Prof. Dr. Sohan Raj Tater
Implicit faith in the truth, which is born either with the help of the preceptor or fostered by a spontaneous intuition of the truth, is the starting point of the path of self-realization. There are various processes of leading oneself from the stage of implicit faith in the truth to the stage of final realization of truth. The processes have a common term for them and that term is yoga. In Jainism the term cāritra (conduct) is the exact equivalent of the general term yoga.
The term yoga has a chequered history. The world yoga occurs in the earliest sacred literature of Hindus in Ṛgveda (about 1500 B.C.) with the meaning of effecting a connection. Later on in about 700 to 800 B.C. the same word is used in the sense of yoking a horse. In still later literature (about 500 or 600 B.C.) it is found with the meaning of controlling the senses, and the senses themselves are compared with untrolled spirited horses. The world probably represents a very old original of the Āryan stock, which can be traced also in the German joch, OE, geoc, Latin jugum, Greek zugon.[9] In Pāṇini's time the world yoga had attained its technical meaning, and he distinguished the root yuj samādhau (yuj in the sense of concentration) from "yujir yoge" (yujir in the sense of connecting).[10] Only Ācārya Haribhadra (8-9 A.D.) who defined for the first time in the history of Jaina thought, the term yoga in the sense of what leads one to emancipation.[11] This meaning of term is unanimously accepted in the post-Haribhadra Jaina literature. Of course, the term 'yoga' was used in general sense of subduing the senses and the mind and the processes of concentration and ecstasy even in the earlier stages of the Jaina thought as well as in the early Buddhist thought. But the term jhāna (dhyāna) and samādhi were more in vogue than the term yoga. It is only in the Yogasūtra of Pātañjali that we find the proper meaning of dhyana in the whole process called yoga for the first time.
Doctoral Thesis, JVBU