Yoga Sutras of Patanjali

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The second line of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali states the whole project in four words: yogas citta-vritti-nirodhah — yoga is the stilling of the turnings of consciousness. Everything before it is preface; everything after it is machinery built to bring that stilling about. The first sutra announces only that instruction in yoga now follows. The second names the discipline by its result. What remains when the mind’s restless motion ceases — when the field of awareness no longer throws up its endless succession of perceptions, errors, imaginings, sleep, and memory — is the seer abiding in its own nature. That abiding is the aim of the entire text.

It is a brief work, fewer than two hundred terse Sanskrit aphorisms, divided into four chapters, the padas. The first, samadhi-pada, treats absorption and the nature of the mind’s turnings. The second, sadhana-pada, sets out the practice and the obstacles to it, and opens the eight-limbed path. The third, vibhuti-pada, catalogs the powers that arise from deep concentration. The fourth, kaivalya-pada, treats release. Manuscripts differ slightly on the count — most give 195 sutras, a few 196 — because the tradition disagrees on whether one line is original. The word sutra means a thread; the aphorisms are threads, each so compressed that pulled from its place it goes almost meaningless. They were never meant to stand alone.

Authorship and date

Almost nothing certain is known of the man named in the title. Tradition calls him Patanjali and sometimes identifies him with a grammarian of the same name, author of the great commentary on Panini; most scholars now treat the two as distinct, though the conflation is ancient and has its defenders. The biographical question and the grammarian-conflation belong to the entry on the man; the text can be dated with more confidence than its author can be described. The work is placed in the early centuries of the Common Era. Older scholarship spread its estimates across several hundred years, from the second century before the Common Era to the fourth or fifth century after; the philologist Philipp Maas, working from the first critical edition of the text and its earliest commentary, argues for a date around 400 of the Common Era, which would make it close to contemporary with the Samkhya-Karika, the founding text of the sister school.

The sutras came bound to a commentary, the Yoga Bhashya, ascribed by tradition to Vyasa and dated to the fifth century. The dependence runs deep. The aphorisms are so compressed that without the commentary much of their argument is invisible; for most of the tradition the two were read as a single fabric, the gloss supplying the connective tissue the threads omit. Maas and others have pressed this further, arguing on manuscript evidence that text and commentary were composed together as one work — that the author of the sutras and the author of the Bhashya were the same hand, and that the original title was Patanjalayogashastra — the treatise on yoga according to Patanjali — with the sutras and their exposition forming a unified whole. On this reading the familiar separation of a terse root text from a later commentary is itself a later construction. The colophons to the four chapters name the work a samkhya-pravacana — an exposition of Samkhya — and the claim is not loose. The metaphysics of classical yoga is very nearly the metaphysics of Samkhya, the oldest of the six orthodox schools of Indian thought.

Yoga and Samkhya

Of the six classical darshanas, yoga and Samkhya are paired so closely that they are often spoken of together. Both rest on a thoroughgoing dualism of two eternal and irreducible realities: purusha, pure consciousness — inactive, attributeless, a mere witness, and (in the strict classical reading) plural, with innumerably many such witnessing selves — and prakriti, primordial unconscious materiality, single and eternally active, the uncaused cause of everything from the intellect down to the gross elements. Suffering arises from a single confusion: consciousness, reflected in the material intellect, mistakes the body-mind-ego complex for itself. The whole apparatus of the discipline exists to undo that confusion.

The decisive difference between the two schools is theological. Classical Samkhya is nirishvara, without a Lord; it explains the cosmos without a creator and pronounces the existence of a god non-proven, though it remains an orthodox, Veda-accepting system and “atheistic” overstates the matter. Yoga is seshvara, with a Lord. Patanjali admits Ishvara, defined not as a creator but as a special purusha — one untouched by affliction, action, and the fruits of action, the original teacher who is beyond time. Devotion to this Ishvara is one means among others to absorption, optional but effective; it is the seam through which a current of theism enters a framework that, in its borrowed Samkhya bones, has no need of one. The kinship to the devotional theism of the Bhagavad Gita — which uses the same vocabulary of guna, prakriti, and purusha in a frankly theistic key — is real, though the Gita belongs to the epic stratum of the Mahabharata and is adjacent to Patanjali’s system rather than a source of it.

The eight limbs

The best-known portion of the text is the ashtanga, the eight limbs, set out in the second and third chapters. They are the ethical restraints (yama); the observances (niyama); posture (asana); the regulation of the breath (pranayama); the withdrawal of the senses (pratyahara); concentration, the binding of attention to a single point (dharana); meditation, the unbroken flow of that attention (dhyana); and samadhi, the absorbed state in which the contemplating mind and its object draw so close that the sense of a separate contemplator falls away. The text frames these less as a ladder to be climbed in sequence than as supports that purify and steady the field of awareness — limbs of a single body rather than rungs. The first five are called outer limbs, working on conduct, body, breath, and the senses; the last three are inner, and the text gives them a collective name, samyama, the conjoined practice in which concentration deepens into meditation and meditation into absorption upon one and the same object. It is samyama, turned upon successive objects, that the third chapter will treat as the engine of the powers.

The restraints and observances come first and are not preliminary niceties: the yamas — non-harming, truthfulness, non-stealing, continence, non-possession — are described as a great vow binding regardless of circumstance, and the moral discipline is held to be the ground without which the inner limbs do not bear. The single limb concerning posture is dispatched in a handful of lines, asking only for a seat that is steady and at ease, so that the body ceases to make its demands and attention can turn inward. Breath, sense-withdrawal, and the three inner limbs that culminate in absorption occupy the architecture from there. The text describes the structure of this ascent; it does not hand the reader a procedure for performing it, and the warnings woven through the later chapters make plain that the discipline was understood as dangerous as well as demanding.

