Do you know that the mainstream yoga we practice today doesn’t fall under the main and the original four paths of yoga?
The majority of yogic practices in the norm now consist of exercising various postures. This form of yoga is popularly known as Hot Yoga, which is a derivation of its actual name, the Hatha Yoga. And this Hatha Yoga has very little to do with the four paths of yoga.
So what are the four main paths of yoga?
The four paths of yoga are:
- Bhakti Yoga
- Jnana Yoga
- Karma Yoga
- Raja Yoga
These are the original pathways of yogic disciplines that emerged out of Vedic texts of ancient India.
These four paths of yoga contain the roots of all the other forms of yoga in practice today.
Why Are There So Many Other Forms of Yoga Practiced Today?
Despite there being so many other varieties of yoga in practice today in various parts of the world, you might be surprised to know that these four yogas are still the best methods to attain the highest goals of any yogic practice that is self-realization or the unification with the divine, the God-realization, the self-realization, enlightenment, kundalini awakening, or whatever other terms you might have heard.
Here, a question that might naturally come to an inquisitive mind is – if these are the most essential, effective, and original forms of yoga, then how come so many other forms came to exist?
Well, it all comes down to individualism and capitalism in a good way.
As all of the four main paths of yoga allow immense flexibility, various teachers, gurus, and practitioners have come throughout the ages and added their own mix of ideas and practices into the flow of yogic thoughts, philosophies, and practices. Often these resulted in branching off into other forms of yoga, such as kriya yoga, kundalini yoga, and many others.
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Add to it the drives of capitalism that fueled the need to offer some tangible packaged forms of yoga with a bit more readily perceivable benefits than the longer-term, too mystical, and often confusing goals of enlightenment. This resulted in the rapidly developing scene of various yoga schools and practices consisting mainly of Hatha Yoga practices, including the Goat Yoga.
It is the story of yogic diversification and the flow or evolution of yogic thoughts and practices in the smallest of nutshells.
4 Paths of Yoga
Now, let’s get back to the topic of this article – the four original paths of yoga.
Here we will find out what are the:
- Four main paths of yoga?
- Similarities and differences among the four paths?
- Practices followed in each path?
Let’s begin with Bhakti Yoga!
What’s Bhakti Yoga
Bhakti Yoga is the path of love. It’s all about loving God.
Bhakti means devotion. The follower of this yogic path is called a Bhakt, meaning a devotee.
The Bhakt is all about love – loving God and everything in the universe as a manifestation or form of the divine. Gradually, the Bhakt burned in the incessant practice of passionately and lovingly seeking the divine becomes one with God and everything else in him, including the universal existence.
Bhakti Yoga Practices
Bhakti yoga is the most emotionally packed path to self-realization. The Bhakt often regards God as their beloved.
There are also other forms of relationship that you can form with your God as you as the Bhakt deem most suitable. You can approach God as a mother, father, master, or friend. Whatever seems to be working for you or brings you closer to God.
You start an inner dialogue, as if in a sweet relationship, with this figure. You chant its name in meditations. Gradually, the relationship grows. The Bhakt gets closer to their beloved God and ultimately becomes one in this figure.
What’s Jnana Yoga
Jnana means knowledge. Jnana yoga is the path of knowledge.
In this path, the yogi attempts to realize God and existence through logic and reason. The intellectual faculty is the main driving force here.
The jnana yogi tries to attain the knowledge of the truth in contrast to the lies. He sharpens his senses and intellect to discern reality as opposed to the unrealities of existence. He pierces through the false knowledge or the illusion of Maya of the physical world to peek at the eternal truth of the soul.
Jnana Yoga Practices
The quintessential practice of Jnana Yoga is the practice involving constant conscious acknowledgment of the physical existence as unreal and the true self as the only incarnate reality.
The practitioner consciously reinforces this idea of Maya or the illusion of the material world through active rejection. His firm aim remains at getting to know the all-pervasive reality of the soul or spirit that which he calls the Brahman.
This practice eventually leads to the true knowledge of the self.
The knowledge that the self is and always has been one with the divine. It was this universal Maya of the physical existence that created the veil of separation from the truth.
What’s Karma Yoga
Karma Yoga is the most practical yoga among the four paths of yoga. Karma means work or service.
In its essence, Karma Yoga tries to achieve divinity or divine realization through work and activity. That means whatever the yogi does, he does for the divine and divine only. There’s no other motivation that drives his actions.
This detachment of personal gains from activity gradually results in ego dissolution, which leads to the rise of the true self or the divinity in the yogi.
Karma Yoga Practices
The Karma Yogi surrenders all of his life’s activity to the divine and performs whatever duties life throws at him with equal joy and patience.
They do everything selflessly without expecting anything in return.
The yogi neither expects good nor bad results out of their work. They keep working with objective perfection as a divine offering.
