The word yoga comes from a root meaning "to yoke" or "to join", and in the Hindu tradition it means far more than postures. Yoga is any disciplined path that joins the individual self to the divine, or that stills the mind enough for the self to be seen as it is. Patanjali's definition (Yoga Sutra 1.2) is simply: yoga is the stilling of the movements of the mind.
Because people differ, the tradition offers more than one road. The Bhagavad Gita speaks mainly of three: the yoga of action, of devotion and of knowledge. Later teachers, above all Swami Vivekananda in the 1890s, set the yoga of meditation alongside them as a fourth and gave the four their modern names. Together they form a map that almost every Hindu practice fits somewhere upon.
Karma yoga: action without clinging
Karma means action. Karma yoga is the path of doing your work, all of it, without grasping at the result. The Gita's central verse on it (2.47) is one every Hindu child learns:
You have a right to your actions alone, never to their fruits. Do not let the fruits of action be your motive, nor let your attachment be to inaction.
Notice the two warnings. Do not work for the reward, but do not use that as an excuse to stop working. The karma yogi is fully engaged and inwardly unhooked: a surgeon who does her best for each patient without staking her peace of mind on the outcome; a parent who raises a child without needing the child to become a particular kind of person; a volunteer who serves and forgets about thanks. Krishna adds in 2.48 that this evenness in success and failure is yoga, and in 2.50 that yoga is skill in action.
Karma yoga has a devotional form too: offering every act to God, so that the work itself becomes worship. Many Hindus practise this without naming it, with a short prayer before a task or a dedication of the day's work each morning. Its great strength is that it needs no change of circumstances. Whatever you are already doing can become the practice.
Bhakti yoga: the path of love
Bhakti is devotion, love directed at the divine in a form the heart can hold: Krishna, Rama, Shiva, Devi, or a formless Lord addressed simply as "You". The Narada Bhakti Sutras define bhakti as supreme love, and that is the whole of the method. Everything else, the chanting, the temple visits, the fasting and festivals, is a way of keeping the love awake.
The Bhagavata Purana lists nine forms of devotion: hearing about God, singing his names, remembering him, serving his feet, worship, prostration, serving him as a servant, befriending him as a friend, and offering one's whole self. Different devotees lean on different ones. Krishna's assurance in the Gita (9.26) is that the offering itself hardly matters:
A leaf, a flower, a fruit, water: whoever offers these to me with devotion, that gift of a loving heart I accept.
Bhakti suits the emotional temperament, those who find it easier to love than to analyse. But it is not the soft option. To love God steadily through loss, boredom and doubt takes as much discipline as any meditation. Bhakti's special gift is that it turns the ego's most stubborn habit, attachment, into the very means of release, by changing its object.
Jnana yoga: the path of knowledge
Jnana means knowledge, and specifically knowledge of what the self is. The jnana yogi asks, relentlessly, "Who am I?" and refuses every answer that can be observed. I am not the body, because I watch it age. I am not the thoughts, because I watch them come and go. The Upanishadic method is neti neti, "not this, not this", until only the witness remains, and that witness is found to be Brahman, the one reality. The great sentences of the Upanishads, "That thou art" (Chandogya 6.8.7) and "I am Brahman" (Brihadaranyaka 1.4.10), are the summit of this path.
The classical Advaita training has three steps: shravana, hearing the teaching from a qualified teacher; manana, reasoning it through until doubts fall away; and nididhyasana, dwelling on it in meditation until it becomes direct experience rather than belief. It also asks for prior qualifications: discrimination between the lasting and the passing, dispassion, a set of inner disciplines such as calm and self-control, and above all a burning wish for freedom.
Jnana yoga suits the philosophical temperament, but the Gita warns against pride in it. Knowledge is the great purifier (4.38), yet it is received through humility, "by prostration, by enquiry, by service" to those who have seen (4.34).
Raja yoga: the royal path of meditation
Raja means king, and raja yoga is the name Vivekananda gave to the systematic discipline of the mind set out in Patanjali's Yoga Sutras. Its structure is the eight limbs, ashtanga:
- Yama, restraints: non-violence, truthfulness, not stealing, continence, non-possessiveness.
- Niyama, observances: cleanliness, contentment, austerity, study, and surrender to the Lord.
- Asana, a posture that is steady and comfortable.
- Pranayama, regulation of the breath.
- Pratyahara, withdrawing the senses from their objects.
- Dharana, holding the mind on one point.
- Dhyana, unbroken meditation on that point.
- Samadhi, absorption, in which meditator, meditating and object become one.
The first two limbs are ethics; the next three prepare the body and senses; the last three are the real work of meditation. What most people now call "yoga" is the third limb, and what they call "mindfulness" is a doorway into the sixth. Raja yoga suits the mystical temperament, the person drawn to inner experiment, and Patanjali's method is strikingly empirical: practise, observe, adjust.
Four roads, one summit
Vivekananda's framing, from the preface to his book Raja Yoga, is the one most Hindus use today:
Each soul is potentially divine. The goal is to manifest this divinity within by controlling nature, external and internal. Do this either by work, or worship, or psychic control, or philosophy, by one, or more, or all of these, and be free.
He matched the paths to four temperaments: the active person to karma yoga, the emotional to bhakti, the mystic to raja yoga, the rational to jnana. But his deeper point was "one, or more, or all". The paths are not sects. Almost every serious practitioner draws on several. A bhakta who serves in the temple kitchen is doing karma yoga. A jnani who sits in silence each morning is doing raja yoga. A meditator who, at the end of every session, bows and offers the practice up is doing bhakti.
The Gita itself shows how they interlock. In chapter 12 Krishna lays out a ladder: fix your mind on me; if you cannot, practise meditation; if you cannot, work for my sake; if even that is too much, simply renounce the fruits of your actions, for from renunciation comes peace. The reader is invited to start wherever their nature allows. Elsewhere Krishna calls the yogi greater than the ascetic, the scholar and the ritualist, and tells Arjuna, "Therefore, be a yogi" (6.46). Not which kind. Just: begin.
A practice to try
For one week, keep a note of which path you naturally reach for. When you are stressed, do you want to do something, to pray, to understand, or to sit quietly? That is your home path. Then, deliberately, borrow one small habit from a neighbouring road: a karma yogi might add two minutes of stillness; a bhakta might read one Upanishadic verse and reason it through; a meditator might offer the session to someone else's welfare. The four yogas were never meant to be kept in separate rooms.