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and had his lawyers send out hundreds of threatening notices that charged small studios with violations. He is not alone. In the United States, yoga entrepreneurs have sought to enhance their exclusivity by registering thousands of patents, trademarks, and copyrights.
    Market analysts identify yoga as part of a demographic known as LOHAS—for Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability. Its upscale, well-educated individuals are drawn to sustainable living and ecological initiatives. They drive hybrid cars, buy natural products, and seek healthy lifestyles. Yoga moms (a demographic successor to soccer moms) are an example. According to marketing studies, they tend to buy clothes for their children from such places as Mama’s Earth, its goods made from organic cotton, hemp, and recycled materials.
    One factor that distinguishes modern yoga from its predecessors is its transformation from a calling into a premium lifestyle. Another is that women make up the vast majority of its practitioners, a fact that dramatically influences the nature of its marketplace. Women buy more books than men, read more, spend more on consumer goods, and pay more attention to their health and appearance.
    Yoga Journal —the field’s leading magazine, founded in 1975—claims two million readers and identifies its audience as 87 percent women. It revels in their quality, citing high incomes, impressive jobs, and good educations. A brochure for prospective advertisers notes that more than 90 percent have gone to college.
    The colorful pages of the magazine offer a vivid example of how companies target the demographic. Hundreds of ads promote skin-care products, sandals, jewelry, natural soaps, special vitamins and enzymes, alternative cures and therapies, smiling gurus, and ecofriendly cars. Each issue features an index to advertisers. One of my favorites is Hard Tail, a clothing line whose ads feature attractive women in striking poses. “Forever,” reads the minimalist copy.
    Another is Lululemon Athletica,a hip brand of yoga clothing known for its form-fitting apparel, most especially its ability to shape and display the buttocks to best advantage. Recently, a market analyst identified Lulu’s signature item as the $98 Groove Pant, “cut with all kinds of special gussets and flat seams to create a snug gluteal enclosure of almost perfect globularity, like a drop of water.”
    All of which bears on what yoga (as opposed to its accessories) does for the body and mind or, more precisely, on what gurus, spas, books, instructional videos, merchants, television shows, magazines, resorts, and health clubs say that it does.
    In this regard, it is important to remember that yoga has no governing body. There’s no hierarchy of officials or organizations meant to ensure purity and adherence to agreed-upon sets of facts and poses, rules and procedures, outcomes and benefits. It’s not like a religion or modern medicine, where rigorous schooling, licensing, and boards seek to produce a high degree of conformity. And forget about government oversight. There’s no body such as the Consumer Product Safety Commission or the Food and Drug Administration to ensure that yoga lives up to its promises. Instead, it’s a free-for-all—and always has been. Over the ages, that freedom has resulted in a din of conflicting claims.
    “The beginner,” notes I. K. Taimni, an Indian scholar, “is likely to feel repulsed by the confusion and exaggerated statements.” Taimni wrote that a half century ago. Today the situation is worse. For one thing, the explosion in publishing—print and electronic—has amplified the din into a cacophony. Another factor is the profit motive.
    Billions of dollars are now at stake in public representations of what yoga can do, and the temptations are plentiful to lace declarations with everything from self-deception and happy imprecision to willful misrepresentations and shadings of the truth. Another temptation is to avoid any mention