50. What is the Difference between Haṭhayoga and Hatha Yoga?
Yoga Studies in Five Minutes - Theodora Wildcroft
James Mallinson [+]
University of Oxford
James Mallinson is Boden Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Oxford and author of a range of books and articles on yoga, including The Khecarīvidyā of Ādinātha (Routledge, 2007), Roots of Yoga (with Mark Singleton, Penguin Classics 2017) and The Amṛtasiddhi and Amṛtasiddhimūla (with Péter-Dániel Szántō, IFP 2022). From 2015 to 2021 he was the Principal Investigator of the SOAS-based ERC-funded Hatha Yoga Project.
Description
The majority of modern practitioners engage in a generic relaxation-oriented yoga which is not associated with any specific lineage or school and which, if it needs to be differentiated from yoga’s branded forms, has, by default, come to be denoted by Hatha Yoga, an anglicised form of haṭhayoga, the Sanskrit technical term for physical yoga.