On the meaning of the word Yoga.
P. Masson-Oursel
Eric Serejski (Tr.)
Revue de l’histoire des religions. 1913. No 68, pp. 18-31
The history of the word Yoga is coextensive with the entire history of Indian speculation, of which this concept was one of the essential factors. Not only is it pertains to the special doctrine which bears this name, perhaps the oldest of the philosophies of India, but it has imposed itself on most systems. Hence, early in the day, the word took on diverse meanings, of which the Indians themselves were astonished, admitting that the primitive meaning, or at least the relation between the original sense and the accessory senses, escaped them. Two works of inspiration and of extremely disparate times, the “Sarvadarçana-saṃgraha”, work of Mādhava (twelfth century), and the “Bhagavad-Gītā”, composed between the 2nd century before and the 2nd century A.C., will show us, by way of examples, the multiplicity of the values attributed to the word Yoga, and how vague became the meaning of this term.[1]
While the “Yoga Sūtras”, attributed to Patañjali, and which can date from the 2nd century BC,[2] expressly admit only a technical sense of the word Yoga: “the restriction of the modifications of the mind”;[3] The Patañjali darśana, fifteenth chapter of the “Sarvadarçana-saṃgraha”, juxtaposes to this first meaning three other meanings. Yoga is defined, according to Yājñavalkya, as “the conjunction of the individual soul and the supreme soul” (saṃyogo yoga ity ukto jīvātma paramātmanoḥ).[4] It is then defined by contemplation, samādhi (yogaḥ samādhir iti); And, further, by the “practice of mortification, recitation and submission to the Lord”, considered as means of producing Yoga (Sā ca tapaḥ svādhyāye ‘śvara praṇidhānāni kriyā yogasādhanatvād yoga iti). Mādhava observes that the latter sense is indirect, as when, defining the means by the end, it is said: “butter is longevity” (yathāyur ghṛtam iti). But he is surprised to find that Yoga is sometimes glossed as Samādhi, for here the whole is defined by the part: Does not Patañjali place samādhi among the eight limbs (aṅgāni, YS 2.29) of Yoga? He rightly remarks that the most technical meaning, that of the Yoga Sūtras, is already a deviation from the etymological sense: “Since,” he says, “we read in the root lists that the root yuj is used in the sense of joining, does not the word Yoga, which derives from it, signify conjunction, instead of restriction? (nanu yujir yoga iti saṃyogārtha tayā paripaṭhitādyujerniṣpanno yogaçabdaḥ saṃyogavacana eva syān na tunirodhavacanaḥ[5]). In support of this objection, he alleges the citation of Yājñavalkya; However, he does not know what conclusion to draw from it, for, indeed, the union of two souls and the restriction of the modalities of the thinking principle are different notions, even though one would take into account an intermediate formula loaned by Mādhava in the Pāśupatas: “Yoga is the conjunction of the soul with God through the mediation of the intellect” (cittādvāreṇātmeçvarasaṃbandho Yogaḥ[6]).
Though anterior by at least ten centuries, the Bhagavad-Gītā was already interpreting the word Yoga in a multitude of senses difficult to reconcile. This term is sometimes synonymous with human practice,[7] or with divine power, a maker of prestige,[8] sometimes with the union of man with a function, a determinate faculty.[9] In the latter case, it is difficult to decide whether the meaning is: united to such faculty, or: finding unity in such faculty; The translators gladly contented themselves with expressions such as: devoted to, (Deussen: Hingebung an... Garbe: Ergebung, Versenkung). Occasionally, Yoga is “defined by indifference” (proktaḥ sāmyena, BhG 6.33); or by the “untying of the bonds of pain” (duḥkha-saḿyoga-viyogaḿ, BhG 6.23). Obviously the word Yoga contains, in itself, a meaning of its own, for it is made frequent use of the participle yukta [युक्त], “joined”, “in union”, used absolutely.[10] There is no mention, however, of the technical meaning possessed by the word Yoga in the Yoga Sūtras (cittavṛttinirodha, ‘quieting of the mind’), maybe because this text had not yet been very widespread when the epic was elaborated, or rather because the “Bhagavad-Gītā” was the work, not of an authentic yōgin, but of an eclectic author of the sect of the Bhāgavatas. Nevertheless, if this last alternative was exact, the poem would not cease to present a documentary value for our evaluation.
