In the broadest sense, Yoga is simply spiritual practice, or spirituality. Hinduism and Buddhism, as well as Jainism, are all yogic cultures or traditions. Buddhism is not, as Frawley claims, an offshoot of Hinduism but of the Indic civilization as such. Yoga is a unique contribution to humankind by the Indic civilization. Many Western Yoga students confuse Yoga with Hinduism and typically pitch it against Buddhism.
Yoga is common to both cultural traditions and forms their spiritual essence.
Yoga must not be reduced to a mere system of physical exercises but clearly offers many spiritual methods and approaches, especially meditation. It makes no sense to say, as often heard, that Yoga has no meditation practice and that therefore one must resort to Buddhist meditation. Yoga has a wide variety of meditation techniques, which include Buddhist, Hindu, and Jaina meditation practices. During the past two and half millennia or so, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jaina have been in dialogue with each other, and each cultural tradition has incorporated elements from the others. It has even been said that the disappearance of Buddhism from India was largely due to the fact that Shankara and his school of Advaita Vedanta, or nondual metaphysics, so successfully assimilated Buddhist ideas that Buddhism lost its foothold with regard to the dominant Hindu culture.