The four paths of yoga

The four paths of yoga are karma yoga, the path of action, bhakti yoga, the path of devotion, jnana yoga, the path of knowledge, and raja yoga, the path of meditation, four routes to the same destination which the Bhagavad Gita presents as suited to different temperaments rather than ranked against each other.

If you arrived here from a question about the types of yoga in the Bhagavad Gita, that list is the answer, and the exam friendly version is above in the table. The Gita itself has eighteen chapters and seven hundred verses and sits inside the Bhishma Parva of the Mahabharata. It does not hand over a tidy list of four; scholars note that it refrains from insisting on one right path, and it discusses and reconciles renunciation, the duties of ordinary household life, and devotion. The fourfold scheme as a scheme owes most to Swami Vivekananda, 1863 to 1902, who wrote a book on each and summarised the whole thing in one sentence: do this either by work, or worship, or mental discipline, or philosophy, by one, or more, or all of these, and be free.

That last clause is the part people miss. The four are not four denominations. Almost nobody practises one alone.

Karma yoga, the path of action. The Gita's answer to a man who wants to walk away from a fight. Its instruction is not to stop acting but to stop owning the result: you have a right to your actions and not to their fruits, at 2.47, and therefore act without attachment, at 3.19. The technical term is nishkama karma, action without desire for the fruit. Chapter 5 puts formal renunciation and karma yoga side by side and prefers karma yoga, calling the dedicated worker the true renouncer. This is the path for people with jobs and children, which is to say most of us. The karma yoga page goes into what it actually asks.

Bhakti yoga, the path of devotion. Chapter 12 of the Gita is its chapter, and the Bhagavata Purana and the Narada Bhakti Sutra are its later literature. The tradition lists nine forms of devotion, the navadha bhakti: listening, singing, remembering, serving, worshipping an image, paying homage, servitude, friendship and complete self surrender. The bhakti movement, which began around the middle of the first millennium in Tamil Nadu and flowered between the twelfth and the eighteenth centuries through the Nayanars and the Alvars and the poet saints who followed, is the reason this is the path most Indian families are already inside without calling it yoga. The bhakti yoga page is the fuller account.

Jnana yoga, the path of knowledge. The oldest and the narrowest. Its question is who am I, and its aim is the recognition that the individual self and the ultimate reality are not two. The Upanishads are its ground, chapter 4 of the Gita its chapter, and Shankara's Advaita commentaries its sharpest expression. It has a syllabus: the four qualifications, viveka, vairagya, shatsampat and mumukshutva, and three stages, sravana, manana and nididhyasana, meaning hearing the teaching, thinking it through, and then meditating on it until it is no longer an opinion. The jnana yoga page sets out both lists.

Raja yoga, the path of meditation. Patanjali's eight limbs, from ethics through posture and breath to absorption. This is the only one of the four with a physical practice inside it, which is why it is the only one that turns up in a modern yoga class at all. The raja yoga page covers it, and the eight limbs guide works through the limbs.

The examination answer is that there are four paths for four temperaments. The truer answer is that the Gita spends its length weaving them together, and that any real practice ends up using all four in different proportions at different times of life.

Watch how they overlap. Karma yoga without any devotion or any enquiry becomes mere hard work with a grievance attached. Bhakti without conduct becomes sentiment, and every tradition on this list has warned about that in plain language. Jnana without meditation becomes cleverness: I have met men who could argue the whole of Advaita and could not sit quietly for ten minutes, and I do not think they had what the texts are describing. Raja yoga without the first two limbs, which are ethical, is a technique for concentrating, and a technique for concentrating is available to anybody for any purpose at all.

So the useful way to hold the fourfold scheme is as four doors into one room, and the door you use is a fact about you rather than a fact about the room. In my experience people are also wrong about which door is theirs. The person who tells me they are too restless to meditate and must therefore serve is often the person who most needs ten quiet minutes, and the person who wants only the philosophy is usually the one who should be doing something useful for somebody else.

None of the four is a posture style, which is worth saying plainly on a site whose other style pages are about classes. If you came looking for a timetable, hatha and its descendants are the physical branch, and the history of yoga explains how a path with four routes ended up being sold as exercise.

Pick by temperament, and be honest rather than flattering about your own.

• You have a demanding job and a family and no spare hour. Karma yoga, and it is not a consolation prize. The Gita's own preference, at chapter 5, is for the person who keeps working.
• You already pray, sing or keep a shrine at home. You are practising bhakti and you do not need permission from a book. Add conduct and consistency rather than intensity.
• You argue with everything, including this page. Jnana yoga, and get a teacher, because this is the path most easily practised as a hobby.
• You are drawn to sitting still. Raja yoga, in the order Patanjali gives, which means the breath before the meditation and the ethics before both. Anulom Vilom is where to start this week.
• You are anxious, stiff or not sleeping. None of the four, first. Those are physical and they have physical answers: yoga for anxiety, yoga for back pain, and how to start yoga at home. Come back to the paths when you can breathe and sleep.
• You are studying this for an examination. The table above is your answer, and the sentence to add is that the Gita presents the paths as complementary rather than hierarchical.

My verdict. I am eighty nine, I have taught for about forty years in one hall, and if you asked me which of the four I have actually lived, the honest answer is karma yoga, and not because I chose it as a philosophy. Turning up to teach the same hour for four decades, mostly to people who will not remember your name, is what karma yoga looks like when nobody is writing it down. The bit I have found true is the exact bit the Gita insists on: the work goes badly the moment I start counting what comes back from it. My advice, then, is not to choose a path in the way you would choose a subject. Notice which one you are already on, do it more deliberately, and borrow from the other three where you are weakest. Sit for ten minutes if you are busy. Do something useful if you are bookish. Be quiet about it either way.

None of these four paths is taught here, and that is not modesty about the philosophy. It is that a path is not a class. The classes here are one teacher, about forty years of teaching, one hall at the residents' association in MSR Nagar in north Bangalore, in person there or live online, all ages and all levels, and the hour is asana, pranayama and relaxation, taught slowly. The classes here are not labelled by style, and they are not labelled by path either.

What that hour is, in the vocabulary of this page, is a portion of raja yoga: limbs three, four and five, posture and breathing and the withdrawal of the senses, in that order, with the cautions for the strong breathing said before rather than after. There is no lecture, no chanting programme, no discipleship on offer and no scripture read aloud.

The reading that goes with the four paths is on this site and costs nothing to read: the eight limbs of yoga for Patanjali, the glossary for the Sanskrit in this page, and the history of yoga for how the older paths and the modern class are related. The classes page has timings and costs if the hour is what you want.

Three of the four paths have no technique to publish, which is why this section is short and honest about it.

Karma yoga has no practice on this site, because its practice is your work. The nearest thing is turning up to the same hour twice a week whether or not you feel like it, and how often should you do yoga is the practical page about that kind of consistency.

Bhakti yoga touches this site at exactly one point: Om chanting, which is sound used as devotion and as a settling practice at the same time. Bhramari, the humming breath, is the same tool used for anxiety instead.

Jnana yoga has no technique either, only enquiry, and the closest instrument here is the long stillness of Yoga Nidra, where the attention is deliberately taken apart, and So Hum, whose two syllables are a statement about the self as much as a breath practice.

Raja yoga is the one with a full syllabus here. The seat, in Sukhasana or Padmasana; the breath, in Nadi Shodhana; concentration, in Trataka; and a body prepared enough to sit, which is what a plain ten minute morning practice is for.