Patañjali

Key ideas

1. Yoga as the stilling of the mind. Sūtra I.2 defines yoga as the stilling (nirodha) of the states (vṛtti) of the mind (citta). When they are stilled, the seer rests in its own nature.
2. A Sāṃkhya metaphysics. The text assumes the dualism of puruṣa, the conscious seer, and prakṛti, nature, which includes the mind. According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Yoga was not a school distinct from Sāṃkhya until well after Patañjali: it was a different method towards the same end.
3. The five afflictions. Suffering is rooted in five kleśas: ignorance, ego, desire, aversion and clinging to life. Ignorance, taking the impermanent and impure for the permanent and pure, is the field in which the others grow.
4. The eight limbs. Practice has eight parts: restraints (yama), observances (niyama), posture (āsana), breath control (prāṇāyāma), withdrawal of the senses (pratyāhāra), concentration (dhāraṇā), meditation (dhyāna) and absorption (samādhi). The first of the restraints is non-injury, ahiṃsā.
5. God as an optional path. Īśvara, a God represented by the syllable om, is introduced as one route to absorption. The word “or” in I.23 makes devotion to him optional, though the text returns to it often.
6. Kaivalya. The final chapter is named for kaivalya, aloneness or isolation: consciousness, no longer caught up in the activities of the mind, stands by itself. This is the Yoga counterpart of Sāṃkhya’s liberation.

Patañjali is the name attached to the Yoga Sūtras, the root text of Yoga philosophy: about two hundred short aphorisms (sūtras) in four chapters on how to still the mind so that consciousness stands apart from nature. The same name belongs to the author of the Mahābhāṣya, the “Great Commentary” on Sanskrit grammar, and whether the two are one person is doubtful. Almost nothing about the man is known.

Who was Patañjali?

No biography survives. Tradition, as Wikipedia reports, regards Patañjali as an incarnation of Śeṣa, the serpent on whom Viṣṇu rests. That is devotion, not history. The name is borne by authors in three fields: grammar, yoga and medicine.

The Mahābhāṣya comments on Kātyāyana’s notes to Pāṇini’s grammar, and Western and Indian scholars alike date it to the mid-second century BCE. The Yoga Sūtras have no such anchor. Estimates run from the second century BCE to the fifth century CE. Edwin Bryant says that most scholars date the text shortly after the turn of the Common Era; Philipp Maas puts it at about 400 CE, from parallels with the arguments of the Buddhist philosopher Vasubandhu. The medical writings that carry the name, including an eighth-century commentary on the Caraka Saṃhitā, possibly date from the eighth to the tenth century CE.

Louis Renou showed significant differences in language, grammar and vocabulary between the Mahābhāṣya and the Yoga Sūtras, and no known text identifies the two authors before Bhoja in the eleventh century. Western scholars generally accept that they were different people, though in more traditional circles the single Patañjali remains an article of faith.

What is the text?

The Yoga Sūtras has four chapters, on absorption (samādhi), practice (sādhana), powers (vibhūti) and liberation (kaivalya). The count is 195 aphorisms on Vyāsa’s reckoning and 196 on others’. Gerald Larson argued that the fourth chapter is a later addition. A commentary traditionally credited to Vyāsa, dated to the fourth or fifth century, became almost as canonical as the aphorisms, and Maas argues that the two are one work, the Pātañjalayogaśāstra, which later readers divided between two authors.

What does Patañjali teach?

Yoga is stilling the mind. The definition in I.2 is citta-vṛtti-nirodha, the stilling of the states of the mind. Johnston renders the aphorism as “Union, spiritual consciousness, is gained through control of the versatile psychic nature”, and the next as “Then the Seer comes to consciousness in his proper nature”. The seer is puruṣa, the witness-consciousness of Sāṃkhya, and the mind belongs to nature. Sāṃkhya supplies the metaphysics; Yoga supplies the method.

Suffering has a cause. Ignorance, ego, desire, aversion and clinging to life are the five afflictions (kleśas). Johnston’s version says that “the darkness of unwisdom is the field of the others”.

The eight limbs. The eight limbs begin with an ethic: the first restraint is non-injury, and, in Johnston’s words, “where non-injury is perfected, all enmity ceases in the presence of him who possesses it”. Posture takes only a few aphorisms, and in Johnston’s rendering the one that defines it reads “Right poise must be firm and without strain” (his Book II, 46). The last three limbs, concentration, meditation and absorption, are exercised together as what the text calls saṃyama.

God and isolation. Īśvara, a God denoted by om, offers one path to absorption. The Internet Encyclopedia reads the particle vā, “or”, in I.23 as making devotion optional. The goal is kaivalya, isolation, the end of the entanglement of puruṣa with prakṛti.

What was Patañjali’s influence?

The Yoga Sūtras became the foundation of Yoga as a school of thought, although Yoga is mentioned as a school separate from Sāṃkhya only near the end of the first millennium. The commentators who followed, among them Vyāsa and, in the eleventh century, Bhoja, shaped how the text is read. Wikipedia’s article on Yoga philosophy calls it a key text that has influenced all other schools of Indian philosophy.

How should you start reading Patañjali?

Begin with the Yoga Sūtras in the library, in Charles Johnston’s English version of 1912. Its title page calls it “An Interpretation”, and it reads the text in a devotional register: it renders īśvara as “the Master” and the eight limbs as “the Commandments, the Rules, right Poise” and so on. Read it beside a literal translation. For the metaphysics behind the text, see Kapila, the legendary founder of Sāṃkhya, and the page on Yoga philosophy.