Yoga Vasistha [English], Volume 1-4

by Vihari-Lala Mitra | 1891 | 1,121,132 words | ISBN-10: 8171101519

The English translation of the Yoga-vasistha: a Hindu philosophical and spiritual text written by sage Valmiki from an Advaita-vedanta perspective. The book contains epic narratives similar to puranas and chronologically precedes the Ramayana. The Yoga-vasistha is believed by some Hindus to answer all the questions that arise in the human mind, an...

Chapter III - The yoga of english writers

The yoga considered merely as a mode or system of meditation is variously described by European authors, as we shall see below.

Monier Williams says "According to Patanjali—the founder of the system, the word yoga is interpreted to mean the act of "fixing or concentration of the mind in abstract meditation. Its aim is to teach the means by which the human soul may attain complete union with the Supreme Soul, and of effecting the complete fusion of the individual with the universal spirit even in the body", Indian Wisdom p. 102.

Weber speaking of the yoga of the Atharvan Upanishads says: "It is the absorption in atman, the stages of this absorption and the external means of attaining it." Again says he: "The yoga in the sense of union with the Supreme Being, is absorption therein by means of meditation. It occurs first in the latter Upanishads, especially the tenth book of the Taittiriya and the Katha Upanishads, where the very doctrine is itself enunciated", Hist. Ind Lit p. 153-171.

Mullins in his prize essay on Vedanta says, the Sankhya yoga is the union of the body and mind, p. 183. In its Vedantic view, it is the joining of the individual with the Supreme Spirit by holy communion of the one with the other through intermediate grades, whereby the limited soul may be led to approach its unlimited fountain and lose itself in the same.

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