It would be necessary to be able to go back very high in the history of Indian thought, in order to have some chance of discovering the primitive meaning of the word Yoga. The inductions we are going to attempt will be hypothetical but not entirely arbitrary, for they will seek to interpret the data of the Yoga Sūtras according to the older Upaniṣads, especially the “Chāndogya”. Though the oldest of these texts, dating back from about the sixth century BC, hardly employ the very term Yoga, it is certainly in the conceptions which they testify, that the Yoga philosophy, like most other systems, drew its inspiration.
The first meaning does not appear to be “union with God”; this is doubtless a derivative acceptation. Tradition has it that the Yoga system has been a practical transposition of the Sāṃkhya’s speculative doctrines; Then as the Sāṃkhya is allied, the Yoga theism must not be primitive. Certainly it occurs in the Yoga Sūtras (1.23-27; 2.1, 45), the oldest text of the school; But Garbe has established[11] that it plays only an accessory role in it and does not serve to define the concept of Yoga. We note that the “Bhagavad-Gītā” itself, however theistic, often uses the expression yukta in an absolute sense. If ātma-yogāt, 11.47, can mean: “by uniting to me, who is the supreme Ātman”, this term can also be equivalent to “by uniting your ātman”, meaning that many passages of the poem present.[12] These two meanings, though very different, are closely connected, for it is explicitly asserted that the unification of the self is the means of union with God: mām evaiṣyasi yuktvaivam ātmānaṃ (9.34). Here is, according to a faithful theist, the clear admission that Yoga implies an inner state or act (habitus, ἕξις [héxis], as a Latin or a Greek would say) before becoming synonymous with fusion with another being.
The etymology suggests that this state or action consists in joining, adjusting, maintaining together, at the cost of an effort. The root yuj [युज्] finds a concrete use in the idea of harnessing horses to a chariot. The Ṛgveda[13] uses this same root, metaphorically, to describe the arrangements of the priests preparing to celebrate a sacrifice: “they harness their spirit” to this work (yuñjate manas). Yoga must therefore have meant not so much a “unification”, in the sense of the Alexandrine “simplification”, ἕνωσις [hénōsis], but an effort to introduce cohesion into a multiplicity, to fight a dispersion. The plurality of factors employed is preserved, but they are grouped in a bundle, and hence it is forbidden to them any manner of being irreconcilable with the close union imposed upon them. Thus it is understood that the adjustment is a concentration, and that the concentration supposes a certain coercion exerted on the associated elements. Indeed, the meaning of “restriction” or, metaphorically, “control,” is alone invoked by the Yoga Sūtras that define Yoga by nirodha.
But it would be necessary to know upon what factors are exerting the effort of grouping and restriction, what is the diversity that must be contained and curbed. According to the text attributed to Patañjali, it is the modifications of the thinking organ (cittavṛtti). But we do not believe it is impossible to go back to an earlier, less clearly psychological, phase of the doctrine. Our abstract and schematic reconstruction can find here a common thread, no longer in the literal use of the word Yoga, but in the common fund of the doctrines or practices of the followers of Yoga. Now, among all the Indian systems, Yoga is unquestionably the one for which bodily discipline and attitudes of the body are most important; It is an asceticism, less in the sense of mortification, than in the proper meaning of the Greek word; It is not simply, in an abstract way, a rule of life, but a regulation of vital functions. The peculiar conduct of the yogis, who have never ceased to multiply on Indian soil, peremptorily attests it: stiffened in immobility or dislocated in acrobatics, charlatans or fanatics devote an intense energy to subtract elementary physiological activities from the unconscious mechanism of the Instinct, to subject them to the mind.
