prologue
If there is one thing that yoga has shown me, it is that life – my life, certainly – is made up of a never-ending, ever-dynamic, multi-directional succession of ands. They begin in the early morning with meditation: one thought and another and another, consecutively or confluently, sometimes opening up a serene moment of silence, oftentimes not. They continue through the day with a sequence of breathing techniques, a series of physical postures, a towering stack of texts to read and to write, all of which inevitably lead to more reading and more writing, a long list of must-dos and should-dos and could-dos… Reader, I’m sure you’ll relate. As ubiquitous as this phenomenon seems to be, I find myself wondering why this is so. The American psychologist William James (1842–1910) locates its source in human consciousness which he describes as “a teeming multiplicity of objects and relations” (224) that seep into our daily lives. The Book of Genesis also gives an explanation of sorts when it recounts God’s creation of the world as a polysyndetic progression of and and and that form the warp for weaving the fabric of life (Gen 1:3–5). And, it seems, is the foundation to our human and worldly existence.
Yoga, too, is often associated with connection and conjunction. Coming from the verbal root √yuj meaning ‘to join’ and ‘to bind’, it is often argued to be per definition the means and end of uniting two disarticulated entities into a harmonious whole: mind and body, male and female, individual and cosmos. Yes and no. While this may hold true for the physical practices of haṭha-yoga, the classical yoga of Patañjali declares with uncompromising clarity that yoga is union’s very opposite: discernment, separation, isolation. How, then, to think about this seam of (dis)connections which runs through the history of yoga’s philosophy and practices as a common thread in distinct kinds of stitching? I would like to propose a single-syllabled answer: च or ca, ‘and’. According to Sir Monier-Williams’ Sanskrit-English Dictionary (1899), the Sanskrit conjunction ca can denote cumulation (“and”) and contrast (“but”), inclusion (“either, or”) and exclusion (“neither, nor”), certainty (“indeed”) and condition (“if”). In short, it can hold complexity in succinctness. And do its possibilities end there? Of course not! As the British lexicographer notes, “with lexicographers ca– may imply a reference to certain other words which are not expressed.” But from the beginning: and as cumulation.
Yoga, too, begins with an and of sorts: “atha yogānuśāsanam: Now, further instructions on yoga” (YS 1.1). Though often overlooked, Mallinson and Singleton’s translation of the particle anu– as “further” articulates that Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra, dated to the 4th century CE, does not proceed neatly ab ovo, golden or otherwise – after all, where would we find its aureal hen? It is a compendium of many earlier influences and teachings on yoga, mythical and philosophical, revelatory and transmitted, Vedic and beyond. Notwithstanding its conjunctive beginnings, there is a fundamentally disjunctive impetus to Patañjali’s yoga of meditation, whose sole end lies in the discernment between and the separation of prakṛti (the phenomenal world) and puruṣa (pure consciousness). What for? Liberation, of course! To break free from saṃsāra, the self-reinforcing loop of kāma (desire) and karma (action) that traps us in a vicious cycle of repetition and rebirth. The way out is, well, out: discernment of the problem and detachment from all action, physical and cognitive, forever. In Patañjali’s words: “By removal of ignorance, conjunction [saṃyoga] is removed. This is the absolute freedom [kaivalya] of the seer [puruṣa]” (YS 2.25). In alignment with Sāṃkhya’s dualistic worldview, saṃyoga is suffering, kaivalya is liberation. Liberation is a matter of ca as either-or.
At the same time – albeit historically almost a millennium later –, texts on the physical practices of haṭha-yoga seem to teach the very opposite. Inspired by the non-dual worldviews of Advaita Vedānta and Tantra, the 14th-century Yogabīja now states that yoga is “the union [saṃyoga!] of all dualities”: sun and moon, prāṇa and apāna, the individual and the supreme (89–90). Still, the ultimate goal remained unchanged: mokṣa, liberation from the cycle of reincarnation into mundane existence. What, then, of liberation and life? Within a worldview whose focus ultimately lay beyond the world: not much – which is not to say: nothing at all. Contours of the jīvanmukta do begin to appear in the texts, although his form remains rather elusive: We encounter him in a cadaverous state beyond senses and self (Haṭhapradīpikā 4.109), or wandering between the worlds wielding his powers (Dattātreyayogaśāstra 128), or “living in a house with children and a wife” and even – brace yourself, Ashtangi: “ha[ving] fun” (Śivasaṃhitā 5.260). So long as all desires have been abandoned, life in liberation, free from the karmic entanglements of action, is possible. While the fundamental logic of liberation remains one of ca as either-or, it paradoxically becomes the foundation of a state of yoga in which ca can be both-and.
