Aug 31, 2013

Vyasa’s Standpoint. The Buddhist Influence upon Yoga

Having set forth my interpretation of the few latest slokas of Yoga Sutras I cannot help but consider the following issue: why and where from there occurred the opinion (that I so much subject to criticizing) about the existence of asamprajnya samadhi as the “superior” samadhi that eliminates contemplations and so on.

No matter how strange it may seem, but the roots of this position, them been deep, go back to one of the earliest “classical” commentaries to this text, the “Vyasa-Bhashya” of Vyasa that (according to Ostrovskaya and Rudoi) is dated to ca. 4th -5th cent. AD. It is this very commentary that was used as a basis by some later medieval commentators such as Vacaspati Mishra and Vijnana Bhikshu. Besides, this text has another undeniable advantage – its availability, for it has been more than once translated into English (and even into Russian – thanks to Ostrovskaya and Rudoi).

Aug 26, 2013

Sutra 1.2. Chitta, Vritti and Psychosomatics

Following the logic I should have inserted this article after those dedicated to vritti and nirodha, but since it has occurred now I shall break the linear succession in developing the ideas and place it here. There’s nothing you can do – thinking and reasoning are non-linear processes, so that when getting deep to the heart of some matter one continuously comes back to prime postulates conceiving them even deeper, or even reconsidering them J. All the more so that in one of my initial posts I promised the readers that they would witness the intellectual activity in real-time mode…

And so:
Despite its complicacy, let us remember our definition of chitta as the “inner substantial self-sentiment of a person”. It has occurred to me that this definition, just like the concept of vritti, can be well objectified and made more clear if we base this upon the track records of modern body psychotherapy and psychosomatics.