Now, among these functions, those which the yogis have always disciplined with the most insistence, are the phases of respiration. Exercises of this kind belong exclusively to Yoga, they find a place in the most speculative treatises of the doctrine; a place perhaps restricted, but mentioned with persistence through the expositions of the most diverse epochs. By this very special fact, Yoga differs essentially from the preoccupations of salvation by knowledge, by ritual, or by devotion, in which the attention of other systems was absorbed. The more peculiar this feature appears, without analogy, the more it must be supposed that it expresses the primitive form of the doctrine. On the other hand, the first Upaniṣads teach us that that the old belief, prior to the philosophies, conceived life, indistinctly corporeal and psychic, as the result of the assistance of several vital breaths, the prāṇas. It is therefore very probable that Yoga, in its original form a pure respiratory gymnastics, consisted of a concentration of the breaths.[14] This hold of the willpower over the elements of life allowed, it was perhaps thought, men to have the ability through his effort to gather and contain himself by unifying himself. By the tacitly admitted principle of the identity of the microcosm and the macrocosm, this doctrine was in accord with the ancient cosmological theories of the objective world explained by an aerial principle, vāyu, the Wind. It was therefore enough to control oneself in order to conquer the whole universe; Indeed, yogis have always thought that the more intense their concentration was, the more it was equivalent to a mastery over the whole nature; Hence the supernatural powers which they flattered themselves to acquire.[15] This discipline, moreover, assumed a religious value: divine powers presided over each breath, obscurely represented in mythical forms; Or rather, for the Indians were rarely fooled by these myths, every breath is a sacred formula; Their adjustment results in a “body of mantras”; Their condensation makes the absolute itself, under the within the consideration of the unique, incomparable and eternal syllable Oṃ.[16] Asceticism is a prayer that not only invokes but realizes the supreme existence; The physiology of the prāṇas is a ritualism; It is fitting that life be a liturgy, since the absolute is the ritual Word, the Brahman.
As observation and reasoning developed, physiological and psychological theories were formed, to which this essential notion of concentration presided. The convergence of the seventy-two thousand veins in the pericardium attests anatomically the unity of the breaths; Similarly the manas, which sits in the heart (Aitarēya upaniṣad 1.2.4), constitutes, to speak like Aristotle, a κοινη αἴσθησις [koinē aesthesis], the common root of the various senses. But this unity, so natural that it is inscribed in anatomy, is intensified by ascetic exercises. Their effect most frequently desired by yogis is to concentrate all life in this suṣumṇā artery, which, rising from the middle of the body, connects the “lotuses” presiding over organic functions, which we could refer to as the medullary and cerebral nervous centers. The Chāndogya Upaniṣad had inaugurated these physiological speculations, declaring that suṣumṇā is a path which, from the heart, allows us to rise up to the top of the head and unite with the Brahman.[17] Later, this artery would become a region lower than the heart, so that it may better serve as a link between the various regions of the body; Some will retain, others will repudiate, the idea of a cranial cleft, according to whether one defines Yoga as a union with a supra-human principle or, on the contrary, as a concentration of organic activity: this anatomy has varied like the speculative convictions, and progressively became more complex, as in Tantrism. The “Yoga Sūtras” and more generally the Rāja Yoga often abstained from similar doctrines; But this was not the case for Haṭha Yoga or Kriyā Yoga; For the mystical value of each posture (āsana) which it recommends is explained by the conformation and functions of the body. According to the “Gheraṇḍa Saṁhitā”, it is a question of provoking the awakening[18] of the force Kuṇḍalinī, which in its spontaneous position winds like a serpent in the lower body so as to raise it up Level of the individual soul (jīva) and to combine it with the Spirit, Śivā (Gh Sam. 3.10.40). It sometimes seems that the Kuṇḍalinī, pressed by the respiratory exercises, tries to find air by the cranial valve; It is rather, however, because the internal organ is excited by the wind,[19] that it is necessary to moderate the respiration, in order to appease the thought.
If we are to believe the “Haṭhayoga pradīpikā”, the yōgin tends simply to retreat into the suṣumṇā, renouncing all external perception: there is no question of uniting with the absolute, but of remaining inert, “Like a bird deprived of its wings “(HP 4.92). A great indecision has thus reigned over the organic process in which mystical asceticism is realized; But in the two principal interpretations of the idea of Yoga, union with a superior principle or subjective unification, it is the idea of concentration which has always imposed itself.