This surrendering of the self to the universal force, nature, or God and letting God fulfill his designs through him enables the yogi to achieve union with the divine.
What’s Raja Yoga
Raja means royal. As a king controls his kingdom, Raja Yoga is all about reigning over the mind through the process of meditation. That’s why it’s sometimes called the path of meditation.
However, it also involves leading a highly ethical life operating from the moral high grounds so that the mind doesn’t get any fuel to create any unrest whatsoever.
Raja Yoga concepts indicate that the clouds of thoughts, emotions, feelings, and all other mental activity that we humans suffer from all the time is the veil that bars us from seeing the ultimate truth lying beneath our existence.
Once the yogi can silence the mind and all of its futile activities, the truth of the self becomes apparent. It’s like when the lake is fully calm, serene, and pristine, we can see even the bottom of it.
Raja Yoga Practices
Raja Yoga practices mostly contain various forms of meditations aimed at silencing mental activity and creating peace of silence in mind.
A few prominent practices involve focusing on breathing meditation, body scan meditation, chanting mantras during meditation, and others.
Meditative practices are often prescribed by an experienced guru according to the temperament of the disciple. Some teachers also incorporate Hatha Yoga practices as means of strengthening the mind and body for sustained peace and silence.
Differences Among the Four Paths of Yoga
The essential difference among the four paths of yoga is in the attitude, temperament, and approach of the practitioner.
- Bhakti Yoga predominantly adopts an emotional approach to yoga.
- Jnana Yoga is all about dry logic; there’s very little place for love or other emotions here.
- Karma Yoga, too, doesn’t give much damn for the emotions, except loving the work as a divine duty.
- Raja Yoga, on the other hand, neither cares much for emotion nor logic. It’s all about total silence and mental serenity.
Now, let’s look at the overarching similarities among the four paths of yoga.
Similarities Among the Four Paths of Yoga
The similarity is in the purpose. All kinds and types of real yoga have the single purpose of unification or union with God.
Every path of yoga starts with and leads to the same objective of attaining divinity.
The verbiage describing the ultimate goal may have various wordings like self-realization, awakening, enlightenment, samadhi, and many others, but essentially all these are the same.
Self-realization means realizing the true, original, and essential identity of the self that’s the divine.
Enlightenment and awakening also refer to rising up to the same truth of the One.
The One is involved in the multitude. The multitude is in the One. And, it’s about becoming that One within.
The use of various meditative tools is also another major similarity among the yogic paths. All four paths utilize meditative practices.
- The Bhakt runs the inner dialogue and nurtures the sweet relationship with God through meditation.
- Jnana Yogi sharpens their senses of discerning reality from the unreality via meditation.
- Karma Yogi aims to turn whatever they do into a meditative practice of surrender to the divine.
- Raja Yoga itself is all about meditating to silence the mind.
Understanding the differences and the similarities of the four paths of yoga is important when it comes to choosing a path for you.
Which Path of Yoga Is Suitable for You?
The essential thing that you should keep in mind is that no single path of yoga is meant to be practiced in isolation.
The paths simply denote the predominant attitude, approach, and philosophy.
They are not meant to be strictly separated from each other.
Every yogi has their own mix of paths according to their temperament.
- A Bhakt naturally surrenders all his actions and deeds, like a Karma Yogi, to the divine out of sheer love.
- A karma yogi must also feel the love like a Bhakt feels while surrendering their life’s work.
- A Raja yogi will automatically receive the knowledge that the Jnana Yogi strives to achieve.
- And the Jnana Yogi, too, will achieve the annihilation of mental activity that the Raja Yogi seeks when in touch with the ultimate knowledge.
So, as a yogi or practitioner, you have all the freedom to mix and match the paths and practices according to whatever works best for you.
Cautionary Note: This article is a very oversimplification of the actual philosophies for the purpose of simplicity :-D. The yogic history spans thousands of years, involving multitudes of texts and sages. A single article is never going to be enough!
Books on the Four Paths of Yoga
There are hundreds of good books available on Yoga and the four paths of yoga. But who has that much time to read all of it?
We need one or two books that get the job done, right? The rest of the books can sit there on our shelves as adornments.
In that case, the pivotal and most essential works on the four paths of yoga come from the celebrated Indian Yoga Guru Swami Vivekananda.
If you want to know deeply about the four paths of yoga and all other related aspects of yoga along with it, the works of Swami Vivekananda would be enough.
He has written separate books on the four paths of yoga, which you can buy together along with his other pivotal works by buying this book: The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda.
This book contains all the books, lectures, prose, poetry, and everything Swami Vivekananda has ever written.
Swami Vivekananda is the first and the most important Indian sage who introduced yogic practices worldwide. His works are the most accessible yet the closest to the Vedantic roots of yogic origin.
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