The word yoga sits at the center of the Pāśupata five-category doctrine — and it means something specific that the modern ear gets wrong. In the pañcārthika system, yoga is the third artha: "the union between paśu and pati," between the bound individual soul and Śiva the Lord.1 Not the stilling of the mind (the Yoga Sūtra commentators' samādhi), not the yoking of chariot-horses (the Vedic sense), but communion with the god — the soul's union with the Lord that the Pāśupata theoreticians "took pains to distinguish from the samādhi of the YBh and later commentaries on the YS."2
This page anchors the Pāśupata sense of yoga (soul-god union) and the masteries it confers — the aiśvarya (sovereignty) and the siddhis that make the practitioner "the equal of Śiva." Where the Pāśupatas page (I1) gives the institution, this page gives the mechanism: what "yoga" meant for the dominant early Śaiva order, and what attaining it actually delivered.
This is the doctrinal anchor for the Pāśupata meaning of yoga and its fruits. The Pāśupata yoga is the union of paśu (the bound soul) and pati (Śiva), achieved through vidhi (the prescribed regimen), yielding duḥkhānta (the end of suffering) — which here means becoming a master (īśvara) possessed of aiśvarya (mastery/sovereignty).3 White stresses that the Pāśupata theoreticians explicitly distinguished their yoga from the YS commentators' samādhi: this was not the contemplative pure-mind state but communion with the god, a relational-soteriological union, not a psychological one.4 And the fruit, aiśvarya, in the plural becomes "a synonym for the siddhis, the supernatural enjoyments that rendered the Pāśupata practitioner the equal of Śiva."5 The classical enumeration of these is the eight masteries (aṣṭa-aiśvarya / the eight siddhis) — the supernatural powers (the ability to become infinitely small, infinitely large, weightless, to reach anywhere, to obtain anything, to control everything, etc.) that mark the attained yogi as a divine master.
Follow why uniting with the Lord makes you a master. The logic is participatory: in uniting with pati (Śiva, the Great Master, Maheśvara), the paśu (the bound soul) "partakes of the attributes of Maheśvara."6 You do not merely approach the Lord; you partake of his attributes — and the Lord's defining attribute is mastery (the aiśvarya of Maheśvara, the "Great Master"). So union with the Master makes you a master; communion with the sovereign confers sovereignty; partaking of the god who possesses all powers confers the powers (the siddhis). The "eight masteries" are not a separate achievement bolted onto liberation; they are what union with the all-mastering Lord delivers — the soul that unites with Maheśvara comes to share his aiśvarya, and aiśvarya in its concrete plural form is the eight siddhis.
This is why the Pāśupata yoga could not be the YS commentators' samādhi. Samādhi (the contemplative stilling of the mind, the isolation of spirit from matter) leads toward kaivalya — aloneness, the sealing-off of the self from the world. Pāśupata yoga leads toward the opposite: not the sealing-off but the opening-into divine mastery, the acquisition of sovereignty and powers, the becoming-equal-to-Śiva. The two soteriologies pull in opposite directions — samādhi toward isolation, Pāśupata yoga toward divine mastery — which is exactly why the Pāśupata theoreticians "took pains to distinguish" them. The internal logic of Pāśupata yoga is participatory empowerment: union with the Master makes you a master, and the masteries (the siddhis) are the proof and substance of the union.
This page is the doctrinal mechanism behind the Pāśupatas institutional-history page (this is the yoga the institution practiced). It sharpens the contrast that runs through the whole corpus: Pāśupata yoga (union-conferring-mastery) versus YS samādhi (contemplative isolation) — feeding White's history-of-meditation thesis. It connects the aiśvarya/siddhi-goal to the Bhairava-identity page (becoming the god) and the vibhūti-pāda (the YS's own neglected powers-book).