The same was true of psychological doctrines. The concentration of the mind is initially negative, as the consequence of a certain number of abstentions: controlled intemperances or inhibited movements (see the definitions of yāma, 2.30, Yoga Sūt., niyama, 32, āsana, 46, prāṇāyāma, 49); Then the pratyāhāra retracts the sensory functions (Chāṇd Up. 8.15, Kṣur., 3, Maitr. 6.25); The dhāraṇa fixes the thought (citta) on a point (3.1); The dhyāna directs and maintains continuously the flow of thought on this single point (2); The samādhi absorbs thought in this single object, emptying it of its own form (3). These limbs (angāni) of Yoga represent successive stages of an asceticism that could be formulated: energy put at the service of inertia. All this discipline would be meaningless if it were a matter of raising our reflection to the intuition of a Supreme Being; To translate dhyāna as meditation and samādhi as contemplation risks making us misunderstand that the yōgin pretends to exalt his thought only by annihilating it. The resorption of the manas or the citta in the atman, to which the psychological process of Yoga is reduced, is not, at least initially, an aspiration to spirituality, but to impassibility. This is the only purpose sought by firmly withdrawing within oneself one’s internal organ (ātmasthe manasi [आत्मस्थे मनसि]). This asceticism is in no way a search for pain; On the contrary, the posture must be both stable and comfortable (2.46 sthira-sukham āsanam); And the Vāiśeṣika sūtras define Yoga by the absence of pain.[20] In this regard, Yoga, whatever its discipline, tackles the same problem as the other philosophical systems of India: it wants to put an end to suffering. His solution consists, it seems, in a renunciation not only of the life of the world, such as the renunciation of the Brahmin sannyasin [saṃnyāsa] or the Buddhist bhikṣu, but even the life of the microcosm; It is an effort to find solitude by even abstracting from this city with multiple doors that is the body. Thus, for psychology as for physiology, the notion of concentration of the breathes leads to the idea of retreat; Yoga, which meant joining, came to mean isolation (kaivalyaṃ); We perceive only the idea of concentration of the breaths as an intermediary or link between these two concepts.
Our hypothesis, of which we cannot disguise its partially conjectural character, may find some confirmation in various historical considerations. The evolution of the word Yoga occurred in correlation with that of the term Ātman. The Ātman referred to the personality indistinctly as body and mind: it was the self of each one; Similarly, the prāṇas are both principles of physical and spiritual life; In particular Kuṇḍalinī is called ātmarūpa. To collect oneself in the Ātman, that is to say to practice Yoga, is not therefore to leave oneself, but rather to collect oneself in oneself. Yoga was simply self-control.[21] Later only, when the Ātman was hypostatized into a metaphysical absolute, one and unique, the individual souls of which are supposed to be only participations, Yoga was conceived as an effort of man to surpass himself and unite himself to a transcendent principle. This transformation was to take place under the influence of the Vedanta. But traces of the primitive meaning subsisted alongside the new meaning: for example, Vijñānabhikṣu, in the sixteenth century, in the “Yogasāra Saṃgraha”, I, p. 1, gives the following definition: “Yoga consists in the suppression of modifications of the thinking organ, which definitively makes the mind reside in its true nature” (Puruṣasyātyantika svarūpāvasthiter hetuçcittavṛttinirodho yoga iti).[22] This true nature is undoubtedly the absolute, the Puruṣa, —a term whose history is parallel to that of Ātman—, but it is also ourselves, or rather the absolute in us.[23] On the other hand, there was a remote period when the very word of Ātman referred to breath, the respiratory function as the principle of life; If this primitive acceptation were forgotten, it is probable that expressions such as ātmayoga, and all similar expressions which we have noted, first alluded to the concentration of breaths. At a later period, the “Bhāgavata Purāṇa” still speaks of the aerial nature of the interior fire of the masters of Yoga (yogeśvarāṇāṃ ... pavanāntarātmanām, 2.2.23). It is precisely when the original meaning of the word Ātman was lost, that Yoga was defined by the resorption of the internal sense in the Ātman. But it turns out that before signifying a thinking principle, citta, the manas would have been a sensory organ, therefore a breath, prāṇa. It is understandable that Yoga philosophy has never given up its practices of respiratory gymnastics, for most of the concepts on which it was based had presented, in a prehistoric cosmology, but never entirely disappeared, of which the explanatory principle was the wind or the air, a very concrete meaning.
