RIDING THE OX HOME
A history of Meditation from Shamanism to Science
by Willard Johnson
Even though Willard Johnson is professor of religious studies at San Diego State University, this book is free of any specific religious agenda. In this unique historical survey, he brings his knowledge of Indic and world religions to bear on making meditation relevant to the Western reader.
He explores the development of Eastern meditation as a systematic discipline with an interpretive reading of the principal Indian, Hindu and Buddhist texts that appeared between 200 BCE and 200 CE.
In his enlightening first chapter he explains the original meaning of the Sanskrit word yoga. He says that in meaning, the word yoga resembles its cognate English word "yoke,’" the action which brings together two or more burly, powerful animals so as to make use of their strength. Ordinarily, swamis and gurus coming from India give a theistic interpretation of the meaning of the word when they say, without hesitation, that yoga means "union." Actually, this translation does not do justice to the term at all. Since, metaphysically, one’s spirit is already one with the Absolute, as the Upanishads declared, what is there to achieve the union?
Furthermore, another Sanskrit term, samadhi, is a much better candidate for the notion of meditation’s aim of unifying the distracted, diverse parts of one’s mental equipment, and is an accepted word for the goal of yoga practice which unifies consciousness. In fact, yoga is more properly the means to samadhi, which in turn is the state wherein the goals to which yoga may be put are realized.
Amazingly enough, the use of the verb yoga in Sanskrit grammar clearly meant "to harness horses to a chariot." The fascinating history of this word arose from the use of chariots and horses by early warrior classes of the Vedic age around 1500 BC when they swooped down from the Khyber Pass to invade and overwhelm the peaceful Harappan civilization.
The ancient Indo-Aryan battle chariots belonged to warrior-aristocrats (something like the cattle barons of the Old West) who financed their construction and fought from them, usually with bows and arrows. However, at that time a sophisticated harness and horse collar had not yet been invented, making the horse and chariot very difficult to handle. So, who harnessed the horses and drove the chariot? Not the owner-aristocrat, but his suta, or charioteer, a figure so important in later Hindu culture that, when Vishnu incarnated to help the forces of righteousness to defeat evil on earth, he chose to be Krishna, Arjuna’s charioteer.
The guild of charioteers developed such skill that tremendous prestige accrued to them. This skill constituted their yoga, their self-discipline which led to achieving their professional goal, the harnessing and driving of their masters’ battle chariots.
Thus, the original meaning of the term "yoga" had as its basis an achieved skill, which one masters in preparation for an adventure or an activity in the world, the yoga’s goal. By its very ancestry, yoga meant the preparations for departure, readying for an expedition or adventure. Many of the later meanings of the term flow from this ancestry.
The term "yoga" could not be applied metaphorically to meditation during the time of the Rg Veda (1500 BC) because meditation had not yet become a discipline. This meaning does not occur in a text until the time of the middle early Upanishads and early Buddhism, around 400 BC. Here the underlying meaning of discipline leading to a special skill comes forth clearly. In this case, the harnessing or disciplining of the mind’s creative verbal abilities leads to better praising of the god to whom the priests address their chants. Thus, the word came to be one of the major Sanskrit terms for the discipline of the metaphorical horses (the senses and mental faculties).
Willard Johnson views Patanjali, Edgar Casey, Confucius, Socrates, Plato, and many others, too numerous to name here in his wide and erudite view of “meditation.”
“Riding the Ox Home” is a must read for anyone who considers himself or herself a “serious thinker.”