________________
XIV] Sāmkhya and Yoga in the Gitā 459 as the dedication of the fruits of actions to God and communion with Him, is absent here.
It is needless to point out here that the yoga of the Gītā is in no way connected with the yoga of Buddhism. In Buddhism the sage first practises sila, or sense-control and mind-control, and thus prepares himself for a course of stabilization or fixation of the mind (samādhāna, upadhāraṇa, patițțhā). This samādhi means the concentration of the mind on right endeavours and of its states upon one particular object (ekārammana), so that they may completely cease to shift and change (sammā ca avikkhippamānā). The sage has first to train his mind to view with disgust the appetitive desires for food and drink and their ultimate loathsome transformations as various nauseating bodily elements. When a man habituates himself to emphasizing the disgusting associations of food and drink, he ceases to have any attachment to them and simply takes them as an unavoidable evil, only awaiting the day when the final dissolution of all sorrows will come. Secondly, the sage has to habituate his mind to the idea that all his members are made up of the four elements, earth, water, fire and wind, like the carcass of a cow at the butcher's shop. Thirdly, he has to habituate his mind to thinking again and again (anussati) about the virtues or greatness of the Buddha, the Sangha, the gods and the law of the Buddha, about the good effects of sila and the making of gifts (cāgānussati), about the nature of death (maranānussati) and about the deep nature and qualities of the final extinction of all phenomena (upasamānussati). He has also to pass through various purificatory processes. He has to go to the cremation grounds and notice the diverse horrifying changes of human carcasses and think how nauseating, loathsome, unsightly and impure they are; from this he will turn his mind to living human bodies and convince himself that they, being in essence the same as dead carcasses, are as loathsome as the latter. He should think of the anatomical parts and constituents of the body as well as of their processes, and this will help him to enter into the first jhāna, or meditation, by leading his mind away from his body. As an aid to concentration the sage should sit in a quiet place and fix his mind on the inhaling (passāsa) and the exhaling (assāsa) of his breath, so that, instead of breathing in a more or less unconscious manner, he may be aware whether he is breathing quickly or slowly; he ought to mark this definitely by counting numbers, so that by