Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c12.s3.1

c12.s3.1

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.