Rethinking 'Classical Yoga' and Buddhism

About this book

"This book revisits the early systemic formation of what we now call yoga in South Asia. Karen O'Brien-Kop develops an alternative way of describing and analysing the history of yoga in South Asia that decentres the Eurocentric and imperialist enterprises of the nineteenth-century to reframe the cultural period of the 1st - 5th centuries CE using categorical markers from Indic intellectual history. Buddhist traditions were just as concerned as Hindu traditions with meditative disciplines of yoga. By exploring the intertextuality of the Pata jalayogasastra with texts such as Vasubandhu s Abhidharmakosa-bhaya and Asaga s Yogacarabhumisastra, this book highlights and clarifies the ideologically Buddhist concepts and practices in Pata jala yoga. Karen O'Brien-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."--