Schools turning on to yoga, but some call it foreign religion

SAN FRANCISCO -- In Tara Guber's ideal world, American children would meditate in the lotus position and chant in Sanskrit before taking stressful standardized tests. But when she asked a public elementary school in Aspen, Colo., to teach yoga in 2002, Christian fundamentalists and even some secular parents lobbied the school board. They argued that yoga's Hindu roots conflicted with Christian teachings and that using it in school might violate the separation of church and state. Portrayed as a New Age nut out to brainwash young minds, Guber crafted a curriculum that eliminated chanting and translated Sanskrit into simple English. Yogic panting became "bunny breathing," and "meditation" became "time in."

"I stripped every piece of anything that anyone could vaguely construe as spiritual or religious out of the program," Guber said. Now, more than 100 schools in 26 states have adopted Guber's "Yoga Ed." program and more than 300 physical education instructors have been trained in it. Countless other public and private schools from California to Massachusetts -- including the Aspen school where Guber clashed with parents -- are teaching yoga.

Teachers say it helps calm students with attention-deficit disorder and may reduce childhood obesity. The federal government gives grants to gym teachers who complete a teacher training course in yoga. "I see a lot fewer discipline problems," said Ruth Reynolds, an elementary school principal in San Rafael, Calif. Her observation of the school's six-year-old yoga program is that it helps easily distracted children to focus. "If you have children with ADD and focusing issues, often it's easy to go from that into a behavior problem. Anything you can do to help children focus will improve their behavior." In 2003, researchers at California State University, Los Angeles, studied test scores at the Accelerated School, a charter school where Guber serves on the board and where students practice yoga almost daily. They found a correlation between yoga and better behavior and grades, and they said young yogis were more fit than the district average from the state's physical fitness test.

Guber, married to former Sony Pictures Entertainment CEO Peter Guber, embraced yoga after moving to California in the 1970s. Their 13-acre Bel-Air estate includes a cliff-top garden leading to a Yoga House retreat. In 2004, Americans spent almost $3 billion on yoga classes and retreats, books, DVDs, mats, clothing and related items. About 3 million American adults practiced yoga at least twice a week in 2006, more than doubling from 1.3 million in 2001, according to Mediamark Research. Despite mainstream acceptance, yoga in public schools remains touchy. Critics say even stripped-down "yoga lite" goads young people into exploring other religions and mysticism. Dave Hunt, who has traveled to India to study yoga's roots and interview gurus, called the practice "a vital part of the largest missionary program in the world" for Hinduism. The Bend, Ore., author of "Yoga and the Body of Christ: What Position Should Christians Hold?" said that, like other religions, the practice has no place in public schools.

"It's pretty simple: Yoga is a religious practice in Hinduism. It's the way to reach enlightenment. To bring it to the West and bill it as a scientific practice for fitness is dishonest," said Hunt, 80. "I've talked to too many people who got hooked on the spiritual deception of yoga. They come to believe in this and become enamored with Hinduism or eastern mysticism," he said. Concerns about yoga's spiritual implications have also fueled a cottage industry of books and videos that offer the purported benefits of yoga -- flexibility, strength and weight loss -- without mentioning the y-word. Laurette Willis, 49, wrote an exercise regimen called "PowerMoves Kids Program for Public Schools." The stretching routine includes pauses for children to contemplate character-building quotes from Martin Luther King Jr., Emily Dickinson, Harriet Tubman and William Shakespeare. She also created an exercise regimen, "PraiseMoves: The Christian Alternative to Yoga."

"I'm not here to say that yoga is necessarily bad, but it is counter to what I think the public education system is for: It should have programs without any form of religious overtones whatsoever," Willis said. The dispute confuses some yogis, particularly Westerners who say yoga as it's practiced in the United States is primarily about fitness and stress relief. Baron Baptiste, who owns three studios in the Boston area and practices with his 7-year-old son, loves Guber's program. He said his son takes yoga far less seriously than he does. "We adults need to be reminded to lighten up, breathe in the joy and have some fun," he said.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoga

Yoga (Devanagari: योग) is one of the six schools of Hindu philosophy, focusing on meditation. In India, Yoga is seen as a means to both physiological and spiritual mastery. Outside India, Yoga has become primarily associated with the practice of asanas (postures) of Hatha Yoga (see Yoga as exercise).

Yoga as a means of spiritual attainment is central to Hinduism (including Vedanta), Buddhism and Jainism and has influenced other religious and spiritual practices throughout the world. Hindu texts establishing the basis for yoga include the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, the Hatha Yoga Pradipika and many others.

And here I thought Public Schools were not supposed to push any religion, however well intentioned.

