THE YOGA SUTRAS OF PATANJALI
EDWIN F. BRYANT
THE YOGA SUTRAS OF PATANJALI
EDWIN F. BRYANT
THE YOGA SÜTRAS OE PATAÑJALI
A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary
WITH INSIGHTS FROM THE TRADITIONAL COMMENTATORS
EDWIN F. BRYANT
North Point Press
A division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux New York
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To my daughter, Mohini
And to all teachers of yoga, that Patafijali's Sūtras may inform and inspire their teachings
CONTENTS
Title Page Copyright Notice Dedication Foreword by B.K.S. Iyengar Sanskrit Pronunciation Guide The History of Yoga Yoga Prior to Patanjali The Vedic Period Yoga in the Upanisads Yoga in the Mahabharata Yoga and Sankhya Patanjali’s Yoga Patanjali and the Six Schools of Indian Philosophy The Yoga Sūtras as a Text The Commentaries on the Yoga Sutras The Subject Matter of the Yoga Sutras The Dualism of Yoga The Sankhya Metaphysics of the Text The Goals of Yoga The Eight Limbs of Yoga The Present Translation and Commentary
CHAPTER I: MEDITATIVE ABSORPTION CHAPTER II: PRACTICE
CHAPTER III: MYSTIC POWERS
CHAPTER IV: ABSOLUTE INDEPENDENCE
Concluding Reflections Chapter Summaries
Appendix: Devanagari, Transliteration, and Tran Notes
Bibliography
Glossary of Sanskrit Terms and Names Word Index
Acknowledgments
Praise for The Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali About the Author
Also by Edwin F. Bryant
Copyright
slation of Sūtras
FOREWORD by B.K.S. Iyengar
I congratulate you on your lucid commentary on the Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali. I have appreciated your commentary guoting the traditional commentators Vyasa, Vacaspati Misra, Sankara, Bhoja Raja, Vijñanabhiksu, and Hariharananda, and it reads well. You have presented it in simple and fluent language, which I am sure will be easily understandable to readers. As you are dedicating it to the teachers of yoga, I am sure your book will provide the readers with plenty of knowledge so that they may grasp the philosophy behind the subject and move toward the higher aspects of life in their sadhana (practice).
Patanjala Yoga is a practical subject and not a discursive one. As each individual is electrically alive and dynamic, so yoga is a living, dynamic force in life. In order to savor its essence, one needs a religiously attentive dynamic practice done with awareness and absorption. The life of man is not only the conjunction of prakrti (the sheaths of the body) and purusa (the soul), but also a combination of these two. Yoga is a means to utilizing the conjunction of prakrti and purusa for freedom and beatitude (moksa), as the two are interwoven and interrelated.
Patanjali explains the practice of kriyā-yoga in sutra I of the sadhana pada, repeating the same ingredients as are found in the niyama disciplines, namely, tapas, svadhyaya, and Isvara-pranidhana (discipline, self-study and devotion to God). This three-tiered definition clearly indicates the paths of karma, jñana, and bhakti. Though Patanjali advises bhakti in the beginning of the text in I.23, I consider the disciplines of yama and niyama (II.30—45) as corresponding to karmamarga (the path of action); āsana, pranayama, and pratyāhāra (II.46—55) as corresponding to jñana-marsa (the path of knowledge); and dhāraņā, dhyana, and samādhi (samyama, IIL1-4) as corresponding to bhakti marga (the path of devotion).
Prakrti and purusa being interwoven and interrelated, the practitioners of yoga have to understand this relationship clearly and perform svadhyaya in the form of asana, pranayama, and pratyahara. Sva means “self”? and adhyaya means “study.” These three aspects of Patanjala Yoga lead the sadhaka (practitioner) to understand himself or herself from the skin to the self. Hence, this guides one on the path of jñana. Dharana, dhyana, and samadhi being the effect of jñana earned through the practices of āsana, pranayama, and pratyāhāra along with yama and niyama, then lead the sadhaka toward the path of bhakti. Bhakti is the summum bonum of Patañjala Yoga. But if the sādhaka abuses the sadhana with selfish motives, he or she ends up with only the joys of sensual pleasure (bhoga).
As yoga is a lively subject, interpretations of the sūtras may vary according to dharma, laksana, and avastha parinama (character, qualities, and conditions) in sādhana (1IL13). Therefore, I differ from the traditional commentators on two things. The first pertains to the effects of āsana: tato dvandvānabhighātāh (II.48). The entire text speaks of the intelligence of nature and the intelligence of the self. I understand that the perfection of asana brings unity between the various sheaths of the body and the self (purusa), which Lord Krsna calls ksetra-ksetrajña yoga in the Bhagavad Gtta (XIIL1ff). Hence, perfection in āsana means a divine union of prakrti with purusa.
The practice of dsanas develops sattva guna, sublimating the gunas of rajas and tamas. The aim of dsanas is to make the prāņa (cosmic universal force) move concurrently with the prajña (insight) of the self on its frontier. This means to make the awareness of the self (sāsmitā) move and cover the entire body (II.19) so that the mechanisms of nature are sublimated and the intelligence (prajnda) of the self engulfs the body with its Sakti.
The second point pertains to the virama pratyaya of verse I.18 (virāma- pratyayabhyasa-pürvah samskāra-šeso ‘nyah—the other samādhi is preceded by cultivating the determination to terminate [all thoughts]. [In this state] only latent impressions remain). Patanjali himself does not call this other state asamprajriata-samadhi (1.46). He has said that it is part of sabija-samadhi (1.46). The various commentators infer this state to be asamprajíita, and this may be because Patanjali mentions
samprajñata-samadhi in the preceding sutra. For me, this sūtra is referring to a consolidating state of samprajfiata-samadhi, after attaining which the yogi can move toward asamprajfiata (nirbija) samādhi. Hence, this state acts as the intermediary state for nirbīja-samādhi. Just as pratyāhāra in astanga-yoga (1L54) is a consolidating stage, where one needs to integrate the external sheath (bahiranga) with the innermost sheath (antaranga), so is the case with the stage of virama pratyaya, for which Patanjali has not coined any term. It is a consolidating stage of sabija- samādhi, after which the yogi naturally moves toward nirbija-samadhi.
For me, the state of pratyahara in astānga-yoga and virama-pratyaya in samādhi are the touchstones in understanding the purity, clarity, and maturity of prajña, intelligence. When this illuminative and luminous intelligence takes place, the union of prakrti with purusa happens (sattva- purusayoh šuddhi-samye kaivalyam iti III.56*). Even in this pratyāhāra state of astanga-yoga and virama-pratyaya state in samādhi if one neglects Sraddha, virya, smrti, samddhi-prajna (faith, vigor, memory, and the insight of samādhi, the four legs of yoga in 1.20), then, even if one has reached the zenith, one is bound to become a yoga-bhrasta, a fallen yogi. Therefore, the practice of pratyāhāra in astanga yoga or virama-pratyaya in samādhi is to be performed with these four legs of yoga so as to maintain and retain that state of seasoned wisdom (rtambharā prajña, L48) that consecrates citi-šakti (the power of purusa). It is this combination only that leads the yogi toward the highest state in bhakti- marga—the šaranāgati-mārga—total dependence on ĪSsvara, God. This is how I understand and practice the astanga-yoga of sage Patafijali.
Having expressed my feelings, I am sure your good work and expressions, using the attributes of all the earlier commentators on the Yoga Sütras, will turn out as a study book for hundreds and hundreds of students who have embraced the subject in the West in knowing the light of that hidden illuminative intelligence on the inner self, the atman, and making that light surface and active in their sadhana, which will help their fellow beings experience this unalloyed and untainted bliss with its stream of virtuous (silata) wisdom.
With all my best wishes, I am sure this volume will benefit yoga sadhakas and spiritual seekers throughout the world.
Pune, December 5, 2007
*Editor's note: B.K.S. Iyengar accepts fifty-six verses in the third pada where other commentators
accept fifty-five.
SANSKRIT PRONUNCIATION GUIDE
DIACRITICS USED IN THIS TRANSLATION: āiūrļhmnūntdšs
The following pronunciation guide attempts to give approximate eguivalents in English to the Sanskrit sounds used in this text.
VOWELS
Sanskrit vowels have both short forms and lengthened forms (the latter are transliterated by a line over the vowel—ā, i, ü), as well as a retroflex r sound articulated by curling the tongue farther back onto the roof of the mouth than for the English r. Other Sanskrit vowels alien to English are noted below. Vowels are listed in Sanskrit in the following traditional order (according to their locus of articulation, beginning from the back of the throat to the front of the mouth):
a as in "but"
a as in “tar”; held twice as long as short a
i as in “bit”
I as in “week”; held twice as long as short i
u as in “bush”
ü as in “fool”; held twice as long as short u
r as in “rim”
l no English equivalent; approximated by | followed by r, above e as in “they”
ai as in “aisle”
0 as in “go”
au as in “vow”
h (visarga) a final “h” sound that echoes the preceding vowel slightly; as in “aha” for ah
m (anusvāra) a nasal sound pronounced like mm, but influenced according to whatever consonant follows, as in “bingo,” “punch”
CONSONĀNTS
Sanskrit consonants have both aspirated forms (kh, gh, ch, jh, and so on) and unaspirated forms (k, g c, j, and so on); the former involve articulating the consonant accompanied by a slight expulsion of air. There is also a set of retroflexes (transliterated with a dot beneath them —t d, th, dh, n, s), which have no precise English equivalents, and these involve curling the tongue farther back onto the roof of the mouth than for the English dentals. Sanskrit dentals (t, d, th, dh) are articulated with the tongue touching the teeth, slightly farther forward than for their English eguivalents. The consonants are listed in Sanskrit in the following traditional order (according to their locus of articulation, beginning from the back of the throat to the front of the mouth):
k as in "pick”
kh asin “Eckhart”
g as in “gate”
gh as in “dig-hard”
n as in “sing”
C as in “charm”
ch as in "staunch-heart” j as in “jog”
jh as in “hedgehog”
n as in “canyon”
t as in “tub,” but with the tongue curled farther back
as in "light-heart," but with the tongue curled farther back
as in “dove,” but with the tongue curled farther back
as in “red-hot,” but with the tongue curled farther back as in “tint,” but with the tongue touching the teeth
as in “tub,” but with the tongue touching the teeth
as in "light-heart,” but with the tongue touching the teeth as in “dove,” but with the tongue touching the teeth
as in “red-hot,” but with the tongue touching the teeth as in "no," but with the tongue touching the teeth
as in “pin”
as in “uphill”
as in “bin”
as in “rub-hard”
as in “mum”
as in “yellow”
as in “run”
as in “love”
as in “vine”
as in “shove”
as in “crashed,” but with the tongue curled farther back as in “such”
as in “hope”
THE HISTORY OF YOGA
Everyone by now has heard of yoga, and, indeed, with millions of Americans in some form or fashion practicing asana, the physical aspect of yoga, the teaching and practice of yoga, at least in the aspect of techniques of body poses and stretches, are now thoroughly mainstream activities on the Western cultural landscape. Yoga has popularly been translated as "union with the divine”! and may refer to a number of different spiritual systems. The Bhagavad Gita, for example, discusses a number of practices that have been termed yoga in popular literature: karma-yoga (buddhi-yoga), the path of action; jñana-yoga (sankhya-yosa), the path of knowledge; bhakti-yoga, the path of devotion; and dhyana- yoga, the path of silent meditation (which is the subject of Patañjali's text),2 and terms such as tantra-yoga, siddha-yoga, nāda-yoga, and so forth are now common in alternative spiritualities in the West. Typically, however, when the word yoga is used by itself without any qualification, it refers to the path of meditation, particularly as outlined in the Yoga Sūtras—the Aphorisms on Yoga—and the term yogi, a practitioner of this type of meditational yoga.
Patanjali was the compiler of the Yoga Sutras, one of the ancient treatises on Indic philosophy that eventually came to be regarded as one of the six classical schools of Indian philosophy. He presented a teaching that focuses on realization of the purusa—the term favored by the Yoga school? to refer to the innermost conscious self, loosely equivalent to the soul in Western Greco-Abrahamic traditions. The practice of yoga emerged from post-Vedic India as perhaps its most important development and has exerted immense influence over the philosophical discussions and religious practices of what has come to be known as mainstream Hinduism, both in its dominant forms in India and in its most common exported and repackaged forms visible in the West. Accordingly, Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras is one of the most important classical texts in Hinduism and thus a classic of Eastern, and therefore world, thought. Along with the Bhagavad Gitd, it is the text that has
received the most attention and interest outside of India. I might add here that Patañjali's Yoga Sūtras is not an overtly sectarian text in the sense of prioritizing a specific deity or promoting a particular type of worship as is the case with many Hindu scriptures, including the Bhagavad Gītā. Therefore, as a template, it can be and has been appropriated and reconfigured by followers of different schools and traditions throughout Indian religious history4 and certainly continues to lend itself to such appropriations, most recently in nonreligious contexts of the West.
In its exported manifestation, yoga has tended to focus on the physical aspect of the system of yoga, the āsanas, or stretching poses and postures, which most Western adherents of yoga practice in order to stay trim, supple, and healthy. Patanijali himself, however, pays minimal attention to the āsanas, which are the third stage of the eight stages, or limbs, of yoga, and focuses primarily on meditation and various stages of concentration of the mind.
There are references to awareness of yogīs on the Western landscape as early as Greek classical sources, Alexander being perhaps the most notorious early Westener to be fascinated with Indian ascetics. Its initial introduction to the West in modern times was by Vivekānanda at the end of the nineteenth century. More recently, generic yoga—particularly as āsanas, postures, but also as a meditative technigue leading to samādhi, enlightenment—was popularized in the West by a number of influential Hindu teachers of yoga in the 1960s, most of whom came from two lineages: Sivananda (1887-1963) and Krishnamacharya (1888-1989). Sivananda was a renunciant and his ashram tradition was transplanted by his disciples Vishnudevananda (1927-1993), Satchidananda (1914- 2002), and Chinmayananda (1916-1993), each of whom founded his own independent mission in the West (the Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centres, the Integral Yoga Institute, and the Chinmaya Mission, respectively). Krishnamacharya's three principal disciples took his emphasis on the practice of asana in their own direction: K. Pattabhi Jois (1915- ) continued to promote his version of astanga-vinydsa-yoga; Krishnamacharya's son, T.K.V. Desikachar (1938- ), developed viniyoga; and—perhaps most influential of all—Krishnamacharya's brother-in-law, B.K.S. Iyengar (1918- ) established the Iyengar method. Almost all yoga
teachers trace their lineage to such masters, and the more serious among such teachers or practitioners of yoga will have a valued copy of the Yoga Sūtras.
YOGA PRIOR TO PATANJALI
The Vedic Period
In terms of Yoga’s earliest origins, the Vedic period is the earliest era in South Asia for which we have written records, and it provides the matrix from which (or, more typically, against which) later religious, philosophical, and spiritual expressions such as Yoga evolved in India, at least in the north of the subcontinent. We do not wish to invest any further energy into the ongoing debate over whether the Vedic-speaking peoples (Indo-Aryans>) were originally indigenous to the Indian subcontinent or Indo-European intruders from an external point of origin (for which, see Bryant 2001 and 2005), except to note the corollaries of these two positions on the protohistory of Yoga. Those accepting an external point of origin for the Vedic-speaking peoples tend to hold that Yoga, both as practice and philosophy, was originally pre-Vedic (and therefore non-Vedic) and indigenous to the subcontinent. From this perspective, since there is no explicit reference to yogic practices and beliefs in the earliest Vedic texts, their emergence in subsequent Vedic literature such as the Upanisads® points to a later period when the Vedic people had long settled and absorbed themselves into the preexisting populations of the Indian subcontinent. In this process, they established their own Vedic rituals as the mainstream "high" religious activity of the day, and also eventually absorbed many non-Vedic religious elements from the indigenous peoples, such as Yoga philosophy and practice.
Those challenging the thesis of external origins for the original Vedic- speaking peoples tend to prefer to see both Vedic ritualism and yogic practices as parallel internal developments evolving within Vedic- (Indo- Aryan-) speaking communities indigenous to the subcontinent. It can certainly be argued that the germs of yogic thought can be found in embryonic form in the (middle period) Vedic literatures themselves, the
Aranyakas and Brahmana texts. Alternatively, there is little that can discount the possibility that Yoga emerged outside Vedic orthodoxy but nonetheless within Indo-Aryan-speaking communities. (And, of course, one can combine components of these two positions and argue for the Vedic or Indo-Aryan origins of Yoga but still hold that the Indo-Aryans were nonetheless originally immigrants into the subcontinent.) What all these positions have in common, and where our own discussion of the early history of Yoga will commence, is that Yoga evolves on the periphery of Vedic religiosity and beyond the parameters of mainstream Vedic orthopraxy. Yoga is clearly in tension with Vedic ritualism, discussed below, and its goals are in stark and explicit opposition to it (for example, Yoga Sūtras 1.15—16).
Before considering the early literary history of Yoga, however, we must note that the arguments above are all primarily deduced from the fields of linguistics and philology. Archaeology has revealed the remains of an enormous and sophisticated ancient civilization, the Indus Valley civilization, covering modern-day northwest India and Pakistan, dating from circa 3000 to 1900 s.c.e. Mention must be made, when considering the earliest origins of Yoga, to seals found in Indus Valley sites with representations of figures seated in a clear yogic posture. The most famous figure is seated with arms extended and resting on the knees in a classical meditative posture.” This evidence suggests that, irrespective of its literary origins, Yoga has been practiced on the Indian subcontinent for well over four thousand years.
Like other Old World cultures, the dominant religious expression in the early Vedic period within which Yoga emerges is that of the sacrificial cult wherein animals and other items are offered to various gods through the medium of fire for the purposes of obtaining worldly boons—offspring, cattle, victory over enemies, etc. A genre of texts, the Brahmanas, describe the ritualistic minutiae of a wide variety of sacrifices, both domestic and public, each one specific to the attainment of particular goals. While the intricacies of the Vedic sacrificial rite may seem alien to our modern worldviews and practices, the mentality that supported it—that of attempting to manipulate the external physical environment for the purpose of enjoying the pleasures of the material world through the medium of the sensual body—has remained constant
throughout human history. It is for this reason that the post-Vedic reactions to this type of mentality, in the form of developments such as the various systems of yoga, remain perennially relevant to the human condition.
Yoga in the Upanisads
There is evidence as early as the oldest Vedic text, the Rg Veda, that there were yogi-like ascetics on the margins of the Vedic landscape.8 However, it is in the late Vedic age, marked by the fertile speculations expressed in a genre of texts called the Upanisads, that practices that can be clearly related to classical yoga are first articulated in literary sources.? The Upanisads reveal a clear shift in focus away from the sacrificial rite, which is relegated to an inferior type of religiosity, replacing it with an interest in philosophical and mystical discourse, particularly the quest for the ultimate, underlying reality underpinning the external world, Brahman, localized in living beings as atman.10 The Mundaka Upanisad (1.2. 7-11) calls the performers of sacrifice “deluded” and “ignorant,” however learned and competent they may posture to be, because the boons and fruits gained from the sacrifice—from the manipulation of one's external environment, to use a more modern frame of reference—are temporary. When they expire, one finds oneself frustrated once more. The Gita, too, calls the Vedic ritualists “less intelligent," since any boons accruing from such materialism do not solve the ultimate problems of life—human suffering inherent in the cycle of birth and death (II.42—45). A move toward understanding higher and more ultimate truths of reality is the prime feature of the Upanisads.
Although the Upanisads are especially concerned with jfíana, or understanding Brahman, the Absolute Truth, through the cultivation of knowledge, there are also several unmistakable references to a technique for realizing Brahman (in its localized aspect of atman) called yoga, which are clearly drawn from the same general body of related practices as those articulated by Patañjali.11 As with the Upanisads in general, we do not find a systematic philosophy here, but mysticopoetic utterances, albeit profound in content. The Katha Upanisad states:
When the control of the senses is fixed, that is Yoga, so people say.
For then, a person is free from distraction. Yoga is the “becoming,” and the "ceasing.”!2 Not by words, not by the mind, not by sight, can he [the self] be grasped; how else can he be perceived except by saying: “he is!” ... For one who perceives him as he really is, his real nature becomes manifest. When all desires lurking in the heart are removed, then a mortal person becomes immortal, and attains Brahman in this world. When the knots in the heart that bind one to this world are all cut, then a mortal becomes an immortal, such is the teachings ... A purusa [ātman or soul] the size of a thumb dwells always in the hearts of men. One should extricate him with determination like a reed from muñja grass. One should know him as resplendent and immortal. Thus, when Naciketas had received this knowledge and the complete rules of yoga from Death, he attained Brahman; he became free of disease and death. So, too, will others who know these teachings about the self. (VI.11—18)
The Svetāšvatara Upanisad gets a little more specific about the actual technigue of yoga practice:
When he holds the body steady, with the three sections erect, and withdraws the senses into his heart with the mind, a wise person will cross over all the frightening rivers [of embodied existence] by means of the boat of Brahman. His breathing restrained here [within the body], and his energy under control, he should breathe through one nostril when his breath is depleted. A wise person should control the mind, just as one would a wagon yoked to unruly horses!3 ... and engage in the practice of yoga ... When, by means of the true nature of the ātman, which is like a lamp, a person perceives the truth of Brahman in this world, he is freed from all bondage, because he has known the Divine, which is unborn, unchanging, and untainted by all things. (II.8—15)
By the later Maitri Upanisad, we have a much more extensive discussion of Yoga, including more specific references to the six angas, or limbs, of yoga: pranayama, breath control; pratyāhāra, sense withdrawal; dhyana, meditation; dhāraņā, concentration; tarka, inquiry; and samādhi, final absorption in the self (VI.18). Five of these limbs correspond to the
last five limbs of Patafijali'S system (the Yoga Sūtras lists eight limbs in Chapter II!4). Although, like the two older Upanisads quoted above, the Maitri is still embedded in the Upanisadic context of unity of Brahman as the ultimate goal of yoga practice (Brahman is not mentioned in the Yoga Sūtras), the specifics of yoga technique (and Sankhya metaphysics, discussed below) receive far more elaborate and technical attention here than in the older Upanisads.!5 In this development, the Maitri represents, as does the Mahābhārata, a transition between the old Upanisadic worldview and the later emergence of the systematic metaphysical traditions such as the one represented in the Yoga Sütras.
