Yoga Vasistha - Text Origin and Evolution

Text Origin and Evolution

See also: Buddhism and Hinduism in Kashmir

The Yoga Vasistha is a syncretic work, containing elements of Vedanta, Jainism, Yoga, Samkhya, Saiva Siddhanta and Mahayana Buddhism, thus making it, in the opinion of one writer, "a Hindu text par excellence, including, as does Hinduism, a mosaic-style amalgam of diverse and sometimes opposing traditions", providing an example of Hinduism's ability to integrate seemingly opposite schools of thought. The oldest available manuscript (the Moksopaya or Moksopaya Shastra) is a philosophical text on salvation (moksa-upaya: "means to release"), written on the Pradyumna hill in Srinagar in the 10th century AD. This text was expanded and Vedanticized from the 11th to the 14th century AD – resulting in the present text, which was influenced by the Saivite Trika school. This version contains about 32,000 verses; an abridged version by Abhinanda of Kashmir (son of Jayanta Bhatta) is known as the Laghu ("Little") Yogavasistha and contains 6,000 verses.

Read more about this topic:  Yoga Vasistha

Famous quotes containing the words text, origin and/or evolution:

    “Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not. A book is not an isolated entity: it is a narration, an axis of innumerable narrations. One literature differs from another, either before or after it, not so much because of the text as for the manner in which it is read.”
    —Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)

    “The real, then, is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries of me and you. Thus, the very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a COMMUNITY, without definite limits, and capable of a definite increase of knowledge.”
    —Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914)

    “Historians will have to face the fact that natural selection determined the evolution of cultures in the same manner as it did that of species.”
    —Konrad Lorenz (1903–1989)