This is the Bhagavad Gītā’s original argument, as presented by Kṛṣṇa to Arjuna on the eve of the great battle that is at the centre of the Mahābhārata epos. Aware that the logic of war is destruction and the logic of karma is suffering, Arjuna finds himself caught in a double bind, in which a refusal to fight would be a refusal to fulfil his dharma, his duty as the warrior that he is, while to engage in war would be to engage ever more strongly in the cycle of karma. Overcome by a crisis of conscience, he lays down his weapons and is set to retreat from the war and the world. Kṛṣṇa, with divine dexterity, turns Arjuna’s either-or-conundrum into a both-and-resolution: “Your concern should be with action, / never with an action’s fruits; / these should never motivate you, / nor attachment to inaction” (2.47). Arjuna can engage with the world without reservations, so long as he divorces karma from kāma, as resounding as their connection might be, “the wise ones yoked to a higher mind / are freed from the bonds of rebirth” (2.51). Over two thousand years later, this conditional aspect of yoga’s ca still resonates in Rudyard Kipling’s aptly entitled poem “If—” (1895).
So much – or rather, so little on yoga’s yesterdays, many of which, in keeping with Sir Monier-Williams’ apropos about ca’s silent references, have not been mentioned or (yet) discovered. What, then, of yoga’s todays and tomorrows? Their development, which begins with colonization and globalization, is one in which yoga’s traditions meet ideas and practices from the West, conjoining men’s calisthenics with women’s gymnastics with martial arts with the methods of modern science employed to attest yoga’s potency and healing potential, while anglophone mesmerists and pseudo-masters of manifestation were trying, within their own esoteric frameworks, to prove much the same thing. It progresses as the Hindu monk Vivekananda (1863–1902) travels to the US to teach and to write and, in doing so, conjoins Patañjali’s Dualism with Advaita Vedānta’s Non-Dualism with occult speculations with a Christian desideratum for a time- and borderless truth. And it continues along this way westward, now travelled by gurus like B. K. S. Iyengar (1918–2014) and Patthabi Jois (1915–2009), who fused their elaborate systems of modern postural yoga with Patañjali’s teachings on restraining all movement within a single, straightforward sentence: “I teach … Ashtanga Yoga, the original method given in Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra” (Jois). Ca, it seems, became a connection to the point of conflation until it finally fell by the wayside altogether.
This could be the end of our exploring, were it not for the intrinsic continuity of and that finds its most concise expression in its symbol, the ampersand: &, which, until some two hundred years ago, constituted the last character of the Latin alphabet: X, Y, Z, &. & – and then what? Following &’s lead and logic, we begin where we started: At the break of dawn, in meditation, watching the mind and the world unfold as a consecutive and concurrent nexus of &s. By Patañjali’s measures, this only goes to show my ongoing shortcomings in meditation. Who am I to challenge his claim? Then again, what yoga’s concerns with puruṣa and prakṛti, truth and illusion, prāṇa and apāna, retreat and engagement have also shown is that ca is fundamental to the path towards yoga’s ends: action and stillness, union and separation, integration and transcendence, at times in opposition, at times in succession, at times side by side. One might venture to say that and represents the process and potential of liberation – and even, as the full expression of ampersand, ‘and, per se, and’, could be read to imply, stand, like &, as an end in itself.
This end, of course, would be an open and a dynamic one – necessarily so, if we, in our own time and place, are not intent on leaving it all behind: a liberation-in-progress, rather than an absolute extrication. If our aim, not unlike the yogins of old, is to become less self-involved and more fully conscious, kind-hearted, engaged human beings, but to be so in and for the here and now, the place of practice and the place of achievement is the connective space between you and me. It is the relational space of life in the world – and life, as the American novelist Philip Roth famously declared, “Life is and” (309). Life, like yoga, expresses itself as continuity and change, connection and separation, many and one. Yoga, like life, may be expressed as “the coming-into-being, / as well as the ceasing-to-be” (6.11), as it is in its earliest description in the Kaṭha Upaniṣad, dated (with scholarly reservation) to the last centuries BCE. Like life, yoga is and, and as such is relation, and as such is responsibility, for ourselves and each other and the more-than-human world, as we all continuously come into being and to cease to be.
Bryant, Edwin F. The Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali. North Point Press, 2009.
“Ca, ind.” Monier-Williams Sanskrit-English Dictionary, 1899, https://sanskritdictionary.com/ca/77625/1. Accessed 22 August 2026.
James, William. Principles of Psychology. Henry Holt and Company, 1890. 2 vols.
Jois, K. Pattabhi. “An Interview with K Pattabhi Jois: Practice Makes Perfect.” Interview by Sandra Anderson. Yoga + Joyful Living Magazine, 1994, https://harmonyslater.com/interview-pattabhi-jois.
Kipling, Rudyard. “If—.” Rewards and Fairies. Macmillan and Co., 1910.
Mallinson, James, and Mark Singleton. Roots of Yoga. Penguin, 2017.
Roth, Philip. The Counterlife. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986.
The Bhagavad Gita. Translated by Gavin Flood and Charles Martin. W. W. Norton, 2012.
The Dattātreyayogaśāstra. Edited and translated by James Mallinson, École Française d’Extrême-Orient, 2024. Haṭha Yoga Series 5.
“The Kaṭha Upaniṣad.” Upaniṣads. Edited and translated by Patrick Olivelle. Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. 231–247.
The Śivasaṃhitā. Edited and translated by James Mallinson, YogaVidya.com, 2017.