Buddhist Philosophy in India and Ceylon c12.s3.4

c12.s3.4

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.