The History of Buddhist Thought c12.6

c12.6

The practice of mental training has always been a part of the Buddhist system, always, that is, so far as the documents allow us to trace it back. But it appears in the earliest documents (see above, p. 17), and there is no reason to doubt that mental training was a pre-Buddhist practice, and that some forms of it were adopted from other sects. The practice was already known in the Brahmin schools and probably in others by the name of yoga. The training consists in the " yoking " (as yoga literally means) of the mind by fixing it on one subject, and so controlling the attention that everything else is excluded.² It may become a form of self-hypnotization, and in itself has no moral character. There is a resulting state or series of states of mind as the concentration becomes more intense, and the methods of fixing the attention are described in detail by the Buddhist commentators.