Yoga-Vasistha tradition

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A young man comes home from pilgrimage and cannot find a reason to go on living. He has seen birth give way to age and age to death; wealth and pleasure and power he has weighed and found weightless; and the prospect of taking up the throne strikes him as one more turn of a wheel that grinds toward nothing. This is Rāma, the prince of Ayodhyā, sunk in a despair so complete that he will neither rule nor act. The court summons Vasiṣṭha, the family preceptor, and what the sage offers is not comfort. He does not tell the prince that things will improve, or that duty redeems sorrow, or that the gods will provide. He tells him, across some thirty thousand verses, that the world he is grieving over does not exist in the way he thinks it does — and that this, correctly seen, is the end of grief. The Yoga-Vāsiṣṭha is the record of that cure.

A scene from the imperial Mughal illustrated edition of the Persian Yoga-Vasistha (Jūg Bāsisht), dated 1602, in the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin — Master of the Jog-Vashisht manuscript, via Wikimedia Commons (PD-Art).

It is among the longest philosophical poems in any language, cast as a dialogue within a frame and stuffed with frames inside that. Tradition assigns it to Vālmīki, the poet of the Rāmāyaṇa, and reads it as the inner teaching standing behind the epic — the metaphysics of which Rāma’s later career is the public face. The poem itself counts thirty-two thousand verses in its colophon; the surviving text runs to something closer to twenty-four thousand, and is conventionally cited at thirty thousand. It is divided into six books, or prakaraṇa, whose sequence traces the whole arc of the cure: dispassion (vairāgya), the conduct of the seeker (mumukṣu-vyavahāra), origination (utpatti), preservation (sthiti), quiescence (upaśama), and liberation (nirvāṇa). The last book alone is as long as the other five combined. The movement is from the prince’s first refusal of the world to a state in which the world has lost its power to bind.

The world as a thought held in place

What Vasiṣṭha teaches is an idealism pressed about as far as it can be pressed. The world has the standing of a dream. It is not that mind reflects a world already there; mind spins the world, sustains it for as long as attention holds, and lets it dissolve when attention rests. Matter is a settled habit of consciousness, no more solid than the cities a dreamer walks through and forgets on waking. From this the soteriology follows directly. Bondage is not a chain fastened on the self from outside; it is a thought the self keeps thinking. Suffering is the world taken as binding. Liberation is therefore not an attainment to be reached at the end of a long career of merit, nor a posthumous reward, but a change of seeing available here, in this body, to anyone whose grip on the appearance loosens. The poem’s word for the liberated-while-living is jīvanmukti, freedom in life, and it is the text’s governing ideal: the jīvanmukta walks through the same streets as before, performs the same acts, rules the same kingdom, and is bound by none of it, because the binding was never in the streets but in the seeing.

The sage Vasiṣṭha greets Shiva and Parvati, from the imperial Mughal Yoga-Vasistha manuscript — attributed to Bishan Das, circa 1602, via Wikimedia Commons (PD-Art).

The argument is carried not by demonstration but by story. Vasiṣṭha rarely proves; he narrates, and the narratives are built to enact the doctrine rather than describe it. Two of them have become emblems of the whole work.

In the tale of the queen Līlā, the king Padma dies, and the grieving queen refuses to let his body be moved. The goddess Sarasvatī appears to her and shows her that the husband she mourns is not gone but living an entire other life, in an entire other world, as another king — a world arisen complete with its own past and geography inside the span of a single mind, in a chamber, in what is no time at all. Taken deeper, Līlā finds that the world she had taken for the real one is itself such an arising. The story dismantles the sequence of lifetimes and the solidity of place in a single stroke: worlds nest in worlds, each fully furnished, each dreamed, none more real than the act of dreaming it.

In the tale of the queen Cūḍālā, the relation is reversed. Cūḍālā attains liberation while her husband, King Śikhidhvaja, does not — and his renunciation runs ahead of his understanding, so that he abandons the kingdom for the forest and austerities that get him nowhere. Cūḍālā, who loves him, takes the form of a young brahman, Kumbha, and as his teacher leads him by question and answer to see that the self he is trying to discipline was never the thing in bondage. The married couple, the disguise, the long patient dialogue: the story makes the point that liberation is not flight from the world but a correction of the seeing that occurs anywhere, in a palace as readily as in a cave. Few works anywhere press the world-as-mind position so far or so concretely — the finite world held to be no more substantial than the figures in a dream, real while dreamed and empty of independent standing, a near neighbor to the acosmism that grants reality to the absolute alone.

A philosophy near Advaita but not within it

Doctrinally the Yoga-Vāsiṣṭha keeps company with Advaita Vedānta, the non-dual school that holds brahman alone to be real and the individual self identical with it. But it is not a school text, and it does not belong to the lineage of Adi Shankara, Advaita’s great systematizer. Where Śaṅkara works by exegesis of the Upaniṣads and the Brahma-sūtras, building a tight scholastic architecture, the Yoga-Vāsiṣṭha works by image, repetition, and narrative immersion, and is freer and more radical in its denial of the world’s independent standing than Śaṅkara’s careful distinctions about levels of reality allow. Its kinship with the early Advaita of Gaudapada — whose doctrine of non-origination holds that nothing is ever really born — is more immediate than its kinship with the classical school proper.

That radicalism has long invited a particular question: how much does the poem owe to Buddhist idealism — the Yogācāra teaching that consciousness alone is real and external objects are constructions of mind? The affinity was noticed in the nineteenth century and has been debated ever since. The poem’s dream-worlds, its mind-only ontology, its dissolution of the perceiving subject, all run strikingly parallel to positions worked out in the Buddhist schools, and the text seems at points to be in conversation with them, absorbing their vocabulary into a frame that remains, finally, a Vedāntic one anchored in an absolute consciousness rather than in the Buddhist denial of any such ground. The matter is genuinely unsettled among scholars and is best left in that condition: the parallels are real, the direction and degree of influence contested.