Yoga in the Mahabharata
The Mahābhārata, which culminates in 100,000 verses,16 is the longest epic in the world and, like the Maitri Upanisad, preserves significant material representing the evolution of Yoga. Usually dated somewhere between the ninth and fourth centuries B.C.E., the epic exhibits the transition between the origins of Yoga in the Upanisadic period and its expression in the systematized traditions of Yoga as represented in the classical period by Patanjali. Nestled in the middle of the epic, the well- known Bhagavad Gitd (circa fourth century B.C.E.) devotes a good portion of its text to the practices of yoga, which it already considers to be “ancient” (IV.3); indeed, Krsna presents himself as reestablishing yoga teachings that had existed since primordial times. While the Gita tends to use the term yoga interchangeably with karma-yoga, and the text focuses primarily on karma-yoga, jñana-yoga, and especially bhakti-yoga, the techniques of Patanjalian-type yoga are outlined throughout the entire sixth chapter, albeit subsumed under devotion to Krsna. The Gitd refers to this type of practice as dhyāna-yoga,!7 as did most early Indic texts.
After establishing a firm seat in a clean place, not too high and not too low ... there, sitting on that seat and fixing the mind on one object, with mind and senses under control, one should practice yoga to purify the ātman, self, by holding the body, neck and head straight, steady and keeping oneself motionless, focusing on the tip of the nose, and not looking about in any direction. With a peaceful self, free of fear, firm in the brahmdcarya vow of celibacy, with mind
controlled and thoughts fixed on Me [Krsna], one should sit in yoga, holding Me as the supreme. (VI.11-15)
As can be seen from this verse, the Yoga Sūtra's Īsvara-praņidhāna, dedication to God, which will be encountered in I.23, becomes the essential teaching of the entire Gita and of all the yoga systems prescribed in it, rather than the more discreet ingredient promoted by Patanjali. Nonetheless, the Yoga Sutras is an inherently theistic text.
The Mahabharata contains a number of references to practices that are clearly relatable to the system of yoga as taught by Patafijali, most of them in the Moksa-dharma section of Book 12 of the epic.!8 For example, the sage Vasistha defines yoga as ekāgratā, concentration, and pranayama, breath control (XII.294.8), both terms and practices essential to Patanjali’s system. The terms yoga and yogi occur about nine hundred times throughout the epic, expressed as noted above in terms midway between the unformulated expressions of the Upanisads and the systematized practice as outlined by Patanjali.19 This, of course, indicates that practices associated with yoga had gained wide currency in the centuries prior to the Common Era, with a clearly identifiable set of basic techniques and generic practices, and it is from these that Patanjali drew for his systemization. One passage from the epic (XII.188.1-22) particularly illustrates this, namely Bhisma’s deliverance to Yudhisthira of the “four stages of dhyāna-yoga,” meditation. Dhyana is the term most often used to refer to meditation in the epic, not just, as with Patanjali, the seventh, penultimate, limb of yoga but often as synonymous with Patanjali’s eighth limb and ultimate goal, samādhi. What is of particular interest in this passage (quoted in the commentary for I.17 below) is that even though the final limb in Patanjali’s system also contains four basic stages (two of which go by the same name as two of the states mentioned by Bhisma29), the terminology and correlations of Bhisma’s four stages of dhyāna-yoga seem to have more in common with the four stages of Buddhist samadhi.?! Scholars have long pointed out a commonality of vocabulary and concepts between the Yoga Sütras and Buddhist texts.22 All this underscores the basic point that there was a cluster of interconnected and cross-fertilizing variants of meditational yoga—Buddhist and Jain as well as Hindu—prior to Patanjali, all drawn from a common but variegated pool of
terminologies, practices, and concepts (and many strains continue to the present day).
Indeed, one might profitably begin a discussion of the relationship between Yoga and what was much later to be considered its sister school, Sānkhya, and for that matter Buddhism, by noting that in this formative late Vedic period, perhaps for even the best part of a millennium prior to the rise of the clearly defined classical philosophical traditions, there were no schools as such to speak of at all; Sānkhya and Yoga (and, for that matter, Buddhism) had yet to become systematic schools, such as what was to become known as the Patanjala Yoga, or even distinct philosophical systems.23 Moreover, there were a number of variants going under the name of Yoga (and of Sānkhya). One might envision a plethora of centers of learning and practice, many ascetic and spearheaded by charismatic renunciants, where parallel and overlapping philosophical doctrines and meditative practices, many going by the name of yoga, were evolving out of a common Upanisadicflavored core. These would become distinct schools only at a much later period of time.
Yoga and Sānkhya
The history of Yoga is inextricable from that of the Sānkhya tradition. Sānkhya provides the metaphysical infrastructure for Yoga and thus is indispensable to an understanding of Yoga. Usually translated as enumeration or counting due to its focus on the evolution and constituents of the twenty-four ingredients of prakrti, material reality, Sānkhya might best be understood as dealing with calculation in the sense of reasoning, speculation, philosophy, as it is defined in the Mahābhārata24—in other words, the path striving to understand the ultimate truths of reality through knowledge, typically known as jñana- yoga. While the specifics of Sankhya metaphysics and Yoga practice will be discussed more elaborately below, we can briefly note here that this metaphysics is dualistic, insofar as ultimate reality is conceived as containing two distinct ultimate principles: purusa, the innermost conscious self broadly synonymous with the notion of soul, and prakrti, the material world with all its variegatedness within which the purusa is embedded. While Yoga and Sankhya share the same metaphysics and the common goal of liberating purusa from its encapsulation, their methods
differ. Sankhya occupies itself with the path of reasoning to attain liberation, specifically concerning the analysis of the manifold ingredients of prakrti from which the purusa is to be extricated, and Yoga more with the path of meditation, focusing on the nature of mind and consciousness, and on the techniques of concentration in order to provide a practical method through which the purusa can be isolated and extricated. (We must note here that while on occasion we use the language, as do the commentators, more appropriate to Vedanta—of purusa being extricated or liberated—we do so rhetorically; in fact, as will be discussed, purusa is and has always been eternally free, liberated, and autonomous, according to Sankhya. It is the mind, not purusa, that must become enlightened).
Sankhya seems to have been the earliest philosophical system to have taken shape in the late Vedic period,25 and, indeed, it has permeated almost all subsequent Hindu traditions: Vedanta, Puranic, Vaisnava,26 Šaivite,27 Tāntric,28 and even the medicinal traditions such as ayurveda. Larson goes so far as to say, “Buddhist philosophy and terminology, Yoga philosophy, early Vedanta speculation, and the great regional theologies of Saivism and Vaisnavism are all, in an important sense, footnotes and/or reactions to a living ‘tradition text’ of Sankhya” (1999, 732). Indeed, Larson has long seen the classical Yoga of Patanjali as a type of “neo-Sankhya,” an updating by those within the old Sankhya tradition in an attempt to bring it into conversation with the more technical philosophical traditions that had emerged by the third to fifth centuries c.E. particularly the challenges represented by Buddhist thought (1999, 2008).29
While this may have been true for the systematized Yoga articulated by Patanjali in the second century c.E., it has also been argued that Sankhya itself evolved out of much earlier primordial Yoga origins. We can refer here again to the Indus Valley seal from the third millennium B.C.E. of a horned figure sitting in a distinctly yoga-like pose, which points to some kind of yoga practice as a primordial element on the Indian subcontinent. Schreiner’s statistical analysis of the context and content of the references to Yoga and Sankhya in the Mahabharata—the richest literary source for considering the origins of Yoga—finds Yoga to be more original and Sankhya a later appendage formulated to provide the
practices with some philosophical rationale. Schreiner provides an intriguing image of the proto-Sankhya philosopher:
Those [Sankhya] redactors ... were ... probably not practicing Yogins, but rather (perhaps) meticulous scholars, scribes with archival ambitions, thinkers with a liking for numbers and classification (but afraid of the existential commitment to a path of Yoga which would lead to death and through dying, literally and spiritually). They may well have been yogabrasta [the “fallen” or “unsuccessful” yogis of the Gita 6.37—45], Yogins who did not make it but were close enough to the practices and experiences of Yoga to be able to speak about it and intellectualize it. The yogabrasta, one who did not reach the goal of no return, is probably the best candidate for becoming a Sankhya philosopher. But he would have been a Yogin first. (1999, 776)
This provocative view might be kept in mind if we choose to wonder if Patanjali himself, and certainly his commentators, had experienced the truths of which they spoke in the sutras and their commentaries, or whether some of them were even practitioners. In any event, for our present purposes, the metaphysics of Yoga is that of Sankhya, and hence the history of the two traditions requires a few words.
As noted, the first important point to be stressed is that Sankhya and Yoga should not be considered different schools until a very late date. In fact, the first reference to Yoga itself as a distinct school seems to be in the writings of Sankara in the ninth century cz. (Bronkhurst 1981). There are (to be precise) 884 references to Yoga in the Mahabharata, “and the common denominator of all the epic definitions of Yoga is disciplined activity, earnest striving—by active (not rationalistic or intellectual) means” rather than the more popular translation and cognate “union” (Edgerton 1924, 38). There are 120 references to Sankhya,?0 defined, as noted, as reasoning, and none of these 1,000-odd combined references to the two approaches indicates any difference between them other than one of method in attaining the same goal: Yoga seeks the vision of dtman, the Upanisadic term for the purusa, through practice and mind control, and Sankhya through knowledge and the intellect. Otherwise, “The knowers of Truth see that Sankhya and Yoga
are one” (XII.304.431).
This is amply expressed by Bhīsma when specifically asked by Yudhisthira to explain the difference between Sānkhya and Yoga: "Both the followers of Sānkhya and those of Yoga praise their own way as the best ... The followers of Yoga rely on experiential methods (pratyāksahetavah), and those of Sānkhya on scriptural interpretation (šāstravinišcayāh). I consider both these views true: Followed according to their instructions, both lead to the ultimate goal” (XII.289.7). And, again:
There is no knowledge equal to Sankhya, there is no power (balam) equal to Yoga; both of them are the same path, both, according to oral tradition (smrtau), lead to deathlessness. People of little intelligence consider them to be different. We however, O king, see clearly that they are the same. What the followers of Yoga perceive, the same is experienced by the followers of Sankhya. One who sees Yoga and Sankhya as one, is a knower of Truth. (XII.304.1—4)
While presenting Yoga as a more action-based practice, Krsna in the Bhagavad Gitd reiterates the same point: “A twofold division was established by Me of old... jndna-yoga, the yoga of knowledge, followed by Sankhya, and karma-yoga, the yoga of action followed by the yogis” (HI.3). Both lead to the same goal (V.2), and anyone who considers them to be different is “childish” (V.4—5—even as Krsna clearly favors the action-based approach, III.4ff; V.6ff). Even where the Gitd articulates a more Patanjalian type of Yoga, which it calls dhyāna, it is still contrasted with Sankhya merely in terms of method leading to the same goal: “Some behold the atman, self, by dhyana, meditation, others by Sankhya” (XIII.25). Nowhere in the Gītā or the entire Mahabharata is there any indication that these two approaches constitute different schools or metaphysical systems.?2 Sānkhya and Yoga are merely different approaches to salvation until well into the Common Era. This continuity and confluence between Sankhya and Yoga is reflected in early sources for well over a millennium, including Patanjali’s time of writing as well as that of Vyasa, the first and primary commentator on the Yoga Sutras in the fifth century cr. Vyasa explicitly concludes the chapters of his bhdsya commentary with the colophon šrī-pātarijale
sānkhya-pravacane yoga-šāstre, “Patañjali's Yoga treatise, an exposition on Sañkhya.”
Another important point to consider when tracing the origins of Yoga is that in the epic, the ultimate liberation accruing from the practice of yoga (as with the practice of Sañkhya) is conceived in a number of passages (for example, XII.228.38; 231.17; 246.8) in terms of the monistic goal of unity of the individual soul, purusa/atman with the one ultimate Absolute called Brahman in the Upanisads (expressed variously in different Upanisads in both personal or impersonal terms). The later classical Sankhya tradition is distinctly dualistic—ultimate reality consists of two ingredients, purusa and prākrti, consciousness and matter —rather than monistic—subscribing to the one absolute principle called Brahman in the Upanisads. The Mahabharata evidences a transitional period between the Upanisads and the later tradition as expressed in the Yoga Sutras; the dualistic purusa and prākrti principles associated with Sankhya/Yoga are retained, but they are subsumed under the higher Upanisadic union with Brahman. This monistic source in the epic is expressed either in terms commonly used for the impersonal Brahman, or as personal Isvara, God, Nārāyaņa.33 Brahman is not mentioned either in the Yoga Sutras or Sankhya Karikas (the text that became to later Sankhya what the Yoga Sutras became to Yoga, that is, the primary text of the system).?^ Both these texts deal with the liberation of the individual ātman rather than the relationship of this ātman with the supreme dtman, or Brahman, which was the concern of the Vedanta tradition (however, Brahman is mentioned by the commentators, and thus the Upanisadic matrix always remains as a backdrop). And, although Patafijali also accepts a personal Isvara, which he equates with the sonic form of Brahman in the Upanisads, om (1.23ff), he introduces him in the context of meditation rather than cosmology or metaphysics.
In short, Yoga and Sankhya in the Upanisads and epic simply refer to the two distinct paths of salvation by meditation and salvation by knowledge, respectively. Followers of both schools upheld belief in the purusa’s ultimate union with a developed form of the Upanisadic Brahman, expressed in both personal and impersonal terms, which simply points to the fact that all orthodox Hindus of the day tended to accept those beliefs. The chief difference in the trajectory that Patanjali’s
Yoga took was its exclusive focus on the psychological mechanisms and techniques involved in purusa’s liberation. Similarly, later Sankhya concerned itself with the specificities of prakrtPs ingredients from which purusa was to be extricated, “which in the earlier Upanisads had been rather ignored, not because its existence was denied, but because it did not interest the earliest thinkers, who were absorbed in the contemplation of the One Ultimate Reality” (Edgerton 1924, 32).
Before concluding this section on the pre-Patañjali background of Yoga, one might add, as an aside, that from the nine hundred-odd references to yoga in the Mahabharata, there are only two mentions of asana, posture, the third limb of Patañjalis system.35 Neither the Upanisads nor the Gītā mentions posture in the sense of stretching exercises and bodily poses (the term is used in the Gtta verse above in its sense as physical seat rather than bodily postures), āsana is not mentioned as one of the six limbs of the Maitrī Upanisad, and Patanjali himself dedicates only three brief sūtras from his text to this aspect of the practice. The reconfiguring, presentation, and perception of yoga as primarily or even exclusively āsana in the sense of bodily poses, then, is essentially a modern Western phenomenon and finds no precedent in the premodern yoga tradition, although the fourteenth-century Hathayoga Pradīpikā does dedicate one of its four chapters to āsana.
PATANJALI’S YOGA
Patarijali and the Six Schools of Indian Philosophy
In addition to various heterodox schools such as Jainism and Buddhism, what came to be identified (in much later times) as six schools of orthodox thought also evolved out of the Upanisadic period (of course, there were various other streams of thought that did not gain this status but nonetheless emerged as significant presences on the religious landscape of Hinduism). As we have seen with Sankhya and Yoga, the streams of thought that later became associated with these six schools were not necessarily conceived of in that way until the end of the first millennium c.E. In fact, it might be more accurate to consider these
traditions distinctive religophilosophical expressions that emerged from the Vedic period with different focuses rather than actual schools in the earlier period. They shared much of their overall worldview but dedicated themselves to different areas of human knowledge and praxis, and while differing quite considerably on metaphysical and epistemological issues, they nonetheless did not necessarily reject the authority of the other traditions in other specific areas where these did not conflict with their own positions. Thus, for example, the Nyaya logician school accepts Yoga as the method to be used to realize the atman as understood within that tradition,36 and Vedanta objects to it only to the extent that it does not refer to Brahman as the ultimate source of purusa and prakrti, not to its authenticity in meditative technique and practice.37 Even a dharmašāstra text like the Yajñavalkya Smrti, which occupies itself exclusively with dharma, codes of ritual, personal, familial, civic, and social duties, states in its opening section that from the abundance of religious scriptures dealing with the plethora of human affairs: “this alone is the highest dharma, that one should see the ātman by yoga” (1.8). Thus, in early Sanskrit texts Yoga referred to a form of rigorous discipline and concentration for attaining the direct perception of the ātman and gaining liberation that was appropriated and tailored by different traditions according to their metaphysical understanding of the self, rather than a distinct school.
In any event, eventually an orthodox school of Yoga came to be identified with Patanjali, the compiler of these sūtras, and took its place alongside other traditions that also had distinct sūtra traditions, as one of the “six schools of Indian philosophy.” These are Sankhya, Yoga, Nyaya, Vaisesika, Mimamsa, and Vedanta. These schools were deemed orthodox because they retained at least a nominal allegiance to the sacred Vedic texts—unlike the so-called heterodox schools such as Buddhism and Jainism, which rejected them. Since various ingredients of these schools are referred to in our commentaries, we can briefly refer to some of their salient features.
As mentioned, probably the oldest Indian speculative tradition is Sankhya, later to be referred to as the sister school of Yoga insofar as they shared the same metaphysics. This featured an analysis of reality in which all categories of the created world were perceived as evolving out
of a primordial matter, prakrti, from which the purusa, which is the term used by Sānkhya and Yoga schools for the ātman, must be extricated. Vaišesika was another metaphysical system, one that perceived the created world as ultimately consisting of various eternal categories such as atoms rather than as evolutes from a singular category of prakrti. This came to be "sistered” with Nyāya, a school that accepted the basics of Vaišesika metaphysics but became distinguished by the aspect of epistemology dealing with the formulation of categories and conditions of valid reasoning and the refinement of rules of logic, such that the debates between the various schools emerging from this period could be conducted according to agreed-upon conventions of what constituted valid or invalid argumentation. Vedanta was a school dedicated to another aspect of epistemology: attempting to systematize the heterogeneous teachings of the Upanisads through a consistent hermeneutics. Its concerns were the relationship between the manifest world; Brahman, the Absolute Truth and ground of all being; and ātman, the localized aspect of this Truth. This was associated with Mimamsa, since both of these schools occupied themselves with hermeneutics, the interpretation of the ancient Vedic texts. The Mimamsa was the main orthodox school that attempted to perpetuate the old Vedic sacrificial rites by composing a philosophical justification for their continued performance.
Indic schools, both orthodox and heterodox, interacted intellectually and sometimes polemically, debating and mutually enriching each other, and their emergence pushed the old Vedic cult further into the background. From this rich and fertile post-Vedic context, then, emerged an individual called Patanjali whose systematization of the heterogeneous practices of yoga came to be authoritative for all subsequent practitioners and eventually reified into one of the six schools of classical Indian philosophy. It is important to stress here again that Patanjali is not the founder, or inventor, of yoga, the origins of which, as should be clear, had long preceded him in primordial and mythic times. Patanjali systematized the preexisting traditions and authored what came to be the seminal text for yoga discipline. There was never one uniform school of ur-Yoga (or of any Indic school of thought, for that matter); there was a plurality of variants and certainly different
conceptualizations of meditative practices that were termed yoga. For example, whereas Patañjali organizes his system into eight limbs, and the Mahābhārata, too, speaks of yoga as having eight "gualities” (astagunita, XII.304.738), as early as the Maitrī Upanisad of the second century B.C.E. there is reference to a six-limbed Yoga (VI.18), as there is in the Visnu Purāna (VI.7.91), and this numerical schema was retained in the later Goraksa-samhitā and the Dhydnabindu and Amrtabindu Upanisads. Along similar lines, there are various references to the twelve yogas and seven dhāraņās (dharand is considered the sixth of Patanjali’s limbs) in the Mahābhārata.9 Yoga is thus best understood as a cluster of techniques, some more and some less systematized, that pervaded the landscape of ancient India. These overlapped with and were incorporated into the various traditions of the day such as the jñana, knowledge-based traditions, providing these systems with a practical method and technique for attaining an experienced-based transformation of consciousness. Patanjali’s particular systematization of these techniques in time emerged as the most dominant, but by no means exclusive, version.
Indeed, internal to his own text, in his very first sutra, atha yoganusdsanam, Patafijali indicates that he is continuing the teachings of yoga (the prefix anu- indicates the continuation of the action denoted by the verb), and the traditional commentators certainly perceive him in this light. In point of fact, the tradition itself ascribes the actual origins of Yoga to the legendary figure Hiranyagarbha (see commentary to I.1). Moreover, evidence that Patanjali was addressing an audience already familiar with the tenets of Yoga can be deduced from the Yoga Sütras themselves.4? For example, on occasion, Patanjali mentions one member of a list of items followed by "etc.,” thereby assuming his audience to be familiar with the remainder of the list. Thus, he refers to animadi, “the mystic power of anima, etc.,” indicating that the other seven mystic powers were a standard, well-known group. He likewise speaks of a *sevenfold” wisdom without further explanation (II.27). But, in short, because he produced the first systematized treatise on the subject, Patafijali was to become the prime or seminal figure for the Yoga tradition after his times and accepted as such by other schools. To all intents and purposes, his Yoga Sütras was to become the canon for the
mechanics of generic yoga, so to speak, that other systems tinkered with and flavored with their own theological trappings.
