What Itihāsa means

If you have read my earlier essays on Śruti and Smṛti, you know the Vedic framework classified every text by what kind of knowledge it carries and what authority it draws from. Śruti was received, not composed apauruṡeya, not of human authorship. Smṛti was composed by human beings steeped in Śruti, for specific ages and conditions. Itihāsa is testimony, the category of text that says this happened, in this world, to these people, with these consequences. The Rāmāyaṇan and Mahābhārata both carry this designation. They fall under Smṛti in the broader classification, pauruṡeya, of human composition, but within Smṛti they form their own distinct category. The Mahābhārata names itself the fifth Veda in the Ādiparvan. What Śruti established in the most refined register of understanding, Itihāsa carries into the conditions of actual human life.

What changes when these texts are called mythology

When the Mahābhārata is read as mythology, the war at Kuruṣetra becomes a metaphor, Kṛṣṇa becomes a symbol of the higher self, and Arjuna becomes the spiritual seeker working through doubt. Everything becomes an archetype. The Bhagavad Gītā is chapters 25 through 42 of the Bhīṣmaparvan, the sixth of the Mahābhārata’s eighteen books. Most people who have studied the Gītā have never been told this. It is a conversation that happens at a specific irreversible moment inside a specific war. Arjuna has trained his entire life for exactly this. He looks across the field at Kuruṣetra and sees his teachers, his grandfather Bhīṣma, his uncles, people he loves arrayed against him, and cannot raise his bow. Kṛṣṇa’s teaching arises in response to this exact meltdown, with the armies standing, at a moment that cannot be undone.

The Gītā extracted from the Mahābhārata is a different text from the Gītā inside it. The philosophy is the same. The condition that produced it is gone. Śaṅkara, Rāmānuja, and Madhva all wrote their commentaries on the Gītā within the full Mahābhārata framework. None of them treated it as a standalone philosophical poem.

What the inner reading rests on

The inner reading of these texts is real and important so I am not denying if these texts are read, studied or understood as archetype. Every serious teacher across every lineage acknowledges the inner dimension and considers it important. Kṛṣṇa as the higher self, the battlefield as the mind, these readings are not wrong. But they rest on the historical claim, not the other way around.

Kṛṣṇa’s instruction to Arjuna is what it is because of the specificity of the situation. Arjuna’s grief is not a literary device. His paralysis is not a narrative technique. The Mahābhārata is not using his fall as a setup for a philosophical discourse. It is recording what happened when a specific person faced an impossible situation and what understanding made it possible for him to act. The inner dimension of that is inseparable from its historical ground.

How the Mahābhārata was composed

Most people who have studied the Mahābhārata do not know it went through three distinct stages before reaching its current form. The Ādiparvan documents this directly. Vyāsa composed Jaya first at 8,800 ślokas. His disciple Vaiśampāyana expanded this to Bhārata at 24,000 ślokas. Ugraśravā the Sūta, having heard Vaiśampāyana recite the Bhārata at King Janamejaya’s snake sacrifice, recited the expanded Mahābhārata at 100,000 ślokas to the sages at Naimiṣāraṇya. The text that survives is this third version. The Mahābhārata exists in two major manuscript traditions northern and southern recensions which differ significantly in content. Most popular and printed editions, including the Gita Press edition widely read in India, follow a northern manuscript tradition based on the commentary of Nīlakaṇṭha Caturdhara, a 17th century scholar. This is the version most people encounter.

The Mahābhārata exists in two major manuscript traditions, northern and southern recensions, which differ significantly in content. Most popular and printed editions, including the Gita Press edition widely read in India, follow a northern manuscript tradition based on the commentary of Nīlakaṇṭha Caturdhara, a 17th century scholar. The Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune produced a critical edition from 1919 to 1966, led by V.S. Sukthankar, then S.K. Belvalkar and P.L. Vaidya, comparing 1,259 manuscripts across both traditions and identifying passages found in some traditions but absent in others. The two traditions contain different episodes and in some cases different versions of the same events. Anyone reading the Mahābhārata seriously is worth knowing which tradition their edition draws from.

How the Rāmāyaṇa was composed

The Rāmāyaṇa was composed by Vālmīki, a contemporary of Rāma. The composition account is in the Bālakāṇḍa itself. Nārada narrated the story of Rāma to Vālmīki at his āśrama. Brahmā granted Vālmīki divya dṛṣṭi (direct vision) of all events of Rāma’s life, past and yet to come and instructed him to compose the Rāmāyaṇa in the śloka meter. Vālmīki composed 24,000 ślokas across seven kāṇḍas: Bāla, Ayodhyā, Araṇya, Kiṣkindhā, Sundara, Yuddha, Uttara. He first taught it to Lava and Kuśa, Rāma’s sons, who later recited it at Rāma’s court. The tradition calls Vālmīki Ādikavi, the first poet, and the Rāmāyaṇa Ādikāvya, the first poem.

The Rāmāyaṇa has one of the largest commentarial traditions in Sanskrit literature more than thirty major commentaries. The three best known Tilaka, Bhūṣaṇa (by Govindarāja), and Śiromaṇi are together called the ṭīkātraya. Maheśvara Tīrtha’s Tattvadīpikā is another major commentary. Ācāryas across philosophical traditions engaged with the complete text, including all seven kāṇḍas. Madhvācārya in the 13th century references Rāmāyaṇa events including Uttarakāṇḍa episodes in his Mahābhārata Tātparya Nirṇaya. Govindarāja wrote commentary on the full Uttarakāṇḍa. The text exists in multiple manuscript recensions southern, northern, Gaudiya, and northwestern across which the commentators worked. The Oriental Institute at Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda produced a critical edition between 1960 and 1975 comparing manuscripts across these recensions. The critical edition retains all seven kāṇḍas.

