《美食祈禱和戀愛》Chapter 38 (81):爲什麼學瑜伽?

"Why do we practice Yoga?"

“我們爲什麼練瑜伽？”

I had a teacher once ask that question during a particularly challenging Yoga class, back in New York. We were all bent into these exhausting sideways triangles, and the teacher was making us hold the position longer than any of us would have liked.

我在紐約時，曾經有位老師在一堂別具挑戰性的瑜伽課上問起這個問題。當時我們每個人都彎成側向一旁的三角形，相當累人，老師讓我們久久保持這種沒人願意做這麼久的姿勢。

"Why do we practice Yoga?" he asked again. "Is it so we can become a little bendier than our neighbors? Or is there perhaps some higher purpose?"

“我們爲什麼練瑜伽？”他再一次問，“是否讓你比你的鄰居更‘能屈能伸’？或者爲了某種更崇高的目的？”

Yoga, in Sanskrit, can be translated as "union." It originally comes from the root word yuj, which means "to yoke," to attach yourself to a task at hand with ox-like discipline. And the task at hand in Yoga is to find union—between mind and body, between the individual and her God, between our thoughts and the source of our thoughts, between teacher and student, and even between ourselves and our sometimes hard-to-bend neighbors. In the West, we've mainly come to know Yoga through its now-famous pretzel-like exercises for the body, but this is only Hatha Yoga, one limb of the philosophy. The ancients developed these physical stretches not for personal fitness, but to loosen up their muscles and minds in order to prepare them for meditation. It is difficult to sit in stillness for many hours, after all, if your hip is aching, keeping you from contemplating your intrinsic divinity because you are too busy contemplating, "Wow . . . my hip really aches."

梵語的“瑜伽”可譯爲“結合”。它的字根來自“yuj”，意思是“套上軛”，以牛一般的紀律參與即時任務。瑜伽的即時任務是尋找結合——心與身之間、個人與神明之間、思想與思源之間、老師與學生之間，甚至我們自身與屈伸不易的鄰人之間的結合。我們在西方，主要透過知名的卷麻卷似的身體訓練而認識瑜伽，但那只是瑜伽哲學的一支，叫“哈達瑜伽”（Hatha Yoga）。古人發明這些體能伸展不是爲了個人健康，而是爲了放鬆肌肉與心靈，爲打坐做準備。畢竟，靜坐數個小時並非易事，因爲在你髖骨疼痛、無法思索內在神性的時候，你滿腦子只是：“哇……我的髖骨真痛啊。”

But Yoga can also mean trying to find God through meditation, through scholarly study, through the practice of silence, through devotional service or through mantra—the repetition of sacred words in Sanskrit. While some of these practices tend to look rather Hindu in their derivation, Yoga is not synonymous with Hinduism, nor are all Hindus Yogis. True Yoga neither competes with nor precludes any other religion. You may use your Yoga—your disciplined practices of sacred union—to get closer to Krishna, Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha or Yahweh. During my time at the Ashram, I met devotees who identified themselves as practicing Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus and even Muslims. I have met others who would rather not talk about their religious affiliation at all, for which, in this contentious world, you can hardly blame them.

然而瑜伽也意味着透過打坐、透過學術研究、透過沉默訓練、透過忠心事奉，或透過唸咒——重複誦唸梵語經文——去發現神。這些練習儘管就其起源而言看似印度教，瑜伽卻不等同於印度教，印度瑜伽士也並非都信仰印度教。真正的瑜伽不與其他宗教競爭，也不排斥其他宗教。你利用瑜伽——神聖結合的修練——可以更接近黑天（Krishna）、耶穌、穆罕默德、佛陀或雅赫維（Yahweh）。我在道場期間遇上各種信徒，稱自己信仰的宗教爲基督教、猶太教、佛教、印度教，甚至伊斯蘭教。我還遇上寧可完全不談宗教信仰的人，在這充滿爭議的世界，你沒辦法責怪他們。

The Yogic path is about disentangling the built-in glitches of the human condition, which I'm going to over-simply define here as the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment. Different schools of thought over the centuries have found different explanations for man's apparently inherently flawed state. Taoists call it imbalance, Buddism calls it ignorance, Islam blames our misery on rebellion against God, and the Judeo-Christian tradition attributes all our suffering to original sin. Freudians say that unhappiness is the inevitable result of the clash between our natural drives and civilization's needs. (As my friend Deborah the psychologist explains it: "Desire is the design flaw.") The Yogis, however, say that human discontentment is a simple case of mistaken identity. We're miserable because we think that we are mere individuals, alone with our fears and flaws and resentments and mortality. We wrongly believe that our limited little egos constitute our whole entire nature. We have failed to recognize our deeper divine character. We don't realize that, somewhere within us all, there does exist a supreme Self who is eternally at peace. That supreme Self is our true identity, universal and divine. Before you realize this truth, say the Yogis, you will always be in despair, a notion nicely expressed in this exasperated line from the Greek stoic philosopher Epictetus: "You bear God within you, poor wretch, and know it not."

瑜伽的道路，是關於解開人類固有的毛病——我在此將之過度簡化一點來談，稱之爲無法維持滿足的毛病。數個世紀以來，各家思想學派曾爲人類固有的缺陷找到不同的解釋。道家說失調，佛教說無知，伊斯蘭教將我們的苦難歸咎於違抗神，猶太基督教傳統上將我們的受苦歸因於原罪 。弗洛伊德派說痛苦是我們的本能與文明需求之間發生衝突所造成的必然結果 （正如我的心理學家朋友黛博拉所說：“慾望是設計的缺失。”）瑜伽士卻說，人類的不滿很簡單，只是因爲身份認知錯誤。我們之所以痛苦，是因爲我們只不過是區區個人，有恐懼、缺陷、憤恨與難逃一死。我們錯以爲有限的小小自我構成我們的整個天性。我們未能看出自己內心深處的神性。我們不知道，每個人的內心某處，都存在一種永久平和的至高自我。至高的自我是我們的真實身份，完整而神聖。瑜伽士說，在明白此一事實之前，你將永遠感到絕望，斯多葛派的希臘哲學家愛比克泰德（Epictetus）說過一句話，精確地表達了此種想法“你這可憐的人，心中懷抱着神，卻不認識他。”