Note on the Yoga

There is an interesting description of the Yogins on the Mountain Raivataka in Māgha (iv. 55):—

"There the votaries of meditation, well skilled in benevolence (maitrī) and those other purifiers of the mind,—having successfully abolished the 'afflictions' and obtained the 'meditation possessed of a seed,' and having reached that knowledge which recognises the essential difference between the quality Goodness and the Soul,—desire yet further to repress even this ultimate meditation."

It is curious to notice that maitrī, which plays such a prominent part in Buddhism, is counted in the Yoga as only a preliminary condition from which the votary is to take, as it were, his first start towards his final goal. It is called a parikarman (= prasādhaka) in Vyāsa's Comm. i. 33 (cf. iii. 22), whence the term is borrowed by Māgha. Bhoja expressly says that this purifying process is an external one, and not an intimate portion of yoga itself; just as in arithmetic the operations of addition, &c., are valuable, not in themselves, but as aids in effecting the more important calculations which arise subsequently. The Yoga seems directly to allude to Buddhism in this marked depreciation of its cardinal virtue.