Beyond Vālmīki’s Sanskrit text, there are major regional compositions that retell the Rāma story in other languages. Kamban’s Iramavataram in Tamil (12th century), Madhava Kandali’s Saptakāṇḍa Rāmāyaṇa in Assamese (14th century), Gona Budda Reddy’s Ranganatha Rāmāyaṇa in Telugu (14th century), and Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas in Awadhi (1576). These are separate literary works, not translations or manuscript variants of Vālmīki’s text. Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas is the dominant version across much of North India and is what most Hindi-speaking people encounter as the Rāmāyaṇa.

What the record shows

The Mahābhārata contains precise astronomical descriptions planetary positions, eclipses, stellar configurations at the time of the Kuruṣetra war. Indian researchers across multiple disciplines are actively working with this data. The astronomical school includes Dr. Narhari Achar, Dr. Manish Pandit, P.V. Vartak, and Nilesh Oak, using planetarium software and traditional astronomical methods. Shrikant Talageri works from linguistic and textual evidence, Rigvedic genealogies and Avesta-Mitanni correspondences. Jijith Nadumuri Ravi, a former ISRO scientist, has produced a three-volume Geo-Chronology Series (Rivers of Rigveda, Geography of Rāmāyaṇa, Geography of Mahābhārata) combining satellite imagery, archaeological data, and analysis of over 110,000 Sanskrit verses. The dates these researchers arrive at differ, and they disagree publicly. What they share is treating the data in these texts as specific and worth working with, not as vague symbolic language. This is an active field of Indian scholarship with ongoing debate

The Sarasvatī river, described extensively across both texts and long treated as mythological by modern scholarship, was confirmed by satellite imaging as a vast dried riverbed running exactly where the texts describe it. Underwater investigations off Dwarka in Gujarat found submerged structures dated to roughly 3500 BCE, consistent with the Mahābhārata’s account of Dvārakā being swallowed by the sea after Kṛṣṇa’s death.

What these texts are for

The events of the Rāmāyaṇan occurred in Tretā yuga. The events of the Mahābhārata at the junction of Dvāpara and Kali yuga. The two texts together show dharmic life under different conditions. The Rāmāyaṇa shows dharma largely intact the ideal son, husband, king, friend, devotee; institutions that function; roles that hold. Rāma is called Maryādā Puruṣottama, the ideal of proper conduct. The Mahābhārata shows dharma under severe pressure and breaking down, and what it takes to hold a dharmic orientation when the conditions are hostile to it.

The crises in the Mahābhārata, the fall of dharma, the corruption of institutions, the confusion of roles, the degradation of human capacity are not ancient problems being remembered. This is what the Ādiparvan means when it says what is not in the Mahābhārata is nowhere. It is not a record of something finished. It is a map of the conditions even this age produces and what it takes to live in them with understanding intact.

This is what is lost when these texts are called mythology. Mythology is about archetypes and universal themes applicable always, specific to nothing. Itihāsa is testimony about what happened to specific people in specific conditions, and what it took for them to hold dharma through it..

Weekly, from the tradition. Words & World continues.

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Trupti · SattvaSpired | Yoga in Essence

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What Smṛti includes

The category is considerably larger than most practitioners realize, and it helps to understand why before looking at what falls inside it. The Vedas are an extraordinarily precise body of knowledge transmitted orally, in specific sounds, specific meters, specific sequences that could not be allowed to drift even slightly across generations. To transmit something like that faithfully over thousands of years, you need supporting sciences; grammar so the language stays exact, phonetics so the sounds stay correct, etymology so the meanings do not get lost, a calendar so the rituals tied to the Vedas happen at the right time, and procedures so they are performed correctly.

These supporting sciences are the Vedāṅgas, the six limbs of the Vedas. Composed by human beings, they exist entirely in service of Śruti. Without them the Vedas could not have been correctly transmitted or applied.

Śikṣā is phonetics, the precise rules of pronunciation that kept Vedic sound intact across generations. Vyākaraṇa is grammar, most famously Pāṇini’s Aṣṭādhyāyī, built so the language of the Vedas could not be misread or distorted over time. Chandas covers meter, the precise rhythmic structures the Vedic hymns are composed in, which the tradition considered meaningful in themselves. Nirukta is etymology; a study of Vedic words whose meanings had already become obscure by the time the scholar Yāska wrote his analysis. Jyotiṣa covers astronomy and the ritual calendar, determining when Vedic ceremonies must be performed. Kalpa covers the ritual procedure itself, the detailed instructions for how each rite is conducted.

