Patanjali

Patanjali

A reader who knows yoga from a studio, all mats and postures and breathing, opens the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali expecting a manual of the body and finds almost nothing about it. There is exactly one terse line on posture, that the seat should be steady and easeful, and then the text moves on. What it is actually about is the mind. Its second aphorism, four words in the Sanskrit, defines the whole enterprise: yoga is the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind. Not a stretch, not a mood, not a workout, but an operation performed on consciousness itself, quieting the ceaseless whirl of mental activity until something that stands behind it can be seen plainly. The most famous body-practice in the world begins as one of the most precise psychologies the ancient world ever wrote, and the postures are a single rung on a ladder of eight.

The book of threads. The Yoga Sutras are about a hundred and ninety-six aphorisms, sutra meaning thread, gathered into four short chapters: on absorption, on practice, on the powers, and on liberation. They are attributed to Patanjali, a figure so wrapped in tradition that his dates are guessed rather than known, conventionally placed around the second century BC but argued by some scholars into the early centuries AD; he may have been less an author than the compiler who threaded an older discipline into a system. The aphorisms are so compressed that they were never meant to stand alone; they have always been read with a commentary, above all the ancient bhashya ascribed to Vyasa, which unfolds each thread into a teaching.

The fluctuations of the mind. The key term is chitta-vritti-nirodha. Chitta is the mind-stuff, the whole field of awareness; the vrittis are its fluctuations, the modifications and whirlings that rise and fall across it, which Patanjali sorts into five kinds, from true knowledge through error and imagination down to sleep and memory; and nirodha is their stilling or restraint. Yoga is the quieting of the vrittis, and the reason it matters is given in the very next thread, which the corpus renders, "Then the Seer comes to consciousness in his proper nature." While the mind churns, the Seer, the pure witnessing consciousness, identifies with the churning and is lost in it, mistaking the weather of the mind for itself. Still the weather and the witness stands revealed. The entire system is contained in those two aphorisms; everything else is method.

The Seer and the seen. Behind the psychology lies a metaphysics, the dualism of the Samkhya school that Patanjali assumes. On one side is purusha, pure consciousness, the witness, changeless and uninvolved; on the other is prakriti, nature, which includes not only matter but the mind itself, for thought too is a subtle product of nature. Bondage is the confusion of the two, the witness taking the activity of the mind for its own being. Liberation, which Patanjali calls kaivalya, a word meaning isolation or aloneness, is the discriminative discernment that finally tells the Seer from the seen and frees consciousness from its long entanglement in the mechanism that it had mistaken for itself. This sharp dualism is what later separates Patanjali from the non-dual Vedanta of Shankara, who would answer that in the end there are not two things but one.

The eight limbs. The practice is a ladder of eight stages, ashtanga yoga. The first two are ethical: the restraints, beginning with non-violence, truth, and non-grasping, and the observances, such as purity, contentment, and self-study. The third is posture, dispatched in that single line about a steady and easeful seat. Then come the regulation of the breath and the withdrawal of the senses from their objects, which turn attention inward; and finally the three inner stages, concentration fixing the mind on a point, meditation sustaining it in an unbroken flow, and absorption, samadhi, in which the distinction between the meditator and the object falls away. The famous postures of the modern studio are the third of these eight rungs, a preparation of the body so that the real work, which is done sitting still, can go on undisturbed.

The afflictions and the powers. What keeps the mind churning is a set of five afflictions, the kleshas, rooted in ignorance and branching into egoism, attachment, aversion, and the clinging to life; the whole discipline aims at thinning these until they no longer drive the fluctuations. The third chapter then catalogs the extraordinary powers, the siddhis, that are said to arise from intense inner focus, knowledge of distant things, of past and future, and stranger feats besides. It would be easy to read this as a manual of the occult, and Patanjali forestalls exactly that misreading: these powers, he warns, are accomplishments in the world but obstacles to absorption, glittering distractions to be noted and passed by on the way to the only goal that matters.

The optional God. Patanjali offers, as one means among several toward absorption, devotion to Ishvara, a special purusha untouched by affliction, the first teacher, signified by the sacred syllable Om. But this is a path, not a foundation, one technique offered to those for whom it works rather than a creator on whom the system depends. The Yoga Sutras are largely a do-it-yourself technology of consciousness; their theism is light, and a practitioner who set Ishvara aside would still find the ladder intact.

What this room reads. The corpus carries two public-domain translations. Charles Johnston's The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: The Book of the Spiritual Man (1912) is a readable, interpretive rendering that states each thread in plain English and comments on it. James Haughton Woods's The Yoga-System of Patanjali (Harvard Oriental Series, 1914) is the scholarly translation, carrying the sutras together with Vyasa's classical commentary and Vachaspati's gloss, from an Internet Archive scan with some OCR noise. Citations run by chapter and aphorism (I.2 for the definition of yoga, II.46 for posture, III for the powers, IV for liberation). The dates and authorship are traditional and contested, and the chat says so; recent translations such as Edwin Bryant's are in copyright and outside the namespace.

For long stretches the Yoga Sutras were eclipsed within India and survived as a specialist's text, until the modern revival of yoga carried them around the world, often keeping the postures and quietly dropping the philosophy, so that yoga now means to most people a form of exercise. Read whole, the work is something far stranger and more rigorous: a map of consciousness drawn with clinical care and a method for stilling it, a psychology that is four limbs deep before it ever reaches the body. Its discipline of attention rhymes with Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius governing the mind to be free of disturbance; its inward climb toward absorption rhymes with Plotinus ascending to the One; and Schopenhauer, who read the Indians and named the will as the root of suffering, found here a kinship the West had lacked. Shankara would meet Patanjali's two with a radical one, but he could not pass him by. The mat in the studio is the last visible rung of a ladder whose real work was always done with the eyes closed.