The Ātman never became so transcendent, that the point of view of immanence retained its legitimacy. Thus, even as it became synonymous with an effort of the individual to surpass himself and to unite either in Brahman or Kṛṣṇa, Yoga remained a subjective, internal, aspiration to unity. Hence there are so many apparently contradictory expressions in the “Bhagavad-Gītā”, which attest the fusion, at least in the school of the Bhāgavatas, between ancient asceticism and theistic piety; Yoga approaches bhakti, confident adoration, devotional love, although expressions such as bhakti yoga (14.26),[24] bhaktyā yukto (8.10) maintain the specificity of the two concepts. Moreover, the word Yoga kept from its origins the notion of effort, coercion, firm will: a conceptual factor that preserved this term from a complete assimilation to the quietist idea of abandonment. It comes to the Bhagavad-Gītā, this manual on quietism, which is also a vehement exhortation to action, even violence, to present Yoga as a force, bala [बल],[25] or as a discipline assiduously practiced, as a repeated and persevering exercise, abhyāsa.[26]
This notion of an inner discipline is so essential to Yoga that it is found in a divergent branch of the philosophy of that name in one of the principal Buddhist schools. Buddhism, which, from its primitive form, had borrowed a great many of Yoga,[27] came to incorporate it entirely according to its own dogmas. Certain followers of the Great Vehicle, among the most illustrious, wanted to adopt the kind of life prescribed by ancient Yoga: the Yogāvacaras, of which the Milinda Pañha speaks,[28] or, according to the name which prevailed, the Yogācāras. Now to lead a life of yōgin was for them, here without doubts, as for the genuine yogis, to subjugate themselves in catalepsy, but nevertheless to exercise by themselves a demanding practical and intellectual discipline pursued through a succession of phases which convey to a state of perfection sufficient to itself. If these stages are objectified in degrees of the being, or, as an Asaṅga says, in bhūmis (earths), if the mystical psychology was projected into ontology, this was a novelty, but it does not mask the persistence of a method borrowed from Yoga.
The proof that Yoga meant above all an effort of concentration, a sense which always imposed itself, in spite of the adventitious acceptances, we would find it willingly in this fact, that, almost alone among the Indian philosophical systems, Yoga gave precisely the example of a method, that is to say of a determined process giving access to a definite end. A practice, an effort, does not immediately give its whole result, as does a knowledge or a faith. The Sāṃkhya, however close its logic to that of Yoga and the Vedānta, were only very simple doctrines and intuitions about the double real and illusory aspect of given reality. Their distinction between truth and error was their first and last word. If we put aside the Nyāya, whose strictly formal dialectic is not strictly bound up with any metaphysics, and the Pūrvā Mīmāṅsā, whose criticism is also all formal, concerns only exegesis, there is only Yoga that conceived the conquest of the absolute in the form of a laborious undertaking and a long-term progress through phases which condition one another, without it being possible to burn any stage. There is reason to believe, therefore, that the idea of an intellectual method appeared in India as the conceptual transposition of a discipline, at first entirely practical; To bring this idea was, so to speak, the mission of Yoga; For through his influence this notion of a spiritual method extended to primitive Buddhism, to the pietism of the Bhāgavatas, and the Mahayanist school of the Yogācāras.
[1] In his Histoire des idées théosophiques dans l’Inde, vol. 1, 1907, p. 300-302, Mr. P. Oltramare noted some of the most common meanings of the word Yoga.
[2] Garbe, Bhagavad Gītā, Einleitung.