I want to thank you for signing up just to inform us on this matter. I would like to suggest to you that you educate yourself before you do it again. I would also like to point out that I did not mention the "Gita" (Bhagavad Gita or Song of the Divine) I said Hinduism.

The word Hindu originated, not as the name of a religion, but as a geographical marker. Hindu derives from the Sanskrit word for river, sindhu, from which the Indus River received its name. Sometime in the first millennium B.C., the Persians, who were then South Asia’s closest neighbors, mispronounced sindhu, and designated the land around the Indus River as hindu. Over a thousand years later, in A.D. 712, the Muslims invaded the Indus Valley. To distinguish themselves, they called all non-Muslims hindus; the name of the land became, by default, the name of the people and their religion (Schoeps, 1966, p. 148). Christians, upon entering Hindustan (as it was then called), committed the same error of reduction. From their perspective, the indigenous people were all idol-worshipping pagans, so they christened the Indians gentoo, a derogatory synchronization of “gentile” and “hindu.” Thus the name hindu originally was given by outsiders to denote a geographic territory, but through the encroachment of various other religious groups it came to encompass all native religions in South East Asia.
Information about the Vedic religion apparently introduced by the Aryans is gleaned largely from the Vedas. Focus was on yajna, ritualistic performance of sacrifice, and on joining the ancestors in heaven.The pre-eminent doctrine was Purva Mimamsa, largely non-theistic and with some strands trying to prove that God is non-existent, or at least redundant. Uttara Mimamsa (Vedanta) emerged towards the latter part of the period with the compilation of the Upanishads. Scholars say that there was no clearly enunciated doctrine of reincarnation at this time. The predominant deities, different from those in later Hinduism, ...
Dating of the text
Though it is not exactly clear when the Bhagavad Gita was composed, western historians assume a date between 500 and 50 BCE. There is, however, considerable debate on the subject. Based on the differences in the poetic styles and supposed external influences such as Patanjali's Yoga Sutra, some scholars have suggested that the Bhagavad Gita was added to the Mahabharata at a later date.
Theories based on archaeoastronomical calculations from passages of the Mahabharata place the incidents upon which the Gita is based around 5561 BCE.[19] The traditional date reflecting the beliefs of many devotional Hindus places the text in the 4th millennium BC. See Mahabharata for a discussion of attempts to date the epic as a whole.

Obviously it is not an established fact as to when the "Gita" was written much less called the Bhagavad Gita. It is very clear that there was and is no one religion called 'Hinduism' and what existed in 500 BC when the historical Buddha lived was a precursor to what evolved as 'Hinduism.'

As for the Buddha (Guatama) being Hindu that is absurd. Firstly because there wasn't Hinduism at that time and secondly because...

Early life and marriage
Siddhartha, destined to a luxurious life as a prince, had three palaces (one for each season) especially built for him. His father, King Œuddhodana, wishing for Siddhartha to be a great king, shielded his son from religious teachings or knowledge of human suffering.

This accords with the history of Sakyamuni Buddha as told in Mahayana and Vajrayana traditions and several other histories translated by western authors. Guatama followed several spiritual masters of the time, none Hindu, before rejecting them all and finding his enlightenment under the Bhodi Tree. That is the historical account as passed down by his followers.

Welcome to Free Republic.

Dude, your Free Republic follows strange logic.

According to you, if something is given a nickname that becomes popular, it is assumed that the thing did not exist before it was given the nickname!

The word "Hindu" is a corruption of the word Sindhu (Indus river) by the Iranains who have no "H" sound in Persian language. It is just a nickname given by dudes living west of Indus river for dudes living east of it.

The word Hindus obviously doesn't occur in any of the "Hindu" sacred literature like Vedas, Upanishads, etc.

But did you ever pause to ask what the Hindus have always called themselves and their religion -- what is their "real" name, as opposed to the nickname "Hindu"?

The answer is "Sanatana Dharma". This means "Eternal Faith" and is the real name of the religion that Hindus follow and they call themselves "Santan Dharamees". This is the name that occurs in their sacred literature.

"apparently introduced by the Aryans is gleaned largely from the Vedas."
The Aryan invasino theory has been discredited as imagination of the 19th century Missionaries like Max Muller and modern day Indian communists. It has been abandoned by most historians, including American universities.

"Obviously it is not an established fact as to when the "Gita" was written much less called the Bhagavad Gita."

You know that Gita and Bhagvad Gita refer to the same text, don't you?

"It is very clear that there was and is no one religion called 'Hinduism' and what existed in 500 BC when the historical Buddha lived"

Santana Dharma existed for thousands of years before that, inclduing all its scriptures like Vedas and Gita and the two epics.

Sure, the nick-name "Hindu" did not exist as Persians had yet to discover India.

Got it?

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