The case study is the Pāśupata theoreticians' deliberate distinction of their yoga from the YS samādhi — a doctrinal boundary-drawing that reveals two incompatible soteriologies sharing one word.7 The Pāśupatas could have simply used "yoga" loosely; instead they took pains to specify that their yoga (soul-god union) was not the samādhi of the Yoga Sūtra commentaries (contemplative mind-stilling). Why the care? Because the two name opposite goals, and conflating them would corrupt the Pāśupata path. Samādhi aims at kaivalya — the absolute isolation of puruṣa (spirit) from prakṛti (matter), the self sealed off, alone, free of all relation. Pāśupata yoga aims at communion — the soul united with the Lord, partaking of his attributes, becoming a master. One seeks aloneness; the other seeks union. One seeks freedom-from (isolation from matter and relation); the other seeks participation-in (communion with the god and the acquisition of his mastery). The case study reveals, in a single doctrinal distinction, the deep fork that runs through the whole Indian soteriological field: the isolation path (Sāṃkhya-Yoga kaivalya, the self sealed off) versus the union/empowerment path (Pāśupata communion, the self made a master). The same word "yoga" served both, which is precisely the semantic confusion White's whole book works to untangle — and the Pāśupata theoreticians' careful distinction is the tradition's own acknowledgment that "yoga" named two opposite things, and that their yoga (union, mastery) was not the contemplative isolation the YS commentators meant.
You are a Pāśupata, and your yoga is not sitting still to empty your mind. Your yoga is communion — the disciplined (vidhi) cultivation of union (yoga) between your bound soul (paśu) and Śiva the Lord (pati). The practices that achieve it are not (primarily) the stilling of thought but the regimen of the Pāśupata path (which included, as the vault tracks elsewhere, the deliberate courting of dishonor and the transfer of karma). As the union deepens, you begin to partake of the Lord's attributes — and the Lord's attribute is mastery. The siddhis begin to manifest: the eight masteries, the powers that are the concrete form of aiśvarya. You are not sealing yourself off from the world (that is the samādhi-path's kaivalya); you are opening into divine sovereignty, becoming a master, approaching equality with Śiva. The discipline the scene teaches the reader: Pāśupata yoga is union-toward-mastery, not stillness-toward-isolation, and to practice it (or to understand it) you must reverse the modern assumption that yoga's goal is inner quiet — here the goal is divine power, and the powers (the eight masteries) are not distractions from liberation but its very substance.
The page fails if Pāśupata yoga is collapsed into samādhi (reading it as contemplative mind-stilling, the very conflation the Pāśupatas guarded against) or if the aiśvarya/siddhi-goal is treated as a corruption of "true" yoga (the modern reflex that powers are a degeneration). The signature of the conflation failure is glossing Pāśupata yoga as "meditation"; of the corruption-reading, treating the eight masteries as a fall from a purer goal. The accurate reading: Pāśupata yoga is union with the god conferring divine mastery, deliberately distinguished by the tradition from contemplative samādhi, and its siddhi-fruit is central, not corrupt — the masteries are what union with the all-mastering Lord delivers, and reading them as degeneration imports exactly the modern power-disowning the page exists to correct.
The central tension is the relationship between the Pāśupata aiśvarya/siddhi-goal and the YS's own vibhūti-pāda (the third book, on the powers). Both the Pāśupata tradition and the YS have a powers-doctrine — but the YS commentarial tradition subordinated or neglected the powers (treating them as obstacles to kaivalya, the vibhūti-pāda as the neglected quarter), while the Pāśupatas made the powers (aiśvarya, the siddhis) central to liberation. So the same powers appear in both, valued oppositely: central in the Pāśupata union-path, marginal in the YS isolation-path. The open question is whether this reflects a genuine doctrinal disagreement (the Pāśupatas affirming what the YS commentators suppressed) or two stages of one development (an early powers-affirming yoga later overwritten by a powers-suppressing reading). White's larger argument suggests the latter — the powers-affirming yoga (Pāśupata, epic, tantric) was the original, overwritten by the powers-suppressing reading (the YS commentators, then Vivekananda) — but the precise relationship between the Pāśupata aiśvarya and the YS vibhūti is a thread the page opens.
