고전 요가에서 citta-vṛtti의 의미 재고 -고대 인도의 마음 개념과 관련하여-

Abstract

As it can be seen from the expression ‘Yoga Psychology’ which is often used among some modern researchers, we tend to believe that the various descriptions of mind in the classical Yoga literature tell us the operating mechanism of psychological phenomena occurring in human consciousness and unconsciousness, similarly to modern psychoanalysis. Furthermore, some people think that Yoga reveals to us a very deep level of mind that modern psychologists could not detect, based on the vague conjecture that the psychological system of the classical Yoga was founded entirely on observation through meditation by Yoga teachers who contributed to the completion of the system. When examining the actual contents of them, however, such an expectation is established only by relying on the concept of mind described by modern psychology, and it is surprisingly overlooked that the concept of the contemporary human-mind may be different from the idea of the mind that those who compiled the classical philosophy of India have thought. The aim of this paper is to discuss how the word citta which translated to ‘the mind’ had been understood in the Indian Yoga tradition and what is difference between the citta and the word ‘mind’ in modern meaning. Firstly, based on the study of Dandekar(1941) which presented examples that manas which is the representative term for ‘consciousness’ had been not the same as the mind that modern people think but meant a comprehensive all-penetrating fluid in early Veda, I will give an interpretation of the theory. Secondly, I will deal with a specific example that the term vṛtti which means the modification of the citta in the Yogasūtra, is used for explaining the transformation of indriya(the sensory organ) in the passage for the definition of direct perception(pratyakṣa) by Sāṃkhya as a sister school of Yoga. Finally, I will examine that the process of saṃyama which is the combined simultaneous practice and comprises the three upper limbs of the eight-fold path(aṣṭāṅga) to the samādhi(a state of meditative consciousness) in the classical Yoga, inherits the concept of manas in the early Vedic Psychology and indriya-vṛtti(the transformation of the sensory organ) in the Sāṃkhya epistemological system, analyzing the passage for it, and prove that the modification of the citta is not at all compatible with the structure of mind depicted in modern psychology.