Concept

Yoga

Overview

Yoga (UK: , US: ; Sanskrit: योग 'yoga' [joːɡɐ] ; lit. 'yoke' or 'union') is a group of physical, mental, and spiritual practices or disciplines that originated with its own philosophy in ancient India, aimed at controlling body and mind to attain liberation (moksha), as practiced in the Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist traditions. Modern forms of yoga are practiced worldwide, often mainly for exercise accompanied by other elements like relaxation.

Yoga may have pre-Vedic origins, but it is first attested in the early first millennium BCE. It developed as various traditions in the eastern Ganges basin and drew from a common body of practices, including Vedic elements. Yoga-like practices are mentioned in the Rigveda and some early Upanishads, but systematic yoga concepts emerged during the fifth and sixth centuries BCE in ancient India's ascetic and Śramaṇa movements, including Jainism and Buddhism. The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, the classical text on Hindu yoga, samkhya-based but influenced by Buddhism, dates to the early centuries of the Common Era. Hatha yoga texts began to emerge between the ninth and 11th centuries, originating in Tantra.

Much of the yoga in the Western world is a modern syncretised form consisting largely of asanas, derived from hatha yoga and western physical culture; this differs from traditional yoga, which focuses on meditation and release from worldly attachments. It was introduced by gurus from India after the success of Swami Vivekananda's adaptation of yoga without asanas in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Vivekananda introduced the Yoga Sutras to the West, and they became prominent after the 20th-century success of hatha yoga. In 1925, Yogananda started a Kriya Yoga centre in Los Angeles, becoming one of the first yoga teachers in the United States.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

In the original texts

Passages from public-domain books where Yoga is discussed.

Hindus, Buddhists, Mohammedans, and Christians all have cultivated it methodically. In India, training in mystical insight has been known from time immemorial under the name of yoga. Yoga means the experimental union of the individual with the divine. It is based on persevering exercise; and the diet, posture, breathing, intellectual concentration, and moral discipline vary slightly in the different systems which…
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
states what it is; names the idea
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Bad Karma is worked out in that state and then the souls come back to earth and get another chance. This human form is the great chance. It is called the _karmic_ body, in which we decide our fate. We are running in a huge circle, and this is the point in the circle which determines the future. So a human body is considered the greatest body there is; man is greater than the gods. Even they return to human birth. So…
Swami Vivekananda, Jnâna Yoga, Part II
a chapter is titled for it; states what it is; the book is about it
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It was from this source that the ethical systems, both the philosophical and those which are supported by systems of religion, took their rise. Both seek constantly in some way or other to connect happiness with virtue, the former either by means of the principle of contradiction or that of sufficient reason, and thus to make happiness either identical with or…
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea
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Becoming is the movement through which a reality or totality becomes; in the animal or plant its essence as universal genus, is that which begins its movement and brings it forth. But this whole is not the product of something foreign, but its own product, what is already present as germ or seed; thus it is called end, the self-producing, that which in its Becoming is already implicitly existent. The Idea is not a…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy
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A profound modification has unquestionably occurred in the running of his mental machinery. The gearing has changed, and his will is available otherwise than it was. My friend is a man of very peculiar temperament. Few of us would have had the will to start upon the Yoga training, which, once started, seemed to conjure the further willpower needed out of itself. And not all of those who could launch themselves would…
William James, Memories and Studies
names the idea; opens on it
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Philosophers who discussed Yoga

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Bhakti

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