Walk into many modern yoga classes and you'll hear an opening chant to Patañjali, the sage of the Yoga-sūtra, honored as the father of yoga.1 It's a touching ritual, and it's based on a historical error. The physical, postural, subtle-body yoga people actually practice — haṭha-yoga and its modern descendants — does not descend from Patañjali. It descends from Śaiva Tantra. The studios are bowing to the wrong grandfather.
Wallis is blunt about the scale of the misunderstanding and its evidence: there is "a widespread misunderstanding today that haṭha-yoga derives from or relates to the yoga of Patañjali," and the primary haṭha-yoga sources themselves demonstrate that they "were (and saw themselves as) inheritors of the Tantrik tradition and no other."1 Not "influenced by"; inheritors of, and no other. The lineage of the practice on the mat runs straight back through Tantra, and the Patañjali connection is largely a later, respectable-sounding overlay.
How do we know? Because the content of haṭha-yoga is quintessentially Tantric, and a scholar traced it line by line. Yoga scholar Christopher Tompkins documented "dozens of passages in the Hundred Verses of Gorakṣa that are drawn from much earlier scriptures of Tantrik yoga" — specifically the influential Transcendence of Time.2 Material widely assumed to originate in haṭha-yoga, Tompkins shows, actually comes straight from Tantric scripture.2
The list of "borrowed" material is essentially the entire signature apparatus of yoga as people understand it today:3 the subtle-body physiology of 72,000 channels (nāḍīs) with ten primary and three most important; the analogizing of those three channels to the radiances of sun, moon, and fire; the functions of the ten vital energies (prāṇa-vāyus); the installation of mantras in the subtle centers; the "recitation of the Self" (haṃsa, so'ham) occurring naturally 21,600 times a day; the heart-center opening like a blossoming lotus; the ascent of the soul through the central channel (suṣumnā) by prāṇāyāma, dhāraṇā, and dhyāna; the "coiled power," kuṇḍalinī; and the culminating "nectar pervasion."3 Every one of these — the chakras, the channels, the kuṇḍalinī, the subtle anatomy that defines yoga in the popular mind — is Tantric, taken by Gorakṣa "direct from The Transcendence of Time or from an intermediate source that faithfully transmitted them," with the Kubjikā tantras as another clear source.4 The subtle body is the fingerprint, and it's Tantric.
Now the counter-evidence about Patañjali, which is devastating in its simplicity. The Yoga-sūtra "bears little resemblance to our modern practice of the same name." How little? "There are only two sentences on posture in the entire Yoga-sūtra."5 Two. The text that modern postural yoga claims as its founding scripture has essentially nothing to say about postures — the very thing modern yoga is built on.
Wallis calls this "the overlooked elephant in the room of modern yoga curricula": more than a hundred English translations of the Yoga-sūtra, a required segment in nearly every teacher training, and yet the realization is "still not widespread that the yoga that text describes bears little resemblance to our modern practice."5 The chronology seals it: "there is no direct connection between Patañjali's pre-Tantric yoga and the discipline of haṭha-yoga, whose respective periods of ascendency are separated by well over a thousand years."6
So how did Patañjali get into the picture at all? Through Tantra, as it happens. "The Tantra itself had absorbed Patañjali's practice teachings early on (while rejecting his philosophical dualism)."6 Tantra took in Patañjali's eight-limbed practice scheme (aṣṭāṅga-yoga) — all eight limbs — and passed them on to haṭha-yoga, while discarding his dualist metaphysics.6 So the bits of Patañjali that are in modern yoga arrived through the Tantric pipeline, not by direct descent. Wallis cites an 18th-century text presenting a yoga of fifteen components, where the eight are Patañjali's and "nearly all the additional components come from Tantrik sources" — the historical record showing Patañjali's scheme absorbed into a larger Tantric framework, not the reverse.7
The clinching evidence is that the haṭha-yoga texts announce their Tantric identity — they're not hiding it; later readers just stopped noticing.8
The Śiva-saṃhitā (c. 1500) "calls itself a tantra and presents itself as a dialogue between Śiva and Śakti" — the classical form of a Tantric scripture.8 The Gheraṇḍa-saṃhitā (c. 1700) frames itself as the teaching of a yogī to his student "Chaṇḍa Kāpāli, 'the Fierce Skull-bearer,' an explicitly Tantrik name," and describes its key teachings "as secrets previously concealed in the Tantrik scriptures."8 The common inversion posture (viparīta-karaṇī) practiced in studios today is said in the Gheraṇḍa-saṃhitā to have been "concealed in all the Tantras" — a phrase Wallis says "is almost a cliché in these texts."8
And the organizing principle of the classic haṭha texts — "the rise of the latent innate Goddess Power, or kuṇḍalinī-śakti" — is, Wallis says flatly, "quintessentially Tantrik."9 He quotes the Gheraṇḍa-saṃhitā (via the haṭha scholar James Mallinson) describing the practitioner raising "the sleeping serpent Goddess" to the highest lotus, becoming "made of Śakti," visualizing "supreme union with Śiva" — and notes: "I hardly need point out that this passage is entirely Tantrik in its language, tone, and tenor."9
The case study's lesson is sharp: the historical record isn't ambiguous or hidden. The haṭha texts call themselves tantras, use Tantric deity-dialogues, bear Tantric names, center the Tantric kuṇḍalinī, and credit the Tantras explicitly. The Patañjali attribution survives not because the evidence supports it but because of an "artificial revivalism divorced from the organic history of the yoga tradition" — a respectable, philosophically-tidy ancestor (the dualist sage with his clean eightfold path) was preferred over the actual one (transgressive, goddess-worshipping, kuṇḍalinī-raising Śaiva Tantra).7 The studios chant to Patañjali because Patañjali is safe, and the real grandfather is the thing modern yoga spent a century distancing itself from.