As with the reputed founders of the other schools of thought, very little is known about Patañjali himself. Tradition, first explicitly evidenced in the commentary of Bhoja Raja in the eleventh century C.E. (and continuing to this day in a verse often recited at the beginning of yoga classes in the Iyengar community), considers him to be the same Patañjali who wrote the primary commentary on the famous grammar by Panini and also ascribes to him authorship of a treatise on medicine.41 There is an ongoing discussion among scholars as to whether this was likely or not;42 my own view is that there is not much to be gained by challenging the evidence of traditional accounts in the absence of evidence to the contrary that is uncontroversial or at least adeguately compelling.
Patanjali’s date can only be inferred from the content of the text itself. Unfortunately, most classical Sanskrit texts from the ancient period tend to be impossible to date with accuracy, and there are always dissenters against whatever dates become standard in academic circles.^? Most scholars date the text shortly after the turn of the Common Era (circa first to second century), but it has been placed as early as several centuries before that.^^ Other than the fact that the Yoga Sütras were written no later than the fifth century, the date cannot be determined with exactitude.
The Yoga Sūtras as a Text
The sütra writing style is that used by the philosophical schools of ancient India (thus we have Vedanta Sütras, Nyaya Sütras, etc.). The term sutra (from the Sanskrit root sū, cognate with sew) literally means a thread and essentially refers to a terse and pithy philosophical statement in which the maximum amount of information is packed into the minimum number of words. Knowledge systems were handed down orally in ancient India, and thus source material was kept minimal partly with a view to facilitating memorization. Being composed for oral transmission and memorization, the Yoga Sütras, and sütra traditions in general, allowed the student to "thread together" in memory the key ingredients of the more extensive body of material with which he or she
would become thoroughly acquainted. Thus sūtras often begin with connecting words linking them with the previous sūtras, typically, pronouns or conjunctions beginning with t (such as tatah and tatra). Each sūtra served as a mnemonic device to structure the teachings and assist memorization. I sometimes compare them to a series of bullet points that a lecturer might jot down prior to giving a presentation, to structure the talk and provide reminders of the main points intended to be covered; thus, from a dozen shorthand phrases incomprehensible to anyone else, a lecturer might discourse for a couple of hours.45
The succinctness of the Yoga Sūtras—it contains about 1,200 words in 195 sūtras—indicates that they were construed to be a manual reguiring unpacking. That the sūtras, or aphorisms, are in places cryptic, esoteric, and incomprehensible in their own terms points to the fact that they were intended to be used in conjunction with a teacher: Feuerstein calls them “maps” (1980, 117). Thus, while some of the sūtras are somewhat straightforward, the fact is that we cannot construe meaning from many sutras of Patanjali’s primary text. Indeed, some are so obtuse that they are undecipherable in their own terms. Therefore, it is, in my view, an unrealistic (if not impossible) task to attempt to bypass commentary in the hope of retrieving some original pure, precommentarial set of ur- interpretations (and those attempting to do so without extensive training in the philosophical universe of India at the beginning of the Common Era freguently have some sectarian or other agenda underpinning their enterprise).
Before considering the commentaries on the Yoga Sūtras, some mention must be made of the view of a number of earlier critical scholars that the text is a composite, composed of a number of layers. Starting with the famous Indologist Max Muller (1899), a number of scholars, including Paul Deussen (1920), Richard Garbe (1897), J. W. Hauer (1958), and Erich Frauwallner (1953), have argued that the text is a patchwork. Deussen, for example, maintains that I.1-16 forms one unit devoted to ordinary awareness; L17-51, another unit, devoted to samadhi, meditative awareness; II.1-27, a third, to kriyā-yoga, preparatory practice; and II.29—III.55, along with Chapter IV, a fourth unit devoted to the eight-limbed process and other assorted topics. Hauer, Garbe, Frauwallner, Dasgupta, and others added various nuances
to the matter.47 These efforts, while meritorious, have all been subject to critique.48 The reason for such lack of consensus is clearly that there is insufficient evidence, hence “the task of finding various layers will always be arbitrary” (Larson 2008, 91). The oral traditions of India and their embodiment in the shape of written primary texts have proved to be remarkably resilient, stemming from the Indian reverence and respect for sacred tradition. While this certainly does not grant them immunity from text-critical scholarship, in a work such as the Yoga Sutras, one is best advised to look very carefully for internal structural, semantic, or logical coherency and rationale before assuming that an apparent sudden break in (modern linear notions of) the sequencing of subject matter indicates a later insertion.^? More recent scholarship has tended to find internal consistency in most of the text.50
In any event, the only disjunction in the text that presents itself to my reading occurs in Chapter II and is best explained by postulating two distinct Yoga traditions that were patched together by Patafijali. The chapter begins with the introduction of a practice called kriyā-yoga, which is defined as consisting of tapas, austerity; svadhyaya, study; and Īsvara-pranidhāna, devotion to God. This practice eliminates the klešas, obstacles to yoga, which the text proceeds to discuss in a coherent sequential manner, and the section culminates in II.26—27 by stating that viveka-khyāti, discrimination, results from the destruction of avidyā, ignorance, the cornerstone of these klešas. Sutras II.28—29 then suddenly announce a new practice, the yoga of astānga, eight limbs, which culminates in this same state of viveka-khyati. There is no indication of the relationship between this practice and the kriya-yoga outlined in the beginning of the chapter. But that they might represent different traditions is a valid consideration given that the second limb of the eight-limbed practice consists of observing five niyamas, ethical observances, three of which are identical to the three ingredients of kriyā-yoga. Why these three items comprising the entirety of a yoga practice called kriyā are then placed alongside two other items (šauca, cleanliness; and santosa, contentment) as the five ingredients comprising the second limb (niyama) of a differently arranged type of yoga practice called astanga is puzzling. But Feuerstein’s opinion (1979) that they most likely indicate that Patanjali had drawn upon and merged two different
traditions with overlapping but differently organized schemas is certainly very plausible.
We therefore find ourselves sympathetic to an alternative and, in our opinion, fruitful way of looking at the issue that respects the historical integrity of the text without denying the likelihood of its containing various disparate strands. R. S. Bhattacharya is willing to concede that “a large part of the sūtras are taken by Patanjali from his predecessors either verbatim or with slight changes” (1985, 52). From this perspective, whatever different strands are contained in the sutras (and we are able to feel any confidence only about the one noted above), it is Patanjali who has pieced them together; the text is not a hodgepodge of successive layers interpolated into some ur-text over the years. This point of view respects the traditional understanding of the text’s integrity of authorship (needless to say, in the perspective of the commentators, the work is a harmonious and logical whole5!), while not ignoring some of the more persuasive observations of modern critical scholars, and one that fits well with the previous discussion of Patanjali as a systematizer of preexisting traditions.
The Commentaries on the Yoga Sūtras
Knowledge systems in ancient India were transmitted orally, from master to disciple, with an enormous emphasis on fidelity toward the original set of sūtras upon which the system is founded, the master unpacking the dense and truncated aphorisms to the students, and this system continues in traditional contexts today. Periodically, teachers of particular prominence wrote commentaries on the primary texts of many of these knowledge systems. Some of these gained such wide currency that the primary text was always studied in conjunction with a commentary, particularly since, as noted, texts such as the Yoga Sutras (and, even more so, the Vedanta Sutras) were designed to be “unpacked” and hence contain numerous sutras that are incomprehensible without elaboration. One must stress, therefore, that our understanding of Patafijali'S text is completely dependent on the interpretations of later commentators; it is incomprehensible, in places, in its own terms.
This, of course, leaves open the possibility that later commentators might have misinterpreted, or, perhaps more likely, reinterpreted aspects
of the text by filtering ancient notions through the theological or sectarian perspectives of their times. Part of the academic approach to a text involves identifying and separating diachronic and synchronic developments and philosophical context. This is of course important, as ideas are never static but develop across time and context, constantly cross-fertilizing with other currents of thought. Thus scholars have always been wary of the extent to which the commentaries are imposing later concerns and perspectives on the text that are alien to Patanjali’s intentions. Modern methods of text criticism sometimes bypass the commentaries and, by comparing the context, style, terminolosy, content, and structure of individual sütras or sequences of sutras themselves, attempt to determine what an author's original intentions might have been prior to exegetical overlay. This includes comparing Patanjali’s sūtras with other earlier texts, particularly Buddhist ones. Critical observations of this nature can often be very insightful, and I include throughout the text some of the analyses and correlations I hold to be more cogent.52
In any event, in terms of the overall accuracy of the commentaries, the present commentary represents the view that there is an a priori likelihood that the interpretations of the sütras were faithfully preserved and transmitted orally through the few generations from Patañjali until the first commentary by Vyasa in the fifth century (and we will see that some commentators, both traditional and modern, even hold Vyāsa's commentary to be that of Patañjali himself). In other words, unless compelling arguments are presented to the contrary, one must be cautious about questioning the overall accuracy of this transmission. Certainly, the commentators from Vyasa onward are remarkably consistent in their interpretations of the essential metaphysics of the system for over fifteen hundred years, which is in marked contrast with the radical differences in essential metaphysical understanding distinguishing commentators of the Vedanta school (a Ramanuja or a Madhva from a Šankara, for example). While the fifteenth-century commentator Vijnānabhiksu, for example, may guibble with the ninth- century commentator Vacaspati Misra, the differences generally are in detail, not essential metaphysical elements. And while Vijüanabhiksu may inject a good deal of Vedantic concepts into the basic dualism of the
Yoga system, this is generally an addition (conspicuous and identifiable) to the system rather than a reinterpretation of it. There is thus a remarkably consistent body of knowledge associated with the Yoga school for the best part of a millennium and a half, and consequently one can speak of the traditional understanding of the sütras in the premodern period without overly generalizing or essentializing. One therefore has grounds to expect compelling reasons as to why this uniformity should not have been the case in the couple of centuries that may have separated Patañjali and Vyasa.
Be all this as it may, the task we have set for ourselves in the present work is not to engage extensively in textual criticism but to attempt to represent something of the premodern history of interpretations associated with the school of Yoga as it has been transmitted for, at the very least, fifteen hundred years, and as it has been accepted by both scholastics and practitioners over this period. This, surely, constitutes a formidable realm of legitimacy and authority in its own right. One thus has grounds to speak of a tradition, and it is this Yoga tradition that the present commentary sets out to represent through some of its primary expressions prior to the modern explosion of interest in yoga in the West.
The first extant commentary by Vyāsa, typically dated to around the fourth or fifth century, attained a status almost as canonical as the primary text by Patanjali himself. Consequently, the study of the Yoga Sutras has always been embedded in the commentary that tradition attributes to this greatest of literary figures. So when we speak of the philosophy of Patanjali, what we really mean (or should mean) is the understanding of Patanjali according to Vyasa: It is Vyasa who determined what Patanjali’s abstruse sütras meant, and all subsequent commentators elaborated on Vyasa. While, on occasion, modern scholarship has insightfully questioned whether Vyasa has accurately represented Patanjali in all instances,53 for the Yoga tradition itself, his commentary becomes as canonical as Patanjali’s (in fact, a number of traditional sources identify Vyasa as none other than Patanjali himself5+). Indeed, the Vyasa bhāsya (commentary) becomes inseparable from the sūtras, an extension of it (such that on occasion commentators differ as to whether a line belongs to the commentary or the primary text5). From one sūtra of a few words, Vyasa might write several lines of
comment without which the sütra remains incomprehensible. It cannot be overstated that Yoga philosophy is Patanjali’s philosophy as understood and articulated by Vyasa.
In traditional narrative, Vyasa, also known as Vedavyasa or Vyasadeva, is the legendary “divider”56 of the four Vedas. The Vedas are the oldest preserved literature in India and, indeed, in the Indo- European language family. Tradition considers that there was originally only one Veda, and at the beginning of the present world age57 this was subdivided into four by Vyasa. Vyasa is also considered to be the recorder of the immense Mahābhārata, as well as the compiler of the Puranas, the largest body of Sanskrit writing, containing most of the stories and ritual details that underpin what has come to be known as Hinduism. Irrespective of the historical accuracy of such literary prolifigacy, Vyāsa's status in traditional Sanskrit sources is that of the primary literary figure of ancient India. Modern scholars, even accepting the actual existence of a sage Vyasa, consider our Vyasa, the primary commentator of Patanjali’s text, to be a later figure who penned his commentary under the name of the legendary sage in order to invest it with indisputable authority. Be that as it may, it is essential to recognize that Patanjali’s Yoga system has essentially been handed down through the centuries as Patanjali’s system as understood by the commentary attributed to Vyasa. Vyasa’s commentary, the Bhdsya, thus attains the status of canon and is almost never questioned by any subsequent commentator. Later commentators base their commentaries on unpacking Vyāsa's Bhdsya—rarely critiquing it but rather expanding or elaborating on it. This point of reference results in a marked uniformity in the interpretation of the sūtras in the premodern period as noted above.
The next commentary considered in the present work is the Vivarana. Although its authorship is debated, it is attributed to the great Vedantin Sankara in the eighth to ninth centuries c.E. Sankara was to become the most influential commentator of the Vedanta school, and all subsequent commentators on the Vedanta, whether in agreement or disagreement with his advaita, nondual interpretations,58 were constrained to define their own theologies in relation to his. It has remained unresolved since it was first questioned in 192759 whether the commentary on the Yoga
Sūtras assigned to Sankara is authentically penned by him. The advaita, nondual, aspect of Sankara’s thought, which is otherwise in stark opposition to the dualism and realism of Yoga metaphysics, is certainly not prominent in the Vivarana to my eye—although one must note Hacker’s intriguing theory that Sankara was originally an adherent of Patafijali'S yoga prior to becoming the famous Vedāntin.60 There is only one surviving manuscript of this text, and all that can be determined with certainty is that it existed in the fifteenth century.
The next best known commentator after Vyasa, Vacaspati Mi$ra, was a Maithila Brahmana from the Bihar region of India, whose commentary, the Tattva-vaisaradi, can be dated with more confidence to the ninth century.61 Vacaspati Misra was a prolific intellectual, penning important commentaries on the Vedanta, Sānkhya, Nyaya, and Mimamsa schools in addition to his commentary on the Yoga Sütras. Despite the differences among these schools, Vacaspati Mišra is noteworthy for his ability to present each tradition in its own terms, without displaying any overt personal predilection. Erudite scholastics of the Yoga tradition would have been familiar with other commentaries in addition to that of Vyasa, and Vācaspati Mišra's Tattva-vaisaradi is the next most authoritative for the overall tradition after the Bhāsya of Vyasa. As an aside, this eclectic scholasticism contrasts with the experiential focus of yoga and makes one wonder whether Vācaspati Misra was a practicing yogī.2
A fascinating Arabic translation of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras was undertaken by the famous Arab traveler and historian al-Biruni (973- 1050), the manuscript of which was discovered in Istanbul in 1922.63 Al- Biruni translates the sütras in the form of a dialogue and interweaves it with "that over-lengthy commentary." However, the translators hold that this commentary to which he refers and had at his disposal does not appear to have been that of Vyasa and “had probably been written at a time when the Bhasya of Vedavyasa had not attained any great sanctity or authority ... [and] may represent a hitherto unknown line of interpretation" (Pines and Gelblum 1966, 304). This is a fascinating consideration, if true, since al-Biruni’s commentary, which seems to be in complete accordance with Vyāsa's, adds weight to our own opinion that there is little evidence to deny the accuracy of Vyasa's Bhasya. (In other words, if al-Biruni is following another commentary almost
contemporaneous with the Bhasya and it reads Patañjali with the same interpretation as Vyasa, the notion of an intact oral lineage from Patanjali informing both commentaries is enhanced.)
Roughly contemporaneous with al-Biruni is the eleventh-century king Bhoja Raja, poet, scholar, and patron of the arts, sciences, and esoteric traditions, whose clan asserted independent rule in the Malwa region of Madhya Pradesh, central India, in the mid-tenth century. While Bhoja Raja is certainly a welcome exemplar of an important political figure who engaged deeply with the Yoga tradition, his commentary, called the Rdja-martanda, essentially reiterates the work of Vyasa without adding much elaboration, although there are occasionally very valuable insights. In contrast, in the fifteenth century, Vijnanabhiksu wrote to my mind the most insightful and useful commentary after that of Vyāsa's, the Yoga-vārttika. Vijüanabhiksu was another prolific scholar, to whom eighteen philosophical treatises on Sankhya, Vedanta, and the Upanisads are attributed. He is noteworthy for his attempt to harmonize Vedanta and Sankhya concepts, subscribing to a metaphysical view of bhedābheda, difference in nondifference, with regard to the relationship between the individual soul and the Absolute Truth. (He thus periodically critiques the nondualism of the Vedāntin Sankara.64) As a Vaisnava (a follower of an ancient sect holding Visnu to be the supreme Īsvara), his commentary also enhances the devotional element and tenor of the text, as indeed do most of the commentaries. His translator, Rukmani, finds him to be *an uncompromising ascetic, steadfast in the principles of Yoga" (1997, 623). With regard to the question whether he was a practicing yogi himself, despite his scholasticism, he claims in another of his publications on Yoga, the Yoga-sāra, that he is expounding the secrets of Sankhya and Yoga as he himself directly experienced them.
In the sixteenth century, another Vedāntin, Rāmānanda Sarasvatī,65 wrote his commentary, called Yogamani-prabha, which also adds little to the previous commentaries. But there are valuable insights contained in the final commentary considered for the present study, the Bhasvati by Hariharananda Aranya. While it is not always clear to what extent some of the commentators were practicing yogis and to what extent they were scholastics, we can affirm that Hariharananda certainly was a fully dedicated yogi.66 From his early life, Hariharananda lived a renounced,
ascetic life as a sannyast, including several years in solitude meditating in the caves of west India and the last twenty-one years of his life in a hermitage where he could be contacted by his disciples only through a window looking into a hall. Although he is technically a “modern” commentator (1869-1947), and this present commentary concerns itself with the premodern, that is, the commentaries of the precolonial period, it is included here because, as a Sankhya ācārya, master, Hariharananda inhabited a traditional universe in terms of his own personal perspectives of reality as well as in his lifestyle. His commentary adds useful insight to the Yoga tradition from a context nearer our own times; his is a standpoint exposed to Western thought but still thoroughly grounded in tradition.
THE SUBJECT MATTER OF THE YOGA SŪTRAS
The Dualism of Yoga
Although situated as one of what later came to be known as the six schools of classical Hindu philosophy, Patafijali's text is not so much a philosophical treatise as a psychosomatic technique of meditative practice. As a dualistic system that presupposes an ultimate and absolute distinction between matter and consciousness, it is concerned with presenting a psychology of mind and an understanding of human consciousness rather than a metaphysics of all manifest reality. In actuality, Patanjali’s text reads more like a manual for the practitioner interested in plumbing the depths of human consciousness than a philosophical exposition.
While the distinction between the material body and a conscious soul has a well-known history in Western Greco-Abrahamic religion and thought, Yoga differs from most comparable Western schools of dualism by regarding not just the physical body but also the mind, ego, and all cognitive functions as belonging to the realm of inert matter. This metaphysical presupposition of Yogic (and, for that matter, much Indic) thought is essential to an understanding of the basics of Yoga. The dualism fundamental to Platonic or Aristotelian thought, or to Paul or Augustine, is not at all the dualism of Yoga. Perhaps Descartes most famously represents the generic Western notions of the dualism between self and body in his Meditations: The self thinks and lacks extension, the body is unthinking and extended. In other words, there are two types of realities in classical Western dualism: physical reality, which is extended in space and empirically perceivable, and mental reality, which does not have spatial extension and is not empirically perceivable but private. For Descartes, following early Greek notions of the soul (tellingly called psyché), it is the soul that is res cogitans, the thinking being engaging in the cognitive functions of dubitans, intelligens, affirmans, negans, volens, nolens, imaginans quoque, et sentiens.
In the Yoga tradition, the dualism is not between the material body and physical reality on one hand, and mental reality characterized by thought on the other, but between pure awareness and all objects of awareness—whether these objects are physical and extended, or internal and nonextended. In other words, in Sankhya and Yoga, thought, feeling, emotion, memory, etc., are as material or physical as the visible ingredients of the empirical world.1 As an aside, in this regard, Yoga has a curious overlap with modern reductive materialism, which holds that the internal world of thought and feeling is ultimately reducible to neurological brain functioning and other purely material phenomena,? as well as with the computational procedures of “artificial intelligence.” It thereby offers an unexpected overlap with modern functionalist accounts of mind that merits further exploration (avoiding some of the pitfalls in the Cartesian view in this regard, while, simultaneously, unlike Artificial Intelligence, retaining consciousness itself as independent of cognition). Pure consciousness, called purusa in this system, animates and pervades the incessant fluctuations of thought—the inner turmoil of fears, emotions, cravings, etc.—but the two are completely distinct entities.
There is thus a radical distinction between the mind, which is considered to be very subtle but nonetheless inanimate matter, and pure consciousness, which is the actual animate life force. Animated by consciousness, it is the mind that imagines itself to be the real self rather than a material entity external to consciousness. The mind is therefore the seat of ignorance and bondage; purusa is “witness, free, indifferent, a spectator and inactive” (Sankhya Karika XIX). Therefore, while the goal of the entire yoga system, and of Indic^ soteriological (liberation- seeking) thought in general, is to extricate pure consciousness from its embroilment with the internal workings of the mind as well as the external senses of the body, in fact, according to Sankhya, “no one is actually either bound or liberated, nor does anyone transmigrate; it is only prakrti in her various manifestations who is bound, transmigrates and released" (Sankhya Karika LXIT). Purusa is eternal and therefore not subject to changes such as bondage and liberation; in the Yoga tradition, the quest for liberation, in other words human agency, is a function of the prākrtic mind, not of purusa. (We will revisit the implications of this fundamental principle and—since it is perceived by
its detractors as the Achilles’ heel of an otherwise meritorious system— the reactions to it from other Indic schools of thought in our concluding reflections.) Thus, although the traditional commentators (and the present commentary) sometimes say “purusa misidentifies itself with prakrti” or “purusa seeks freedom,” these are rhetorical or pedagogical statements. Purusa has never been bound; all notions of identity whether bound or liberated are taking place in the prākrtic mind. In conclusion, then, Yoga claims to provide a system by which the practitioner can directly realize his or her purusa, the soul or innermost conscious self, through mental practices.
