MEANINGS AND FORMS OF YOGAMeanings of ‘Yoga’
The word yogais derived from the Sanskrit verbal root √yuj, ‘to yoke.’
The Indo-European root of yuj is √yeug-, which is also the source of the
Latin noun jugum, yoke, and the English yoke.^1 A range of words derives
from the Sanskrit yuj. Primary meanings of yujare to harness, bind, inte-
grate, unite, or unify. Sanskrit words derived from yuj have meanings
such as: to meditate, to recollect, to be adapted, joined to, bound by
(duty), to be appropriate, and to be logically linked. The derivative noun
yogaalso has a variety of meanings, for instance: the yoking of a team or
equipment, union, contact, combination, mixture, connection, relation,
performance, employment, use, application, remedy, cure, means, expe-
dient, device, opportunity, undertaking, fitness, propriety, order, succes-
sion, effort, exertion, endeavor, zeal, assiduousness, occupation, mental
concentration, and meditative abstraction.^2 The great Sanskrit grammar-
ian P ̄aÓnini distinguished the root √yuj, meaning meditative concentration
(yuj samadhau ̄ ) from the root √yujir, meaning connecting or yoking
(yujir yoge).^3 This distinction is made in V ̄acaspati’s Tattva-vai ́s ̄arad ̄ı:
“The word ‘yoga’ is derived from the root yuj, to contemplate, and not
from the root yujir, in which latter case it would mean conjunction” [TV
1.1]. The words ‘yoga’ and ‘religion’ share the meaning of yoking: reli-
gion is derived from the Latin ligare, ‘to bind,’ ‘to bond,’ from the Indo-
European root √leig, ‘to bind.’^4 While a large number of words derived
from yujconnote yoking or connecting, in classical Yoga, yuj’s primary
meaning is yogic meditative absorption, yuj samadhau ̄. However, yujin
the sense of ‘uniting’ is certainly operative in classical Yoga, and refers to
unifying one’s efforts, integrating one’s physiological functions (for in-
stance, by controlling the breath), making one’s concentration one-
pointed, and overcoming the fragmentation that characterizes ordinary
human attention and activity.
Eliade notes that an important meaning of yoga is the effort of yok-
ing one’s powers. The purpose of this effort is “to unify the spirit, to do
away with the dispersion and automatism that characterize profane con-
sciousness.”^5 The effort of self-integration by practice of yoga breaks the
bonds keeping puruÓsa—pure consciousness and the person’s true na-
ture—enmeshed in prakÓrti, the world and the person’s mentality and
physicality. In devotional forms of yoga, yoking connotes the yoking of
the individual with God. Eliade contends that the basic meaning of the
verb yuj, ‘to bind,’ presupposes “breaking the ‘bonds’ that unite the spirit
classical yoga as a religious therapeutic 85