Among Indologists it is well known that the teaching of Pātañjalayogaśāstra is a blending of Sāṃkhya philosophy and the teachings of Buddhist meditation traditions. Pātañjalayogaśāstra is in many ways a Sāṃkhya tradition of Buddhist meditation. In her book Rethinking ‘Classical Yoga’ and Buddhism: Meditation, Metaphors and Materiality, Karen Obrien-Kop compares conceptual metaphors and selective passages from two Buddhist Sanskrit texts from around the 4th and 5th centuries CE with the Pātañjalayogaśāstra, a text from around the same time period, in order to point towards this Buddhist influence. Although the Buddhist influence on the Pātañjalayogaśāstra is well known, it is often little recognized by modern India-derived yoga schools and their teachers and practitioners, by Hindutva nationalist politicians and their followers, and by some yoga research that is devoted to Hindu teachers and seems permeated with aspirations of developing Hindu yoga theologies.
The current growing field of yoga research has also to some degree been driven by enchantment with contemporary Indian and Hindu yoga traditions and interpretations. However, the field of yoga research is also producing valuable critical research. The book under review belongs to this latter category and is a welcome contribution. The main object of the book, Obrien-Kop states, is to enlarge the concept of “Classical Yoga,” which in current yoga culture and scholarship mostly refers only to the Pātañjalayogaśāstra tradition, in order to include Buddhist textual traditions. The author also wants to suggest a new term, śāstra yoga or śāstric yoga, to replace the misnomer “Classical Yoga.” The book analyzes selections from three texts: Pātañjalayogaśāstra, Abhidharmakośabhāṣya (a Sautrāntika text) and the Yogacārabhūmiśāstra (a Yogacāra text). The main method deployed by Obrien-Kop is textual interpretation, as well as identification and analysis of conceptual metaphors. The book uses these conceptual metaphors to investigate commonalities in the texts and understand their relationships.
In chapter 1 Obrien-Kop discusses conceptual metaphors and cognitive processes, maintaining that metaphors use knowledge of concrete domains to map more abstract domains. She writes that “early meditation was materially determined” and that “textual metaphors tell us something about the material world in which they were produced” (21). The goal is to use this understanding of a common material and geographical context to better understand commonalities between Brahmanical and Buddhist yoga. The focus is on metaphors from agrarian economies. The chapter identifies the use of attributes from agricultural cultivation, which are applied to the domain of spiritual cultivation using the concept of bhāvanā (cultivation). The idea of cultivation of the mind is analogous to botanical cultivation in agriculture and is an illustrative example.
In chapter 2 Obrien-Kop analyzes common uses of agricultural metaphors in interpretations of kleśa (affliction) and karma (imprint, trace), central concepts in the Pātañjalayogaśāstra and the Abhidharmakośa. These commonalities indicate that the author of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra was well versed in the Abhidharmakośa. Obrien-Kop indicates that the same metaphors taken from agricultural cultivation are not found in Jain texts from the period, and also identifies the metaphors used by these texts, which strengthen her case. In chapter 3 the author reviews research on the historical emergence of Yogacāra as a form of Buddhist meditation and the core texts of this meditation tradition, Yogacārabhūmiśāstra. The author makes the case that the earliest systematization of yoga practice in India was in fact in this text and not in the Pātañjalayogaśāstra. Since the Yogacārabhūmiśāstra is an earlier text than the Pātañjalayogaśāstra, it is of interest to compare these two texts to discern any Buddhist influences on the Pātañjalayogaśāstra, which the author does in chapter 4, again looking at shared conceptual metaphors. She identifies three common conceptual metaphors: yoga as antidote to kleśas, which are like poison; yoga as path, to which kleśas are an obstacle; and yoga as clear vision, which kleśas obscure. She analyzes in particular the understanding of pratikṣabhāvanā in the path of kriyāyoga described in the Pātañjalayogaśāstra and in the Yogacārabhūmiśāstra.
Chapter 5 asks the interesting question of why Buddhist textual yoga was not included in the dominant modern textual history of yoga. The chapter gives some answers derived from the writings of European and Indian Orientalist philosophers and scholars, but here the influence of Indian modern yogis and yoga could have been included. Yoga was identified with Indian yogis and Indian yoga teachers who were able to promote themselves as living representatives of a timeless Indian yoga. Many of them spoke and wrote in English, which contributed to their global success. There was no living Indian Buddhist culture connected to the Abhidharmakośabhāṣya or the Yogacārabhūmiśāstra, which could similarly have promoted the yoga of these texts.
This book is carefully argued and offers a skilled analysis of some significant commonalities in the Pātañjalayogaśāstra and texts identified with Sautrāntika and Yogacāra Buddhism and of aspects of the developments of yoga studies. The book reads well and illustrates the importance of studying material from Indian religions in the broader pluralistic context. Buddhism had formative influences on Hindu traditions, and in some cases Hindu phenomena can even be seen as offshoots of Buddhism, as shown in this book’s discussion of some central features of the Hindu tradition of yoga in the Pātañjalayogaśāstra. The book will be of interest to anyone concerned with the formative periods of Hindu and Indian Buddhist traditions and to students and scholars of yoga studies.
Knut A. Jacobsen is a professor of religion at the University of Bergen.
Knut Axel Jacobsen
Date Of Review:
March 23, 2024
