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One of the distinctive features of early Buddhist meditation was the wide range of awareness or attention practices of smṛti (sati). There is also an important role for smṛti in the Pātañjalayogaśāstra, where it appears in a variety of semantic contexts, not only in the mundane cognitive function of memory, but as an applied meditation technique of correct and clear recollection of objects of attention. This paper argues that to analyse how smṛti functions in Patañjali’s meditative formulas, we should consider Buddhist recollection practices such as affective conceptual/visual recollection (anusmṛti) and the four abiding awarenesses (smrṭyupasthāna) – since both categories of smṛti are mentioned in Patañjali’s text.
Dr Karen O'Brien-Kop is Lecturer in Asian Religions at King's College London. Her recent books are The Routledge Handbook of Yoga and Meditation Studies (with Newcombe, Routledge 2020), Rethinking 'Classical Yoga' and Buddhism: Meditation, Metaphor and Materiality (Bloomsbury 2021) and The Philosophy of the Yogasutra (Bloomsbury 2023).
