Rethinking 'Classical Yoga' and Buddhism

This book revisits the early systemic formation of meditation practices called yoga in South Asia by employing metaphor theory. Karen OBrien-Kop also develops an alternative way of analysing the reception history of yoga that aims to decentre the Eurocentric and imperialist enterprises of the nineteenth-century to reframe the cultural period of the 1st 5th centuries CE using categorical markers from South Asian intellectual history. Buddhist traditions were just as concerned as Hindu traditions with meditative disciplines of yoga. By exploring the intertextuality of the Patanjalayogasastra with texts such as Vasubandhus Abhidharmakosabhasya and Asangas Yogacarabhumisastra, this book highlights and clarifies many ideologically Buddhist concepts and practices in Patanjala yoga. Karen OBrien-Kop demonstrates that classical yoga was co-constructed systemically by both Hindu and Buddhist thinkers who were drawing on the same conceptual metaphors of the period. This analysis demystifies early yoga-meditation as a timeless classical practice and locates it in a specific material context of agrarian and urban economies.