[3] Yogaḥ cittavṛtti nirodhaḥ, YS 1.2. We can understand the word “nirodha” in various ways: “restriction”, “control”, or “destruction”. The commentary of Bhoja [Rāja-Martaṅda (Rājamārtaṇḍa) or Patañjali-Yogasūtra-Bhāṣya] says: nivarttanam [निवर्त्तनम्]. Ballantyne translates: “the hindering, or the preventing” (Aphorisms of the Yoga Philosophy, Allahabad, 1852, p. 3). Rāma Prasāda translates as: “the restraint of mental modifications” (Patañjali’s Yoga sūtra. vol. IV of the Sacred Books of the Hindus, Allahabad, 1910). Swāmi Vivekānanda: “restraining the mindstuff from taking various forms”; the same author, at sūtra 12, translates nirodha as: “control”. Deussen (Geschichte der Philosophie, I, iii, p. 513 et suiv.) : « die Unterdrückung der Funktionen des Bewusstseins ».
[4] [See also Garuḍ Purāṇa.]
[5] Ed. Âpte, p. 129; trad. Cowell, p. 242.
[6] Ed. Âpte, p. 102.
[7] For example BhG 3.3, where jñāna-yoga is opposed to karma-yoga as Sāṃkhya to Yoga; BhG 6.2 opposes yogaṁ to sannyāsam, renunciation, although these two terms are right after identified: BhG 6.3.
[8] BhG 9.5, and 11.8: paśya me yogam aiśvaram, “look at my sovereign Yoga”; BhG 11.9: mahā-yogeśvaro hariḥ, “Hari, Lord of Great Yoga”; see BhG 18.75: yogeśvarāt; BhG 7.25: yoga-māyā-samāvṛtaḥ, “I am (says the Blessed One) wrapped in the illusion of Yoga.”
[9] Abhyāsa-yoga, 8.8; abhyāsa-yogena BhG 12.9; — bhakti-yogena, BhG 14.26, — jñāna-yogena, BhG 3.3; 16.1; — karma-yogena, BhG 3.3; 5.2; — buddhi-yogād, BhG 2.49; 10.10; 18.57; — dhyāna-yoga, BhG 18.52; — ātma-yogāt, BhG 11.47.
[10] BhG 6.8; 14; 17; 18; 47; see BhG 6.12: yuñjyād yogam.
[11] Sāṃkhya Philosophie, p. 40 ff.
[12] BhG 6.10: yogī yuñjīta satatam ātmānaṃ; 15: yuñjann evaṃ sadātmānaṃ yogī; 19: yuñjato yogam ātmanaḥ; 28: yuñjann evaṃ sadātmānaṃ yogī. Cf. Mahānār. Up., 63, 21; and Maitr. Up., 6, 3: ātmānam yuñjita; Śvet. Up. 2, 9.
[13] RV 5.81.1. We owe this information to Mr. Louis Finot. [See also Coomaraswamy, What is civilization, 10.]
[14] J. Dahlmann remarks, without insisting, but rightly, that Yoga « bedeutet Anspannung der Organe ». Sāṃkhya-Philosophie, 151. [Mahābhārata-Studien: Die Sāṃkhya-Philosophie als Naturlehre und Erlösungslehre.]
[15] The notion of Yoga as a phantasmagoric power, māvā, which we have pointed out among the Bhāgavatas, appears to be only the objectification of an entity of those supposed powers which the yogis possess.
[16] Maitr. Up. 6.25: Yoga understood as the link between Prāṇa and Oṃ.
[17] Chānd. Up. 8, 6, 5-6. The Bhāgavata Purāṇa takes up this idea: the one who practiced Yoga, going out through the luminous suṣumṇā, and going through the world of Brahmā, will gather at Vaiśvānara (vaiśvānaraṃ yāti vihāyasā gataḥ suṣumṇayā brahmapathena śociṣā, 2.2.24.1).
[18] Gh Sam. II, § 31: jāgarti [2.43]. Gh Sam. III, 21, § 82; 22, § 84: śaktiprabodhakāriṇī [3.82, 84].