The Sankhya Metaphysics of the Text
We have discussed how Yoga and Sankhya are not to be considered distinct schools until well after Patanjali’s time, but instead as different approaches or methods toward enlightenment. While there are minor differences between the two traditions, Sankhya provides the metaphysical or theoretical basis for the realization of purusa, and Yoga offers the technique or practice itself.€ While the Yoga tradition does not agree with the Sankhya view that metaphysical analysis, that is, jñana, knowledge, constitutes a sufficient path toward enlightenment in and of itself?" the metaphysical presuppositions of the Yoga system assume those of Sankhya. Therefore, an understanding of the infrastructure of Sankhya metaphysics is a prerequisite to comprehending the dynamics underpinning both the essential constituents of Yoga psychology and practice, as well as the supplementary aspects of the system such as the siddhi mystic powers of Chapter III.
As with the cluster of Yoga traditions, there were numerous variants of Sankhya, amply attested in the Mahabharata? (the Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Hsiien Tsang’s disciple in the seventh century reports eighteen schools? and the Bhāgavata Purdna also refers to several). Only fragments quoted by other authors have survived from the works of the original teachers of the system—Kapila, the divine sage whom tradition assigns as the original expounder of Sankhya, is mentioned as early as the Rg Veda (X.27.16), the earliest Indo-European text, as well as in a number of other ancient treatises.!0 Additionally, there are quotes from Paficasikha, who is sometimes quoted by our commentators,!! and Asuri,
the latter's disciple. There are various references to the original Sankhya tradition as Sasti-tantra, containing sixty topics (for example, Sankhya Karika LXXII),!2 but the original text appears to be lost. The later Sankhya Karika of I$varakrsna, which scholars assign to the fourth or fifth century, has by default become the seminal text of the tradition, just as Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras has become for the Yoga tradition, and represents its developed, systematic form. It is quoted throughout the present commentary (as it is in the traditional commentaries).
In the Sankhya (literally, numeration) system, the universe of animate and inanimate entities is perceived as ultimately the product of two ontologically distinct categories; hence this system is quintessentially dvaita, or dualistic in presupposition. These two categories are prakrti, or the primordial material matrix of the physical universe, “the undifferentiated plenitude of being,”!3 and purusa, the innumerable conscious souls or selves embedded within it. As a result of the interaction between these two entities, the material universe evolves in stages. The actual catalysts in this evolutionary process are the three gunas, literally, strands or qualities, that are inherent in prakrti. These are sattva, lucidity; rajas, action; and tamas, inertia. These gunas are sometimes compared to the threads of a rope; just as a rope is a combination of threads, so all manifest reality consists of a combination of the gunas. These gunas are mentioned incessantly throughout the commentaries on the text,!4 as are the various evolutes from prakrti, and thus require some attention.
Given the meditative focus of the text, the gunas are especially significant to yoga in terms of their psychological manifestation; in Yoga, the mind and therefore all psychological dispositions are prakrti and thus also composed of the gunas—the only difference between mind and matter being that the former has a larger preponderance of sattva, and the latter of tamas. Therefore, according to the specific intermixture and proportionality of the gunas, living beings exhibit different types of mind-sets and psychological dispositions. Thus, when sattva (from the root as, “to be”!5) is predominant in an individual, the qualities of lucidity, tranquillity, wisdom, discrimination, detachment, happiness, and peacefulness manifest; when rajas (from the root rafj, to color, to redden) is predominant, hankering, attachment, energetic endeavor,
passion, power, restlessness, and creative activity manifest; and when tamas, the guna least favorable for yoga, is predominant, stillness, ignorance, delusion, disinterest, lethargy, sleep, and disinclination toward constructive activity manifest.
The guņas are continually interacting and competing with each other, one guna becoming prominent for a while and overpowering the others, only to be eventually dominated by the increase of one of the other gunas (Gita XIV.10). The Sankhyan text the Yukti-dipika (13) compares them to the wick, fire, and oil of the lamp which, while opposed to each other in their nature, come together to produce light. Just as there are an unlimited variety of colors stemming from the mixture of the three primary colors, different hues being simply expressions of the specific proportionality of red, yellow, and blue, so the unlimited psychological dispositions of living creatures (and of physical forms) stem from the mixture of the gunas, specific states of mind being the reflections of the particular proportionality of the three gunas.
The gunas underpin not only the philosophy of mind in Yoga but the activation and interaction of these guna qualities result in the production of the entirety of physical forms that also evolve from the primordial material matrix, prakrti, under the same principle.!6 Thus the physical composition of objects like air, water, stone, fire, etc., differs because of the constitutional makeup of specific gunas: air contains more of the buoyancy of sattva; stones, more of the sluggishness of the tamas element; and fire, more rajas (although its buoyancy betrays its partial nature of sattva as well). The gunas allow for the infinite plasticity of prakrti and the objects of the world.
The process by which the universe evolves from prakrti is usefully compared to the churning of milk: When milk receives a citric catalyst, yogurt, curds, or butter emerges. These immediate products can be manipulated to produce a further series of products—toffee, milk desserts, cheese, etc.!7 Similarly, according to classical Sankhya,!8 the first evolute emerging from prakrti when it is churned by the gunas (sattva specifically) is buddhi, intelligence. Intelligence is characterized by the functions of judgment, discrimination, knowledge, ascertainment, will, virtue, and detachment,!? and sattva is predominant in it. This means that in its purest state, when the potential of rajas and tamas is
minimized, buddhi is primarily lucid, peaceful, happy, tranquil, and discriminatory, all qualities of sattva. It is the interface between purusa and all other prakrtic evolutes. From this vantage point, it can direct awareness out into the objects and embroilments of the world, or, in its highest potential, it can become aware of the presence of purusa and consequently redirect itself toward complete realization of the true source of consciousness that pervades it.
DIAGRAM OF THE TWENTY-FIVE TATTVAS OF CLASSICAL SANKHYA Hlustrating the evolution of prakrti according to the Sāmkhya- Karika of I$varakrsna
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From buddhi, ahankara, or ego, is produced (aham, I + kāra, doing; referred to as asmitā in this text). This is characterized by the function of self-awareness and self-identity. It is the cognitive aspect that processes and appropriates external reality from the perspective of an individualized sense of self or ego—the notion of I and mine in human awareness. The Sankhya Kārikās refers to it as conceit, abhimāna. It is essential in conceptualizing and distinguishing subject and object, the knower and the known. It creates the notion of an individual self, but additionally, it is from ahankara that both the objective external world, and the instruments through which one can interact with the world (the sense organs, etc.) evolve; in order for there to be a subject, there needs to be a world of objects and instruments through which to access this
world. Ahankara also limits the range of awareness to fit within and identify with the contours of the particular psychophysical organism within which it finds itself in any one embodiment, as opposed to another. In other words, the ahankara of a bug acts almost like a concave screen that refracts consciousness to pervade and appropriate the contours of the bug. If the bug dies and becomes, say, a dog and then a human in subsequent lives, the ahankara aspect of the citta adjusts to accommodate and absorb consciousness into these new environments. Thus the bug thinks it is a bug, the dog thinks it is a dog, and the human thinks he or she is a human.
Ahankara is thus not only pivotal in all experience but also is the critical midpoint in the choice between material identification or spiritual pursuit, the external material world or the pure purusa. Turned inward, ahankāra (asmitā) can reflect awareness toward its source, purusa; turned outward, it can misidentify the self with its prakrtic entrapment.20 It is the ahankara that determines whether one’s notion of self is spiritual or phenomenal.
When ego in turn is churned by the guna of sattva inherent in it, manas, the mind, is produced. The mind is the seat of the emotions, of like and dislike, and filters and processes the potentially enormous amount of data accessible to the senses. It primarily receives, sorts, categorizes21 and then transmits. It serves as the liaison between the activities of the senses transmitting data from the external world, and buddhi, intelligence; indeed, the only two times the term occurs in the sūtras is in connection with its relationship with the external senses. It therefore partakes both of internal and external functioning: internally, it is characterized by reflective synthesis (sankalpa) as noted above, while simultaneously being “a sense because it acts similar to the senses” (Sānkhya Karika XXVII).
The Katha Upanisad (3.9) compares the body to a chariot, the senses to the horses, the mind to the reins that control the horses, the buddhi to the driver who controls the reins and charts the course, and the purusa to the inactive passenger. Buddhi, intelligence; ahankāra, ego; and manas, mind, together comprise the internal body (antahkarana), the inner noetic world of thoughts, emotions, feelings, determination, will, cognitions, memories, etc. The purusa soul is cloaked in these psychic
layers prior to receiving a gross body and senses. As noted, the Yoga school, while using the terminology of (especially) buddhi, but also ahankāra and manas, differs somewhat from that of Sankhya in conceiving these three as interacting functions of the one citta, mind, rather than as three distinct metaphysical layers. Citta, then, is the term used by Patañjali and the commentators to refer to all three of these cognitive functions combined (thus it is not a separate evolute from prakrti).
Moving onto more physical levels of reality, from the ego stirred by tamas emerge the tanmātras, or subtle elements—the energies or powers underpinning sound, sight, smell, taste, and touch. These are the generic energies behind the sensory powers, not specific sounds or varieties of tastes, etc., hence their name, tanmātra, only that (namely, the essences of these energies, not their particular individualized expressions).22 Since knowledge and illumination are gualities of sattva, the tanmātras are still very sāttvic in nature. These, in turn, seguentially produce the five mahābhūtas, or gross elements—ether, air, fire, water, and earth— the world of form, the actual physical, tangible stuff of the universe. This evolutionary seguence must be kept in mind in order to understand the metaphysics behind a number of sūtras in the Yoga Sūtras, particularly those that deal with the mystic powers.
The Sānkhya system is classified in Indian thought as satkārya, namely, that the effects of the world are present in their cause. This is one of the important points to keep in mind: Gross matter is actually an evolute or derivative of something subtler, the subtle elements, and these of something subtler still, the ego, which is an evolute of buddhi, intelligence. This means buddhi underpins all reality, even as buddhi itself is a manifestation of prakrti and the guņas, or, put differently, any expression Of reality, subjective or objective, is nothing other than a manifestation of the guņas. These evolutes are all called tattvas, thatnesses; they are the real constituents of "that” world out there perceived by the self.
The Goals of Yoga
According to Patanjali’s definition in the second sutra, yoga is the cessation (nirodha) of the activities or permutations (vrttis) of the citta.
The vrttis refer to any sequence of thought, ideas, mental imaging, or cognitive act performed by the mind, intellect, or ego as defined above— in short, any state of mind whatsoever. It cannot be over-stressed that the mind is merely a physical substance that selects, organizes, analyzes, and molds itself into the physical forms of the sense data presented to it; in and of itself it is not aware of them. Sense impressions or thoughts are imprints in that mental substance, just as a clay pot is a product made from the substance clay, or waves are permutations of the sea. The essential point for understanding yoga is that all forms or activities of the mind are products of prakrti, matter, and completely distinct from the soul or true self, purusa, pure awareness or consciousness.
The citta can profitably be compared to the software, and the body to the hardware. Neither is conscious; they are rather forms of gross matter, even as the former can do very intelligent activities. Both software and hardware are useless without the presence of a conscious observer. Only purusa is truly alive, that is, aware or conscious. When uncoupled from the mind, the soul, purusa, in its pure state, that is, in its own constitutional, autonomous condition—untainted by being misidentified with the physical coverings of the body and mind—is free of content and changeless; it does not constantly ramble and flit from one thing to another the way the mind does. To realize pure awareness as an entity distinct and autonomous from the mind (and, of course, body), thought must be stilled and consciousness extracted from its embroilment with the mind and its incessant thinking nature. Only then can the soul be realized as an entity completely distinct from the mind (a distinction such clichés as “self-realization” attempt to express), and the process to achieve this realization is yoga.
In conventional existence, purusa's awareness of objects is mediated by means of buddhi, the intellect. As the discriminatory aspect of the mind, the intelligence is the first interface between the soul and the external world. More specifically, the soul becomes aware of the outside world when images of sense objects are channeled through the senses, sorted by the manas, the thinking and organizing aspect of citta, and presented to the intellect. Although inanimate, the intellect, in addition to its functions of discrimination noted earlier, molds itself into the form and shape of these objects of experience, thoughts, and ideas, and, due to the
reflection of the consciousness of purusa, appears animated. Since the soul is adjacent to23 the intellect (and the citta in general), the intellect is the immediate covering of purusa; hence it is through the intellect that purusa becomes aware of these forms and therefore of the objects of the world. The pure consciousness of the soul pervades the citta, animating it, Just as a torch, although distinct in its own right, pervades an inanimate object with light and makes it appear luminous.
Pervaded by this consciousness, the citta mind appears as if it itself were conscious, as metal placed into intense fire becomes molten and appears as if fire. But the mind animated by consciousness is in reality unconscious—just as an object appears illuminated in its own right but is in actuality dependent on an outside light source for its illumination and visibility. Most important, the soul, the pure and eternal power of consciousness, never changes; as a spectator or witness, it does not itself transform when in contact with the ever-changing states of mind. It simply becomes aware of them. Just as light passively reveals gross and subtle objects in a dark room and yet is not itself affected or changed by them, consciousness passively reveals objects, whether in the form of gross external physical objects or subtle internal thoughts, vrttis, including the higher stage of discrimination, but is not itself actually affected or touched by them. But the awareness of the pure soul does permeate or shine on the citta, like a projector light permeating inanimate pictorial forms of a movie reel, thereby animating these pictures as if they had a life of their own. In so doing the animated mind misidentifies consciousness with itself, eguating consciousness with the churnings of thought, vrttis, as if consciousness were inherent within itself rather than the effulgence of an entity outside and separate from itself. This misidentification is ignorance, avidyā, and the cause of bondage in samsāra. It is the mysterious glue that binds the self to the world of matter in all Indic soteriological traditions. (Ignorance is mysterious, since the question of how it comes to arise in the first place is bypassed by all Indic metaphysicians by stating that it is beginningless.24)
According to some commentators, such as Vijfianabhiksu, the intellect functions like a mirror. Just as light bounces off an illuminated reflective object back to its source, the consciousness of the soul bounces off this
animated intellect that presents a reflection to the soul (Vijnanabhiksu’s double-reflection theory is sometimes referred to in this commentary, being in my view more cogent than Vacaspati Mišra's single-reflection theory25). Because sattva is predominant in the intellect, it is able to reflect pure consciousness back to itself. Just as we become conscious of our appearance in a mirror due to its reflectivity, the soul becomes conscious of its reflection in the animated intellect. But since the intellect is constantly being molded into the images presented to it by the mind and senses, this reflection presented back to the purusa soul is distorted or transformed by changing forms, vrttis, Just as our reflection in a mirror is distorted if the mirror is warped. The soul, that is, the actual source of consciousness, is mistaken to be this distorted reflection by the mind, which considers awareness to be inherent within itself rather than a feature of the purusa, an entity completely outside of and separate from itself. The soul is thus identified with the world of change through these changing states of mind, the vrttis, just as we may look at our reflection in a dirty mirror and mistakenly think that it is we who are dirty.
Whether the vrttis of the citta are reflected back to the purusa soul, or whether consciousness simply becomes aware of them by proximity and pervasion, the soul nonetheless is identified with the experiences of the body and mind—birth, death, disease, old age, happiness, distress, peacefulness, anxiety, etc., even though these are merely transformations occurring in the inanimate and external body and mind, and therefore unconnected with the purusa. They are nothing other than the permutations of gross and subtle matter external to the soul that are pervaded by the soul's awareness. But awareness is misidentified with these permutations, as a result of which the self (that is, the mind animated by consciousness) considers itself to be subject to birth and death, happiness and distress, etc., and it is this misidentification, or ignorance, that is the root of bondage to the world. Yoga involves preventing the mind from being molded into these permutations, the yrttis, the impressions and thoughts of the objects of the world, such that purusa can regain its autonomous nature.
To accomplish this, one of the goals of Yoga meditation, as discussed repeatedly by our commentators, is to maximize the proportion of the
guna of sattva in the mind and correspondingly decrease that of rajas and tamas. When all trace of tamas and rajas is stilled, the mind attains the highest potential of its prākrtic nature—illumination, peacefulness, discernment, etc., all gualities inherent in sattva. When the citta mind has cultivated a state of almost pure sattva,26 the discriminative aspect of buddhi, intelligence, can reveal the distinction between the ultimate conscious principle, the purusa soul, and even the purest and most subtle (but nonetheless unconscious) states of prakrti When manifesting its highest potential of sattva and suppressing its inherent potential of rajas and tamas, which divert consciousness from its source, purusa, and into the external world of objects and internal world of thought, the pure sattva nature of the mind can recognize the distinction between purusa and prakrti, and redirect consciousness back inward toward this inner self (one of the ultimate goals of yoga), just as a dusty mirror can reflect things clearly when cleaned. In short, yoga can also be viewed as the process of stilling the potential of rajas and tamas, and allowing the maximum potential sattva nature of the mind to manifest, and the commentators often promote it this way.
The means prescribed by Patanjali to still the vrtti states of mind or fluctuations of thought is meditation, defined as keeping the mind fixed on any particular object of choice without distraction. God, I$vara, comes highly recommended in this regard; Yoga is clearly, but nondogmatically, a theistic system. By concentration and meditation (or by the power of God's grace), the distracting influences of rajas and tamas can be curtailed, and the sattva constitution of the mind can exhibit its full potential.
Through grace or the sheer power of concentration, the mind can attain an inactive state where all thoughts remain only in potential but not active form. In other words, through meditation one can cultivate an inactive state of mind where one is not cognizant of anything. This does not mean to say that consciousness becomes extinguished, Patanjali hastens to inform us (as does the entire Upanisadic/Vedantic tradition); consciousness is eternal and absolute. Therefore, once there are no more thoughts or objects on its horizons or sphere of awareness, consciousness has no alternative but to become conscious of itself. In other words, consciousness can either be object-aware or subject-aware (loosely
speaking).27 The point is that it has no option in terms of being aware on some level, since awareness is eternal and inextinguishable. By stilling all thought, meditation removes all objects of awareness. Awareness can therefore now be aware only of itself. It can now bypass or transcend all objects of thought, disassociate from even the pure sāttvic citta, and become aware of its own source, the actual soul itself, purusa. This is self-realization (to use a neo-Vedāntic term), the ultimate state of awareness, the state of consciousness in which nothing can be discerned except the pure self, asamprajfiatasamadhi. This is the final goal of yoga and thus of human existence.
The Eight Limbs of Yoga
Asamprajfiatasamadhi is the highest stage of the eighth and final limb of yoga presented by Patanjali to attain this lofty goal. These eight limbs are yama, abstentions, moral restraints; niyama, ethical observances; āsana, posture; pranayama, breath control; pratyahara, withdrawal of the senses; dhdrand, concentration; dhyana, meditation; and samādhi, full meditative absorption. The first limb, the yamas, are nonviolence, truthfulness, refraining from stealing, celibacy, and refraining from coveting. They deal with how the aspiring yogi relates to others. Obviously, if one’s goals are to remove consciousness from identification with the body and the mind, one must curb activities that pander to the grosser urges of the body—violence, stealing, deceit, sexual exploitation, and coveting are generally performed with a view to improving one’s bodily or material situation and must be resisted by one striving for transcendent goals. The second limb, the niyamas, are cleanliness, contentment, austerity, study [of scripture], and devotion to God. These deal with how the yogi cultivates his or her own lifestyle. Once the cruder and more destructive potentials of the body are curtailed by following the yamas of the first limb, consciousness can be turned more inward toward personal refinement. Each limb furthers and deepens this internal progression. The third limb, dsana, focuses on stretches and postures with a view to preparing the yogi’s body to sit for prolonged periods in meditation. It is this aspect of yoga that has been most visibly exported to the West but too often stripped from its context as one ingredient in a more ambitious and far-reaching sequence.
While successful performance of the third limb begins the focusing of attention and stilling of the mind, the fourth limb, pranayama, furthers this process through fixing the mind on breath control. By regulating and slowing the movement of breath, the mind too becomes regulated and quiescent. The fifth limb, pratyahara, withdrawal of the senses, deepens the process by removing consciousness from all engagement with the sense objects (sight, sound, taste, smell, touch). This is followed by the three final limbs: dharana, dhyana, and samadhi (which Patañjali divides into seven rather esoteric stages). The last three limbs are essentially different degrees of concentrative intensity and culminate in the realization by awareness of its own nature, asamprajñatasamadhi. 'The Yoga Sūtras, in fact, is primarily a manual for the practitioner rather than an exposition of Yoga philosophy.
THE PRESENT TRANSLATION AND COMMENTARY
There are dozens of modern translations of the sūtras, which have been marketed to the yoga community or nonspecialized reading public interested in esoteric Eastern practices. There are also a number of outstanding scholarly editions marketed to an academic audience, which typically include elaborate and highly specialized translations of one of the traditional Sanskrit commentaries on the text. Much of the traditional intellectual background is understandably often bypassed or watered down, in an effort to make the material accessible to a modern, primarily Western, nonspecialized audience. On the other hand, much of the scholarly translations are not very accessible to the nonspecialized reader with little or no background in ancient Indian philosophical thought. The present translation attempts to bridge these two worlds of discourse. It attempts to ground the text in its traditional intellectual context but to articulate the subject matter in a way that is accessible to the educated nonspecialist as well as to scholars and students of Indic philosophy. This is a daunting challenge and perhaps by its very nature destined to draw some criticism from all sides, but it is the result of teaching this text over the years to students in the university setting as well as to yoga practitioners in numerous workshops in yoga communities around the world.
