A Tibetan monastery in north India, 1985: Harvard scholar Herbert Benson and his team visited this monastery, high in the Himalayas. They found that the monks practised a form of yoga resulting in a meditative trance so deep it affected their body temperatures. The team filmed monks using their own bodies to dry wet clothes when the outside temperature was -20OC. The monks were able to sleep peacefully on rocky ledges at 15,000 ft, dressed just in light shawls. Benson’s videos stimulated great interest in yoga in the West. Can we say anything about the origins of yoga? To answer this, let’s skip to a different time and place.