INDIA, June 21, 2025 (OpIndia): The assault on Hindu civilization takes many forms, some violent, some insidious. None is more treacherous than the whitewashing of yoga, our most profound spiritual practice, into a sterile fitness routine baptized with Christian prayers. Yoga is not a modular fitness regimen to be dismembered and repackaged; it is the beating heart of Sanatana Dharma. As Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras (circa 200 BCE) codified, yoga is an eight-limbed path (ashtanga) integrating ethics, meditation, and devotion toward moksha (liberation). This holistic system emerged from Vedic fire rituals and Upanishadic contemplation (1500–500 BCE), later refined by Hindu rishis who viewed the body as a vehicle for transcendent union (yuj = to unite). Yet Western appropriators surgically try to remove its spiritual core, reducing dhyana (meditation) to “mindfulness” and pranayama to “breathwork” as if dissecting a living being to display its organs.

Christian yoga brands like “Holy Yoga,” “PraiseMoves,” “Yahweh Yoga” are not benign adaptations but theological land grabs. They replace Om with crosses, chant Biblical verses during surya namaskar, and market “Christian psalms.” This mirrors colonial missionary tactics: first demonize Hinduism as Mark Driscoll decries yoga as “hypersexualized” and “demonic”, then rebrand its practices as “redeemed” Christian tools. As scholar-priest Aseem Shukla of the Hindu American Foundation’s Take Back Yoga campaign argues, this erasure perpetuates the myth that Hinduism contributed “nothing but superstition” to civilization. As the Indian government’s 2015 International Yoga Day manifesto asserts: “Yoga is India’s gift to the world, rooted in Vedanta and Tantra.” We cannot tolerate pastors like Rev. Anthony Randazzo, who slathers Christian dogma onto asanas while denying their prana-activating purpose. Nor can we abide by “Christianized yoga manuals” that replace Yamas (ethical vows) with Beatitudes. Yoga’s ontology atman-Brahman unity, karma-samsara cycle is irreducibly Dharmic. To amputate this is to murder yoga itself.

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