Is tradition a sufficient moral justification?

Can we practise Yoga while participating in violence against other living creatures? While lying? While stealing? While doing drugs or drinking alcohol? While engaging in abusive sexual relationships? While taking more than we need?

Of course we can. I practise Yoga and I’ve done all sorts of harmful things in my life that I deeply regret. None of us arrives morally pure.

But I do think we’re personally responsible for helping build a more ethical and compassionate society than the one we inherited. In many ways, I think humanity is moving in that direction. What I don’t think we should do is use cave dwellers, medieval spiritualists or ancient traditions as our moral compass simply because something was done historically.

When considering ethics and social justice, I think we should begin with those affected by our actions — especially the vulnerable, exploited and harmed — rather than beginning with our own desire to justify comfort, habit, identity or tradition.

Martin Luther King said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”

Practising Yoga invites us to examine how our thoughts, words and actions impact the world around us and all other sentient beings.

If we follow the teachings sincerely, we may find the logical direction is to reduce our participation in exploitation and harm as much as possible.

But we are also living deep in an age of self-reification: the era of neoliberal capitalism, personal branding and influencer culture, where identity itself becomes a product to market and defend. Hyper-individualism encourages us to curate the self, protect the ego and justify our desires, rather than question the wider consequences of how we live.

We can easily get caught in the idea that whatever has been done traditionally must therefore be normal, natural or necessary. We may distort, minimise or justify our behaviour in order to feel more comfortable with it. Rather than using the past to excuse our choices, we can ask more honestly: who is affected by the way I live, consume, speak and relate?

B. Alan Wallace argues that while modern mindfulness is often presented as a secular, non-judgemental technique for stress reduction, traditional Buddhist mindfulness is an ethical and discerning practice designed to reveal interdependence and the moral consequences of our actions in the pursuit of liberation.

So I think Yoga practitioners and teachers are continually faced with a choice: to use philosophy and tradition to reinforce existing preferences and identities, or to allow practice to deepen our sensitivity, challenge our conditioning and expand our sense of responsibility towards others. For me, the latter is where genuine practice begins.