THE HISTORY OF YOGA
I can provide here only the merest thumbnail sketch and, if you wish to inform yourself more about the long history of Yoga, recommend that you study my book The Yoga Tradition. This is the most comprehensive historical overview available anywhere. But be prepared for challenging reading and a fairly large tome.
The history of Yoga can conveniently be divided into the following four broad categories:
Vedic Yoga
Preclassical Yoga
Classical Yoga
Postclassical Yoga
These categories are like static snapshots of something that is in actuality in continuous motion—the “march of history.”