Kapila founded Yoga as a school of study and Mahaveera, Buddha and Patanjali elaborated it and made it a deep system. Schisms developed and yoga became a split school somehow becoming an underground movement for all the established religions.
It was good that Yoga got dissociated from any religion as it should always have been. Yoga means union and as stories from the Upanishad illustrate, it is the ultimate union with truth.
Reincarnating Universes – It is an objective truth that even the universe has to be compressed into a little dot for creation to start again through the big bang process. So it is a built-in mechanism in the universe that that which expands becomes small and that which is small will expand. This is the drama of reincarnation of the Universe at a much bigger level than the level of humans. This is the physical reality of things.
At the human level, we are energy that has taken shape into matter for a purpose. Our cycles are smaller than the universe but we too reincarnate. Cycles of expanding and contracting that go on for ever. In Hinduism, the world begins with the Brahmin impregnating the Hiranya Garbha, the golden womb of the cosmos, and the result is creation as we know. In Tao, this is the Yin and the Yang and this is in the creation myths of the South Seas and the Aztecs too in various forms.
Yoga is one way for us to understand this reality that is at the root of our being. We are all made from the same iron and the earth is made from this energy as is the heaven.
Buddha was an amazing scientist who discovered a pure path that the ancients before him had spoken of and everybody after them had forgotten. He was a discoverer of a pristine path of liberation that has inspired billions in its long journey. But what was the essence of the path he had described?
- There is despair
- Despair is caused by a separateness (caused by contact)
- There is a cure
- The cure is following the right path.
Pay attention to the second point. Separateness is caused in all beings except for those in the right path. Contact causes despair when we are not whole and complete within ourselves. For example if someone insults us and we see it wholesomely, we would understand that the individual is saying it from a sense of hatred and the insult will have no bearing on us.
For one to be wholesome in the way I describe, we should be in contact with ourselves in the present moment. That is yoga. To be in union with you at any given moment is the Goal. Understand that the path has to be walked on to come to the point of Union. Buddha’s path is entirely compatible with that of yoga and there are no differences with either of these approaches.
– by Srinivas Reddy