In September 1893, Swami Vivekananda stood before the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago and told an American audience that Hinduism was not a heap of superstitions. Three years later, after a winter of classes in New York, he published “Raja Yoga” (1896). There he went further. Patanjali’s yoga, he said, was a science. Not like a science. A science, as exact as chemistry, open to anyone willing to do the experiment on their own mind.Start with what science asks for. Karl Popper put it plainly in “The Logic of Scientific Discovery” (1934): a claim is scientific only if it can, in principle, be shown wrong. You make a prediction, you test it, and if it fails, you drop the idea. Using words like “force” or “energy” does not make a theory scientific. Neither does saying it rests on experience. What matters is the willingness to be refuted. Vivekananda’s yoga never offered that. Does prana belong in physics?Look at prana. In the Yoga Sutra, prana is breath. Sutra 1.34 speaks of exhaling and holding the breath to steady the mind. Sutra 2.49 defines pranayama as regulating the flow of breath in and out. That is all. Modest, physical, practical.Vivekananda turned this breath into the sum of every force in the universe, and placed gravity, electricity and the movement of thought all under its name. The reasoning went like this. Prana feels like energy. Energy is a word from physics. So prana belongs to physics. That is a metaphor for wearing the clothes of a definition. Energy in physics has units. It can be measured, written into equations, conserved, and tested again in another lab by someone who dislikes you. Prana has none of this. Vivekananda borrowed the prestige of physics and left its discipline behind.Ether died in physics, but yoga books kept it He did the same with akasha. He matched it with the luminiferous ether of nineteenth-century physics, the invisible medium that was supposed to fill space and carry light. It made ancient Indian cosmology look as if it had arrived early at modern science. In February 1896, he even wrote to his English friend E.T. Sturdy about meeting Nikola Tesla, who, he said, believed he could show mathematically that force and matter could be reduced to potential energy. Vivekananda saw in this a proof of Vedanta waiting to happen.Story continues below this adThen the ether died. Michelson and Morley failed to detect it in 1887. Einstein made it unnecessary in 1905. Vivekananda himself died in 1902, so he cannot be blamed for missing relativity. His followers can. The ether stayed in the yoga books long after it left the physics books. A science corrects itself when the evidence changes. This “science” simply froze at the year of its founder’s death.When yogic powers escaped scientific scrutiny The siddhis show the problem most clearly. The third chapter of the Yoga Sutra lists powers such as becoming invisible, entering another body, and knowing past lives. Vivekananda presented these as the results of mastering prana, natural laws that materialist Western science had not yet grasped.He was quick to call Western scientists rigid. He never applied the same test to yogic claims. No experiment was proposed. No failure was ever allowed to count.There is an awkward detail here. Patanjali himself was cautious about these powers. Sutra 3.37 says they are attainments only for the outward-turned mind, and obstacles to samadhi. The old text is more sceptical about its own wonders than its modern champion was.Story continues below this adHow Yoga became “science” Where did this way of talking come from? Not from Patanjali. It came from the air of the 1890s. The Theosophical Society, founded in New York in 1875 by Helena Blavatsky and Henry Olcott, had already been mixing evolution, magnetism and electricity with Asian religious ideas for two decades. Blavatsky’s “Isis Unveiled” came out in 1877. Vivekananda mocked the Theosophists in his letters, but he worked in the same market and spoke much the same language to the same American seekers. Elizabeth De Michelis, in “A History of Modern Yoga” (2004), traces “Raja Yoga” to exactly this blend of Western esotericism, Brahmo reform, and Vedanta. The book is a product of its decade, written for its audience. It is not a recovery of ancient India.None of this makes yoga worthless. Sitting still, watching the breath, quieting the mind: these do something real for people, and modern medicine studies some of those effects, using its own methods. But a feeling of certainty, however intense, is not evidence. An inner experience cannot be repeated by someone else in another room. Patanjali never claimed otherwise. Vivekananda did, because in 1896, the word “science” opened doors in America that the word “religion” kept shut.That was a sales decision. Students should learn to tell the difference.Story continues below this ad(Devdutt Pattanaik is a renowned mythologist who writes on art, culture and heritage.) Post read questions1. Swami Vivekananda’s presentation of yoga as a science reflected both his interpretation of Indian philosophy and the intellectual climate of nineteenth-century America. Discuss.2. The use of scientific terminology does not necessarily make a claim scientific. Explain with reference to concepts such as energy, force and consciousness.3. Examine how nineteenth-century scientific discoveries influenced attempts to establish a relationship between Vedanta and modern physics.Story continues below this adShare your thoughts and ideas on UPSC Special articles with ashiya.parveen@indianexpress.com.Click Here to read the UPSC Essentials magazine for October 2026. 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