Origins of Yoga - Part 3 : Buddhism and Yoga Sutras

The Buddha lived at a time when the Vedic rituals were no longer a unifying force in society (as it originally intended on being). They had become a religion of outer trappings, mere ritualism and empty speculation. In the ruins of Vedic civilization, the first followers of the Buddha inaugurated the religion that was to irradiate almost all southeast Asia and the Far East.

There are many obvious similarities between the early Buddhism and the message of the Yoga Sutras. The "noble eightfold path" closely resembles the "eight limbs of yoga" and the eight stages (Jhanas) of Buddhist meditation are practically the same as the stages of Samadhi delineated by Patanjali.

Scholars have taken such parallels as proof that the Yoga Sutras were heavily influenced by Buddhist teachings. It is more fruitful to see that both sets of texts drew on a common body of nonsectarian knowledge that had been available from time immemorial. Both were responses to the needs of that time, looking to a wisdom that is perennial.

It was at this same wisdom which inspired a contemporary of the Buddha, Mahavira. He also turned to yoga, and applied its methodology to a dogmatic system that was austerely monastic and outside the tradition of Vedic orthodoxy. The result was Jainism.

In fact, each of the disparate elements of the Indian religious tradition are united by Yoga; it is the hub around which they all revolve. The esoteric  Tantric cults of Bengal adopted yoga as a means to ecstacy, and it was their baroque form of teaching that was to provide techniques and ritual for various sects, both Hindu and Buddhist, that flourished encapsulated in the remote Himalayan kingdoms.