Playboy puts Hindu yogis in a difficult position

FOR centuries, Hindu sects have espoused the benefits of nudity with holy men trekking for miles across India wearing little more than a smile.

Now the religion's ascetics have an unlikely fellow traveller: Hugh Hefner, the Playboy publisher, whose attempt to cash in on the benefits of naked yoga have outraged Hindu leaders.

A video from Playboy features Sara Jean Underwood, a former Playmate of the Year, performing yoga poses. Hindu elders are angry at what they see as the latest in a string of attempts to commercialise an ancient and spiritual practice.

"Hindus are upset over what is the misuse of the age-old and revered system of yoga by Playboy for mercantile greed and we are urging the organisation to withdraw all its yoga-related products," said Rajan Zed, president of the Universal Society of Hinduism.

"Yoga is one of the six systems of orthodox Hindu philosophy and it is highly revered in Hinduism. It is a serious mental and physical discipline by means of which the human soul can unite with the universal soul."

The criticism is the latest salvo to be fired in what some have dubbed the yoga wars, a series of disputes over the alleged hijacking of yoga for profit.

The yoga industry is estimated to be worth $US6billion a year in the United States alone, where recently invented variations include yoga for pets and hot nude yoga.

Money-making yogis have scandalised yoga's purists who believe that the true goal should be the attainment of moksha, a blissful release from the endless cycle of rebirth and death.

India, the birthplace of the art, is striking back at what it calls yoga theft by those who claim techniques that may date back thousands of years as their own inventions.

"Yoga deals with spirituality," said V.K.Gupta, the head of India's Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, a government-funded database that is in the process of recording hundreds of yoga poses to ensure that foreign gurus cannot patent them. "Attempts to trademark the ancient property of humanity are offensive - they hurt," he added.

The yoga wars began in Beverly Hills in 2004 when Bikram Choudhury, a Calcutta-born yoga master, claimed to own a sequence of 26 postures to be performed in a room heated to 40.5C.

He claimed that anybody else who performed what he called hot yoga should pay him a licence fee.

He was sued by a group of yoga activists with whom he agreed an out-of-court settlement but not before he accrued a fortune estimated at $US7million.

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