and instructions make no claim to completeness, and should not be taken as such.

Yama: Restraint

The first limb in yoga concerns avoiding sin. The tools to do that are expressed in five restraints. You can think of these like yoga’s cardinal sins, and the expiatory methods to eradicate them.

Ahimsa (against violence), Satya (against lying), Asteya (against stealing), Brahmacharya (against lust), and Aparigraha (against attachment)

For the most part, these deal with fairly standard, universally sinful activities — i.e. violence, lying, stealing, lust… — so I won’t try very hard to rationalize why they’re considered sinful. And instead, I’ll talk about why observing them might help, or inform, your practice.

Ahimsa: against violence

B.K.S. Iyengar wrote that ahimsa is not just a restraint against violence but an active attitude of benevolence. It’s important to remember that all kinds of people practice yoga, and everyone gets something different from it. Yoga is not (well, usually not) a competition, and as in any community little will be gained by hostilities or tribalism within. We aspire to help and support each other, not attack or injure; and the idea is that attitude should make us all better off in the long run.

Satya: against lying

Lying, as well as its corollary, actively telling the truth, seem like fundamental tenets of any community. In terms of physical well-being, you want to make sure that your instructors and the people around you know how you’re feeling, whether your injured, etc.

So you have to be honest with the people around you, as well as with yourself, in order to avoid further injury and aggravation. But I think it’s also important to think about honesty more broadly, and consider the emotional and functional ramification of lying, or failing to tell the truth. Trust is one of society’s most fundamental institutions, and we dedicate a lot of energy to making sure it can be maintained. It’s how we work together, and it’s what helps us come together and make good decisions.

Astaya: against stealing

Short answer. People want to feel comfortable and secure in their belongings and in public. When you learn not to take what isn’t yours, you also learn to develop or find what you need for yourself.

Brahmacharya: against lust

Brahmacharya is one of the yamas that gets a lot attention from the gurus and is the source of a lot of obfuscation on their part. Simply put, it’s an injunction against sex. However, that’s sort of hard to maintain as a life practice for, say, more than a generation, though, and no one really condones universal celibacy anyway. So in the face of that, you find these various theories of when it’s appropriate to have sex, and when not to, a lot of which are fairly bizarre from a Western perspective and which I won’t go in to because, while sort of risible, I don’t think it would be productive here….

But I also don’t want to just discard the whole idea off the cuff, either. I think there’s a real danger of making a baby/bath water type mistake by going with the knee-jerk reaction to the gurus’ treatment of brahmacharya. After all, plenty of morality has been developed regarding the issue of sex, and to assert some moral control over it shouldn’t immediately feel like a bad idea….

So I translate brahmacharya as an injuction “against lust,” which I find apposite, given that lust is one of the 7 deadly sins of Christianity, and it maybe evokes what it is about sex that might warrant restraint. The gurus say that sex drains your vitality, and it makes your concentration wander. It can also unexpectedly get you in to trouble and tie up your life in other ways that might inhibit your practice, or your life more broadly. As Matt Ridley put it in The Red Queen, a book on sexual selection: “The gradual synonymy of sex and sin in Christendom is surely based more on the fact that sex often leads to trouble rather than that there is anything inherently sinful about sex”

Sex can be a distraction. It can also make people do crazy things. Therefore, the gurus would advise you to exercise prudence and restraint where it’s concerned. So I think you do have to water it down in the end, but the fundamental rationale does make sense.

Aparigraha: against attachment

The final yama is aparigraha, and this one, too, may feel slightly unnatural to a Westerner — if not really everyone. People, after all, are attached to the things they have and the things they want.

B.K.S. Iyengar wrote: “By the observance of aparigraha, the yogi makes his life as simple as possible and trains his mind not to feel the loss or the lack of anything.” (Light on Yoga)

That explanation doesn’t quite do it for me, though. The philosophy of renouncing all worldly aspirations seems almost inhuman in a way. I think, maybe, the key here is to remember that there are more important goals than the accumulation of stuff, and material wealth. That doing good for others, building friendships, families, communities, and knowledge, are more important than some other kinds of wealth. And by observing that, everybody benefits.

That’s my best shot.