Is Yoga a Religion?

This weekend, the homeboy Mike Lyons posted up a video on whether yoga is a religion.  Mike's been doing his practice for a long time and is serious about aspects of yoga beyond asana, so I have no doubt the video is worth a watch.  However, I'm going to skip it, because I have no interest in the question.

Don't get me wrong.  I am very interested in the history and roots of yoga, and I think yoga in the West has probably strayed too far from them and rushed into the embrace of "Rock Your Asana" a little too eagerly.  I'm all for making yoga more quiet, more contemplative, and more spiritual.

That said, two things bug me about the religion question.  One, from my limited understanding, asking whether yoga is a religion is like asking whether a duck is a number or a letter.  When we in the West use the word "religion," I don't think we can escape the Judeo-Christian association with the word.  So when we ask if yoga is a religion, we're asking if it fits into a box that was designed to fit something else, whether a square peg can really fit into a round hole.

Some people I've heard in this debate acknowledge this dynamic, and they have a tendency to use it to justify a negative answer.  As in, no, yoga doesn't fit into the tidy western concept of a religion, so it isn't a religion.  What bothers me here is not the answer itself but its consequences.

In my experience, the quicker someone is to maintain that yoga is not a religion, the quicker they are to try to sell you something.  The religion debate seems to me to be a way to decouple yoga from its roots so that it fits more easily within a consumer culture.  In other words, if yoga isn't a religion, you don't have to be like dirty brown people.  You're not going to to dive naked into the Ganges, or whatever.  You can continue to lead your good American consumer life.  In fact, here's a 100 dollar yoga mat we think you'll like.

Yoga is hard, and yoga is alien to the West.  It is a demanding way of life that, if practiced fully, will lead one into conflict with the broader society.  Yoga is about achieving transcendence by yourself right now, so if you think Jesus Christ is our savior and the only road to transcending the misery of day to day life, yoga is going to cause you some discomfort.  Yoga demands nonviolence, so it's going to be pretty hard to justify eating that factory farmed beef that's so readily available.