The Samkhya System: A History of the Samkhya Philosophy c8.1

c8.1

The Yoga philosophy, according to the epic, is a system which is ancient like the Sāmkhya, and this parallel position belongs to the Yoga in the whole of its historical existence. The practises of Yoga, as they are revealed to us in the Yoga Sūtra of Patañjali, the oldest text-book of the school, contain much that is in itself a relic of very primitive conceptions of the value of psychic states of profound excitement. This tendency to attribute importance to the obtaining of such states is widespread: there is a striking example for this form of belief in the history of Greek religion in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., and in the Ṛgveda itself (x, 136) there is a mention of the mad Muni, probably a predecessor of the later Yogin. It is unnecessary, therefore, to see in the Yoga practice any borrowing* from the aboriginal tribes, though we need not doubt that these tribes practised similar rites and that their influence may have tended to maintain and develop Yoga to the extraordinary popularity which it has achieved in India.