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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
Mircea Eliade's book Yoga: Immortality and Freedom has deservedly become a classic, and has reached, as he intended, a far wider audience than the narrow circle of Indologists. The book's popularity may justify the following remarks. It was originally published in French in 1936, then in an enlarged French version in 1954, and in English translation in 1958. There has thus been ample opportunity for revision, and indeed in the second English edition (1969), which we are taking as our text, Eliade notes (p. xi) that he has made ‘numerous minor corrections’. However, the accuracy of his observations on early Buddhism still leaves much to be desired. Let us try to set the record straight.
page 225 note 1 Pub. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London. The American publishers are the Bollingen Foundation, New York. The pagination of the main text is the same as in the first edition, and is very close to that of the 1954 French edition.
page 225 note 2 Le Traité de la Grande Vertu de Sagesse de Nāgārjuna, I, Louvain 1949, note 3 to p. 6. Eliade refers to this volume several times.
page 226 note 1 Le Muséon, LXIX, 1956, pp. 218–21.Google Scholar
page 226 note 2 Dhammapadam, ed. and trans. A. P. Buddhadatta Mahāthera, Colombo n.d., p. 104.
page 227 note 1 Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1956, pp. 252–4.Google Scholar
page 227 note 2 See especially Davids, T. W. Rhys in the Introduction to his translation of the Sāmañña-phala-sutta, Dialogues of the Buddha, Part I (Sacred Books of the Buddhists, vol. II), London 1899, p. 59.Google Scholar
page 229 note 1 Glasenapp, H. von, Buddhism: a non-theistic religion, English trans. London 1970, p. 50.Google Scholar
page 230 note 1 Visuddhimagga, XIII, 16, fin.
page 231 note 1 But vide contra the review by Filliozat, Jean, Journal Asiatique CCXLIII, 1955, pp. 368–70.Google Scholar
page 231 note 2 The probable influence of Taoism on Tantric yoga (and perhaps vice versa) has since been demonstrated by Filliozat, Jean, ‘Taoīsme et Yoga’, Journal Asiatique CCLVII, 1969, pp. 41–87.Google Scholar