This commentary draws material from all (rather than just one) of the principal historical traditional Sanskrit commentaries, from which I have selected relevant explanatory comments. However, since a good deal of the commentarial tradition deals with abstruse philosophical minutiae of interest only to the specialist, my extracts primarily consist only of material that is essential to understanding the sūtras in their own right. I have trimmed superfluous or peripheral philosophical specificity from this commentary, as a thorough representation of these would reguire extensive background or presentation of Hindu philosophical concepts and issues.
This is not to say that I have watered down this commentary. I have
tried to make it user-friendly but still academically rigorous: Readers unfamiliar with Hindu philosophical discourse will unavoidably encounter novel philosophical issues here. The Yoga Sutras is classified as a daršana, classical school of philosophical thought, after all, written and handed down over the centuries by scholastics, and so a commentary that claims to represent the Yoga tradition cannot be presented outside this context. Western practitioners of yoga have excelled in mastering the rigors of asana, and I would like to think that the more serious and committed among them will be eager to engage intellectually with the traditional interpretations of the Yoga Sütras.
I have included the commentarial sections critiquing Buddhist views of mind and consciousness, since—apart from the fact that they occupy a large portion of Chapter IV (and surface elsewhere)—it seems useful to establish the main points of divergence on these topics between these traditions and classical Yoga, given the popularity of Buddhist traditions in the West. I do, additionally, include frequent snippets of information and other material from the commentaries that are of genuine historical, cultural, and spiritual interest to those for whom this edition is intended: scholars and students of ancient Indian thought, both within academia and without, seeking a synopsis of the text and its commentaries; the educated but nonspecialized lay readership; and aspiring yogis approaching the text as an historical source of authority for meditative practice and willing to marshal some intellectual rigor in this quest. With this latter community in mind, I have attempted to eschew hyperacademic jargon and vocabulary when a topic can be articulated in less technical terms. I might add that the commentaries can be repetitive in parts—after all, the core of the teachings are very simple: to remove consciousness from its absorption in prakrti. Any type of pedagogy involves repetition, and this is especially true of the Indic traditions and their history of oral transmission. This commentary has preserved some of this character.
In many ways, this commentary shares features of traditional exegesis insofar as it primarily seeks to unpack and represent Patanjali as well as the traditional commentaries, although there is plenty of my own elaboration, critical analysis, and, I hope, contributive insight. In classical India, proponents of knowledge systems have a tendency to
perceive themselves as members of disciplic successions, paramparās (for example, Gītā IV.2). Knowledge is perceived as divine revelation and is divided into two categories. Revelation is either šruti (that which is heard, namely, the Vedic corpus), transhuman revelation emanating from Isvara, God, for the theist schools,! or smrti (that which is remembered, the Purāņas and epics and other later texts including the sutra traditions), intrahuman revelation emanating from enlightened rsi sages. But both genres are descending bodies of knowledge. Consequently, the exegete plays the role of transmitter of information perceived as a priori universally and inherently valid. His or her role, then, is to take the existing traditions and expand upon them according to time and context as existing Truths, rather than formulate new Truths. While I consider the content of the Yoga Sutras text to stem from a core of meditational and enstatic experiences attained in yogic practice that has been subsequently systematized and scholastized by Patanjali (who may very likely have been a practicing yogi), I have attempted to ground my commentary in the traditional commentaries to provide a chronological variety of premodern traditional perspectives and insights on the sutras. Of course, while attempting to represent these traditional perspectives, I offer plenty of elaboration, interpretation, illustration, cross-referencing, and further clarification, and, as noted above, inform the commentary with the more persuasive observations of modern critical scholars.
With regard to representing tradition, as with all Sanskrit literature, philosophical or other, Hindu cosmology flavors the worldview underpinning the text—there are references to various divinities, celestial realms, mystic powers, and so forth. While such beliefs obviously conflict with the parameters of modern post-Enlightenment rational thought, I have not attempted to sterilize the text from these elements, as some modern translations tend to do, but have retained these teachings within their greater traditional context and presented them with all the trappings accepted by the commentators. Indeed, I probe the metaphysical rationale of the mystic powers (siddhis) from the perspective of Sankhya metaphysics and argue that they are an inherent part of the presuppositions of the system. Readers are left to extract whatever aspects of the text are meaningful to them or do not conflict
fatally with their own worldviews (and, in any event, such conflict, or cognitive dissonance, affords an opportunity to probe and perhaps reevaluate one’s own intellectual and cultural preconceptions and predispositions).
In short, I have adopted something of the phenomenological approach in the study of religion in presenting this material. One of the approaches of phenomenology involves presenting—in its own terms and frame of reference—material that conflicts with or is inexplicable from within the parameters of our modern world knowledge systems. The material is presented without imposing reductionist? interpretational models from our very different modern time and context upon it, without value judgment, and in as neutral a fashion as possible. Phenomenology concerns itself with representing the claims and beliefs of a religious tradition as accurately and objectively as possible as phenomena in their own right and within their own context—suspending judgment on issues of “truth” from the perspective of scientific validity. The goal of this commentary is to present the traditional Yogic worldview not as an imagined monolith but through some of the permutations and configurations it has taken in the hands of the commentators over the centuries.
Additionally, the commentaries are replete with references to other texts such as the Bhagavad Gita and Upanisads and, with Vijnanabhiksu, frequently the Bhāgavata Purana. I include some of them in the present commentary and add numerous cross-references of my own. Again, since, in traditional Hindu perspectives, these texts are all divine revelation,? traditional exegetes draw freely from other (usually) classical sources where these might serve to bolster a particular point. Sometimes the demarcation of ancient Indian thought into Hindu and Buddhist and the former into six schools of philosophy (a much later development in any case) can take on contours that are far more rigid than was likely the case in Patanjali’s time. Thinkers drew broadly from a common pool of ideas, and even when they aligned themselves with specific sects, these were demarcated not so much along lines of outright rejection of other sects but to a great extent on the specific areas of interest that a particular sect chose to focus on and develop—from the orthodox side: Mimamsa on epistemology, hermeneutics, and dharma;
Nyaya on logic; Vaišesika and Sānkhya on metaphysics; Vedanta on interpretation of the Upanisads from the perspective of knowledge of Brahman; Yoga on praxis, etc. All (with the exception of early Mīmāmsā) are dedicated to a common goal of freeing the ātman from the world of suffering. Even where other doctrines are refuted, through the ubiquitous category of the purvapaksa,* only very specific areas or items of dogma are rejected, not the entirety of a school’s metaphysics. Thus, Yoga is partially rejected by the Vedanta tradition only insofar as strains of it subscribe to the (later) Sankhya view of causation from prakrti rather than Brahman, which, while all-important to Vedanta, is a peripheral topic of no great concern to Patanjali in the Yoga Sutras. There is no rejection of the central enterprise of the Yoga tradition, namely, presenting a psychology of the mind and a technique of extracting the ātman from the mind’s machinations. Likewise, the Nyāya Sutras, while differing in their metaphysics, nonetheless accept Yoga as the means to realize the ātman (IV.2.46).
In parallel fashion, the Yoga commentators from Vyasa onward draw freely from sources and concepts associated with the Upanisadic/Vedanta tradition, most conspicuously in the case of Vijnanabhiksu. I am not as uncomfortable with this as some scholars seem to be: To my reading, these types of references do not always impose material on the text that necessarily conflicts with Patanjali’s teachings. Patanjali was an orthodox Hindu, which means he accepted the Truths of Divine Revelation, āgama—even if he holds that the experience of these Truths is higher than simply belief in them. Moreover, he requires the study of scripture, svādhyāya, as a mandatory ingredient of his system, both in the practice of kriyd-yoga and in that of astanga. As an ascetic, Patanjali would certainly have been interested in the Upanisadic strata of dgama (rather than the earlier ritualistic corpuses, which he indirectly dismisses5). He therefore does not present his teachings as separate from this tradition, even as his own sūtras are focused on one ingredient within the Upanisadic corpus, meditational yoga. Thus, even though he makes no mention of the central Upanisadic concern, Brahman as source of all reality (unlike the commentators, beginning with Vyasa, who do correlate purusa with Brahman), we cannot say he rejected this notion simply because his particular treatise
concerned itself with a related but specific subject matter, the individual purusa. He does adopt Upanisadic language on occasion and incorporate Upanisadic concepts into the sütras even if only in passing.
Therefore, we do not know where Patañjali stood in terms of the relationship between the purusa and Brahman or Isvara (Brahman can refer to the Absolute Truth as either impersonal or personal, whereas Isvara is exclusively a term for the personal aspect), but we certainly cannot presume that he rejected at least whatever conventional views on these concepts were standard (even as there were a plethora of interpretative differences, some fundamental, among Vedantins). What we do know is that there are both Sankhya and Yoga traditions preceding Patanjali expressed in the Upanisads and in the Mahabharata that accommodated their purusa-prakrti metaphysics within a Brahman or I$vara framework. We also know that by the time of Badarayana, who wrote the Vedānta Sütras, Sānkhya is extensively critiqued for jettisoning Brahman as the original source of reality (that is, as the source of both prakrti and purusa), and a passing comment is made that on the same grounds Yoga is rejected (etena yogah pratyuktah). But since there were numerous strains of Yoga, many of them represented in the Puranas (and most readily visible in the Gita), which undoubtedly did preserve the Brahman/Isvara-based theism of the Mahābhārata and Upanisads, Badarayana can be referring only to particular strains of Sankhya and Yoga. In any event, apart from anything else, Badarayana wrote his sutras centuries before Pataūjali's, so we really have no grounds to deduce that Patanjali departed from the shared presuppositions of the Vedantic tradition on these matters (although later Vedanta commentators likely are referring to Patanjali’s text when they deem Yoga as culpable in this regard). I argue strongly that Pataíijali's I$vara cannot be excised or sterilized from the theistic context and Isvara- related options of the second and third centuries. Similarly, it seems probable that he would have seen his teachings as elaborating on one aspect of the greater orthodox corpus stemming from the Upanisads, rather than as departing from other essential aspects of it. One must be wary of assuming he rejected standard Vedantic teachings simply because he does not explicitly direct attention to topics not connected to the specific project he is focusing on in his succinct 195 sutras, namely,
the uncoupling of purusa from prakrti. And the commentators certainly correlate purusa with Brahman as if this were a perfectly standard thing to do.
In any event, I have chosen to represent some of these quotations from the commentators even when, as with Vijñanabhiksu, sectarian Vedantic specificities are introduced that may not have been subscribed to by Patañjali. I indicate the source of these quotes, since my goal is to give an overall sense of the methods, exegetical practices, and perspectives of the principal traditional commentators of the Yoga tradition, and to suggest how traditions cross-fertilize. This is especially visible with Vijnanabhiksu’s blending of Yoga with Vedantic concerns. I also introduce plenty of quotes from the Upanisads, Gita, and other texts, as well as the occasional illustration from my ongoing translations of the Bhagavata Purdna. There is nothing like a colorful story from the Puranas to lighten up and exemplify elements in what is otherwise a dense and demanding text (and these Purana texts have yet to receive the scholarly attention they deserve, as they are a vast repository of not just mythological narrative, but sometimes quite ancient philosophical material transmitted through epic-type narrative which is very relevant to the early history of the Indic intellectual traditions). Nonetheless, while one would be hard put to consider that Patanjali was not well read in texts such as the Gita, Upanisads, epics, and the developing Purāņic corpus of his day, the reader should always keep a healthy awareness of the distinction between the theological concerns underpinning a commentary and what is explicitly stated in the primary text.
For this commentary, I read Vyāsa's commentary in the Sanskrit and used this as the springboard for my own commentary. For the other later commentaries, due to the sheer bulk of the material involved, I availed myself of various English translations in determining which material to extract for this commentary, for which I then consulted the original Sanskrit. I am therefore indebted to the following translators: of Vacaspati Mi$ra's Tattva-vaisdradi, Rama Prasāda (1912), and Woods (1914); of Sankara’s Vivarana, Leggett (1992); of Bhoja Raja’s Vrtti, Ballantyne (1852); of Vijnanabhiksu’s Yoga-varttika, Rukmani (1981); and of his Yoga-sāra-sangraha, Jha (1923); of Ramananda Sarasvati’s Yogamani-prabha, Krishnan (1996); of Hariharananda (1963), Mukerji
(1968); and of al-Biruni, Pines and Gelblum (1966-89). All translations from the Upanisads, Bhagavad Gita, and other texts are my own unless otherwise stated. I do not provide the Sanskrit for translations from these classical sources, since these are easily available to specialists. Also, I provide the Sanskrit in footnotes only for the material I have selected from the Yoga commentaries for direct quotations, not for my own paraphrases.
In addition to the debt I owe these translators or primary sources, and, of course, the insight of the commentators themselves, I would like to acknowledge my indebtedness to the insights I have gained from the work of critical scholars whose secondary sources are mentioned in the bibliography (some of which are represented throughout this commentary in the relevant places). Although the present work concerns itself primarily with presenting how the traditional commentators have understood the text over the centuries, how it has been handed down for over a millennium and a half, I have gained great insight from the work of modern text critical scholars into ways of making sense of certain obscure sūtras in particular, and in thinking about the overall text itself. I hesitate to pull out any names for fear of neglecting others, but I would be remiss not to mention at least the various contributions of Koelman, Larson, Feuerstein, Chapple, and Whicher, who have dedicated such rigorous yet sympathetic scholarly analysis to the text for so many years.
In conclusion, while the old Vedic sacrificial cult from which yoga emerged no longer defines our modern religious or cultural horizons, a number of the traditions that it spawned, such as Yoga, remain. Modern societies no longer sacrifice animals to the gods, recite Vedic hymns, or pour ghee into the fire in order to attain material goals. But we share many of the same attitudes as the Vedic ritualists—that the goal of life is the pursuit of ever-increasing levels of material abundance and sensual gratification—and we manipulate our environment to attain this goal in other, more damaging ways. From a certain perspective, one might say that the only difference between our modern goals of life and those of the ancient Vedics is the technologies we use in attempting to attain them. They tried to achieve the good life through technologies of mantra and ritual, and we use machine-based industrial technologies. Our modern world has universalized, idolized, and mass-produced
consumerism—the indulgence of the senses and the mind—as the highest and most desirable goal of life. From the perspective of the Yoga tradition, our vrttis, the restlessness of the mind caused by ignorance and desire, are out of control.
And so, proportionately to our material attachments, according to Yoga, a sense of malaise and dissatisfaction is engendered since, as the Gita informs us, desire is never satisfied and burns like fire (III.39). It is thus our “eternal enemy.” According to almost all schools of Indic thought, including Buddhism and Jainism, the more we desire, the more we are frustrated. The more we are frustrated, the more we strive to remove our frustration with more sensory stimuli. And the more we strive, the more we damage ourselves and our environment, and perpetuate our samsāric existence. It is in the critique of this mind-set of consumption that Patañjali claims to offer an alternative that remains perennially relevant to human existence. But it is a solution that requires an abandonment of the consumer mentality by the practice of the full eight limbs of yoga, beginning with the yamas and niyamas. Without these, attempts to perfect the third limb of yoga, āsanas, postures, are simply physical gymnastics. To equate the practice and purpose of yoga with this limb alone is to miss the whole point of Patañjali's system (particularly and ironically if this is done with a view of improving the sensual prowess of the body and mind in order to maximize physical and mental pleasure). Without recognizing the actual goal of yoga, the realization of the true self as other than the body, mind, and sensual apparatus, modernity may not have progressed in attitude and presupposition concerning life's goals from those lusty performers of Vedic sacrifice. It is this attitude that the ancient spiritual teachers of India such as Patañjali were so concerned to redress, and it is in this regard that the teachings of yoga will remain perenially relevant to the human condition.
TH: C HHIPHWIG: | prathamah samādhi-pādah
CHAPTER I
MEDITATIVE ABSORPTION
The chapter begins by introducing the subject of the work and providing a definition of yoga—the cessation of citta-vrtti, the fluctuating states of the mind [1-2]. This is followed by a discussion of the two possible functions of awareness [3-4]; a description of the vrttis [5-11]; and how to control them by practice [13-14] and dispassion [15-16]. Then comes the division of samādhi into samprajfiata [17] and asamprajfiata [18] samādhis and how to attain it [20—22], after pointing to other states that might resemble it [19]. I$vara is then introduced as the easy method of attaining samadhi [23], along with his nature [24-26], name [27], worship [28], and the fruits accruing therefrom [29]. The chapter describes the distractions of the mind [30] and their accompanying effects such as grief, etc. [31]; outlines the means to combat these by dwelling on one truth [32], practicing benevolence, etc., [33], breath control [34], and other means [35-39] that are conducive to samādhi. Additionally, the variety of samāpatti meditative states [42] with definitions [42-44] and their fruits [46-48] and object [49] are presented. The chapter concludes with a discussion of samprajfiata- samadhi preceding the final stage of asamprajnata [50-51].
Om namo bhagavate Vāsudevāya; I offer obeisances to Lord Vasudeva (Krsņa).!
Commentators and authors of traditional texts typically begin their commentaries with an invocation, nāndi-šloka, to their personal deity, the particular form of Isvara, God, that they revere, soliciting blessings and inspiration for the enterprise they are about to undertake. This, notes Vijñanabhiksu, is in order to remove any obstacles that might arise either in the completion of the work by the author, or in the students' ability to grasp its meaning. By so doing, one also strives to remove personal ego so that one can become a conduit, accurately transmitting
the essence of the text. Most commentators on the Yoga Sūtras, in addition to an invocation to God, offer homage to Patañjali himself, the author of the text, usually invoking him in his traditional form as an incarnation of Sesa, the bearer of Visnu.2
A4 ATA 19 1
I.1 atha yogānušāsanam
atha, now; yoga, yoga; anušāsanam, teachings Now, the teachings of yoga [are presented].
It is common for authors of philosophical works to commence their treatises by announcing the specific nature of their subject matter, thereby indicating how their undertakings are to be distinguished from other strains of philosophical thought or knowledge systems. Thus, while from the six classical schools of Hindu philosophy? the followers of the Vedānta school see their tradition as explaining the nature of the absolute Truth (Brahman), and the followers of the Vai$esika and Mimamsa schools as explaining the nature of dharma, duty, and these respective points of focus are announced in the first sūtras of the primary texts associated with those schools,4 the Yoga school is interested in the subject of yoga.» Patañjali accordingly uses the first sūtra of his text to announce the topic of his teachings: The primary subject matter of his text differs from that of other systems insofar as his work will be about yoga.
It is also standard in the commentarial literature, as will become apparent throughout this work, for the later commentators to analyze each word in every sūtra (as discussed in the introduction, sūtra means aphorism or extremely succinct verse), and words are analyzed in various ways—etymologically, semantically, contextually, philosophically, etc. Commentaries thus unpack the meaning of words, both individually and collectively, in the sūtras of primary texts. Vyāsa, Vācaspati Miśra, Vijñanabhiksu, Sankara, Bhoja Raja, Rāmānanda Sarasvatī, and Hariharananda Aranya are, in chronological order, the main commentators recognized as the most important of the premodern
period and their interpretations form the basis of the present commentary.
Accordingly, the first word in this sūtra, and thus of the entire Yoga Sūtras, is atha, now, that is, in the present work Patañjali is about to deliver, demarking these teachings from those in other texts (the word also initiates the opening sūtras of other philosophical works®). As will be seen below with Vijnanabhiksu’s comments, the word atha is also sometimes read as differentiating the text in question from other texts in a hierarchical or sectarian fashion, as indicating that when one has exhausted dabbling with other philosophical or religious systems as represented in other texts, one has now finally come to the summum bonum of Truth, namely, that represented by the text in guestion.7 The commentators add, as an aside, that the word atha is deemed somewhat sacred? and thus also functions as an auspicious opening to the text.
Vyasa, the primary and most important commentator (whose commentary is almost as canonical as Patanjali’s primary text), then proceeds to discuss yoga, the second word in this sūtra. In accordance with the famous Sanskrit grammarian Panini, he glosses yoga with samadhi, the ultimate subject matter of the Yoga Sutras. Samadhi consists of various contemplative stages of mental concentration that will be described in detail throughout the text. Indeed, the commentator Vacaspati Misra traces the etymology of yoga to one of the meanings of the root yuj, to contemplate, which, he points out, is the correct etymology here. The more established etymology from the perspective of modern historical linguistics is, of course, derived from the same Indo- European root as the English word "yoke.”9 Yoga can thus mean that which joins, that is, unites one with the Absolute Truth, and while this translation of the term is popularly found (and may be apt in other contexts, such as the Gitd, IX.3410), it is best avoided in the context of the Yoga Sutras, since, as was pointed out over a hundred years ago by the famous Indologist Max Müller (1899, 309ff) (and long before that, by the sixteenth-century Indian doxographer Madhava!!) the goal of yoga is not to join, but the opposite: to unjoin, that is, to disconnect purusa from prakrti.!2 If the term is to mean “yoke,” it entails yoking the mind on an object of concentration without deviation.
Elaborating on this, Vyasa notes that when the mind is directed
toward an object, it can manifest five different degrees of focus (bhūmis): wondering, confused, distracted, concentrated, and restrained. It is the last two that are of interest to Yoga: when the mind, citta, is restrained and concentrated, or fixed on one point, a type of samadhi known as samprajñata can be attained.13 Samprajñata-samadhi entails concentrating the mind in various degrees upon an object of concentration14 (all of which will be discussed at length below). Vyasa also introduces the notion of asamprajñata-samadhi in these opening comments. This is the seventh and ultimate level of samadhi, when all activities of the mind have been fully restrained—including those involved in samprajñata- samadhi of one-pointed concentration on an object. Since asamprajñata- samadhi will also be discussed at length in the text, we will simply note here that in this state, pure objectless consciousness alone remains, that is, self-contained consciousness conscious only of its own internal nature of pure consciousness rather than of any external object. Vyasa thus provides a minipreview of the subject matter of the Yoga Sūtras in his opening comments.
