Light on Yoga: A Gift to Humankind by Richard Ward

25th August 2026

This year marks the 60th Anniversary of the publication of B.K.S. Iyengar’s Light on Yoga by Messrs George Allen & Unwin.

I do not need to describe the impact this book has had on people all across the world, with over three million copies having been sold since publication. Suffice to say that it has been the outstanding book about Yoga written for many decades or perhaps centuries.

It is the longer term perspective I would like to take in order to try to identify Light on Yoga’s true significance not only for people today but in terms of generations of both the past and the future.

It is sometimes said that all modern Western philosophy consists mostly of footnotes to Plato. You might also say that most yoga philosophy since Patanjali consists of footnotes to the Yoga Sutras.

We think we understand the context within which Plato lived and taught, but what do we know of the times which gave rise to Patanjali?

Patanjali was traditionally said, and this view was supported by B.K.S. Iyengar to be not only a master of yoga but also of Sanskrit grammar and he is reputed to be the author of the Mahabhyasa, a major commentary on Pāṇini’s Sanskrit grammar rules, dated by scholars to around the 2nd century BC and in Ayurveda, according to commentaries from the 11th century AD onwards. He is traditionally credited in some commentaries with writing or influencing works tied to the Charaka Samhita, a medical treatise.

Scholars are not all agreed on the details and it is sometimes claimed that the authors of these works were up to three different Patanjalis, not one and the same. His place in history is variously put at between the 2nd century or so before the Christian era and the 4th century of that era.

It was Iyengar’s view that Patanjali was a grammarian and expert linguist not least because he managed to exercise such a masterly and scientific precision and economy of expression of what Iyengar described as a flowery and lyrical language such as Sanskrit.

Even if it were true that the author of the Yoga Sutras was not the author of Charaka Samhita it occurs to me that Patanjali the Yogi clearly understood the identification and diagnosis of disease and the prescriptive measures and treatment necessary to remedy disease.

If we take Patanjali either as belonging to the 2nd century BC or the 4th century AD as has been variously suggested by scholars, this early era was marked by major imperial expansions, massive domestic wars, and subsequent fragmentation that invited waves of foreign incursions into the northwestern frontier. The early part of this period began with aggressive territorial consolidation under the Maurya Empire.

Most notorious was the bloody Kalinga War (c. 260 BCE) led by Ashoka, which resulted in over 100,000 deaths before inspiring his conversion to Buddhism and pacifism. The first four centuries of the Christian era (1st to 4th century CE) in India were neither entirely peaceful nor consumed by total war. Instead, this era saw a mix of regional stability, shifting powers, and external invasions, particularly concentrated in the northern and northwestern parts of the subcontinent. The Kushan Empire, The Satavahana Empire and the rising Gupta Empire were all features of this era.

We often see in history that decades or centuries of conflict, of war, blood and atrocities finally give way to periods of peace, law and order and a desire on the part of people never to go back to war to try to solve their problems. As historians such as Arnold Toynbee, Oswald Spengler and others have suggested, societies oscillate between periods of war, periods of peace, with further cycles of war and peace.

Like Patanjali may have done, Iyengar’s life and adulthood coincided with the conclusion of one of these long and turbulent and violent periods of history. By 1966 people were getting accustomed to a post world war settlement and the prospect of enduring peace.

It may well have been that Patanjali in his era was contributing to a culture of peace and settlement after centuries of violence when mankind was turning to anyone who could show ways of living and developing peacefully and how to benefit, to develop and how to evolve during periods of relative peace.

Both Patanjali and Iyengar may have emerged at times when societies had experienced great crises and had recently been engaged in existential battles for survival.

Patanjali offered a diagnosis of mankind’s problem. He said that the problems arose from the state of mankind’s consciousness. False identification of the Seer with the fluctuations of chitta and the failure of the Seer to identify with itself was the essential diagnosis of the problem. This was further explained in the Yamas. Al the conditions described in the Yamas exemplify the problems seen when both societies and individuals embark on periods of war, conquest and imperial expansion. Violence, mendacity, theft, sensual indulgence and pleasure seeking all feed the cruelty and selfishness of grasping, looting, seizing what belongs to others and erasing the rights of others such as is consistent with the spread of empire.

The treatment offered by Patanjali for this disease is encapsulated in the Niyamas which is a prescription and a treatment of this disease, starting with the vairagya the renunciation, the emergency action taken to arrest the symptoms undertaken by the practice of saucha and santosha and the healing, the reversal of the disease brought about by the threefold kriya yoga, the abhyasa of tapas, svadhyaya and ishvara pranidhana.

Of course, Iyengar was faithful to Patanjali and he did not need to reinvent the wheel so to speak, but like Patanjali he strongly emphasised the importance of personal responsibility for the state of one’s own consciousness, for a new post World War 2 audience.

