YOGA PRIOR TO PATANJALI:-The Vedic Period. In terms of Yoga’s earliest origins, the Vedic period is the earliest era in South Asia for which we have written records, & it prdvides the matrix from which (or, more typically, against which) later religious, philosophical, & spiritual expressions such as Yoga evolved in India, at least in the north of the subcontinent. We do not wish to invest any further energy into the ongoing debate over whether the Vedic-speaking peoples (Indo-Aryans) were originally indigenous to the Indian subcontinent or Indo-Eurouders from an external point of origin (for which, see Bryant 2001 & 2005), except to note the corollaries of these two positions on the protohistory of yoga. Those accepting an exteernal point of origin for the Vedic-speaking peoples tend to hold that Yoga, both as practice & philosophy, was originally pre-Vedic (and therefore non-Vedic) and indigenous to the subcontinent. From this perspective, since there is no explicit refernce to yogic practices & beliefs in the earlist Vedic texts, their emergence in subsequent Vedic literature such as the Upanisads points to a later period when the Vedic people had long settled & absorbed them-selves into the preexisting populations of the Inaian subcontinent. In this process they established their own Vedic rituals as the mainstream “high” religious activity of the day, & akso eventually absorbed many non-Vedic religious elements form the indigenous peoples, such as Yoga philosophy & practice. PATANJALI’S YOGA:- Patanjali & the Six Schools of Inadian Philosophy. In addition to various hererodox Schools such as Jainism & Buddhism, what came to be identified (in much later times) as six schools of orthodox thought also evolved out of the Upanisadic period (of coures, there were various other streams of thought that did not gain this status but nonetheless emerged as significant presences on the religious landscape of Hinduism). As we have seen with Sankhya & Yoga, the streams of thought that later became assoicated with these six schools were not necessarily conceived of in that way until the end of the first millennium C.E. In fact, it might be more accurate to consider these traditions distinctive religophilosophical expressions that emerged from the Vedic period with different focuses rather than actual schools in the earlier period. They shared much of their overall worldview but dedicated themselves to different areas of human knowledge & prasix, & with which differing quite considerably on metaphysical & epistemological issued, they nonetheless did not necessarily reject the authority of the other traditions in other specific areas where these did not conflict with their own positions. Thus, for example, the Nyaya logician school accepts Yoga as the method to be used to realize the atman as understood within tradition, & Vedanta objects to it only to the extent that it does not refer to Brahman as the ultimate source of purusa &prakrti, not to its authenticity in meditative technique & practice. Even a dharmasastra text like the Yajnavalkya Smrti, which occupies itself exclusively with dharma,codes of ritual, personal, familial, civic, & social duties, in its opening section that from the abundance of religious scriptures dealing with the plethora of human affairs: “this alone is the highest dharma, that one should see the atman by yoga” (I.8). Thus, in early Sanskrit texts Yoga referred to a form of rigorous discipline & concentration for attaining the direct oerception of the atman & gaining libration that was appropriated & tailored by different traditious according to their metaphysical understanding of the self, rather than a distinct school.