The powers, and release

The third chapter is the one that has most fascinated and most embarrassed the text’s modern readers. It treats samyama — the conjoined practice of concentration, meditation, and absorption directed upon a single object — and then catalogs, soberly and at length, the powers said to arise from it: knowledge of past and future, of former births, of the cries of all creatures; invisibility; strength; the perception of the subtle, the hidden, and the distant; entry into another body; passage through space. The catalog is neither apologized for nor sensationalized. It is reported as the natural fruit of a consciousness that has gained command over the layers of nature — and then, at the chapter’s hinge, it is set aside. These attainments, the text says, are perfections in the world of manifestation and obstacles to absorption; the seeker who pauses to gather them has mistaken a wayside power for the goal and stopped short of it.

That goal is kaivalya — isolation, aloneness. It is not union and not merger, despite the word “yoga,” which means yoking. It is the radical disentanglement of pure consciousness from its long entanglement with matter, accomplished not by belief, ritual, or acquisition but by viveka, the discriminating insight that consciousness is wholly distinct from the changing complex it had taken for itself. When that insight is complete and unbroken, prakriti — in the text’s image — ceases to dance for that witness, having shown it everything it was there to show; the turnings stop, and consciousness rests in its own nature, the condition named in the second sutra. Because the selves are plural, this is an individual event: the world does not end, it simply releases one of those it had held.

The text is precise about the texture of this freedom. It distinguishes a lower absorption still seeded with the residues of cognition from a higher one without seed, and it distinguishes liberation realized while the body still lives from the final isolation when the conjunction of consciousness and matter is wholly undone. Until that point the practitioner’s habits of mind carry latent impressions, samskaras, that can germinate again; absorption gradually burns these out, and even the absorbed state must finally be relinquished, since clinging to it is one more turning. The fourth chapter closes on this: when the gunas, the three constituent strands of nature, have completed their purpose for a given consciousness and resolve back into their source, what is left is the power of awareness standing in itself. The architecture is unsparing about the difference between a quieted mind and a freed one.

The text and modern postural yoga

The global discipline of mats and poses draws its prestige and very nearly its name from this work while having little to do with its contents. The book’s one limb on posture occupies a few lines and asks for a steady, comfortable seat for meditation, not a sequence of shapes; the elaborate postural practice of the modern studio descends instead from the medieval hatha yoga lineages and their twentieth-century recombination with European physical culture. This is a difference of kind, not a verdict: the text orders a discipline for stilling the mind and ends in the isolation of consciousness; the postural practice cultivates the body and the breath toward health, steadiness, and calm. Each is coherent on its own terms, and the philosophical sutras and the physical practice now travel under a single name that each fills differently.

The text, its commentaries, and modern reception

The sutras generated a dense commentarial tradition. The Yoga Bhashya attributed to Vyasa is the indispensable first layer, so bound to the root text that the two are now sometimes edited as one. Upon it were built further glosses — Vachaspati Mishra’s Tattvavaisharadi in the ninth century, the Vivarana attributed to the great Vedantin Shankara, and, in the sixteenth, the Yoga-varttika of Vijnanabhikshu, who read the system in a more theistic key and worked to soften its distance from Vedanta. The first critical edition of the conjoined text and Bhashya, on which the recent redating rests, was prepared by Philipp Maas; his account of the manuscript tradition and the single-author thesis is laid out in his A Concise Historiography of Classical Yoga Philosophy (in E. Franco, ed., Periodization and Historiography of Indian Philosophy, Vienna: Sammlung de Nobili, 2013, pp. 53–90). The standard scholarly English remains James Haughton Woods’s The Yoga-System of Patanjali (Harvard Oriental Series 17, 1914), which renders the sutras with the Vyasa-bhashya and Vachaspati’s gloss together; among recent renderings, Edwin Bryant’s The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (2009) presents the text through its traditional commentators. For the school’s metaphysical background, Gerald Larson and Ram Shankar Bhattacharya’s Yoga: India’s Philosophy of Meditation surveys the philosophy as a whole, and Ferenc Ruzsa’s treatment of Samkhya for the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy sets out the dualist framework yoga inherits.

The text’s modern global life began late in the nineteenth century. Swami Vivekananda made it the spine of his Raja Yoga (1896) — collected in his Complete Works — built around his own paraphrase and commentary on the sutras, and through that book Patanjali entered the Western imagination as the authority behind a practical science of meditation. The Theosophical movement founded by Helena Blavatsky read the sutras as a charter of esoteric self-development, and it was within that milieu that Charles Johnston, an Irish Sanskritist of the Theosophical circle, produced his 1912 rendering, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: The Book of the Spiritual Man — first serialized in the Theosophical Quarterly between 1909 and 1911. Johnston’s is an interpretive, frankly esoteric reading: he renders the discipline as the birth of “the spiritual man” from “the psychical,” and glosses yoga as union of the individual soul with the Oversoul — a Vedantic and Theosophical sense of union that sits oddly against the text’s own dualist destination in kaivalya, isolation. He keeps the original word sutra rather than “aphorism” for a reason he states plainly: the word, he writes, “comes from the same root as the word ‘sew,’ and means, indeed, a thread, suggesting, therefore, a close knit, consecutive chain of argument.” It is one English voice among many for a work whose brevity has always made it depend on the reader who unpicks the threads.

→ In the library: The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (Johnston, 1912) · Raja Yoga (Vivekananda, Complete Works)

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