School

Yoga

The classical Indian school of disciplined practice and meditation systematized in the Yoga Sūtras.

Also called Classical Yoga, Pātañjala Yoga, Rāja Yoga

Introduction

Yoga, from a root meaning to yoke or join, is used in Sanskrit for many disciplines of body and mind. As one of the six orthodox schools of Indian philosophy, it names the system of the Yoga Sūtras attributed to Patañjali, whose definition is famous: yoga is the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind (Yoga Sūtras 1.2).

Classical Yoga shares its metaphysics with the Sāṃkhya school. Reality consists of two kinds of thing: many selves of pure consciousness (puruṣa), inactive and unchanging, and a single nature (prakṛti), of which mind and body are products. Suffering arises because consciousness seems to be entangled with the mind’s activities. Yoga adds to Sāṃkhya a method, and a place for the Lord (Īśvara), a special self ever free, devotion to whom aids practice.

The method is set out as eight limbs (aṣṭāṅga): ethical restraints and observances, posture, breath control, withdrawal of the senses, concentration, meditation and absorption (samādhi). Its goal is isolation (kaivalya): consciousness standing in its own nature, no longer mistaken for the movements of the mind. The word “yoga” is also used, notably in the Bhagavad Gītā, for the disciplines of action, knowledge and devotion.

History

Historical

Practices of meditation and austerity are older than any surviving Yoga text, and appear in the Upaniṣads, the Mahābhārata and the early Buddhist and Jain literature. The Yoga Sūtras gathered these traditions into a system; their date is debated, but an influential recent view places the sūtras with their oldest commentary, attributed to Vyāsa, around 325–425 CE.

Commentators kept the school alive: Vācaspati Miśra in the ninth or tenth century, the king Bhoja in the eleventh, and Vijñānabhikṣu in the sixteenth, who read Yoga as compatible with Vedānta. From around the eleventh century, haṭha yoga developed alongside, with an emphasis on posture, breath and subtle physiology; the Haṭhapradīpikā of the fifteenth century is its best-known manual.

In the modern period, Vivekananda’s Raja Yoga (1896), with its translation of the Yoga Sūtras, presented classical Yoga to Western readers, and in the twentieth century postural yoga became a worldwide practice. Scholars distinguish this modern yoga, which owes much to haṭha yoga and to modern physical culture, from the classical school of the Yoga Sūtras.

1st millennium BCEMeditative disciplines in the Upaniṣads and early śramaṇa movements
c. 325–425 CE (debated)The Yoga Sūtras with the commentary attributed to Vyāsa
c. 9th–10th c.Vācaspati Miśra’s Tattvavaiśāradī
15th c.The Haṭhapradīpikā of Svātmārāma
1896Vivekananda’s Raja Yoga
1914J. H. Woods’s translation in the Harvard Oriental Series

Major thinkers

Key concepts

Important texts

Convergence and divergence

Resemblance and difference, given equal room. Each note is marked with the kind of statement it makes.

Areas of convergence

Contemplation, with Christian Mysticism
Scholarship
Both describe stages of recollection in which attention is gathered from the senses and stilled, culminating in a state beyond discursive thought.
Samādhi, with Buddhism
Scholarship
Yoga and Buddhism share a vocabulary of meditative absorption and an analysis of the mind’s afflictions, and the Yoga Sūtras engage closely with Buddhist thought.

Areas of divergence

Self, with Advaita Vedānta
Scholarship
Classical Yoga is dualist, distinguishing many conscious selves from a real nature; Advaita teaches one non-dual reality, in which nature is appearance.
Ātman, with Buddhism
Scholarship
Yoga’s goal is the isolation of an eternal conscious self; Buddhism denies such a self, though the two describe meditative practice in similar terms.

Cite this entry

Chicago (bibliography): “Yoga.” Tradition. The Library, Unitive Knowledge Society. Last modified November 7, 2026. https://www.unitiveknowledge.org/library/traditions/yoga.
Chicago (note): “Yoga,” tradition, The Library, Unitive Knowledge Society, last modified November 7, 2026, https://www.unitiveknowledge.org/library/traditions/yoga.
MLA: “Yoga.” The Library, Unitive Knowledge Society, 7 Nov. 2026, www.unitiveknowledge.org/library/traditions/yoga.
BibTeX: @misc{traditions-yoga, title = {{Yoga}}, howpublished = {The Library, Unitive Knowledge Society}, note = {Tradition. Last modified November 7, 2026}, year = {2026}, url = {https://www.unitiveknowledge.org/library/traditions/yoga} }