Beyond the Vedāṅgas, the Smṛti category holds everything the tradition produced as human composition rooted in Śruti. The Dharmasūtras are among the older texts, concise treatments of righteous conduct and social order attributed to teachers like Āpastamba, Gautama, Baudhāyana, and Vasiṣṭha. The eighteen major Dharmaśāstras, attributed to sages like Manu, Yājñavalkya, Parāśara, Nārada, and Bṛhaspati, are comprehensive treatments of how dharma is to be understood and lived in specific ages and conditions, they are not law codes in any Western sense of that word, and reading them as such, as colonial-era translators did, strips them of what they actually are. The Itihāsas, the Rāmāyaṇan and the Mahābhārata, are Smṛti. The eighteen major Purāṇas are Smṛti. The philosophical schools Nyāya, Vaiśeṣika, Mīmāṃsā whose methods of inquiry the tradition developed to investigate Vedic knowledge are Smṛti. The Sāṃkhya Kārikā, which gives yoga its metaphysical framework of Puruṣan and Prakṛti, is Smṛti. The Yoga Sūtra of Patañjali is Smṛti. The range of what falls under this category is wider than most practitioners expect, and understanding what holds it together matters more than simply knowing what belongs to it.

The Bhagavad Gītā sits within the Mahābhārata and is formally Smṛti. Its place in the tradition — and why every major lineage has treated it with a weight that goes beyond ordinary Smṛti — is something we will come to properly in the Itihāsa piece next week.

Where Smṛti gets its weight

Smṛti does not stand on its own. It draws from Śruti, and the tradition maintained this across every school. A Smṛti text that clearly contradicts Śruti is to be questioned. One consistent with Śruti carries that consistency as its credential, even where no direct Vedic passage can be identified as the source.

The Mīmāṃsā school, whose foundational text is the Mīmāṃsā Sūtra of Jaimini, elaborated in Śabara’s Bhāṣya on sūtras 1.3.1-3, worked out the relationship between Śruti and Smṛti with precision. Where a Smṛti teaching has no directly traceable Vedic source, the position is that it rests on a Vedic basis that has not come down to us intact. The gap in the textual record does not, in the tradition’s reasoning, constitute an absence of root. This is a methodological stance, not an act of deference it holds that wisdom transmitted with this consistency and depth across lineages does not originate in individual opinion.

When Smṛti texts disagree

Different Smṛti texts give different answers to the same questions, and this is not a failure of the tradition to arrive at consistency. It is built into how Smṛti functions. Manu prescribes one thing. Parāśara prescribes something different. Yājñavalkya says something else. These texts were not composed as a single unified code meant to apply everywhere and always. They were composed for specific regions, specific communities, specific periods of time. The concept of yuga-dharma, that what is appropriate shifts with the nature of the age, is not a later rationalization. It is structurally present in the Smṛti literature itself. The Parāśara Smṛti states plainly that it was composed for Kali Yuga because what was understood in Kṛta, Tretā, and Dvāpara no longer fits the conditions people actually live in now. Both Manu and Parāśara draw from the same Śruti, the Vedic understanding. The application differs because the world it enters is different.

Scholars reconciled the variations through nibandha texts, digest compilations that drew together multiple Smṛtis and worked through their harmonization question by question, region by region. P.V. Kane’s History of Dharmaśāstra documents this genre in detail: texts like the Smṛticandrikā, Kṛtyakalpataru, and Dharmasindhu exist precisely because different Smṛtis gave different answers and the tradition needed a method for working through that. For questions no existing Smṛti had directly settled, Āpastamba Dharmasūtra (1.4.12) recognises a parishad - an assembly of learned scholars - as a valid source of guidance, drawing on the full range of Śruti, Smṛti, and reasoned inquiry to arrive at what was appropriate for that time and place.

What this means if you practice yoga

The Yoga Sūtra is Smṛti. The commentaries built on it such as Vyāsa’s Yogabhāṣya, Vācaspatimiśra’s Tattvavaiśāradī, Vijñānabhikṣu’s Yogavārttika are Smṛti building on Smṛti. What you are working with when you study these texts is not the origin point of the tradition but a transmission vehicle: carefully constructed, carrying real knowledge, standing on a foundation that goes further back. Mahrashi Patañjali’s understanding of Puruṣan and Prakṛti, of the deeper states of samādhi, of what he calls ṛtambharā prajñā (truth-bearing wisdom) is rooted in what the Upaniṣads had already seen. The Yoga Sūtra is not where that inquiry begins. It is one of the clearest transmissions of it that we have.

When teachings drawn from Smṛti appear to conflict and they do, at time for given place and time; the tradition’s method is to look at what both are drawing from and ask which teaching sits closer to the Upaniṣadic understanding both are trying to transmit. Without any grounding in Śruti, that method is simply not available. What replaces it is preference which teacher sounds more convincing, which interpretation is most common in your community, which reading feels most reasonable right now. These are not illegitimate ways to navigate, but they are not the tradition’s method and they will not serve you the same way when the questions get harder.

Smṛti is not a diminished category. It is the category through which Śruti became teachable, applicable, capable of reaching people where they actually are. The tradition honored that work and produced texts of extraordinary depth within it. What it did not do was allow Smṛti to lose its sense of where it came from.

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A note: any error in this article is mine. Where I have simplified, the intent is to make this accessible to readers encountering the Vedic literary tradition for the first time not to override my gurus or the tradition they carry. Any over-simplification reflects my own effort to understand and convey the connection between the Vedic corpus and yoga practice. If you find an error or feel something has been misrepresented, please DM me. I will correct it immediately or in the next revision.

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What the word means

Śruti comes from the Sanskrit root śru to hear. To hear something that was already there. To receive something that was already there. Not to compose. Not to reveal in the way a prophet receives a divine message. To hear something that was already there.