Vyasa makes a point of noting that a distracted mind, the third on his list of states, is not to be confounded with yoga. Vacaspati Misra elaborates that while it is obvious that the other two states of mind, wondering and forgetfulness,!5 are not yoga, a distracted state of mind may appear to be so because it is periodically fixed. However, since such steadiness soon relapses into wondering and forgetfulness, it cannot be considered real yoga. Only the fully concentrated or one-pointed state of mind is yoga.
Vacaspati Misra notes that the third and final term from this sūtra, anušāsanam, strictly speaking means further teaching.!6 He points out that the Ydjnavalkya Smrti states that a sage known as Hiranyagarbha was the original teacher of yoga. Hence Patanjali is using the prefix anu-, which indicates the continuation of the activity denoted by the noun to which it is prefixed, in this case, šāsanam, teachings. The Mahābhārata also identifies Hiranyagarbha as the founder of Yoga (XII.326.65; 337.60). In the Puranic tradition (e.g., Bhdgavata Purdna, X.71.8), Hiranyagarbha is considered to be an epithet of Brahma, the celestial being responsible for engineering the forms in the universe. In Puranic lore—for example, Bhāgavata Purdna, which is quoted frequently herein
(IIL.8)—Hiranyagarbha is born on a lotus emanating from the navel of Visņu, the supreme Godhead, who is reclining on the divine serpent Šesa on the cosmic waters pervading the entire universe prior to creation. (As an aside, Patañjali himself is considered an incarnation of Šesa; see commentary in IL47.) Awakening to consciousness atop the lotus, Hiranyagarbha has no means of knowing who he is, or what is the source of the lotus or the all-expansive waters, indeed, no means of discerning or knowing anything at all. Confused and disoriented, he stills his mind (in accordance with the next verse), and enters into the ultimate state of yoga (samadhi), as a result of which he is granted a divine vision of Lord Visnu. Hiranyagarbha is thus the first yogi in primordial times, and deemed to have written the original treatise on the subject.
Although mentioned in various texts, the Hiranyagarbha treatise is no longer extant, but information about its twelvefold content, all overlapping with the material found in Patafijali's sūtras,!7 is preserved in the Vaisnava text the Ahirbudhnya Samhitā.!8 Indeed, the information provided in this text suggests that Patanjali has, indeed, preserved the ancient formulation of the original philosophy ascribed to Hiranyagarbha, rather than patching together some innovative Yogic collage.!9 Elsewhere, Vyasa also refers to the teachings of one Jaigisavya as a forerunner of Yoga (11.55). Madhava in his sixteenth-century doxography (compendium of philosophical schools) states that Patanjali, out of kindness, seeing how difficult it was to make sense of all the different types of yoga scattered throughout the Puranas,20 collected their “essences” (111). Patanjali is not the founder of the practice of yoga, which, Vacaspati Mi$ra stresses, is an ancient practice that preceded even Patanjali. Thus, by using the prefix anu, Patanjali himself implies that he has articulated and systematized a method from preexisting sets of teachings. His opening sütra, atha yogānušāsanam, thus informs the reader about the subject matter of the text.
Although Yoga becomes one of six schools of orthodox Hindu thought, its adherents naturally consider it to supersede the other schools. Vijnanabhiksu, the most philosophical of the commentators, quotes a number of scriptural passages that point to the supremacy of yoga. For example, Krsna, in the Bhagavad Gita (which Vijüanabhiksu quotes
frequently) states, “The yogi is higher than the ascetic, and also considered higher than the jAdni, one who pursues knowledge. The yogi is higher still than the karmi, one who performs action; therefore, Arjuna, become a yogi” (VI.46). Just as all rivers such as the Ganga are present as parts of the ocean, says Vijnanabhiksu, so all other schools of thought are fully represented as parts of Yoga. While he allows that one can certainly obtain genuine knowledge from these other schools, all knowledge is, by its very nature, a faculty of the intellect, buddhi; it is not a faculty of the soul proper. Sectarianism apart, it is perhaps useful to consider the argument so as to establish a preliminary understanding of the mind and intellect from Yoga perspectives. All aspects of mind, intellect, and cognition in Yoga psychology are external to or distinct from the true self, or soul. As will become clearer, the soul, which is pure consciousness, is autonomous and separable from the mind, and lies behind and beyond all forms of thought.
It is essential to fully grasp this fundamental point in order to understand the Yoga system. Just as in most religious systems the body is commonly accepted to be extraneous to and separable from some notion of a soul or life force, and discarded at death, so (in contrast to certain major strains of Western thought), according to the Yoga system (and Hindu thought in general), the mind is also held to be extraneous to and separable from the soul (although it is discarded not at death but only upon attaining liberation). The soul is enveloped in two external and separable bodies in Yoga metaphysics:2! the gross material body consisting of the senses, and the subtle body consisting of the mind, intellect, ego, and other subtle aspects of the persona.22 At death, the soul discards the gross body (which returns to the material elements, to “dust”) but remains encapsulated in the subtle body, which is retained from life to life, and eventually attains a new gross body, in accordance with natural laws (karma, etc.). In order to be liberated from this cycle of repeated birth and death (termed samsāra in ancient Indian thought), the soul has to be uncoupled from not just the gross body but the subtle body of the citta as well. The process of yoga is directed toward this end. For our present purposes, then, in contrast to the Cartesian model, knowledge, as a feature of the intellect, or the discriminatory aspect of the mind, is extraneous to the pure self and thus not the ultimate aspect
of being.
The point here is that while knowledge is initially essential in leading the yogī practitioner through the various levels of samādhi, concentrative states, it is only through yoga, for Vijñanabhiksu, that one can transcend the very intellect itself and thus the base of knowledge, to arrive at purusa, the ultimate state of pure, unconditioned awareness. From this perspective, Yoga is therefore superior to other schools of thought that occupy themselves with knowledge and thus remain connected to the material intellect. Just as a person with a torch in hand gives up the torch upon finding treasure, says Vijnānabhiksu, so, eventually, the intellect, and the knowledge that it presents, also become redundant upon attaining the ultimate source of truth, purusa the soul and innermost self. The self is pure subjectivity23 and transcends all knowledge, which is of the nature of objectivity: One knows, that is, one is aware or conscious of, something, hence some other object distinct from the knower or power of consciousness itself, whether this is an external object of the physical world, or an internal object of thought.
Thus, Vijnānabhiksu says (paraphrasing Sānkhya Kārikā XXXV), knowledge and the intellect are the door and doorkeeper, and both lead the practitioner of yoga from the domain of material cognition to the highest goal of existence, realization of purusa, consciousness itself, but this ultimately lies beyond even the intellect. This state of pure consciousness, which is not conscious of anything other than consciousness itself, is termed asamprajfiata-samadhi. The attainment of this state is the ultimate goal for the school of Yoga, not any type of knowledge however profound or mystical. Hence, from this perspective, Yoga is superior to knowledge-centered paths.
The origins of Yoga are rooted in direct perception of its subject matter, says the commentator Hariharananda Aranya. He too notes that Yoga is based not on the mere logical reasoning of the intellect but on direct experience, and in this regard differs from some of the other schools of orthodox thought, which are highly philosophical. Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras is more a psychosomatic technique than a treatise on metaphysics; the truths of Yoga cannot be experienced by inferential reasoning but only by direct perception. As will be seen in I.49, the Yoga school prioritizes experience over other forms of attaining knowledge.
These personal realizations, says Hariharananda, are handed down from teacher to disciple, generation after generation. The teachings of Yoga are an attempt to encapsulate those truths as best as possible through the medium of words and concepts. Since the ultimate truth of the soul, attained in asamprajñata-samadhi, is by definition beyond the intellect, and thus beyond words and concepts, the primary purpose of this text is, as far as possible, to point the reader toward the actual practice of yoga. While the Yoga Sütras provides much interesting information on the nature of Hindu psychology and soteriology, it is useful to keep in mind that its intended function is as a manual for the practitioner (hence its cryptic nature from the perspective of the intellect).
drmfgagfatavma: 11211 I.2 yogaš citta-vrtti-nirodhah
yogah, yoga; citta, the mind; vrtti, fluctuation, state; nirodhah, restraint, control Yoga is the stilling of the changing states of the mind.
There are various definitions of yoga expressed in different traditions which, while all overlapping, reflect the fact that yoga referred to a cluster of practices featuring various forms of discipline and mind control practiced by many differing ascetics and communities on the landscape of ancient India with a view to liberation from the sufferings of embodied life; it was not associated with a distinct school until well into the Common Era.?^ In the Katha Upanisad, for example, "yoga is believed to be when the senses are firmly under control” (VI.11), while in the karma-yoga (path of action) section of the Bhagavad Gītā, yoga is defined as samatvam, evenness of mind (II.48) and as karmasu kaušalam, skill in action (II.50). Elsewhere, the text defines yoga as duhkha- samyoga-viyogam, separation from union with pain (VI.23), which is essentially the definition given in the Vaisesika Sutras: duhkhabhavah, the absence of pain (V.2.1625), a definition that finds its roots in the Katha Upanisad (II.12).26 The Nyaya Sutras associate the practice of yoga with the attainment of liberation (IV.2.46). While his teachings will
incorporate all the above definitions, Patañjali here gives his formal definition of yoga for the classical school of Yoga itself: “Yoga is the stilling of all thought.”
The commentators have packed a considerable amount of rather dense information into their commentaries in this sūtra, since Patanjali has basically defined and summarized the entire system of Yoga here, and the commentaries use this sūtra to lay out the infrastructure of the psychology and metaphysics of the yoga process. Although an attempt will be made here to present the information in stages, the unfamiliar reader might well feel alarmed or overwhelmed by the sudden immersion in yogic concepts and Sanskrit terms presented in the commentary to this sūtra. The task is complicated somewhat since the commentators presuppose that their readers are aware of the system of Sankhya, one of the other six schools of orthodox Indian thought with which the Yoga school is typically coupled.27
Having said this, there are advantages to the "sudden-immersion” technigue into Yoga psychology that follows, since once the basics are grasped, the teachings of Yoga become progressively clearer as one advances through the text. The reader unfamiliar with Hindu metaphysics is reassured that if a clear and coherent picture of Yoga psychology is not gained at this early stage, the material presented in the commentary for this sūtra will be unpacked, explained, reiterated, and elaborated upon repeatedly and in great detail throughout the remainder of the text such that one soon becomes familiar with the system. Additionally, there are a dozen or more technical Sanskrit words that are retained throughout this translation, which do not translate succinctly into English, and a number of them will be introduced here in rapid succession, but, again, readers will become familiar with them by dint of sheer repetition. That said, the commentary for this sūtra remains unavoidably challenging since it presents something of a synopsis of Yoga psychology and practice, and an understanding of these reguires a prior discussion of Sānkhya and Yoga metaphysics.
The first of the Yoga Sūtras introduced the subject matter of the text, a discussion of yoga, and this second sūtra proceeds to define what this yoga is. According to Patanjali’s definition in this sūtra, yoga is the cessation (nirodha) of the permutations or activities (vrttis) of the citta. In
order to define citta, perhaps the most important entity in yoga practice, one must become familiar with ultimate reality as elaborated upon in the Sankhya (literally, numeration) system. As we know, in Sankhya, ultimate reality is perceived as the product of two distinct ontological categories: prakrti or the primordial material matrix of the physical universe, and purusa, pure awareness, the innermost conscious self or soul (the terms “consciousness” and “awareness,” although problematic,28 will be used interchangeably in this commentary to refer to the nature of the purusa). As a result of the contact between these two distinct entities, prakrti and purusa, the material universe evolves in a sequential fashion.
To reiterate, the first and subtlest evolutes from the material matrix, according to Sankhya, are, in order: buddhi, intelligence; ahankara, ego; and manas, mind. These layers, which are grouped together under the rubric of the “internal body,”29 constitute the inner life of an individual, and the purusa soul is cloaked in these psychic layers prior to receiving a gross physical body equipped with senses. The term citta (from cit, to think, consider, fix the mind on) is used in this sūtra and throughout the text by Patanjali and the commentators to refer to all three of these cognitive functions combined (the Yoga school differs somewhat from that of Sankhya in conceiving these three as interacting functions of the one citta, mind, rather than as three distinct metaphysical layers?0), but the main point, as stressed in the last sutra, is that they are distinct from the soul proper.
Buddhi, intelligence, is the aspect of citta that produces, among other things, the functions of thought connected to judgment, discrimination, knowledge, ascertainment, and will?! (from budh, to wake up, be aware of). It is the most important aspect of the citta as it is from its function of discrimination that liberation is achieved. Additionally, it is buddhi that molds itself into the forms of the data funneled to it by manas, below, and presents these images to the purusa soul, to which it is immediately adjacent. Buddhi is thus the liaison between purusa as pure awareness, and the objects, whether physical or psychic, of which purusa can be aware.
Ahankara, or ego,?2 produces the function of thought related to self- awareness, self-identity, and self-conceit (the personal pronoun aham
means I, and kara, the doer). This is the aspect of citta that causes notions of I-ness and my-ness: “I know,” “I am a man,” “I am happy,” “This is mine." It also delimits awareness, which is potentially omnipresent,33 and refracts it to fit into the contours of the particular body and mind within which it finds itself. It is because of ego that the awareness of an ant is limited to the range of the ant’s senses and the conceptual structure of its mind, while the awareness of an elephant has a larger range, and that of a human an even larger range. This restructuring of the lens of ahankara, so to speak, is the result of specific sets of samskāras (imprints from present and past lives, which will be discussed in I.5), relevant to any particular form—bug, dog, or human— activating at the appropriate time.
Manas, the mind, is the aspect of citta that engages in the functions of thought especially related to organizing sensory input and directing the senses; it imposes a conceptual structure on the chaotic field of raw sensations, recognizing and identifying sensual impetuses and categorizing them (from man, to think, believe).?^ It exhibits attraction to some sensory possibilities and aversion to others—in other words, the functions of feeling, emotion, and desiring. It is the bridge connecting the world of the sense objects as accessed through the sense organs; the ego, which appropriates this under the notion of I; and the intelligence, which judges, evaluates, and strategizes over the input to determine what its duty (dharma35) is in relation to the data it is receiving from the mind and senses (that is, what to do about it, how to respond or act). In his commentary to the Sankhya Karika (36), Vacaspati Mi$ra says:
As the village chief collects rent from the heads of the families and presents it to the district chief, who delivers it to the chief superintendent, who delivers it to the king, so the sense organs, having perceived an external object, deliver it to the mind, who considers it and delivers it to the ego, who appropriates it and delivers it to the intelligence, the chief superintendent of all. Thus it is said "they present it to intelligence, [thereby] illuminating the purpose of the purusa. “36
I will gloss the Sanskrit word citta throughout this discussion with the term mind for ease of reference, since this is how it is usually translated,
but it should be noted that the term encapsulates all of the functions of thought outlined above,37 and not just that of manas, which is also usually translated as mind (when I use mind in the latter sense, I will qualify it by the Sanskrit term manas). Vijñanabhiksu states that the citta is the one unified internal organ, and this becomes manifest in the various functions of intelligence, ego, and mind because of vrttis.
The vrttis indicated by Patañjali in this sütra will be categorized into five basic types in I.5 and discussed thereafter, and so we will simply note at this point that they ultimately refer to any permutation or activity of the mind, in other words, any sequence of thought, ideas, mental imaging, or cognitive act performed by either the mind, intellect, or ego as defined above, or any state of the mind at all including deep sleep. The verbal root vrt means to revolve, turn, proceed, move, and underscores the always active, seguential, rambling aspect of the mind. The mind is a physical substance in Hindu thought in general and assumes the forms of the sense data presented to it. The ensuing sense impressions, thoughts, or states are products made of that mental substance, just as a gold statue is a form made from the substance gold, or a clay pot is a form from the substance clay. These constantly moving mental images, states, or formations in the citta are vrttis. If citta is the sea, the vrttis are its waves, the specific forms it takes. (They will be defined in I.5 below.) I will gloss the term vrtti with states or activities of mind or fluctuations of thought, and I will refer to purusa as pure consciousness or pure awareness. The essential point Patanjali is making here is that since all forms or activities of the mind are products of prakrti, matter, and completely distinct from the soul or true self, purusa, they must all be restrained in order for the soul to be realized by the yogi as an autonomous entity distinct from the mind.
Since, as Vyasa notes, the soul in its pure state is considered to be free of content and changeless—it does not transform and undergo permutations in the way the mind constantly does—Vijnanabhiksu raises the issue of how it can be aware of objects at all in the first place. Awareness of objects is brought about by means of buddhi, the intellect. The intelligence is the first interface between the soul and the external world. The sense objects provide images that are received through the senses, sorted by the manas, the thinking and organizing aspect of citta,
and presented to the intellect. Although inanimate, the intellect molds itself into the form and shape of these objects of experience, thoughts, and ideas. Vijñanabhiksu compares this process to liquid copper being poured into a mold and taking the exact shape of the mold, although the forms into which buddhi is molded are extremely subtle and psychic in nature. This molding of the citta into these thoughts and ideas is the vrttis referred to by Patanjali in this sūtra.
This process can be compared to dull, opaque external objects being captured as photographic images on film, which is both translucent and representational, or to geometric patterns on a stained-glass window (Schweitzer 1993, 853), which are again both translucent and representational. That is to say, images on film or in stained glass are translucent enough to allow the light to filter through them, which, on account of the opaqueness of matter, is not the case with the original external gross objects they represent (due to the greater tāmasic component).38 But they are also representational, insofar as these external objects are still indirectly represented as images on the film or forms in the stained-glass windows, becoming visible when pervaded by light. Due to adjacency, the pure consciousness of the soul shines onto the intellect and animates it with consciousness, like a lamp illuminates the film or stained glass with light and makes it appear luminous. Because the pure highly translucent sattva element is maximized in buddhi, it is able to absorb and reflect the soul’s power of consciousness. Enveloped in the soul’s consciousness, the workings of the citta mind appear to be themselves conscious, but they are in reality unconscious, just as the film or stained glass appears illuminated in their own right but are in actuality dependent on light external to themselves for their illumination and visibility. The awareness of the pure soul permeates the citta, animating the churnings of thought, citta-vrttis, but due to ignorance, this animated citta considers consciousness to be inherent within itself, rather than an entity outside and separate from itself. It is this ignorance that is the ultimate cause of bondage and samsara.
According to some commentators (most notably, Vijüanabhiksu),?? just as light bounces off an object back to its source, the consciousness of the soul is reflected off this animated intellect and back to the soul. From this perspective, the intellect also functions like a mirror, the soul
becoming conscious of its reflection in the animated intellect, just as one becomes conscious of one's appearance in a mirror. However, since the intellect is constantly being transformed into the images presented to it by the mind and senses, this reflection presented back to the purusa soul is constantly obscured and distorted by vrttis, just as one’s reflection in a mirror is distorted if the mirror is dirty or warped. When this distorted reflection is considered to be inherent within the actual purusa, rather than the product of the citta, an entity outside of and separate from it, the soul becomes misidentified with the world of change, through the changing states of mind, the vrttis noted in this sütra, just as one may look at one's reflection in a dirty mirror and mistakenly think that it is oneself who is dirty. Consider a young child looking at herself in one of those “crazy mirrors” that make one appear grotesguely fat or thin (or, in the premodern analogy used by Šankara, a face reflected in a long sword, making the face appear elongated, III.35). If the child does not realize that her deformed appearance in the mirror is merely a distorted reflection and not her actual self, she may experience fear or panic.
The soul, in short, is neither the physical body in which it is encased nor the mind that exhibits psychic functions. It is pure autonomous consciousness. The Sankhya Sütras refer to a quaint traditional story to illustrate this point:
A certain kings son, due to being born under an afflicted astrological constellation, is expelled from the city and raised by a member of the forest dwelling Sabara tribe. He thus thinks: “I am a Sabara!” Upon finding him to be still alive, one of the king’s ministers informs him: “You are not a Sabara, you are a king's son.” Thereupon, the son gives up the idea that he is a Sabara, accepts his true royal identity, and thinks: “I am a king's son.” In the same way, the soul, by means of the instruction of a kind soul [the guru], is informed: “You are manifest from the first Soul [Brahman], who is made of pure consciousness.” Thereupon, giving up the idea of being made of prakrti, the soul thinks: “Because I am the son of Brahman,^? I am Brahman, not a product of samsāra.” (IV.1)
Thus, the soul appears to undergo the experiences of the body and mind—birth, death, disease, old age, happiness, distress, peacefulness,
anxiety, etc., but these are mere transformations of the body and mind. In other words, they are the permutations of gross and subtle matter external to the soul that are pervaded by the soul's awareness. The mind misidentifies the pure self with these permutations and considers the pure self to be subject to birth and death, happiness and distress, etc. This misidentification, or ignorance, is therefore the root of bondage to the world, as will be discussed in the beginning of Chapter II. As stated in this sūtra by Patañjali, yoga involves preventing the mind from being molded into these permutations, the vrttis, the impressions and thoughts of the objects of the world.
An understanding of the process underpinning the workings of the mind—the citta-vrttis noted here—requires the introduction of a further set of categories: the three gunas, strands or qualities. They are sattva, lucidity; rajas, action; and tamas, inertia.41 Vyasa and the commentators waste no time discussing these gunas here and continue to do so continuously in their commentaries throughout the text. Since they are pivotal to an understanding of yoga meditation and practice, they require some attention.
The gunas are inherent in prakrti, matter, and are the catalysts in the evolution of the mind and all manifest reality from primordial prakrti. Just as threads are inherent in the production of a rope, says Vijñanabhiksu, so the gunas underpin and permeate the material matrix of prakrti. Prakrti is constituted by the three gunas. Therefore, since everything evolves from this material matrix, the gunas are present in varying proportions in all manifest reality, just as the three primary colors are present in all other colors produced from them. As one can create an unlimited variety of hues by simply manipulating the relative proportions of red, yellow, and blue, so the unlimited forms of this world, as well as psychological dispositions of all beings, are the product of the interaction and intermixture of the gunas. The Mahabharata states that as one can light thousands of lamps from one lamp, so prakrti can produce hundreds of thousands of transformations of the gunas (XII, 301, 15-16). For our present purposes, the citta, as a product of matter, also consists of the three gunas: sattva, rajas, and tamas.
