The Philosophy of the Upanishads c12.s3.t4.3

c12.s3.t4.3

In post-Vedic times the practice of yoga was developed into a formal system with its own text-book (the sûtras of Patañjali). The rise of this system, as its first beginnings in Kâṭh. 3 and 6, S'vet. 2 and Maitr. 6 show, belongs to the time when the original idealism of the Upanishad teaching began already to harden into the realistic philosophy of the Sâṅkhya. On this foundation, which was far from being adapted to its original conception, the later yoga system was raised. This system therefore lays the chief stress on external means (*sâdhana*), and the external results thereby attained (*vibhûti*); and regards the union with the only real âtman, which was the original aim of the yoga, as a separation (*kaivalyam*) of the purusha from the prakṛiti, dismissing entirely into the background that which was properly its chief concern, the meditation on the âtman by means of the syllable *om*. Only the theism was preserved over from the later Upanishads, in contrast to the chosen basis of the Sâṅkhya; and thus external support was secured for the system, although no real life could ever be fostered on this uncongenial ground.¹ A remarkable testimony to this theistic modification of the Sâṅkhya system in the service of the doctrine of the yoga is given by the C'ûlikâ Upanishad, which, starting from the twenty-five principles of the Sâṅkhya, ranks the Îs'vara with them on purely external grounds “as the twenty-sixth” (or probably by the insertion of âtman as twenty-seventh),² and recognises its difference from the purushas only in the freedom with which it drinks from the breasts “of its foster-mother Mâyâ” :—