It is useless to seek the origins of Yoga, which are submerged in that magical history in which primitive people live and which the evolving of culture doesn’t succeed to disregard. Certain analogies with the doctrines of ancient schools of China as emerged in Taoism, make a great deal probable that existed to a large extent in southern and south-oriental Asia certain routines, based above all on the control of breath and on auto hypnotic processes, from which slowly and with degrees derived both Yoga and the mentioned Taoist currents.

Although some evidences allow to think that these doctrines and exercises were diffused in prearyan India, traces can be found in the Vedas (X, 136), where we can read about a longhaired (kesarin) follower of Rudra, who has drunk from the cup of God, and flies in the air in a state of ecstasy and sees the destiny of all beings and animals. There were many attempts to trace the ancient origins of Yoga to nonaryan origins as represented in the cross-legged sitting figure found at Mohenjodaro (if this is really a prearyan figure), as it will be later a custom of yogins and as will be represented both in Buddha and Jina sculptures.

But if the concept of yoga is ancient, we find the word yoga with a precise attributed meaning only in the Upanishads. An examination of yoga literature shows a lot of analogies with the psychological investigations of other schools, especially the Buddhist and the Jainas. Can we conclude that the yoga teachers, and authors of yoga essays in which their doctrines are codified, have plentifully drawn from the Buddhists? Certainly not. The implied ascetic techniques and psychological investigations represent a common foundation that doesn’t allow to attribute the paternity of the doctrines to one school rather than to another: similarities in the classification of psychological states or in the meditative processes and proposed theories on the trails that the karma leaves on the thinking organ responsible of individuals and of their fates, depend on the fact that these arguments had been discussed for centuries in the ascetic communities of India, and had been in different manner adapted. On this foundation of ancient experiences all schools, which were all projected to liberation, have inserted the techniques in their own doctrinal constructions: in short the analogy is not due to borrowing of ideas, but to a concomitance of ideas.

On the other side probably happened that a certain current of yoga when it tried to find a logical consistence for it’s own psychological investigations and to create therefore something we today call a system, turned to the Sankhya, which separated spirit and matter and gave a well framed solution to the souls in the schemes of the yogic soteriology.

Yoga texts that have come to us leave open the discussion if the original yoga is explained in them, or has yoga organically evolved in many directions and under many influences; it is probable that in the great fervor of ideas of which the Upanishads mark the beginning and on which Buddhism and Jainism, with their ancient texts, gave some light on the subject of yoga, different paths were crossed, parallel and often convergent, in the intent to give form to this first speculation focused on the theory of multiplicity of souls and only one material substance.

buddhists, cross legged, magical history, mohenjodaro, psychological investigations, rudra, upanishads, yoga teachers