อ้างอิงถึงลักษณะจิตวิญญาณมากกว่าที่เป็นระบบปรัชญาที่พัฒนามาหลายศตวรรษต่อมา[92]
Early Buddhist texts[edit]
Werner notes that "only with Buddhism itself as expounded in the Pali Canon" do we have the oldest preserved comprehensive yoga practice:
"But it is only with Buddhism itself as expounded in the Pali Canon that we can speak about a systematic and comprehensive or even integral school of Yoga practice, which is thus the first and oldest to have been preserved for us in its entirety."[9]
Another yoga system that predated the Buddhist school is Jain yoga. But since Jain sources postdate Buddhist ones, it is difficult to distinguish between the nature of the early Jain school and elements derived from other schools.[9]
Most of the other contemporary yoga systems alluded in the Upanishads and some Pali canons are lost to time.[93][94][note 12]
The early Buddhist texts describe meditative practices and states, some of which the Buddha borrowed from the śramana tradition.[96][97] One key innovative teaching of the Buddha was that meditative absorption must be combined with liberating cognition.[98] Meditative states alone are not an end, for according to the Buddha, even the highest meditative state is not liberating. Instead of attaining a complete cessation of thought, some sort of mental activity must take place: a liberating cognition, based on the practice of mindful awareness.[99] The Buddha also departed from earlier yogic thought in discarding the early Brahminic notion of liberation at death.[100] While the Upanishads thought liberation to be a realization at death of a nondual meditative state where the ontological duality between subject and object was abolished, Buddha's theory of liberation depended upon this duality because liberation to him was an insight into the subject's experience.[100]