The Vedas: the four collections of Ṛg, Yajur, Sāma, and Atharva along with the Upaniṣads that emerge from them, carry the designation Śruti. They are apauruṣeya not of human authorship. No sage composed them. No deity dictated them. The ṛṣis who are associated with them are called dṛṣṭas (seers) or more precisely, receivers. They did not generate this knowledge. They received it.

For a Western reader, the immediate instinct is to reach for a familiar framework. Was this like Moses receiving the Ten Commandments? Was it vision, prophecy, divine inspiration? The answer is no to all of these. The Abrahamic idea of revelation involves a personal God communicating to a human recipient. Apauruṣeya means something fundamentally different. It means this knowledge does not belong to anyone. No individual owns it, authored it, or stands behind it as its source. It was there before the ṛṣis heard it and it remains there still.

A closer analogy, though still imperfect, is mathematics. When a mathematician discovers a theorem, we do not say they invented it. The relationship between prime numbers existed before anyone found it. The mathematician became the person whose mind was refined enough to perceive what was already operating. Apauruṣeya is something like this except applied not to physical laws but to the deepest laws of consciousness and reality.

The instrument that receives

This is where the tradition makes a claim that is not religious but epistemological and it is the claim your yoga practice is directly related to. The ṛṣis could perceive what ordinary minds cannot because their instrument of knowing had been thoroughly refined. The ordinary human mind is constantly in motion pulled by desire, fear, memory, anticipation, opinion, and the endless noise of its own commentary. In this state, perception is always partial and distorted. What we know is always filtered through what we want, what we fear, and what we already believe.

Patañjali in the Yoga Sūtra describes a specific state that arises in deep meditation as ṛtambharā prajñā, truth-bearing wisdom. This is not insight in the ordinary sense. It is perception that arises when the mind has become so still and transparent that it no longer distorts what passes through it. The individual ego is not receiving a message. The individual ego has temporarily ceased to be the loudest thing in the room.

The tradition’s claim about Śruti is that the Vedic ṛṣis were people who had cultivated this state so completely, through years of disciplined practice, that what they received was not colored by personal preference, cultural conditioning, or the limitations of ordinary mind. Sri Aurobindo, in his study of the Veda, argued exactly this, that the ṛṣis were not primitive poets anthropomorphizing natural forces as European scholars assumed, but practitioners who had evolved their consciousness far beyond ordinary mental functioning and were recording what became perceptible from that vantage point.

This is not a claim you have to believe. It is a claim you can hold as a question and carry into your own practice. What does your practice point toward? What becomes perceptible when the fluctuations settle? The tradition is saying the ṛṣis went further in that direction than anyone you have read about and what they found when they got there is Śruti.

Why it was never written down

Here’s something about the Vedas that usually isn’t explained very clearly. For thousands of years, Śruti was not written. It was memorized, chanted, and transmitted orally from teacher to student across generations. This was not because writing had not been invented. It was a deliberate choice. The tradition understood that the knowledge was not in the words the way ink is in paper. The knowledge was alive in the transmission, in the relationship between teacher and student, in the precise sound of the chanting, in the breath and intention behind every syllable.

The Sanskrit word for this oral transmission is pāṭha recitation. And the tradition developed extraordinary systems to ensure accuracy. The Vedas were memorized in multiple ways simultaneously forward, backward, in pairs, in permutations so that any error in one version could be detected and corrected by the others. The Vedic chanting we can hear today is considered by scholars to be among the most accurately preserved oral literature in human history, transmitted across at least three thousand years with a precision that written transmission could not have guaranteed. When the tradition eventually did write the Vedas down, it was understood as a concession to a time when oral transmission was becoming harder to maintain not as an improvement. The text was a support for memory, not a replacement for it.

Reading the Veda without a teacher was, in the traditional understanding, like reading the notation of a rāga without having heard it played. You have the symbols. You do not have the thing itself. This is why even today the most rigorous Vedic traditions insist that Śruti must be received from a qualified teacher and not simply studied from a book. The knowledge is not only in the meaning of the words. It is in the sound, the breath, the precise transmission of something that has been kept alive across an unbroken human chain.

The Vedas and the Upaniṣads

The Saṃhitās of the four Vedas are the most ancient layer. They are collections of hymns, chants, and ritual formulas. For a long time, Western scholars read them as nature poetry or primitive mythology. Aurobindo spent decades arguing that this reading was a fundamental misunderstanding that the Vedas are a highly sophisticated psychological and spiritual record, using a symbolic language that was deliberately veiled to protect it from being used without proper preparation and transmission.

The Upaniṣads emerge from the later portions of each Veda and are called Vedānta, the end of the Vedas, the culmination of Vedic inquiry. If the Saṃhitās are the seed, the Upaniṣads are the fruit. They are conversations between teachers and students, between sages, sometimes between a seeker and their own deepest inquiry. Yājñavalkya explaining the nature of the self to his wife Maitreyī. Uddālaka showing his son Śvetaketu the reality of Brahman through a series of direct experiments. These are not lectures. They are transmissions happening in real time, through relationship, through sustained questioning, through direct investigation.

The Upaniṣads gave us the great statements that still echo through every yoga class and Vedānta lecture in the world. Tat tvam asi: That, thou art. Aham Brahmāsmi: I am Brahman. Prajñānam Brahma: Consciousness is Brahman. Ayam Ātmā Brahma: This self is Brahman. These are not beliefs to be accepted. In the tradition, they are destinations of inquiry, things a prepared person is meant to discover for themselves.