Although all of prakrti, including the cosmological and physical aspect of the universe, is also a product of the three gunas, the Yoga tradition is
interested in their psychic aspect. The gunas are usually portrayed, and perhaps best understood in the context of Yoga, by their psychological manifestations (indeed Dasgupta translates them as "feelings"42). Sattva, the purest of the gunas when manifested in the citta, is typically characterized, among a number of things, by lucidity, tranquillity, wisdom, discrimination, detachment, happiness, and peacefulness; rajas, by hankering, energetic endeavor, power, restlessness, and all forms of movement and creative activity; and tamas, the guna least favorable for yoga, by ignorance, delusion, disinterest, lethargy, sleep, and disinclination toward constructive activity. The Bhagavad Gita (XIV, XVII, and XVIII) presents a wide range of symptoms connected with each of the gunas.^? Krsna makes the useful observation that the gunas are in continual tension with each other, one guna becoming prominent in an individual for a while and suppressing the others, only to be dominated in turn by the emergence of one of the other gunas (Bhagavad Gita XIV.10).
One of the goals of yoga meditation, as discussed repeatedly in the traditional literature, is to maximize the presence of the guna of sattva in the mind and minimize those of rajas and tamas. According to Sankhya metaphysics, all three gunas are inherently present in all the material by- products of prakrti including the citta, so rajas and tamas can never be eliminated, merely minimized or, at best, reduced to a latent and unmanifest potential. Clearly, sattva is the guna most conducive—indeed, indispensable—to the yogic enterprise, but while rajas and tamas are universally depicted as obstacles to yoga, a certain amount of each guna is indispensable to embodied existence. Without tamas, for example, there would be no sleep; without rajas, no digestion or even the energy to blink an eye. Nonetheless, yoga is overwhelmingly about cultivating or maximizing sattva. Another way of putting this is that sattva should control whatever degree of rajas and tamas are indispensable to healthy survival—sleeping for six or seven hours, for example, rather than ten, eating a modest amount of food, rather than gorging, etc.
The etymological meaning of sattva is the nature of being. This indicates material reality in its purest state, and is characterized by the desirable qualities of discrimination, lucidity, and illumination, since it is sattva that can reveal matter for what it is before rajas and tamas cause
it to transform. On the other hand, rajas and tamas are the active influences in the production of the changing states of the mind and fluctuations of thought, the vrttis mentioned in this sūtra, by disrupting the citta's placid and lucid aspect of sattva. Vyāsa states that when rajas and tamas become activated, the mind is attracted to thoughts of the sense objects.^^ But both direct the consciousness of the soul, the pure purusa self, outward, drawing it into the external world and thus into awareness of action and reaction, the cycle of birth and death, in short, samsara.*5 When all trace of tamas and rajas is stilled, however, the mind attains the highest potential of its nature, which is sattva, illumination, peacefulness, and discernment.
When the citta mind attains the state of sattva, the distinction between the ultimate conscious principle, the purusa soul, and even the purest and most subtle (but nonetheless unconscious) states of prakrti, matter, become revealed. Buddhi, intelligence (the subtlest product of prakrti), is the aspect of the mind that produces such discrimination when manifesting its highest potential of sattva and suppressing its inherent potential of rajas and tamas. When freed from the obscuration of these other two debilitating gunas, which divert consciousness from its source, purusa, and into the external world of objects and internal world of thought, the pure sattva nature of the mind redirects consciousness inward toward this inner self. It is like a mirror that, freed from the coverings of dirt, can now reflect things clearly, say the commentators, and can ultimately reflect the true nature of the soul back to itself as it is without distortion. The ensuing state of contemplation is known as samprajndata-samadhi, which, while not the ultimate level of samādhi, is the highest level of discriminative thought. In short, the goal of yoga is to eliminate, that is, still, the potential of rajas and tamas, and allow the full potential sattva nature of the mind to manifest. This is another way of conceptualizing the citta-vrtti-nirodha of this verse.
The means prescribed by Patanjali to still the states of mind or fluctuations of thought is meditative concentration, defined as keeping the mind fixed on any particular object of choice without distraction. By concentration, the distracting influences of rajas and tamas are suppressed, and the sattva aspect of the mind can manifest to its full potential. Since sattva is by nature discriminating, it recognizes the
distinction between purusa and prakrti, the soul and matter, when not distracted by the other two gunas. But, since sattva is also by nature luminous and lucid, it is able to reflect the soul in an undistorted way, once the disruptive presences of rajas and tamas have been stilled, and thus the soul becomes aware of itself in the mirror of the mind, so to speak. Once the dust has been removed, a person can see his or her true face in the mirror. One of the goals of yoga is for the mind to develop such discrimination and to reflect the true image of the soul to itself.
The commentators point out, however, that the very faculty of discrimination—even its ability to distinguish between matter and spirit —is nonetheless a feature of the guna of sattva, and sattva itself is still an aspect of prakrti matter. The point is that discrimination is not a function of the soul, the innermost conscious self. The soul, notes Vyasa, the pure and eternal power of consciousness, never changes—a fundamental axiom of Indic thought in general; it does not transform when in contact with states of mind. Rather, consciousness passively pervades and illuminates objects, whether in the form of gross external sense objects or subtle internal thoughts including the higher stage of discrimination, just as light passively reveals gross and subtle objects in a dark room and yet is not affected by them. Hariharananda points out that the consciousness of the soul, citi-šakti, is pure, infinite, immutable, detached, and illuminating. Therefore, as Vijñanabhiksu outlined in the last sūtra, discriminative intelligence, even the ultimate pure sāttvic act of discrimination, which is recognition of the distinction between the soul and the subtlest aspect of matter, although indispensable in the yogi’s progress, still connects the soul to matter albeit in its subtlest aspect. It, too, must eventually be transcended for full liberation to manifest. As Šankara puts it, the mind sees the limitation in its own nature and deconstructs itself. When lead is burned with gold, says Bhoja Rāja, it not only burns away the impurities in gold, but burns itself away too; discrimination discerns that it itself is not the final aspect of being and pushes the citta to dissolve itself and transcend discerning thought altogether so as to reveal the ultimate consciousness beyond. There is thus a still higher goal in yoga beyond discrimination.
When the mind restrains even the ability to discriminate, continues Vyāsa, and exists in an inactive state where all thoughts remain only in
potential but not active form, in other words, when all thoughts have been stilled (nirodha), one has reached a state of mind where nothing is cognized—all cognition, after all, is connected to some external reality (since cognition requires a subject, the cognizer, and an object of cognition distinct from or external to this subject). With no further distractions including discrimination and even the reflection of itself in the mirror of the sāttvic buddhi intelligence, consciousness can now abide in its own autonomous nature, the actual soul itself, purusa. This is the samadhi called asamprajñata, the state of awareness in which nothing can be discerned except the pure self. In this stage, the mind, which is ultimately an interface between the purusa and the external world, becomes redundant and can be discarded by the yogī upon attaining full liberation.46 This is the ultimate goal of yoga and thus of human existence. This stage, however, must be preceded by samprajñata- samadhi, uninterrupted meditation, that is, concentration on an external object (which, by definition is a product of matter) so that the states of mind and fluctuations of thought mentioned in this sütra can first be fully stilled.
Bhoja Raja raises a possible objection to the existence of purusa, the soul, which is most likely an implicit reference to Buddhism (although it could in principle apply to the Nyāya and Vaišesika schools). If the soul, or pure consciousness, has no object of consciousness, then would it not cease to exist altogether, like fire ceases to exist when the wood upholding it is destroyed? In other words, if the vrttis, fluctuations of thought, are eliminated, then what would consciousness be conscious of? Buddhists hold that the human persona consists of five sheaths, skandhas,47 one of which is consciousness itself, but none of these are eternal or autonomous as almost all Hindu philosophical thought considers the purusa, or conscious self, to be. There is thus a fundamental and intractable difference between Buddhism and Hindu and Jain philosophies on this point.
For Buddhists, when the objects of consciousness are removed, so is consciousness. There is thus no ultimate, eternal, essential entity such as a purusa, soul, that is separable from an object of consciousness; indeed, clinging to such notions of an autonomous self is the very cause of samsāra. Buddhist theologians used the analogy of the wood and fire
mentioned by Bhoja Raja to argue that consciousness is generated by an object. It is not an entity sui generis with an independent existence—one cannot have consciousness that is not conscious of some object, any more than one can have fire without a substratum such as wood.48 Even the orthodox Nyaya and Vaišesika schools, which do accept the existence of an autonomous purusa, hold that when the purusa becomes liberated and uncoupled from the mind and the objects of the senses, it ceases to be conscious. They, too, hold that consciousness requires contact with the mind as an external object in order to manifest in the ātman; it does not manifest independently.49 To answer such objections, says Bhoja Raja, Patañjali offers the next sutra.
aT ZZ: AEST |1311
1.3 tadā drastuh svarūpe ‘vasthanam
tadā, then, at that point; drastuh, of the seer, of the soul; svarūpe, in its own real essential nature; avasthānam, abiding, remaining, being absorbed in When that is accomplished, the seer abides in its own true nature.
There are various terms in Hindu philosophical thought to refer to the soul according to context or the partiality of different texts and schools, ātman being perhaps the most commonly encountered.50 The Yoga tradition in general favors purusa, but Patafijali here uses (the genitive case of) drastr, the seer (from the root drs, to see), a term he uses on several occasions throughout the text, and, indeed, along with other cognates of the root drs, is used almost as often as purusa.>! By seeing, he does not intend the gross power of sight as manifest through the physical organ of sight but as a metaphor for consciousness itself, which “sees” in the sense of exhibiting awareness.
Having stated in the last sūtra that yoga means the cessation of all thought, Patanjali now immediately reassures his audience. Some might worry that cessation of thought—the elimination of all objects of consciousness—entails the cessation of the subject of consciousness,
purusa, itself. After all, our only experience of reality is one mediated by the thinking process. Does the elimination of thought entail the elimination of experience and of existence itself? Is it existential suicide? What happens to the purusa self, asks Vyasa, when the mind is void of content, as prescribed in the last sūtra?
Vijñanabhiksu rhetorically considers three possibilities that might transpire once all the vrttis, states of mind, have been removed: (1) Does the purusa soul remain as pure consciousness that is conscious only of itself? (2) Does it remain unconscious, like a log of wood (becoming conscious only when confronted by a state of mind, as held by the followers of the Nyaya and Vai$esika schools)?52 or (3) Does it cease to exist like a lamp on the destruction of the wick (as held by followers of the materialistic Carvaka school53)? The Yoga school subscribes to the first view. Once freed from its association with the states of the mind, the soul can abide in its own nature, the highest state of pure consciousness, asamprajñata-samadhi. It is devoid even of knowledge, says Vijnanabhiksu, since knowledge implies an object of knowledge and thus requires a connection with the states of mind and the external world.
In fact, Vyasa and the commentators make the point that the soul has always abided in its own nature, even though, when it is absorbed in the outgoing mind and the world of thoughts and sense objects, it appears not to be. The nature of the soul is pure consciousness, just as, says Sankara, the nature of the sun is and has always been to shine. It needs no external instrument to shine, nor does it exert any effort to do so; indeed, it has no alternative but to shine. Similarly, it is the inherent and inescapable nature of purusa to be conscious.
To illustrate the nature of the soul as pure consciousness alone, devoid of content, the commentators often refer to the example of a pure transparent crystal used frequently (and variously) in philosophical discourse to illustrate the relationship between consciousness and the mind (or between the mind and its object). When a red flower is placed next to a crystal, the flower’s color is reflected in the crystal, and so the crystal itself appears to be red. The true nature of the crystal, however, is never actually red, nor is it affected or changed by the flower in any way—even while it reflects the flower—nor does it disappear when the
flower is removed.54 Similarly, consciousness reflects or illuminates external objects and internal thoughts, vrttis, but is not itself affected by them. Purusa, although an autonomous entity separable from the citta with its vrttis placed in its vicinity, is as if colored by them. Since its awareness animates the citta, which is “colored,” it is consequently (and understandably) misidentified with the vrttis by the citta. But in actuality it is not tainted by them, nor does it disappear upon the disappearance of the objects of consciousness. As a crystal is essentially an autonomous entity separable from the red flower placed in its vicinity and retains its pure transparent nature when separated from the flower, so consciousness is an autonomous entity separable from the citta with its vrttis placed in its vicinity, and thus retains its pure nature of awareness when detached from the citta through the practice of yoga. The commentaries frequently utilize another example favored by the Vedanta school to illustrate a related point: Mother-of-pearl does not give up its own essential nature simply because someone mistakes it for the actual pearl itself. Likewise, consciousness does not change its nature simply because it may be confounded with the physical body or the changing states of the mind and intelligence.
The Santi-parvan section of the Mahābhārata abounds in similes illustrating the continued existence of purusa when apart from its prākrtic encapsulation.55 It is like a silkworm that continues to exist after the destruction of the cell made by its threads, a deer that abandons its horn or a snake its slough after shedding it, a bird that goes elsewhere when the tree on which it is perched falls (XII 212.47—49), or a fish and the water that surrounds it (XII 303.17). Elsewhere, the epic compares the direct vision of the soul within the body indicated by this sūtra to the perception of a lamp blazing forth from a pot (XII 187.44), the effulgent sun, a smokeless flame, a streak of lightning in the sky (XII 232.18), or the streak of gold in a stone (XII 198.4).
qfare A FATT JL 601
I.4 vrtti-sārūpyam itaratra
vrtti, fluctuation; sārūpyam, identification; itaratra, otherwise,
at other times Otherwise, at other times, [the seer] is absorbed in the changing states [of the mind].
Patanjali states here that at other times—that is, when not abiding in its own nature as pure consciousness devoid of content—the seer is absorbed, sārūpyam, in the vrttis, the mind’s changing states. Vyasa calls the soul the master and the mind its property: He compares the mind to a magnet that attracts iron within its proximity—the consciousness of purusa. The mind serves its master, the soul, by presenting objects of experience in the form of vrttis. When these ever-changing states of mind are presented to the soul, the soul becomes conscious of them, but is mistakenly identified with them by the citta, and thereby appears affected by them. This misidentification, or ignorance, avidyd, is the cause of the soul’s apparent bondage in the physical world of matter. Vacaspati Misra repeats the analogy of someone looking in a dirty mirror, identifying with the dirty reflection, and then becoming anxious thinking he or she is dirty. Likewise, when one is not aware of the distinction between consciousness and the mind, one wrongly attributes the states of the mind to the self. The cause of the person’s anxiety, frustrations, and experiences is misidentification with something that he or she is not.
The notion of misidentifying the true self with a false reflection goes back to the Upanisads. In the Chandogya Upanisad (VIII.8—12), there is a charming narrative about Indra, lord of the celestials, and Virocana, lord of the demons. Upon hearing that by attaining the atman, one conquers the universe,56 the two rivals approached the sage Prajapati for instruction as to where to find this atman. Perceiving their misguided intent for this enterprise (their interest was in gaining control over the universe, for which the gods and demons are perennially battling), Prajapati decides to test them. He tells them that they can find the atman by looking into a pan of water. Peering into the waters, the two see their bodies reflected back. They take their leave, thinking that their bodies are this atman, and, while Virocana remains content with this surface realization, Indra sees the inadequacy of this view of the atman and so returns to Prajapati. ^I see no worth in this," he complains, “for this self
will die when the body dies.” Prajapati then takes him through progressively more subtle understandings of the self until he teaches him the true nature of ātman.
Although the mind is actually inert and unconscious, say the commentators, as a result of being permeated by the consciousness of the soul, its states and fluctuations appear to be states of the true self and are as if experienced by the self. (Recall the analogy of a dark object appearing to be luminous due to contact with an illuminating lamp.) And so, says Vacaspati Mišra, the soul, which has no misconceptions, appears to have misconceptions and, although completely pure and transcendent, appears to be affected by mundane states of mind such as pleasure, pain, or delusion. This is like the phenomenon of a lake appearing to have trees on it due to the reflection of the trees on its bank, says Vijñanabhiksu. Bhoja Raja gives the well-known illustration of the moon appearing to be altered and rippled when reflected on rippling water, but it is the water, not the moon, that constantly fluctuates due to the wind. Similarly, the mind is constantly experiencing and processing the forms of sense objects through the senses. It is thus constantly changing, like the flame of a candle, says Vijñanabhiksu, and, depending on the experiences of the moment, producing temporary states such as happiness, distress, etc. The self, although pure, is then misidentified with these changing states of the mind, due to proximity, and appears also to be affected. It seems to experience the emotions of the mind triggered by the senses and their objects, and thus to be the enjoyer or sufferer of the things of this world. In reality it is not affected, any more than the moon is affected by the ripples on its reflection in water. Vijñanabhiksu quotes the Gita: “One who sees that all activities are being performed by prakrti, and that the self is not the doer, truly sees” (XIII.29).57
Sankara here alludes to the image of a dancing girl in the Sankhya Karikds, the primary text for the Sankhya school: “As a dancer ceases from the dance after having been seen by the audience, so also prakrti ceases after having manifested herself to the purusa” (LIX). In the same vein, a more modern analogy comes to mind for the process by which prakrti is conjoined with purusa. Consider a group of people watching a film. The film itself consists of just a sequence of inert flickering images
and sounds, which are nothing more than light particles and frequency waves—material energy. The people watching the film, however, can become so absorbed in this spectacle of light and sound that they forget their own existence. If the film is a good one, two or three hours can pass during which the viewers forget about their real lives and personal issues they are undergoing, such as mental anxieties or fears, or bodily needs or aches and pains. Moreover, the viewers can become so wrapped up in the illusory world of the film that they experience, let us suppose, sadness when the hero or heroine is killed, or happiness when hero and heroine live happily ever after. In other words, the viewers forget their own separate existences and experience emotions produced by intense identification with the illusory and separate world of the film. Indeed, a good performance (and this is also the case in classical Hindu dramaturgy) aims to stir precisely such absorption and identification. When the film is over, the viewers are thrust back into their own realities—they are suddenly returned to the world of their own problems, perhaps they become aware of being hungry or thirsty.
In the same way, due to the mind’s ignorance and illusion, the soul appears absorbed in the lights and sounds and emotions of the external objective world and forgetful of its own real nature as pure consciousness, even though it is merely the witness of all these, which are actually taking place in the mind’s vrttis. Yoga is about stilling the vrttis, stopping the film midway so that the mind can realize that the emotions, fears, happiness, pains, births and deaths, etc., it has been experiencing do not exist in the soul but are the inert flickerings and permutations of the material spectacle. Thus yoga is ultimately about liberation from the external material world, or, in traditional Hindu terms, from samsara, the cycle of birth and death.
Vacaspati Misra raises the question of the cause of the soul’s association with the mind in the first place, in other words, the cause of ignorance. It is eternal, he answers, like the relationship between seed and sprout. Almost all schools of Indic philosophy conceive of ignorance as eternal and do not speculate over any first impetus that caused the individual to be associated with ignorance and samsāra. As the Buddha is reputed to have said, if a man is shot by an arrow, it is useless to inquire as to the nature of the arrow, its point of origin, etc. One should more
profitably first remove the arrow.58 Likewise, for one drowning in the ocean of birth and death, samsāra, it is fruitless to speculate as to how one originally fell in; it would be more productive to find first a means to get out. Such a means, of course, is yoga.
qu: Ya: fF FTIT: iy i I.5 vrttayah pancatayyah klistaklistah
vrttayah, the changing states of mind; paficatayyah, fivefold; klista, detrimental, harmful, damaging, afflicted; aklistah, nondetrimental, unafflicted There are five kinds of changing states of the mind, and they are either detrimental or nondetrimental [to the practice of yoga].
Patanjali defined yoga in L2 as citta-vrtti-nirodha and now dedicates sutras I.5-12 to discussing the vrttis and I.13—16 to discussing nirodha. We here get a sense of the systematic nature of the sütra traditions, in contrast to the more spontaneous but unsystematic nature of the earlier Upanisadic corpus from which a number of knowledge systems stemmed. As has been noted, vrtti is used frequently throughout the Yoga Sūtras essentially to refer to any sensual impression, thought, idea, cognition, psychic activity, or mental state whatsoever. Since the mind is never static but always active and changing, vrttis are constantly being produced and thus constantly absorb the consciousness of purusa away from its own pure nature, channeling it out into the realm of subtle or gross prakrti. Vijnānabhiksu compares vrttis to flames of a fire or waves of the sea. In other words, if the citta is the sea, the vrttis are its waves, the never-ending but ever-changing temporary forms and permutations produced by the constant flux of the tides, undercurrents, and eddies of the citta. In I.2, Patañjali defined yoga as the complete cessation of all vrttis. Here, he addresses the consequent question: What are these vrttis that must be eliminated? There are five categories, paricatayyal, of vrttis (which will be discussed in the following sūtras); Patanjali indicates that these can be either aklista, conducive (at least initially) to the ultimate
goal of yoga, or klista, detrimental.
Vyasa states that the detrimental vrttis are caused by the five klešas, the impediments to the practice of yoga, ignorance, ego, attachment, aversion, and clinging to life, that will be discussed in II.3. The term for detrimental, klista, comes from the same root as kleša (klis, to trouble or torment). These types of mental states are detrimental to the goals of yoga because they are the fertile soil from which the seeds of karma sprout; the klista-vrttis culminate in bondage. They are essentially the products of rajas and tamas. Aklista-vrttis are sattvic and have the opposite effect; they are born of insight and culminate in liberation. When under the influence of the detrimental vrttis, the mind becomes attracted or repelled by sense objects drawing its attention. In its attempt to attain that which attracts it, and avoid that which repels it, the mind provokes action, karma, which initiates a vicious reactive cycle.