Clearly there was a world wide desire for peace in the 1950s and 1960s. In the 2nd century BC it was the Emperor Ashoka who renounced violence and sought to refashion society along peaceful lines and introduce a prolonged period of peace.

In the mid 20th century there were world wide institutions set up to maintain and preserve peace and resolve conflicts, such as the United Nations. We have all lived under the Pax Americana since 1945, even though that status is visibly cracking and increasingly threadbare. It could well be that we are now about to enter another prolonged period of worldwide conflict. All the signs are here.

Iyengar’s contribution was not only to show us all how to live in peace but how to benefit from that peace, especially how to gain and maintain health through the exercise of personal responsibility, based on the yogic principles of Patanjali and to the art and science of yoga as developed by Iyengar himself.

However, for the period of relative peace under which we have all lived for the past 80 years Light on Yoga as a text, and Iyengar’s great teachings have helped us to realise what we can achieve for ourselves in what may prove to have been a long intermission of peace between wars.

Iyengar has made many great contributions to the understanding of yoga. His teaching has actually penetrated to the core of both Krishna’s teaching in the Bhagavad Gita and to Patanjali’s teaching in the Yoga Sutras. Both Krishna and Patanjali proposed fusing together the different components of the individual into one to achieve a state of yoga.

Krishna talked about karma marga (the path of action for practical people and their practicalities), jnana marga (the path of the mind for intellectual people and their thoughts) and bhakti marga (the path of devotion for emotional and benevolent people and their devotions). He proposed binding them together into one, as Yoga Marga.

Patanajli made a very similar recommendation. He proposed the tapas (action, effort, determination) as synonymous with karma marga to be bound up with svadhayaya (equivalent to jnana marga) and ishavara pranidhana (equivalent to bhakti marga) bound up together as kriya yoga.

In other words, every type of person could follow yoga as made up of these different aspects just as people display different proportions of these aspects in themselves and their lives.

In asana and pranayama, all yoga technique and practice in Iyengar’s system falls under the process of joining the body energy (tapas, karma) with the brain energy (svadhyaya, jnana) in the heart (the location of bhakti and ishvara pranidhana). These three are joined together in wisdom in every asana and act of pranayama. In this process they are transformative of the individual who is responsible for his or her own consciousness.

In Light on Yoga Iyengar demonstrated how this integration of body, intellect and heart took place and was carried out. This was not made explicit in the text. In the online course I gave to pupils last year about Light on Yoga I explained that there was of course much that was explicit in Iyengar’s teachings in the book but there was also much that was implicit.

If you study the photographs in Light on Yoga in particular you can begin to understand how in each asana, Iyengar was able to activate the feet in order to begin the process of transmitting body energy upwards towards the heart. He explained at other times how the stretching of the skin of the sole of the foot forwards and downwards enable the muscular parts of the foot to separate from the skin and ascend, including the arch which generated upward movement of energy.

In the text he explains how ashwini mudra, the mannerism of contracting of the anal sphincter is used to initiate the mula bandha. This bandha is instrumental in moving the body energy further up the body towards the heart. In order to allow the energy of the brain to descend jalandhara bandha may be used to teach the brain energy how to descend. The brain can allow the intellectual energy to descend and meet the bodily energy coming up, not only meeting that energy in the feet where it is generated but meeting it in its home, its resting place in the heart, the source of the ishvara pranidhana, the bhakti.

Years later in Light on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali Iyengar made this more explicit.  Guruji beautifully translates Chapter 2 verse 46 “sthira sukham asanam”

“Asana is perfect firmness of body, steadiness of intelligence and benevolence of spirit.”

Here he defines asana as the union of body energy, intellectual energy and the energy of the heart. The outcome of asana should be to create benevolence, compassion and love, and therefore peace in the practitioner and everyone with whom he or she comes into contact with.

In the evaluation of Light on Yoga you might choose to say, as one reviewer did that it was the “finest manual of instruction” or “the fullest, most practical and most profusely illustrated book on Yoga in English.”  You could see it as light on yoga knowledge, on the practices and processes of learning how to perform the asanas and pranayamas, an invaluable guide to techniques and courses to be followed.

However, in years to come I believe it will be accorded its rightful place as an indispensable link in the chain or the thread of yoga knowledge, passed from the first Guru down to the present day.

When the next cycle of imperial aggression and expansionism, war and destruction is over in the world and the world yearns to return to peace once again, when people turn away from violence, then once again there will be an appetite for what is truly divine and what it is truly Yoga., Yoga is not simply something to be seen as a glorified system of exercise. It’s aim is to help the Self within to recognise its own divine nature instead of identifying with the illusory conceptions which form our view of ourselves and our existence.  Iyengar’s books, starting with Light on Yoga will again be seen as gifts to humankind the world over.

In this way Iyengar made his unique contribution just as Krishna and Patanjali had done in earlier eras.

Written by Richard Ward