"Why do we practice Yoga?"
我们为什么练瑜伽？

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.
我在纽约时，曾经有位老师在一堂别具挑战性的瑜伽课上问起这个问题。当时我们每个人都弯成侧向一旁的三角形，相当累人，老师让我们久久保持这种没人愿意做这么久的姿势。

"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?"
我们为什么练瑜伽？他再一次问，是否让你比你的邻居更‘能屈能伸’？或者为了某种更崇高的目的？

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."
梵语的瑜伽可译为结合。它的字根来自yuj，意思是套上轭，以牛一般的纪律参与即时任务。瑜伽的即时任务是寻找结合——心与身之间、个人与神明之间、思想与思源之间、老师与学生之间，甚至我们自身与屈伸不易的邻人之间的结合。我们在西方，主要透过知名的卷麻卷似的身体训练而认识瑜伽，但那只是瑜伽哲学的一支，叫哈达瑜伽（Hatha Yoga）。古人发明这些体能伸展不是为了个人健康，而是为了放松肌肉与心灵，为打坐做准备。毕竟，静坐数个小时并非易事，因为在你髋骨疼痛、无法思索内在神性的时候，你满脑子只是：哇……我的髋骨真痛啊。

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过打坐、透过学术研究、透过沉默训练、透过忠心事奉，或透过念咒——重复诵念梵语经文——去发现神。这些练习尽管就其起源而言看似印度教，瑜伽却不等同于印度教，印度瑜伽士也并非都信仰印度教。真正的瑜伽不与其他宗教竞争，也不排斥其他宗教。你利用瑜伽——神圣结合的修练——可以更接近黑天（Krishna）、耶稣、穆罕默德、佛陀或雅赫维（Yahweh）。我在道场期间遇上各种信徒，称自己信仰的宗教为基督教、犹太教、佛教、印度教，甚至伊斯兰教。我还遇上宁可完全不谈宗教信仰的人，在这充满争议的世界，你没办法责怪他们。

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，是关于解开人类固有的毛病——我在此将之过度简化一点来谈，称之为无法维持满足的毛病。数个世纪以来，各家思想学派曾为人类固有的缺陷找到不同的解释。道家说失调，佛教说无知，伊斯兰教将我们的苦难归咎于违抗神，犹太基督教传统上将我们的受苦归因于原罪 。弗洛伊德派说痛苦是我们的本能与文明需求之间发生冲突所造成的必然结果 （正如我的心理学家朋友黛博拉所说：欲望是设计的缺失。）瑜伽士却说，人类的不满很简单，只是因为身份认知错误。我们之所以痛苦，是因为我们只不过是区区个人，有恐惧、缺陷、愤恨与难逃一死。我们错以为有限的小小自我构成我们的整个天性。我们未能看出自己内心深处的神性。我们不知道，每个人的内心某处，都存在一种永久平和的至高自我。至高的自我是我们的真实身份，完整而神圣。瑜伽士说，在明白此一事实之前，你将永远感到绝望，斯多葛派的希腊哲学家爱比克泰德（Epictetus）说过一句话，精确地表达了此种想法你这可怜的人，心中怀抱着神，却不认识他。