The text behind the text: Mokṣopāya

For most of its career the poem presented itself as ancient — the secret heart of the Rāmāyaṇa, beyond dating. Philological work on Kashmirian manuscripts has told a different and more precise story. The earliest recoverable form of the work is not the Yoga-Vāsiṣṭha at all but a text called the Mokṣopāya, “the means to liberation,” an anonymous composition written in Kashmir around the middle of the tenth century. Its date is fixed with unusual firmness by an internal reference to the Kashmirian king Yaśaskara, who ruled from 939 to 948; the work appears to be the production of a single author writing in a warrior-class milieu, not the slow accretion of many hands that its sprawl might suggest. The Mokṣopāya, in this reconstruction, is the original; the familiar Yoga-Vāsiṣṭha is a later and longer recension, reworked between roughly the eleventh and fourteenth centuries — taking on the coloring of the Śaiva Trika of Kashmir along the way and then being edited toward Vedāntic orthodoxy, until it could be received as a pillar of Advaita.

The case for this rests on a critical edition of the Mokṣopāya undertaken at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg under Walter Slaje, with Jürgen Hanneder, Roland Steiner, and others, published by Harrassowitz with a German translation, philological commentary, and a dictionary of the work’s distinctive terminology — the first four of the six books having appeared. The edition draws on the Kashmirian manuscript tradition and on the fragmentary commentary of Bhāskarakaṇṭha, the Mokṣopāya-ṭīkā, which preserves readings older than the vulgate. The upshot reverses the traditional picture of the text’s history: the Advaita reading of the poem is not its origin but its destination. This is the heart of the modern reassessment, and it carries a methodological lesson, sharply put in Slaje’s study of how the Mokṣopāya’s originally theistic, non-Advaitin material was turned into orthodox Vedānta — the scholarship treats the transformation as a documented case of a tradition rewriting an inherited text into its own image.

Transmission and reception

The poem traveled, and it traveled by being made smaller and by being made foreign. An abridgment, the Laghu-Yoga-Vāsiṣṭha — “the short Yoga-Vāsiṣṭha,” attributed to Abhinanda of Kashmir — reduced the immense work to a circulating size and became, for many readers and teachers, the practical form of the text. It was this abridgment that the later Advaita tradition most often had in hand. Vidyaranya, the fourteenth-century pontiff of Sringeri, drew on the Laghu-Yoga-Vāsiṣṭha in his Jīvanmuktiviveka, his treatise on liberation-in-life, taking from it the apparatus of vāsanā-kṣaya — the eradication of latent dispositions — and manonāśa, the dissolution of mind, and welding these yogic disciplines onto the jñāna-centered Advaita he had inherited. In doing so he treated the poem as an authority on precisely the question of jīvanmukti, and helped license a current that later scholarship has called “Yogic Advaita” — the integration of meditative discipline into a school that under Śaṅkara had held knowledge alone to be sufficient. The poem thus entered the bloodstream of late-medieval Vedānta not as scripture but as a quarry of authoritative passages.

It crossed a linguistic and religious frontier as well. In the late sixteenth century the work was rendered into Persian as the Jūg Bāsisht, a translation completed in 1597 at the instance of the future Mughal emperor Jahangir, then still a prince; further Persian versions followed under Mughal patronage, and the text became a favorite among readers drawn to the meeting of Indian non-dualism with the inward currents of Sufism, with the prince Dārā Shikōh among its later patrons. Its dream-cosmology and its language of the one reality behind appearances found a ready audience among those for whom the unity of being was already a familiar doctrine. A complete English translation, the Yoga-Vasishtha-Maharamayana of Valmiki, was at last produced by Vihari-Lala Mitra and published at Calcutta by Bonnerjee and Co. beginning in 1891 — four volumes carrying the whole of the poem into a European language for the first time, and the form in which it reached most of its modern non-Indian readers.

King Janaka overhears ascetics singing of the absolute, a scene from the Mughal illustrated Yoga-Vasistha — circa 1602, via Wikimedia Commons (PD-Art).

The Yoga-Vāsiṣṭha sits in an unusual relation to the disciplines that share part of its name. It is not the Yoga-Sūtras of Patañjali, that terse manual of the eight limbs, nor is the yoga of its title the system of physical postures and breath-control that the word now most often summons. The yoga it teaches is the yoke of inquiry by which mind comes to rest in its own nature — closer in spirit to the Bhagavad-Gita’s yoga of knowledge than to any regimen of the body, and the connection to yoga as a family of practices is one of name and metaphor rather than method. Its afterlife runs on through the modern non-dual teachers who have prized it as a manual of liberation-in-life, and into the literature of neo-Advaita, where its image of the world as a self-arising dream has found a wide and informal currency.

Within the frame story the cure takes. Rāma’s questions run out; the seeing changes; and the prince who could not lift his hand to the throne takes up the kingdom he had refused. Nothing in the world has altered — the same court, the same wars, the same long reign the epic will go on to tell. What has altered is that none of it any longer holds him. He rules as the dreamer who has learned the dream is a dream and keeps dreaming it on purpose, which is the poem’s whole definition of a man set free.

→ In the library: The Upanishads (Müller, SBE I & XV) · The Crest-Jewel of Wisdom (Johnston, 1925) · The Vedanta-Sutras with Śaṅkara's commentary (Thibaut, SBE 34 & 38)

→ Related: Acosmism · Vedanta Advaita Visistadvaita Dvaita · Sankara · Kashmir Shaivism · Vidyaranya · Brahman · Gaudapada · Neo Advaita · Bhagavad Gita