[19] The point in dispute is the meaning of vātāhatam. Nandalal Sinha (who quotes this text about the sūtra V, n, 16, of the “Vāiśeṣika sūtras” of Kaṇāda, Sacred Books of the Hindus, VI, translates: “smitten with air”, as if there was vātahataṃ: but the text carries vālāhatam, “stimulated, shaken by the air.” See Monier Williams, Sanskrit. English Diction., 935, col. a et b. This is the text quoted from the “Skanda purāṇa”: In order to avoid this excitement of the internal organ (citta), it is necessary “to be on one’s guard, to restrict the air, in order to calm the citta , and to restrict the air, to practice Yoga”:
Vātahatam tathā cittaṃ tasmāttasya na viçvaset
ato’nilaṃ nirūndhita cittasya sthairyahetave
marun nirodhanārthāya ṣaḍaṅgaṃ yogam abhyaset.
Here vāta, anila, and marut refer to the vital breath. [See Skanda purāṇa 1.2.55.]
[20] Vāiś 5,2.16 Tadanārambha ātmasthe manasi śarīrasya duḥkhābhāvaḥ saṁyogaḥ (here tad [this] means duḥkhābhāvaḥ, as it appears from the context): “when pleasure or pain are no longer produced, the manas being firmly established within the soul; and when there is no pain in the body, it is Yoga.” [See Vāiś (Tr. Nandalal Sinha, 1923), p. 167.-168.]
[21] BhG 4.27: ātma-saṃyama yogāgnau. Bhāg. Pur. 11.29.1: Self-control is the condition of Yoga.
[22] [See Yogasara-sangraha, Jha (Tr.), 1894, 2018 (Repub.).]
[23] This definition can be found in Chinese and Japanese texts on Yoga, according to Jushinhinso [4:71], who, according to Sadajiro Sugiura (Hindu logic as preserved in China and Japan, p. 12), “maintains the principle of the mutual relation (in the sense of adjustment, reciprocal adaptation: sōō 相應 [xiangying]) of the internal mind to be the true ego.” This definition of Yoga seems to corroborate our interpretation. It would not be surprising that the authentic meaning of the word Yoga would have been better preserved in Chinese texts than on the very soil of India, where different and new ideas obliterated this fundamental meaning. When we learn that the doctors of Ceylon classed Yoga among the “categories of evil” and understood it as the attachment which connects us to transmigration (cf. Aung. Compendium of Philosophy … Abhidhammattha sangaha, a work of the twelfth century, p. 171 of the English translation published by the Pali Text Society), should we see here a strange contradiction in the word Yoga, the name of a philosophy which, like all others, wants to tear us from transmigration, — or simply a spontaneous use of the word Yoga with its etymological value of binding, attachment?
[24] See Bhāgavata Purāṇa, 11.29; 3.29; bhakti and Yoga identified in 3.25.
[25] BhG 8.10: By the force of Yoga directing its breath in the interval, exactly, of both eyebrows yoga-balena caiva bhruvor madhye prāṇam āveśya samyak. When Yoga is hypostatized, we have recognized that it is in the form of a power the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, 1.2.28, speaks of “the force, the maker of prestige, of the Yoga”, of which arms Indra: yoga māyā-balena [3.15.26].
[26] BhG 8.8: abhyāsa-yoga yuktena [अभ्यासयोग = by practice; युक्तेन = being engaged in meditation]. 12.9: abhyāsa-yogena [अभ्यासयोगेन]. Already one of the definitions of Yoga presented by Yoga sūtras, 1.32, was: ekatattvābhyāsa, that M. P. Oltramare (loc. Cit.) translates “the application of thought to the single essence,” as if it were here about the union with God, but which, we believe, can simply mean, by allusion to the fixing of the mind in one attitude and one point, to the exclusion of all the rest, “the sustained, reiterated examination of a single subject “. The preceding sūtras show that it is a question of avoiding the deviations, the distractions, the aberrations of the thinking principle.
[27] Senart, Origines bouddhiques, Conférences du Musée Guimet, t. XXV, 1907.
[28] The questions of King Milinda, volume 1, p. 68, S. B. E.