The practical upshot for anyone who practices or teaches yoga is a re-sorting of where the practice actually comes from. When you work with the breath moving through channels, the three nāḍīs (iḍā, piṅgalā, suṣumnā) as moon, sun, and fire, the chakras, the kuṇḍalinī at the base of the spine, the bandhas and mudrās, the visualized ascent to the crown — you are doing Tantra, specifically the simplified inheritance of classical Śaiva Tantric subtle-body practice. The Yoga-sūtra, valuable as it is for meditation, is not the source of any of that. The implication Wallis draws for practitioners who want to re-embed postural yoga in a coherent spiritual context is direct: the system that "fits most harmoniously" and that the practice "can ultimately be traced back to" is classical Śaiva Tantra, not Patañjali's dualism — so the honest move is to align modern yoga with the tradition that actually produced its subtle-body technology rather than with the philosophically incompatible text it was retroactively assigned. At minimum, knowing the real lineage lets you stop mistaking the Yoga-sūtra for an instruction manual for a practice it barely mentions.
The evidence here is unusually strong and converges from multiple scholars — Tompkins's source-tracing of Gorakṣa, Mallinson's haṭha scholarship, and the haṭha texts' own self-descriptions, all marshaled by Wallis.28 The tension is less about the facts than their reception: why does the Patañjali attribution persist against such clear counter-evidence? Wallis names it "artificial revivalism," suggesting a motivated preference for the respectable ancestor. Open question: is the persistence of the Patañjali story merely inertia (a hundred years of teacher-trainings repeating it), or is it a continuing active preference — modern yoga, marketed to a global audience often wary of "Tantra's" sexual-and-sorcerous reputation, having a live incentive to keep claiming the clean dualist sage rather than the transgressive goddess-tradition that's its real source? In other words, is the wrong grandfather an honest mistake or a convenient one — and does the answer change how the correction should be made?
This is one of the most multi-sourced pages in the Wallis material, and the scholars converge tightly: Tompkins proves the textual borrowing, Mallinson confirms the Tantric language of the haṭha classics, and the primary texts confess their own parentage — there's little internal disagreement about the facts. The productive tension is between this scholarly consensus and the practitioner culture that ignores it. The historians have established the Tantric lineage of haṭha-yoga about as firmly as such things get established; the global yoga industry continues to invoke Patañjali. Wallis sits at the seam, writing as both the scholar relaying the consensus and the practitioner-advocate urging modern yoga to act on it by realigning with Tantra. Where his insider commitment shows is the closing argument — that modern yoga should re-embed itself in Śaiva Tantra because that's where it "can ultimately be traced back to."7 This moves from description (here's the real history) to prescription (here's what you should therefore do), and a stricter historian might stop at the description. What the page reveals is the gap between established scholarship and living practice: knowing a lineage's true origin and a tradition acting on that knowledge are different things, and a hundred years of institutional habit (teacher-trainings, the Patañjali chant) can keep a practice bowing to an ancestor that careful scholarship has already disproven — the correction exists; the culture hasn't absorbed it.
The bridge: this is a page about a misattributed lineage — a practice claiming a respectable ancestor while its real, less-respectable origin is forgotten or suppressed — which recurs wherever genealogy is curated for prestige rather than accuracy.
The Sharpest Implication If the subtle body, the chakras, the kuṇḍalinī, and the channels — the entire energetic apparatus that makes yoga yoga rather than calisthenics — are Tantric and not Patañjalian, then millions of practitioners are doing Tantra while believing, and being taught, that they're doing something else, something safely distanced from Tantra's reputation. The practice quietly carries the lineage the culture around it disavows. Take that seriously and the modern yoga world is built on a disavowal of its own grandmother: it kept her technology (the kuṇḍalinī she raised, the channels she mapped) while crediting a tidier ancestor who barely mentioned the body. The destabilizing question for any serious practitioner is whether you can really run a tradition's engine while refusing its source — whether the subtle-body practices can deliver what they were built to deliver when severed from the nondual Śaiva metaphysics that gave them their meaning, or whether the disavowal leaves you with the machinery of a path and the map of a different, incompatible one.
Generative Questions