Why this matters for yoga practitioners

Yoga as a living tradition stands on Śruti. The Upaniṣads are not historical context for what you practice. They are its source.

When a yoga teacher quotes the Gītā or references the Yoga Sūtra, they are standing on a foundation that goes back through Smṛti to Śruti. Most do not know this. And not knowing it changes how you hold the teachings. If you think the Yoga Sūtra is the origin point, you are starting in the middle of a river and wondering where the water is coming from.

There is also a more direct connection. The state Patañjali describes the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind, the arising of truth-bearing wisdom, is the same state the tradition says the ṛṣis inhabited when they received the Veda. The goal of yoga practice and the source of Śruti are pointing at the same thing from different directions. The ṛṣis arrived there and received something. Your practice is moving you toward the same place. What you find when you get there even in glimpses, even in brief moments of genuine stillness is a small taste of what made Śruti possible.

This is why the tradition insists that Śruti cannot be understood only intellectually. You can study the Upaniṣads for years and still be standing outside them. The understanding that the tradition is pointing at comes through practice, through the refinement of the instrument, through the relationship with a teacher who has already gone further than you. Reading about Śruti is the beginning. The beginning is worth taking seriously.

The living source

The state from which Śruti arose did not belong to the Vedic age alone. Ṛtambharā prajñā is not something that existed only then. It is available wherever the conditions for it are met wherever a human mind has been sufficiently refined through practice and transmission. The tradition preserved what the ṛṣis received with extraordinary care precisely because that level of reception is rare. What it takes to arrive there is what the entire edifice of Vedic and yogic practice is designed to cultivate.

Next in Words & World: Smṛti - what human beings do with revealed knowledge, and why the difference between Śruti and Smṛti is one of the most important distinctions you are not being taught in yoga trainings.

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Trupti · SattvaSpired | Yoga in Essence

McKinsey’s 2025 Future of Wellness report, which surveyed over 9,000 consumers across the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and China, makes this visible in plain numbers. Nearly 30 percent of Gen Z and millennials say they are prioritizing wellness significantly more than they were a year ago. They drive 41 percent of all annual wellness spending in the United States, despite being only 36 percent of the adult population. They are the most engaged, most invested wellness consumers in history. And yet, in the same survey, 40 percent of Gen Z respondents report feeling almost always stressed, nearly double the rate of the general population. Their mental health needs remain, by their own account, largely unmet. Lululemon’s State of Mind report adds something that stings even more: 61 percent of respondents say they feel overwhelming social pressure not to be well, but to appear well. The practice, for many people, has become a performance. And the performance, it turns out, is exhausting.

You could spend a long time explaining this through the usual suspects social media, economic anxiety, the general state of the world. All of those are real and worth taking seriously. But there is another explanation, one that yoga offered long before anyone was selling wellness as a lifestyle, and it is more uncomfortable because it points directly at the practice itself. Maharshi Patanjali, compiling the Yoga Sutras roughly in the fourth or fifth century CE, identified what he called the kleshas, the root causes of human suffering. Ignorance was first, but close behind it came raga, which is usually translated as attachment or desire. Not attachment to bad things, note. Attachment itself. The compulsive reaching for outcomes. The clinging to results. The need for the practice to produce something you can measure, feel, or show. And the more urgently you reach, Patanjali argued, the more agitated the mind becomes because the reaching itself is the problem, not the thing you are reaching for.

The antidote he proposed was vairagya (non-attachment). This word gets misunderstood constantly. It does not mean indifference. It does not mean you stop caring or stop trying. It means you practice without making the result the reason you showed up. You do the work and then you release your grip on what the work should produce. Maharshi Patanjali paired this directly with abhyasa, the word for consistent practice, in Sutra 1.12. The two belong together. Effort and release. Practice and non-attachment. He was explicit that you cannot have one without the other and still be doing yoga in any meaningful sense.

What the wellness industry has been selling, very successfully and very profitably, is abhyasa without vairagya, effort without release, practice as self-improvement project, movement and breath and meditation all conscripted into the service of becoming a better, calmer, more optimized version of yourself.

That is not what the tradition was describing. And if the data is any indication, it is not working particularly well either.

The harder question this raises is not about the industry. The industry will do what industries do. The harder question is for people who actually practice, who actually care about what yoga is and what it asks of them. Because the pull toward making the practice about results is not just a marketing problem. It is deeply human. We come to the mat because something hurts, or because we are afraid, or because we are looking for something we cannot quite name. That is fine. That is a legitimate reason to begin. But at some point the practice asks you to stop treating it as a means to an end, and that shift is genuinely difficult to make. It requires sitting on the mat on a day when nothing opens, nothing shifts, nothing feels better and staying anyway. Not because you will feel better later. Just because you are there.

The Global Wellness Summit’s 2026 trends report, interestingly, is beginning to sense this from the inside. It describes what it calls a cultural pivot away from optimization, a growing awareness that “optimization without integration is proving costly.” It talks about moving toward “regulation over results, sensation over scores.” That is not a bad instinct. It is also, more or less, what Patanjali was pointing at roughly 1,600 years ago. The tradition had already done this thinking. It had already named the trap. The question is whether modern practitioners and the teachers and studios serving them are willing to actually engage with that teaching rather than simply borrow its vocabulary while keeping the optimization logic intact. Wellness language can absorb almost anything, including the language of non-attachment, and sell it back as a more refined form of self-improvement. The only defense against that is knowing what the teaching actually says and holding yourself to it honestly.

