Udaya

Yoga Sutras of Patanjali

योगसूत्राणि

Also Patanjala Yoga Sutra, Ashtanga Yoga.

Treatise Sanskrit Probably second to fourth century

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What it is#

The Yoga Sutras are a hundred and ninety six aphorisms setting out a method for stopping the activity of the mind, and they are the foundational text of yoga as a philosophical system. The second aphorism defines yoga as the stilling of the movements of consciousness, and almost everything else follows from it. The text is famous far beyond India and is almost universally misattributed: it has very little to say about physical posture, which is given three aphorisms, and nothing at all about the postures modern yoga practises.

Its shape#

A hundred and ninety six sutras in four padas: Samadhi, on contemplation; Sadhana, on practice, which contains the eight limbs; Vibhuti, on the powers that arise and the warning not to pursue them; and Kaivalya, on liberation. A sutra is a few words, often ungrammatical on its own, designed to be memorised and expanded by a teacher, so the text cannot be read without a commentary and has never been meant to be.

What it argues about#

These are not settled texts

The modern argument is about what yoga is. The eight limbs are restraint, observance, posture, breath, withdrawal, concentration, meditation and absorption, and posture is one of eight and is defined only as a seat that is steady and comfortable. The hundreds of postures of modern practice come from the twentieth century work of Krishnamacharya and his students, who drew on Indian wrestling, gymnastics and the hatha yoga texts, and not from this book. Mark Singleton’s work set this out in detail and it is now broadly accepted by historians and disputed by some practitioners. A second argument is older: Patanjali’s system is dualist Samkhya, with spirit and matter permanently distinct, which is not what most modern yoga philosophy teaches.

Episodes worth knowing#

Three lines on posture

Of a hundred and ninety six aphorisms, three concern asana. The first says the posture should be steady and comfortable. The second says it is achieved by relaxing effort and letting the mind rest on the infinite. The third says that then one is not disturbed by the pairs of opposites. That is the whole of it. No posture is named. The text is concerned with sitting still long enough to do the other seven limbs, and the global industry built on the word takes its practice from somewhere else entirely.

The powers, and the warning

The third pada lists siddhis that arise from concentration: knowledge of past and future, understanding the speech of animals, invisibility, knowledge of the time of one’s death, strength, knowledge of the solar system. It is a strange catalogue in a sober text. The sutras then say plainly that these are obstacles to absorption, however much they look like attainments. The structure is deliberate: the powers are listed at length and then dismissed, so that a practitioner who meets them knows what they are and knows to go past.

Whose telling#

There is no single text

Vyasa, Yoga Bhashya
The oldest commentary, from about the fifth century, without which the sutras are largely unreadable; some scholars argue it and the sutras are by one hand.
Vachaspati Misra and Vijnanabhikshu
The later classical commentaries that shaped how the text was read in the Sanskrit tradition.
Vivekananda, 1896
Raja Yoga introduced the text to the English speaking world and largely created its modern reputation.
Krishnamacharya and his students
Iyengar, Pattabhi Jois and Desikachar built modern postural yoga in the twentieth century and attached the sutras to it; historians including Mark Singleton have traced how recent that attachment is.

Where the regions differ#

  • Tamil
  • Kerala
  • Telugu
  • Kannada
  • North
  • Maharashtra
  • Bengal
  • Punjab
  • Assam
  • Sri Lanka
  • Nepal
  • Gujarat
  • Odisha
  • Mithila
  • Kashmir
  • Tulu Nadu
  • manipur
  • rajasthan
  • konkani
  • sindhi
  • jharkhand
  • himalayan
  • kodava
Where it is kept: 4 of the 23 traditions this app follows. The filled one is where it is from.
North India
Taught in the Sanskrit tradition and in the modern yoga institutions, with Rishikesh and Haridwar as the centre of the international practice.
Tamil Nadu
The Tamil siddha tradition has its own body of yogic literature, Thirumular’s Thirumandiram above all, which is older in Tamil and differs from Patanjali.
Maharashtra
Lonavla and Pune hold the main twentieth century institutions, including Iyengar’s, and the Kaivalyadhama research centre.
Karnataka
Mysore is where Krishnamacharya taught and where Ashtanga Vinyasa developed, which is why the city is on the world yoga map.

All the works