Abstract

Yoga, like the other five orthodox schools or darśanas of Hindu philosophy, is primarily soteriological in purpose; it offers the hope of salvation from the inevitable suffering of life and the cycle of death and rebirth more broadly. Unlike the other darśanas, its prescribed method for achieving this salvation is meditation, by which the practitioner focuses his or her attention so as to become undisturbed by the fluctuations of his or her own consciousness caused by stimuli in the external world and by upheavals in his or her own emotional state. In light of this, the individual practices that comprise the path of meditation are often understood to liberate one from one’s own consciousness by turning one’s...