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Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c12.s3: 3. Buddhism and Yoga

Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c12.s3

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English

3. Buddhism and Yoga

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That Yoga, that discipline, physical and mental, which procures its adepts magic powers as well as the highest reward of release or beatification,¹ is old in India is unquestioned. It is a development and rationalization of the asceticism, Tapas, which is acclaimed in the Veda as all powerful, and it stands clearly in close relation with the metaphysics both of the Upaniṣads and the early Sāṃkhya. The effort of the thinkers of the Upaniṣads to realize the absolute resulted in aiming at the divorce of the self from the things of empiric life; in such a result as was attained in deep dreamless sleep we have a condition suggesting union with the absolute, and the motive is given to adopt practices which will produce artificially a trance wherein realization of the absolute may become real. But the end is adaptable; the seeking of trance is too valuable and attractive to the Indian spirit to fail to be accommodated to any system of philosophy, and Yoga persists in close union with Sāṃkhya through the changes of that doctrine. Its first definite appearance in the Upaniṣads is, consistently enough, contemporaneous with the emergence of Sāṃkhya ideas in the Katha Upaniṣad. By the time of early Buddhism the ascetics had perfected Yoga practices more and more energetically, and the Buddhists took them over with more than good will, regardless of the fact that the Yogin was a firm believer in the self which was denied by the Buddhist.

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¹ Poussin, *Bouddhisme*, p. 361. See Senart, RHR. xlii. 345 f.; Oldenberg, LUAB., pp. 257 ff., 319 ff.; Beckh, *Buddhismus*, ii. 10 ff, 72 f.

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It is, however, an error to exaggerate the situation or to treat Buddhism as a branch of Yoga. True, the master attained the saving enlightenment by trance; the four noble truths mention trance as the last of the members of the noble eightfold path to the destruction of misery; the texts contemplate frequent use of trance. But it does not appear in the chain of causation; ignorance and intuition as the cause of misery, and of its removal are not essentially bound up with trance; and many narratives reveal the attainment of enlightenment without recourse to this means. The importance of Buddhism does not rest in its Yoga aspect, but that is not to deny the powerful influence which Yoga had upon its theory and practice.

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The four ordinary meditations or trances of Buddhism correspond in general with the four stages of conscious concentration (*samādhi*) of the classical Yoga,¹ and, what is important, we have in the *Mahābhārata* a description of the first stage of concentration which expressly mentions the Buddhist features of initial and sustained application and of the separation (*viveka*) of the mind, doubtless from desire and impurity, for we cannot here read in the technical Sāmkhya-Yoga terminology of distinction between spirit and matter. In the four or five matterless or formless meditations we have the Yoga² parallel of the achievement of infinity, and the Buddhist conceptions of the attainment of the infinity of intelligence and infinity of space. Āḷāra Kālāma and Uddaka, two teachers of the Buddha, attained also the realms of nothingness and neither ideation nor non-ideation; the Buddha who could surpass them in this regard claims to be able to do so through the possession of the five qualities of faith, energy, thought, concentration and wisdom, and these five qualities appear in the Yoga as the necessary conditions for trance.³ There is a precise parallel in the Yoga⁴ for the series of four Brahma-vihāras of friendship, sympathy with sorrow, sympathy with happiness, and indifference, and the term Brahmavihāra is sufficient to prove Brahmanical, and perhaps Yoga origin. Significant also is the use of the terminology Citta and Nirodha of thought and its suppression in either system.

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¹ YS. i. 17; MBh. xii. 195. 15; Hopkins, JAOS. xxii. 357.

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² YS. ii. 47.

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³ MN. i. 164.

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⁴ YS. i. 33; Kern, *Ind. Buddh.*, p. 54.

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It is possible also that from the Yoga Buddhism borrowed the conception of a carefully planned regulation of psychical life in order to attain the desired end, and it is certainly interesting to recognize that the Yoga, at least in its later representatives, is conscious of the necessity of avoiding inflicting needless pain on the body. The rule to choose a pleasant spot of rest for meditation is in the Çvetāçvatara Upanisad as well as in Buddhism, and we hear of the feeling of lightness and gladness of the Buddhist monk as well as of the Yogin.

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Much more doubtful is the question whether the Yoga influenced the development of Buddhist theory, since we do not know with any precision the form of Yoga in the centuries when Buddhism was forming its Canon. It is possible, in view of the frequency with which the epic connects the conception of Nirvāṇa with Yoga, that the term was borrowed hence by Buddhism. It is certainly remarkable that the Yoga should use of the nature of existence the terms ‘impermanent, impure, misery, not-self’, and the presence of ignorance at the head of the chain of causation can hardly stand apart from the fact that the Yoga with the Sāmkhya makes ignorance the cause of the misery of the connexion of the spirit and matter, and ranks it also as the first of the five infections or defilements (kleça), a term taken over by Buddhism, and the ground of the others. It is far more doubtful if we can accept the idea that it is from the Yoga that Buddhism borrows the system of four noble truths; apart from the possibility of a common borrowing from medical science, the Yoga division is far too late and unimportant in the system to be accepted as the origin of the Buddhist.¹

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¹ The chain of causation may conceivably be connected with YS. iv. 11 (RHR. xlii. 359). The magic power of a Buddhist is akin to YS. iii. 27. It is less likely that the four stages of Arahantship are connected with the four degrees of Yogins, YS. iii. 51. That, in the Jhānas, Vitarka and Vicāra refer to cognition of the sensible and super-sensible (YS. i. 44 f.) is implausible, despite Beckh, *Buddhismus*, ii. 46; Geiger, PD., p. 82, n. 1.

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