
Contents
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Introduction Introduction
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Origins of Yoga Origins of Yoga
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The Ascetic Reform Movements and the Upaniṣads The Ascetic Reform Movements and the Upaniṣads
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The Transition to Classical Yoga The Transition to Classical Yoga
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Classical Yoga and the Pātañjalayogaśāstra Classical Yoga and the Pātañjalayogaśāstra
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Conclusion Conclusion
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Abbreviations Abbreviations
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References References
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5 Hinduism and Meditation: Yoga
Get accessBjarne Wernicke-Olesen is a Research Lecturer at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and a tutor in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sanskrit at the Faculty of Theology and Religion, University of Oxford. He is the director of the Śākta Traditions Research Programme at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies, and his research focuses on goddess traditions, yoga, and asceticism in South Asia.
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Published:10 November 2020
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Abstract
Yoga, meditation, and asceticism have been intimately linked throughout Indian religious history since the early beginnings in the ascetic reformism of India’s “axial age.” Traditional yoga addresses the main concerns of the ascetic reformism and is a practical method to solve the problem of suffering and attain liberation from this world. It primarily refers to the practice of meditation as described and systematized in the later classical yoga of Patañjali, where yoga is a synonym for non-cognitive samādhi, the highest state of consciousness. As indicated in the Upaniṣads and the yoga-auxiliaries, meditation consists in stilling the body, the senses, and the mind through a withdrawal of the senses, breath-control, and fixing the mind on a single point (including god or īśvara) as a way to reach samādhi. These techniques were combined with Sāṃkhya philosophy and other ideas and terminology (especially Buddhist) from the ascetic reformism discourse and systematized into a whole by Patañjali in the Pātañjalayogaśāstra in the fourth century ce. Via this kind of Brahmanical Sanskritic adaptation of ascetic practices, yoga and meditation became gradually incorporated into the mainstream of Indian religious life and were successfully exported to the Western world almost two millennia later.
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