Yoga as philosophy and religionDasgupta, Surendranath
Religion
Yoga as philosophy and religion
Dasgupta, Surendranath
Hindu philosophy; Patañjali; Yoga
Now as the vāsanās are of the nature of saṃskāras or impressions, they
lie ingrained in the citta and nothing can prevent their being revived.
The intervention of other births has no effect. For this reason, the
vāsanās of a dog-life are at once revived in another dog-life, though
between the first dog-life and the second dog-life, the individual may
have passed through many other lives, as a man, a bull, etc., though the
second dog-life may take place many hundreds of years after the first
dog-life and in quite different countries. The difference between
saṃskāras, impressions, and smṛti or memory is simply this that the
former is the latent state whereas the latter is the manifested state;
so we see that the memory and the impressions are identical in nature,
so that whenever a saṃskāra is revived, it means nothing but the
manifestation of the memory of the same experiences conserved in the
saṃskāra in a latent state. Experiences, when they take place, keep
their impressions in the mind, though thousands of other experiences,
lapse of time, etc., may intervene. They are revived in one moment with
the proper cause of their revival, and the other intervening experiences
can in no way hinder this revival. So it is with the vāsanās, which are
revived at once according to the particular fructification of the
karmāśaya, in the form of a particular life, as a man, a dog, or
anything else.
It is now clear that the karmāśaya tending towards fructification is the
cause of the manifestation of the vāsanās already existing in the mind
in a latent form. Thus the Sūtra says:—“When two similar lives are
separated by many births, long lapses of time and remoteness of space,
even then for the purpose of the revival of the vāsanās, they may be
regarded as immediately following each other, for the memories and
impressions are the same” (_Yoga-sūtra_, IV. 9). The _Bhāshya_ says:
“the vāsanā is like the memory (smṛti), and so there can be memory from
the impressions of past lives separated by many lives and by remote
tracts of country. From these memories the impressions (saṃskāras) are
derived, and the memories are revived by manifestation of the
karmāśayas, and though memories from past impressions may have many
lives intervening, these interventions do not destroy the causal
antecedence of those past lives” (IV. 9).
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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