More practice is not the answer. Neither is less practice. The answer the tradition offers is the same one it has always offered: practice without clinging to what practice should give you.

That sounds simple. Anyone who has actually tried it knows it is one of the most demanding things the tradition asks. Yoga stood at this crossroads long before the industry arrived. The question is whether we engage with what it actually taught or keep borrowing the words. That is what this section is for. Share your thoughts in the comments and subscribe so you don’t miss what’s coming next.

A philosophical darśana works the same way. It is a complete vision of reality what the world is, what a human being is, what causes suffering, and what the path out looks like that you enter, practice, and let work on you over time. Every darśana comes with practice built in, because the problem these traditions address is not that we are thinking incorrectly. It is that we are seeing incorrectly. You cannot fix seeing with thinking alone. This puts darśana in a different category from what the English word philosophy suggests. Philosophy is a project of the mind argument, analysis, conclusion. Darśana is a project of perception. The goal is not a better position. It is clearer sight.

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It is not a political name. It was not created to mark a border or administer a territory. It is a civilizational name, one that holds within it a particular understanding of what this land is, what it asks of those who live within it, and how the practices that arose here are meant to be held. That it remains present today is significant in itself. The Constitution of India opens with it: India, that is Bhārat. A modern nation choosing to root itself in a name thousands of years older than the nation.

Before any of the philosophical texts were written, before the traditions had names, this land was already known to the ancient world. Mesopotamian records speak of a trading civilization they called Meluhha, ships arriving from this coast, whole communities of Meluhha people living in Mesopotamian cities, a professional interpreter employed full-time to work between two worlds. Carnelian from Gujarat, teak from the western coast, lapis lazuli travelling south from a trading colony in what is now Afghanistan. We do not know what those people called their own land. Their script has not been deciphered. But the civilization was already flourishing, already in conversation with the ancient world, long before it settled on a name for itself.

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I. Why this matters

Why does this matter for a series about words in the yoga tradition? Because one of the most persistent misunderstandings about yoga is to give it a starting point that is far too recent. It gets traced to the Yoga Sūtras, or to the Śramaṇa movements, or to the Ṛgveda as though each appeared from nowhere, and as though the Ṛgveda itself was a beginning rather than a layer within something much older. The civilization that eventually named this land Bhāratavarṣa was already flourishing, already philosophically alive, already known to the wider world before any of these texts or movements emerged. That depth of continuity is part of what the name carries, and part of what gets lost when the name is replaced.

Today, yoga’s origins are increasingly described using the term South Asian. It sounds careful, academically precise, respectful of multiple national identities. But South Asia is a contemporary geopolitical category, assembled from nation-states whose borders were drawn largely in the 20th century, in many cases through partition, violence, and displacement. It is not the framework within which yoga was developed, transmitted, or understood. Applying it to a tradition thousands of years old is not neutral. It is a substitution and what it substitutes matters, which is what this essay is about.

To understand what Bhāratavarṣa names, it helps to look at all the names this land has carried, because each one is a different way of knowing it and each one, if followed carefully, opens into an entire world of history, philosophy, and lived understanding.

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The idea came from something I keep noticing in conversations around yoga and Indian traditions: many misunderstandings begin not with the practice itself, but with the words used to describe it. The language around yoga is everywhere now, yet the meanings behind those words are often far less clear than t…

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And somewhere in the back of your mind, you call yourself a yogi.

There is nothing wrong with any of that. The mat is a beginning. The body is a doorway.

But there was a boy in Tamil Nadu in 1896 who never once stepped onto a mat. Who neve…

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“In violent, turbulent times, many people turn to yoga for groun…

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You’ll hear some version of: “Yoga is whatever you need it to be.” Or “Yoga is basically movement and breath.” Or “Yoga is spirituality, not religion.” Or “Yoga is healing.” None of these lines are necessarily said with malice. Many people repeat them out of a sincere desire to help, to include, and to soften the sharp edges that sometimes show up in spiritual spaces. The issue is that traditions are not preserved by sincerity alone. They are preserved by disciplined transmission, and disciplined transmission begins with disciplined language.

The sentences modern yoga repeats

The most effective distortions are rarely hostile, and that is why they work. They arrive as simplification that sounds like kindness. They arrive as “making it accessible.” Over time, the simplification becomes the framework, and the framework starts dictating what yoga is allowed to mean.

This is also why the conversation gets emotionally charged so quickly. People aren’t merely defending a definition; they’re defending an experience that helped them. But yoga, as a tradition, can’t be held together by experience alone. Experience is real, and experience matters, but it doesn’t automatically create accurate understanding. It certainly doesn’t automatically grant authority to redefine terms that have carried meaning for centuries.

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When one word is asked to hold everything

In modern usage, “yoga” is being asked to cover fitness, mobility, breathwork, stress relief, community, identity, therapy, nervous system regulation, and a general sense of self-improvement. Some of those experiences may be real and beneficial. I’m not dismissing that. What I’m pointing to is what happens when we pretend they are interchangeable and then keep using one word to cover the whole bundle.

