The Samkhya System: A History of the Samkhya Philosophy c8.8

c8.8

The theory has often been held that Yoga was first atheistic, and that the theism of the classical system of the Yoga Sūtra and of the epic alike is due to a concession to popular feeling, nor is there any doubt whatever that in the Sūtra the connection of the divinity with the system is really a loose one.∗ But the theory that there was an earlier atheistic Yoga as a philosophical system is clearly not made probable by the evidence of the epic, which shows the Yoga as clearly distinguished from the Sāṃkhya by its twenty-sixth principle, though it ever tries to assimilate the Sāṃkhya to the Yoga, and both to the doctrine of the Brahman. It is, therefore, perfectly possible that the position of the classical Yoga is due to its close association with the Sāṃkhya, which has accentuated its real indifference to the idea of a deity, which is certainly not philosophically, though perhaps historically, essential to the conception of Yoga.