page_title: Yoga
section_title: Buddhist Abhidharma and Yogacara
hierarchical_section_title: Yoga / History / Classical era (200 BCE – 500 CE) / Buddhist Abhidharma and Yogacara
caption_attribution_description: English: Kofukuji, Nara, Japan
context_page_description: Yoga is a group of physical, mental, and spiritual practices or disciplines which originated in ancient India. Yoga is one of the six Āstika schools of Hindu philosophical traditions.
  There is a broad variety of yoga schools, practices, and goals in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. The term "Yoga" in the Western world often denotes a modern form of hatha yoga and yoga as exercise, consisting largely of the postures or asanas.
  The practice of yoga has been thought to date back to pre-vedic Indian traditions; possibly in the Indus valley civilization around 3000 BCE. Yoga is mentioned in the Rigveda, and also referenced in the Upanishads. Although, yoga most likely developed as a systematic study around the 5th and 6th centuries BCE, in ancient India's ascetic and Śramaṇa movements. The chronology of earliest texts describing yoga-practices is unclear, varyingly credited to the Upanishads. The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali date from the 2nd century BCE, and gained prominence in the west in the 20th century after being first introduced by Swami Vivekananda. Hatha yoga texts began to emerge sometime between the 9th and 11th century with origins in tantra.
context_section_description: The Buddhist tradition of Abhidharma developed various treatises which further expanded teachings on Buddhist phenomenological theory and yogic techniques. These had a profound influence on Buddhist traditions such as the Mahayana and the Theravada.
  During the Gupta period (4th to 5th centuries), a movement of northern Mahāyāna Buddhism termed Yogācāra began to be systematized with the writings of the Buddhist scholars Asanga and Vasubandhu. Yogācāra Buddhism received the name as it provided a "yoga," a systematic framework for engaging in the practices that lead through the path of the bodhisattva towards awakening and full Buddhahood. Its teachings can be found in the comprehensive and encyclopedic work, the Yogācārabhūmi-Śāstra (Treatise on the Foundation for Yoga Practitioners), which was also translated into Tibetan and Chinese and thus exerted a profound influence on the East Asian Buddhist and Tibetan Buddhist traditions. According to Mallinson and Singleton, the study of Yogācāra Buddhism is essential for the understanding of yoga's early history, and its teachings influenced the text of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra.
  Like the northern tradition, the south India and Sri Lankan based Theravada school also developed manuals for yogic and meditative training, mainly the Vimuttimagga and the Visuddhimagga.
caption: Asanga, a 4th-century CE scholar and a co-founder of the Yogacara ("Yoga practice") school of Mahayana Buddhism.[161]
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