When a word becomes broad enough, it becomes vague enough. And when it becomes vague enough, it becomes ownerless. Ownerless language is easy to repackage, because there is no accountable meaning to protect. You can attach the word to almost anything and still sound legitimate. That might feel expansive in the short term, but over time it erodes the ability to say what yoga is and what it is not.

When a word can mean almost anything, it becomes easy to repackage and hard to protect.

Why good intentions don’t preserve meaning

I want to be explicit about what I’m not doing here, because it matters. I live in America. I’m a citizen. I’m not interested in turning this into a geography argument where one place is morally superior and another is morally corrupt. Modern life everywhere rewards speed, confidence, and simplicity. Yoga, as it travels, absorbs those incentives.

The question is whether we are willing to admit what gets lost under the pressure to simplify. In serious domains like medicine, engineering, law, we understand that language is not decoration. Precision is not elitism; precision is how you prevent harm. Yoga is one of the few spaces where we’ve been trained to treat precision as aggression and vagueness as compassion. That’s a cultural habit worth questioning, because vagueness can feel gentle while still quietly distorting a tradition.

A tradition-level view of speech

In the Indian imagination, there is a name for the discipline of clean speech and responsible transmission: Saraswati. You do not have to be Hindu to grasp the idea, and you certainly don’t have to treat it as “mythology” in order to see what it points to. Think of this concept as a reminder that speech is power, and anything powerful requires standards.

Saraswati is often flattened into “the goddess of knowledge,” and in modern wellness spaces she becomes a soft symbol for creativity or flow. That framing is emotionally easy, but it misses what the tradition is actually guarding. The older emphasis is on speech on the way language shapes minds, ethics, relationships, and reality itself. Knowledge sitting inside books can’t do much harm. The harm begins when knowledge travels through mouths with the arrogance of certainty, or the carelessness of half-study, or the seduction of performance.

This is why disciplined traditions do not treat interpretation as a free-for-all. Indian philosophical traditions have always allowed debate, but they also insist on a question modern culture increasingly avoids because it slows down certainty: how do you know what you claim to know? The classical word is pramāṇa, valid means of knowing. In plain English, it forces intellectual honesty about your source, your method, and your scope. It interrupts the modern habit of speaking first and studying later.

Readiness isn’t elitism

Another concept that gets misunderstood because people hear it through modern suspicion is adhikāra, readiness or fitness. It is easy to caricature this as exclusion or “gatekeeping,” but the logic is ordinary and universal. We accept readiness everywhere else. Nobody wants an engineer signing off a design based on enthusiasm. Nobody wants a therapist improvising a modality because it “resonates.” Nobody wants a surgeon learning on the patient.

Applied to yoga, it doesn’t mean only scholars can speak or only certain identities can belong. It means that the right to teach, interpret publicly, or redefine terms isn’t granted by confidence or audience size. It is earned through study, practice, guidance, humility, and time. Without that, yoga becomes a culture where persuasion replaces understanding, charisma replaces competence, and tradition becomes an aesthetic that can be rearranged freely.

The quiet role of tuning

If you prefer to keep Saraswati entirely out of deity language, you can still hold the central lesson: speech must be tuned. A person can be intelligent, articulate, and well-intentioned and still be “untuned” in ways modern culture rewards, the hunger to be seen, the need to be right, the habit of speaking in absolutes, the tendency to moralize, the desire to compress nuance into a headline.

Even correct statements can become harmful when they are delivered through ego, haste, or performance. That’s why truth alone is not the standard. Integrity is. The deeper question is not only “Is this true?” but also “Am I fit to carry this truth without distorting it in my voice?”

A cultural reminder I still keep

Even now, living a modern American life, I keep one small version of a practice I saw growing up. Once a year, around the time spring begins to show itself, many Hindu families mark a day connected with learning books, music, study, speech, discernment (a festival to worship Ma Saraswati). The rituals differ, but the underlying posture is the same: clean the space, handle what you learn with respect, and don’t treat speech as casual.

You don’t have to share my culture to understand why this matters. When language is cheap, people become careless with truth, and traditions become easy to remodel without noticing. A yearly reminder to slow down around knowledge to treat it as something that can clarify or injure, feels less like “religion” to me and more like a sanity practice.

A speech discipline worth borrowing

If you teach yoga, write about yoga, or even just speak about it in your circles, you don’t need a festival to practice the core principle. You can treat speech as part of the practice.

Before making a strong claim, it helps to ask: am I within my real scope? Do I know my sources, or am I repeating what’s popular? Am I using loaded words carefully, or casually? Will what I am saying reduce confusion, or will it create heat while sounding virtuous? This isn’t censorship. It’s restraint, and restraint is a yogic value. It is also, in my view, the only way yoga survives as something more than a flexible wellness label not by better branding, and not by louder arguments, but by seriousness, shown through study, practice, and language that respects definitions enough to keep the tradition intact.

I’m still learning how to hold my own speech to a higher standard, in times where quick takes are rewarded. This is one place where yoga has changed me in real life: not in what I can do with my body, but in what I’m willing to say, and what I’m willing to leave unsaid until I’ve studied more. As someone living in America, I care about making yogic teachings and deeper connection to Sanatan Dharma accessible without making it vague. The balance is hard, and I am still working it out in my own life. Writing is one way I practice that discipline publicly.

If you want more essays like this, rooted, honest and unwilling to turn scared stories to slogans, subscribe and stay connected. And if you disagree, I am open to thoughtful dialogue.