Karma, from the root kr, to do or make, literally means work, but inherent in the Indic concept of work, or any type of activity, is the notion that every action breeds a reaction.59 Thus karma refers not only to an initial act, whether benevolent or malicious, but also to the reaction it produces (pleasant or unpleasant in accordance with the original act), which ripens for the actor either in this life or a future one. Hence (as will be seen in IL13-14), people are born into different socioeconomic situations, and pleasant or unpleasant things happen to them throughout life in accordance with their own previous actions.
This cycle of action and reaction, or samsara, is potentially eternal and unlimited since not only does any one single act breed a reaction, but the actor must then react to this reaction, causing a rereaction, which in term fructifies and provokes rerereactions, and so on ad infinitum. Thus, since the vicious cycle of action and reaction for just one solitary momentary act is potentially unlimited, and since one has to act at every moment of one’s life (even blinking or breathing is an act), the storehouse of karma is literally unlimited. Since these reactions and rereactions cannot possibly be fitted into one life, they spill over from one lifetime to the next. It is in an attempt to portray the sheer unlimited and eternal productive power of karma that Indic thinkers, both Hindu and Buddhist, use such metaphors as the ocean of birth and death. Thus,
karma, which keeps consciousness bound to the external world and forgetful of its own nature, is generated by the vrttis, and the vrttis, in turn, are produced by the klešas.
The aklista nondetrimental mental vrttis, on the other hand, are produced by the sattvic faculty of discrimination that seeks to control the influence of rajas and tamas and thereby the detrimental vrttis that they produce. Vyasa notes that this type of vrtti is beneficial even if situated in a stream of detrimental vrttis.6% In other words, for the novice struggling to control his or her mind, even if the emergence of sattva occurs only periodically, it is always a beneficial occurence, and it can be gradually increased and strengthened by a yosgic lifestyle. The reverse also holds true, adds Vyasa: Detrimental vrttis also can surface periodically in a predominantly sāttvic citta (hence the Gītā's statement in IL60 that the senses can carry away the mind even of a man of discrimination).
Vācaspati Misra mentions activities such as the practice of yoga and the cultivation of desirelessness born from the study of scripture as nondetrimental, that is, mental activities beneficial to the goal of yoga. These actions, like any actions, produce seeds of reactions and create samskaras (discussed further below), but these seeds are sdttvic and beneficial to the path of yoga and the ultimate goal of samādhi. In time, and with practice, these seeds accumulate such that they eventually transform the nature of the mind. The mind then becomes more and more sāttvic, or illuminated and contemplative, such that the beneficial vrttis eventually automatically suppress any stirrings of rajas and tamas— the detrimental vrttis—until the latter remain only as inactive potencies. When the citta manifests its pure sattva potential, it becomes “like” the atman, says Vyasa. He means that, becoming aware of the true nature of reality, it no longer distracts the purusa with permutations of prakrti, the world of samsāra, but provides it insight into its true nature and reflects purusa undistorted, allowing it to contemplate its true nature as per the mirror analogy.
Ramananda Sarasvati notes here that, essentially, the citta mind is nothing but samskāras, mental imprints or impressions (not to be confused with samsāra, the cycle of birth and death). Samskāras are a very important feature of Yoga psychology: Every sensual experience or
mental thought that has ever been experienced forms a samskāra, an imprint, in the citta mind. Essentially, any vrtti leaves its copy on the citta before fading away, like a sound is imprinted on a tape recorder or an image on film. The mind is thus a storehouse of these recorded samskāras, deposited and accumulated in the citta over countless lifetimes. However, it is important to note that these samskāras are not just passive imprints but vibrant latent impulses that can activate under conducive circumstances and exert influence on a person’s thoughts and behaviors. Vyasa notes that there is thus a cycle of vrttis and samskāras. Vrttis, that is, sense experiences and thoughts, etc. (and their consequent actions), are recorded in the citta as samskāras, and these samskāras eventually activate consciously or subliminally, producing further vrttis. These vrttis then provoke action with its corresponding reaction, which in turn are recorded as samskāras, and the cycle continues.
Memories in Hindu psychology, as we will see in I.11, are considered to be vivid samskaras from this lifetime, which are retrievable, while the notion of the subconscious in Western psychology corresponds to other less retrievable samskāras (accumulated, in Hinduism, primarily in previous lives), which remain latent as subliminal impressions. Samskāras also account for such things as personality traits, habits, compulsive and addictive behaviors, etc. For example, a particular type of experience, say smoking a cigarette, is imprinted in the citta as a samskara, which then activates as a desirable memory or impulse, provoking a repetition of this activity, which is likewise recorded, and so on until a cluster or grove of samskaras of an identical or similar sort is produced in the citta, gaining strength with each repetition. The stronger or more dominant such a cluster of samskaras becomes, the more it activates and imposes itself upon the consciousness of the individual, demanding indulgence and perpetuating a vicious cycle that can be very hard to break. The reverse, of course, also holds true with benevolent aklista-vrttis: One can become addicted, so to speak, to benevolent yogic activities and lifestyle by constant repetition. Klešas, vrttis, samskāras, and karma are thus all interconnected links in the chain of samsāra.
Through the practice of yoga, the yogi attempts to supplant all the rājasic and tamasic samskāras with sāttvic ones until these, too, are restricted in the higher states of meditative concentration. This is
because while sāttvic samskāras, the nondetrimental vrttis, mentioned by Patanjali in this sūtra, are conducive to liberation, they nonetheless are still vrttis and thus an external distraction to the pure consciousness of the dtman. Of course, as Vijnanabhiksu points out, all vrttis, including sāttvic ones, are ultimately detrimental from the absolute perspective of the purusa, as they bind consciousness to the world of matter, so the notions of detrimental and nondetrimental are from the relative perspective of samsāra; the detrimental (rajasic and tamasic) vrttis cause pain, and the nondetrimental (sāttvic) ones at least lead in the direction of liberation, even though they too must eventually be given up. Vijnanabhiksu quotes the Bhāgavata Purāņa here to make the point: “Other things [the obstacles to yoga] must be eliminated by sattva, and [then] sattva is eliminated by sattva" (XI.25.20). Also, vrttis that are truly and literally aklista, not subject to any ignorance at all, can point only to the state of jivanmukta, liberated while still embodied. This verse thus gives a clear indication that it is possible to act in the world in one's prākrtic body and mind from an enlightened perspective free from ignorance.
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I.6 pramana-viparyaya-vikalpa-nidra-smrtayah
pramāņa, epistemology, source of right knowledge; viparyaya, error; vikalpa, imagination, fancy; nidra, sleep; smrtayah, memory [These five vrttis are] right knowledge, error, imagination, sleep, and memory.
The vrttis, which bind purusa to the world of samsara, are enumerated here. Patañjali lists five distinct types of vrttis. The implication, in essence, is that the human mind finds itself in one of these five states at any given moment. According to the Yoga tradition, all possible mental states that can be experienced can be categorized as manifestations of one of these five types of vrttis. Any other states of mind that one might conceive of would be considered by the Yoga tradition as a subset of one
of these five essential categories. The commentators reserve their comments for the ensuing sūtras, which explain each of these items in turn.
ATATAATATITAT: FATT |1 di
1.7 pratyaksanumanagamah pramanani
pratyaksa, sense perception; anumana, inference, logic; agamah, testimony, verbal communication; pramāņāni, epistemology Right knowledge consists of sense perception, logic, and verbal testimony.
The first of the five vrttis to be discussed is pramana, the central concern of epistemology, that is, what sources constitute valid knowledge of an object, the methods of attaining accurate information about reality.6! Philosophy and, of course, science—Sankhya, after all, sees itself as dealing with physical verifiable truths—have as their goals the attainment of knowledge about reality, so it is standard in Indic philosophical discourse for scholastics to state which methods of attaining such knowledge of reality they accept as valid. The Yoga school accepts three sources of receiving knowledge, as does the Sankhya tradition (Sarkhya Karika IV), but other philosophical schools accept differing numbers from one to six.62
The first method of attaining valid knowledge listed by Patañjali is sense perception: We can know something to be true or valid if we experience it through one or more of our senses—if we see, smell, touch, hear, or taste it. So, for example, you *know" this book is real because you see it and feel it. Šankara notes that sense perception, empiricism, is placed first on the list of pramanas because the other pramanas are dependent on it.63
Vyasa defines sense perception as the state or condition of the mind, yrtti that apprehends both the specific (višesa) and generic (samanya) nature of an external object through the channels of the five senses. The generic and specific nature of objects are categories especially associated with the Vaisesika school of Hindu philosophy and are technical ways of
attempting to analyze physical reality. The generic nature of a dog that one might happen to come upon, for example, is that it belongs to the canine species, the specific nature is that which demarcates it from other members of this generic category, that it is, let us say, a ginger Irish terrier. (Technically speaking, visesa is what differentiates ultimate irreducible entities such as the smallest subatomic particles of matter from each other, but Vyasa is using the term in a more general sense, since dogs, as all material objects, are made up of conglomerates of atoms.6^) When one sees a particular dog, the mind typically apprehends both its generic and specific natures.5 This is accomplished by the citta encountering a sense object through the senses and forming an impression of this object, a vrtti.56 More specifically, the tamasic natures of sense objects imprint themselves upon the mind and are then illuminated in the mind by the mind’s sattvic nature. Due to pervading the mind, the purusa’s awareness then becomes conscious of this mental impression, as if it were taking place within itself, indistinguishable from itself. In actual fact, the impression is imprinted on the citta, mind, which is pervaded by consciousness.
Vacaspati Misra raises a question here. If the impression is imprinted on the mind, which, according to the metaphysics of Yoga, is a totally separate entity from the purusa soul, then how is it that the latter is aware of it? Or, as he puts it, if an axe cuts a khadira tree, it is not a plaksa tree that is thereby cut. In other words, if an impression is something that is made on the mind, then how does it end up being made on the purusa? Here, again, Vacaspati Misra introduces the analogy of the mirror. It is the mind and intelligence, not the soul, that take the form of the object as a result of sense perception. According to the reflection model of awareness, consciousness is reflected in the intelligence due to their proximity and then is misidentified with the reflection by the mind. This reflection, in turn, is altered according to the form assumed by the intelligence—just as a reflection appears dirty if the mirror is dirty. Thus, since the mind and intelligence have taken the form of the object in question, consciousness sees its own reflection as containing that form. This corresponds to the analogy of the moon appearing rippled when reflected in rippling water. According to the nonreflection model, awareness simply pervades the citta just as it
pervades the body and is misidentified as being nondifferent from the forms of citta in the same way as it is misidentified with the form of the body. According to either manner of conceptualization, this misidentification of the awareness of purusa with the forms of the intellect is the essence of ignorance.
Moving on to the second pramana, source of receiving valid knowledge, mentioned by Patañjali in this sūtra, Vyàsa defines anumana, inference, as the assumption that an object of a particular category shares the same qualities as other objects in the same category, qualities that are not shared by objects in different categories. He gives the rather clumsy example of the moon and stars, which belong to the category of moving objects because they are seen to move, but mountains belong to a category of immobile objects, because they have never been seen to move. Thus, if one sees an unfamiliar mountain or hill, one can infer that it will not move, because other known objects in this category, all mountains and hills with which one is familiar, do not move.
The more classical example of inference among Hindu logicians is that fire can be inferred from the presence of smoke. Since wherever there is smoke, there is invariably fire causing it, the presence of fire can be inferred upon the perception of smoke even if the actual fire itself is not perceived. So if one sees clouds of smoke billowing forth from a distant mountain, one can say with certainty that there must be fire on it, even if one cannot actually see the blaze itself. It is in this regard that inference, anumana, differs from the first source of knowledge, pratyaksa, sense perception. Pratyaksa requires that one actually see the fire. In anumana, the fire itself is not actually seen, but its presence is inferred from something else that is perceived, smoke.67 The principle here is that there must always be an absolute and invariable relationship (vyapti, concomitance) between the thing inferred, say, the fire, and the reason on which the inference is made, the presence of smoke—in other words, wherever there is or has ever been smoke there must at all places and at all times always be or have been fire present as its cause with no exceptions. If these conditions are met, the inference is accepted as a valid source of knowledge. If exceptions to the rule can be found, even one instance of smoke ever that does or did not have fire as its cause, then the inference is invalid.
Finally, agama, verbal testimony, the third source of valid knowledge accepted by Patañjali, is the relaying of accurate information through the medium of words by a trustworthy person who has perceived or inferred the existence of an object, to someone who has not. Vyasa describes a trustworthy person as someone whose statements cannot be contradicted. Vacaspati Mišra adds that such a person should have keen sense organs and be trustworthy and compassionate, and Vijñanabhiksu, that a reliable or trustworthy person is one who is free from defects such as illusion, laziness, deceit, dull-wittedness, and so forth. The words of such a reliable authority enter the ear and produce an image, vrtti, in the mind of the hearer that corresponds to the vrtti experienced by the trustworthy person. The person receiving the information in this manner has neither personally experienced nor inferred the existence of the object of knowledge, but valid knowledge of the object is nonetheless achieved, which distinguishes this source of knowledge from the two discussed previously.
The most important category of valid knowledəe in the form of agama, verbal testimony, is divine scripture, which is also referred to as šruti,68 that which is heard, or šabda, the word. Since scriptures are considered to have been uttered by trustworthy persons in the form of enlightened sages and divine beings, their status as trustworthy sources of knowledge is especially valuable. In order to elaborate on this, Vacaspati Mišra raises the issue of how sacred scriptures can be considered valid given that all accurate verbal knowledge must itself originally come either from perception or inference (hence the Carvaka and Vaišesika schools do not even consider them separate sources of knowledge6?), but scriptures deal with certain subjects that no human being has either seen or inferred (such as the existence of heavenly realms). Vacaspati Mišra responds that the truths of scripture have been perceived by God, Isvara; thus divine scripture, too, is based on perception—and God, quips Rāmānanda Sarasvati, is surely a trustworthy person! However, Vacaspati Misra, in his commentary to the Sankhya Karika (V), precludes the blind acceptance of scripture by qualifying that revelation may be a useful means of attaining knowledge only if it has a solid foundation, contains no internal contradictions, is supported by reason, and is accepted by people in general.
Vyasa makes a telling comment in I.32 relevant to the hierarchy of Yoga epistemology. Perception is superior to any other sources of knowledge—indeed, the other sources of knowledge are based on it. If we consider the syllogism there is fire on the mountain because there is smoke, even though the fire is not seen by direct perception and therefore an inference is required to establish its existence, this inference is dependent on perception insofar as the sign (linga) of the fire, namely, smoke, is perceived. So valid inferences are also dependent on perception. And, as indicated, verbal authority is predicated on the original perception of the object of information by the relayer of the information. Additionally, it can be argued that accepting knowledge from a verbal authority is nothing other than making an inference—one makes an inference that a verbal authority is reliable and does not counter perceivable data. Verbal authority too, then, is indirectly derived from direct perception. Therefore some schools of thought, like that associated with the materialist Carvaka, accept the need for only one pramana, that of sense perception. The Yoga school accepts three sources but is very clear that it considers pratyaksa the highest, not just because the other pramanas depend on it, but (as will become clearer in I.49) because it is the only way of truly knowing the essential nature of an object.
Different schools of thought prioritized different pramanas. The Nyāya school features anumana, dedicating itself for centuries to refining categories of logic, and Sānkhya, too, was associated with this epistemology.79 The Vedanta school occupied itself with agama (Vedanta Sutras 1.1.3), dedicating itself to the interpretation and systematization of the Upanisads and the Vedānta Sūtras derived from them; the Mīmāmsā school, too, prioritized agama and became especially associated with developing hermeneutics, the methods of scriptural interpretation.7! While Patanjali accepts āgama as a valid source of knowledge, he does not guote or even indirectly refer to a single verse from scripture in his treatise (in contrast with the Vedānta Sūtras, which are almost entirely composed of references from the Upanisads). The very fact that he categorizes āgama as a vrtti and thus comparable in one sense with other vrttis such as viparyaya, error, the subject of the next sūtra, points to correspondences with aspects of post-Enlightenment
thought, namely, that verifiable (in this case yogic) experience trumps scripture. This has been termed a “radical mystico-yogic orientation,”72 since, certainly, as with the Enlightenment, such claims would have challenged the mainstream Vedic authority of the day. As for anumana, while Patañjali uses this source of knowledge on occasion, such as in his arguments against certain Buddhist views, (IV.14—24), clearly almost his entire thrust throughout the sūtras is on pratyaksa as the ultimate form of knowledge. Anumana and agama are forms of knowledge, but mediate forms, the truths of which are indirect, where the Yoga tradition bases its claims to authoritativeness on direct, personal experience.
It is because of this orientation that yoga is, in my view, destined to remain a perennial source of interest to the empirical dispositions of the modern world. One must also note that there are different types of pratyaksa: the commentary on the Sankhya Karika, the Yukti-dipika, speaks of yogic perception as well as sensual perception (38.2). Indeed, several schools make a distinction between apara-pratyaksa, conventional perception, and para-pratyaksa, supernormal perception, or, as the Sankhya Sūtras put it, external perception, bahya-pratyaksa, and internal perception abdhya-pratyaksa (1.90).73 As will become clearer later in the text, the perception of interest to Yoga is the latter, that of a supernormal nature. But even the startling claims of omniscience that occur later in the text are relevant only as signposts of experiences that the yogi will encounter on the path of Yoga, not as articles of faith.
fayaar fears Aaguufaza ic i I.8 viparyayo mithya-jfianam atad-rüpa-pratistham
viparyayah, error; mithyā, false; jranam, knowledge; atat, not that, incorrect; rüpa, form; pratistham, established in Error is false knowledge stemming from the incorrect apprehension [of something].
Patafijali now proceeds to the second of the five different types of vrttis, error. Vyasa defines error as considering something to be what it is not, atad-rüpa, a state that can be subsequently removed by true knowledge
of the actual nature of the thing in question. As an example he gives the perception of two moons. After consuming alcohol, a person may see double. This error of perception nonetheless produces a vrtti in the mind of this person, but this vrtti differs from vrttis produced by valid sources of knowledge insofar as the seeing of two moons is an apparent perception that can be contradicted and dismissed by a later accurate perception that there is only one moon in reality, whereas valid knowledge cannot be contradicted. Vijñanabhiksu notes that error is the result of the superimposition of wrong knowledge, mithya-jñanam, onto an object (in our example, an extra moon is superimposed onto the actual solitary one).
The classical example of error, especially among the followers of Vedanta, is mistaking a rope for a snake: If one happens upon a rope on the path as one is walking home at dusk, and imagines it to be a snake, one is superimposing the form of a snake upon something that is not a snake. This is error according to the Yoga school (different schools of philosophy hold differing views on what constitutes error74). The Nyaya school, which especially concerns itself with epistemology, the methods of accurate knowledge, has a similar definition, giving as an example of error considering mother-of-pearl as containing silver. (Specifically, Nyāya defines knowledge, pramā, as apprehending an object as it is, correctly identifying the attribute of that object, and error as the opposite, considering an object to have an attribute that in fact it does not have—the mother-of-pearl does not contain silver.75) Vyāsa considers error to be essentially the five klešas, the impediments to the practice of yoga: ignorance (avidyā), ego, attachment, aversion, and clinging to life. However, avidyā is the root of the other klešas (II.4), and we will argue in II.5 that it is a fundamentally deeper and more subconscious type of ignorance than the surface-level error represented in this sūtra by viparyaya.
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1.9 sabda-jnananupati vastu-stinyo vikalpah
šabda, words; jndna, knowledge; anupātī, resulting from,
followed in sequence; vastu, actual object; šūnyah, devoid of; vikalpah, conceptualization, fancy, imagination; here, figurative language Imagination consists of the usage of words that are devoid of an actual object.
The commentators take the third type of vrtti, imagination, to be metaphor, words or expressions that do not correspond to any actual physical reality, vastu-$unya, but are understood in common parlance, Sabda-jfiana-anupat. When we say “consciousness is the essence of purusa” (caitanyam purusasya svarūpam iti), says Vyasa, we are, strictly speaking, making an incorrect statement. Using the genitive case, as in the “essence of purusa,” implies a distinction between the possessor and the thing possessed, as in the phrase “the cow of Citra.” But consciousness is not a separate entity owned by another separate entity purusa as this phrase suggests. Consciousness is purusa, not something owned by purusa. Likewise with negative predictions such as “the purusa has the characteristic of not being born”: there is not a factual positive state of “not being born”; something that does not exist has no sensible existence, yet such phrases do bear meaning. Using language in this way is vikalpa.
Vyasa gives other examples of this nature,76 but if we, along with the commentators, can extend the technical denotative range of vikalpa somewhat, perhaps a more straightforward example from English usage might be “the sun rises and sets” or “time flies.” The sun doesn't actually either rise or set, nor is there a tangible entity called time flapping about with wings, but common usage has assigned meaning to these imaginary states of affairs, and no one bats an eye when such expressions are uttered. In other words, metaphors and similes might be considered types of vikalpas. Indeed, Vacaspati Mišra notes that these expressions, which, if dissected to their literal meanings, do not correspond to actual objective reality, are normal everyday expressions and ubiquitous in human language, since language is largely figurative.
In this way, although other schools, such as Nyaya and Vaišesika, consider vikalpa to be a category of error rather than a vrtti in its own right, the Yoga school considers the vrtti of vikalpa, imagination, to differ
essentially from the previous two vrttis. This is because the first vrtti, right knowledge, corresponds to accurate knowledge of an actual objective reality, recognized as such by others, and error corresponds to a misperception or misunderstanding of something, and therefore it is perceived as an error by other people who can see the actual nature of the misunderstood object. Vikalpa, on the other hand, while, like error, referring to an object that lacks actual objective physical reality, yet, unlike the vrtti of error but like the vrtti of right knowledge, is not based on an error of judgment and is intelligible to other people in practice, producing a vrtti impression in the mind of the listener without being perceived as an error or attracting any attention. It thus paradoxically represents a meaningful expression that yet has no actual reality in the real world. It is therefore held to be a different category of vrtti from pramana or viparyaya.