A second open question: the eight masteries specifically. The enumeration of eight siddhis (aṣṭa-aiśvarya / aṣṭasiddhi) is classical, but its precise Pāśupata form and its relationship to other enumerations (the YS's powers, the tantric siddhis) is not fully specified in White's material here. The "eight masteries" is a known framework; its exact Pāśupata content and canonical list would require the doctrinal texts the page rests on White summarizing.
White's treatment of Pāśupata yoga serves his central thesis — that "yoga" named multiple, even opposite, things, and that the powers-affirming union-yoga was overwritten by the powers-suppressing contemplation-yoga. The convergence is with Sanderson (the institutional history) and with White's own etymological and Patañjali arguments. Where the productive tension lives is between the Pāśupata tradition's self-distinction (we are not doing samādhi) and the later conflation that erased it. The Pāśupata theoreticians knew their yoga was different from the YS samādhi and said so; the later tradition (and the modern reception) conflated all "yoga" into the contemplative-isolation model, erasing the Pāśupata union-mastery sense. White's contribution is to recover the Pāśupatas' own boundary-drawing — to show that the tradition itself distinguished union-yoga from samādhi-yoga, so that the modern conflation is not just a scholarly error but the erasure of a distinction the practitioners themselves insisted on. The convergence (Pāśupata yoga = union-toward-mastery) and the recovered self-distinction (we are not samādhi) reveal what the modern image forgot: that the dominant early Śaiva order practiced a yoga it explicitly defined as the opposite of contemplative mind-stilling — union and mastery, not isolation and stillness — and that "yoga" meant divine empowerment to the people who most prominently used the word.
Why would Pāśupata yoga-doctrine reach into psychology and into comparative religion? Because union-conferring-mastery is a model of participatory transformation (psychology) and the union-vs-isolation fork is a fundamental soteriological typology (comparative religion).
Psychology: Participatory Identification and the Acquisition of Attributes — Pāśupata yoga works by partaking of the attributes of the Lord through union — a model in which one acquires qualities not by developing them internally but by uniting with a being who possesses them. The handshake reveals a transformation-mechanism distinct from self-cultivation: rather than building mastery from within (the self-improvement model), the Pāśupata acquires mastery by communion with the master, partaking of his attributes. The insight neither domain alone produces: there are (at least) two models of acquiring a quality — cultivation (develop it in yourself) and participation (unite with one who has it and partake) — and the Pāśupata path is a pure participation model, which is psychologically distinct from the modern self-improvement yoga (cultivation) and closer to devotional/sacramental participation (becoming holy by union with the holy).
Comparative Religion: Union Versus Isolation — The Fork in Soteriological Goals — The Pāśupata distinction between their yoga (union with the Lord) and the YS samādhi (isolation/kaivalya of spirit from matter) is a local instance of a universal soteriological fork: the goal as union (with God, with the absolute, theosis, communion) versus the goal as isolation/liberation (the self freed, alone, sealed from all relation — kaivalya, certain nirvāṇa readings). The handshake reveals that the deepest typological divide in soteriology is whether the end-state is relational (union with an Other) or non-relational (the self alone, freed), and that the Pāśupata-vs-YS distinction is the Indian staging of this divide. The insight: the same tradition, even the same word ("yoga"), can house both poles, and recovering which pole a given practice aims at (union or isolation) is the key to understanding what it is actually for — a key the modern conflation of all yoga into "inner peace" obscures.
The Sharpest Implication The dominant early Śaiva order practiced a yoga it explicitly defined as the opposite of contemplative mind-stilling — union with the Lord conferring divine mastery, the eight siddhis as the substance of liberation — and the practitioners themselves insisted their yoga was not the samādhi of the Yoga Sūtra commentaries. Take this fully and the modern certainty that "yoga means stilling the mind toward inner peace" is revealed as the victory of one soteriological pole (isolation) over its opposite (union-mastery), a victory so complete that the union-yoga of the most important early Śaiva order — and its frank goal of becoming a divine master — has been forgotten so thoroughly that its very existence surprises. The Pāśupatas would not have recognized the modern yoga that bears their tradition's word.
Generative Questions