Patanjali

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Patanjali is the name attached to the Yoga Sutras, the foundational text of classical Indian yoga — and the figure is known almost entirely through that work, a set of fewer than two hundred terse aphorisms that codified yoga into a formal philosophical system. Tradition treats him as a single sage who gathered an older body of practice into doctrine. What can be said with confidence is narrower: a name, a text, and the system the text lays out.

The dating is genuinely unsettled. Scholarship places the Yoga Sutras somewhere across a wide span — proposals range from the second century BCE to the fourth or fifth century CE — and there is no agreement on whether the Patanjali of the sutras is the same person as the grammarian Patañjali, author of a famous commentary on Sanskrit grammar, whom Hindu tradition often identifies with him. Some scholars now read the work as a compilation, its final shape owed to an editor who drew earlier material together rather than to a lone author. The biographical figure, in short, is thin; the text is not.

The system the sutras set out is what later tradition calls raja yoga, the “royal” yoga, and within Indian philosophy it is one of the six orthodox darshanas, or schools. Its aim is kaivalya — the isolation or release of pure consciousness from the turnings of the mind. The text opens by defining yoga itself as the stilling of those turnings, and lays out an eightfold path (ashtanga): ethical restraints, observances, posture, breath control, withdrawal of the senses, concentration, meditation, and samadhi, the absorbed state in which the distinction between knower and known is said to fall away. Built on the dualist metaphysics of the Samkhya school, the system holds spirit and matter to be utterly distinct, and treats liberation as the recognition of that difference.

The text has lived many lives. For long stretches it was studied chiefly through its classical commentaries; in the modern period it became, for many outside India, the single most cited source on what “yoga” means philosophically, well beyond the physical postures that the word now most often calls up. Swami Vivekananda’s lectures of the 1890s, which presented raja yoga to Western audiences as the heart of the tradition, did much to fix that reading. The figure behind the name remains largely a question mark. The system that bears it has been continuously read, contested, and practiced for the better part of two millennia.

→ In the library: The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (Johnston, 1912) · The Hathayogapradipika (Sinh, 1914)

→ Related: Yoga · Yoga Sutras Of Patanjali · Hinduism · Swami Vivekananda · Dualism