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Conventionally, the label 'classical yoga' has been aligned with-and sometimes conflated with-the text of Patañjali's Yogasūtra. Yet if we broaden the scope of inspection to a wider textual corpus, we can identify a richer and more complex discourse of classical yoga in soteriological contexts. This discourse is also employed in Buddhist Sarvāstivāda traditions and is semantically and metaphorically entangled across religious boundaries. By comparing passages from the Pātañjalayogaśāstra and the Abhidharmakośabhāṣya, this article highlights the botanical image of the seed and its seedbe (the substratum) as a key metaphorical structure in the soteriology of the two texts.

The Pātañjalayogaśāstra concludes with a description of the pinnacle of yoga practice: a state of samādhi called dharmamegha, cloud of dharma. Yet despite the structural importance of dharmamegha in the soteriology of Pātañjala yoga, the śāstra itself does not say much about this term. Where we do find dharmamegha discussed, however, is in Buddhist yogācāra, and more broadly in early Mahāyāna soteriology, where it represents the apex of attainment and the superlative statehood of a bodhisattva. Given the relative paucity of Brahmanical mentions of dharmamegha in the early common era, Patañjali appears to adopt this key metaphor from a Mahāyāna context—and to revise its primary meaning from fullness to emptiness. This article traces the early elaborations of dharmamegha in Buddhist texts, and, drawing on conceptual metaphor theory, lays out four arguments that each, in part, accounts for the stark contrast in how classical yoga and yogācāra employ the superlative metaphor of dharmamegha.

Yoga in Transformation: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. Edited by Karl Baier, Philipp A. Maas, and Karin Preisendanz. Vienna: Vienna University Press, 2018. 630 pages; 55 figures. The Yoga in Transformation volume pulls together extended research papers from an eponymous conference held at the University of Vienna in 2013. Featuring sixteen peer-reviewed chapters from world-leading scholars, the volume is a valuable resource for academic yoga studies—probably more at graduate than undergraduate level, given its original research content. The collection is divided into two sections. The first, titled “Yoga in South Asia and Tibet,” features mostly studies on texts, while the second, titled “Globalised Yoga,” focuses on developments in the twentieth century and is more interdisciplinary, including textual research, anthropology, sociology, affect theory, and art history.

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