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In that version, Mirabai was described as a fierce spiritual rebel, defying patriarchy, breaking social rules, and claiming her freedom through dance and song. It was a neat story. But it missed the real one.

Who Mirabai actually was

Mirabai was born around 1498 in Kudki, near Merta in present-day Rajasthan. Her father, Ratan Singh Rathore, was a respected Rajput noble connected to the royal house of Mewar. After her father died, she was raised by her grandfather, Rao Dudaji, who was a committed Vaishnava devotee of Lord Krishna.

Mirabai’s devotion did not appear suddenly as an act of rebellion in adulthood. It shaped her entire childhood. According to accounts preserved and retold by traditional lineages, Mirabai’s bond with Krishna began when she was still a small child.

A visiting saint once stayed with her family and brought with him a beautiful idol of Krishna. The young Meera was so drawn to it that she asked for it. The saint refused, but that night he dreamed that Krishna told him to hand the idol over to the child. The next morning, the statue became hers. From that day on, Krishna was not just an image for Mirabai, he was a living presence she dressed, decorated, talked to, and offered her daily life to as worship.

A life of Bhakti — not defiance

Even as a child, Mirabai built a miniature temple for Krishna, bathed and dressed the idol, decorated him with flowers and jewelry, and spent hours singing and dancing for him while playing her ektara - a simple one-string folk instrument.

Later, she accepted Saint Raidas, a saint and disciple of Ramananda, as her guru. Saint Raidas was a cobbler (Chamar, a Shudra community). It was he who gave her initiation with the name Rama. Some found this unusual since Meera’s poems mostly praise Krishna, but in the Bhakti tradition, Krishna and Rama are not separate deities competing for loyalty. They are both forms of the same Supreme Reality.

Mirabai’s devotion to Raidas shows that not only she, but all sincere seekers in her time, did not let caste or social rules stand in the way of receiving true knowledge and guidance. She did not campaign to reform society, nor did she rally others to demand access to Raidas. She simply followed her guru with full surrender, showing by example that Bhakti dissolves all social divisions when the heart is true.

Mirabai herself wrote verses that explain this directly. In Payoji Maine Ram Ratan Dhan Payo (पायो जी मैंने राम रतन धन पायो), she calls the name of Rama the greatest treasure her guru gave her, the jewel that made her his own forever.

Marriage — and freedom within it

One popular claim is that Mirabai’s life is an example of rejecting arranged marriage to live on her own terms. The real story is more subtle and more powerful.

As a young girl, Mirabai once saw a wedding procession and asked her mother who her own husband would be. Her mother, perhaps lightly or perhaps deeply, told her that Krishna was her true husband. This became Mirabai’s deepest conviction. But to maintain her family’s standing, she was married young to Prince Bhoj Raj, heir to the throne of Mewar.

Far from imprisoning her, Bhoj Raj understood that Mirabai’s love for Krishna was not an ordinary religious habit. He gave her the freedom and protection to live as she chose. He allowed her to host saints, sing bhajans, and spend hours in Krishna’s temple. The same was true of her grandfather and father before him.

After Bhoj Raj passed away, however, Mirabai’s brother-in-law, the new Rana of Mewar, did not share the same acceptance. According to traditional accounts, he and other courtiers often tried to restrict her, seeing her open devotion and constant gatherings with saints as a threat to royal decorum. Several stories describe how the Rana tested her faith, but witnessing miracles and her unwavering love for Krishna, he ultimately surrendered to her will and allowed her to leave the palace freely to follow her path.

In other words, Mirabai was not locked in constant conflict with the men in her life. On the contrary, many men her in lives supported her devotion. This part of her story is almost always left out when people want to frame her as a lone rebel challenging patriarchy.

Bhakti is about surrender — not social rebellion

What the modern “misfit” version of Mirabai ignores is that her songs are not about self-expression in the sense we think of it today. Mirabai’s poems are not calls for social revolution. They are cries of longing for union with her Lord and the complete surrender of her separate self.

In Bhakti, the point is not to stand out or perform your uniqueness. The point is to dissolve the ego altogether in the name and form of the Divine. Mirabai’s constant singing, dancing, and traveling from temple to temple did scandalize her in-laws at times but not because she was campaigning against men. She simply did not care about social standing anymore. Krishna alone was real for her.

There are many folk stories about attempts to distract her — but again, the response was never modern rebellion. It was detachment. For Mirabai, the world’s approval was irrelevant because her entire identity had been offered at Krishna’s feet.

Why this distortion matters

Reimagining Mirabai as a “yoga misfit” or early feminist rebel might feel inspiring in today’s world, but it is misleading. It reduces Bhakti to a type of personal therapy or self-expression exercise. It erases the discipline and depth of surrender that defines the path.

It also wrongly paints the whole historical context as purely oppressive. It ignores the fact that Mirabai’s father, mother, grandfather, husband, and guru all supported her devotion in different ways. Her obstacles were real, jealousy, gossip, social conservatism but she did not respond with defiance for its own sake. She responded with total renunciation of ego and status.

A mystic, not a misfit

This is what Bhakti Yoga really shows us: you do not need to reclaim your place in society to find freedom. You need to surrender the small self that craves status and recognition in the first place.

That is what Mirabai did. To call Mirabai a misfit in Yoga is to misunderstand her entirely.

If the story has to be bent for you to buy yoga, may be yoga’s not you are buying. If this spoke to you, please share it and help keep yoga connected with its roots.

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