Over the past forty years or so, a theory has been forged in university departments of history and cultural studies that much of what is thought to be ancient in India was actually invented—or at best reinvented or recovered from oblivion—during the time of the British Raj. This of course runs counter to the view most Indians, Indophiles, and renaissance hipsters share that India’s ancient traditions are ageless verities unchanged since their emergence from the ancient mists of time. When I began this project, I was of the opinion that “classical yoga”—that is, the Yoga philosophy of the Yoga Sutra (also known as the Yoga Sutras)—was in fact a tradition extending back through an unbroken line of gurus and disciples, commentators and copyists, to Patanjali himself, the author of the work who lived in the first centuries of the Common Era. However, the data I have sifted through over the past three years have forced me to conclude that this was not the case.
The present volume is part of a series on the great books, the classics of religious literature, works that in some way have resonated with their readers and hearers across time as well as cultural and language boundaries, far beyond the original conditions of their production. Some classics, like the works of Shakespeare for theater, are regarded as having defined not only their period but also their genre, their worldview, their credo. As the sole work of Indian philosophy to have been translated into over forty languages, the Yoga Sutra would appear to fulfill the requirements of a classic. But if this is the case, then the Yoga Sutra is a very special kind of classic, a sort of “comeback classic.” I say this because after a five-hundred-year period of great notoriety, during which it was translated into two foreign languages (Arabic and Old Javanese) and noted by authors from across the Indian philosophical spectrum, Patanjali’s work began to fall into oblivion. After it had been virtually forgotten for the better part of seven hundred years, Swami Vivekananda miraculously rehabilitated it in the final decade of the nineteenth century. Since that time, and especially over the past thirty years, Big Yoga—the corporate yoga subculture—has elevated the Yoga Sutra to a status it never knew, even during its seventh-to twelfth-century heyday. This reinvention of the Yoga Sutra as the foundational scripture of “classical yoga” runs counter to the pre-twentieth-century history of India’s yoga traditions, during which other works (the Bhagavad Gita, Yoga Vasistha, and various texts attributed to figures named Yajnavalkya and Hiranyagarbha) and other forms of yoga (Pashupata Yoga, Tantric Yoga, and Hatha Yoga) dominated the Indian yoga scene. This book is an account of the rise and fall, and latter day rise, of the Yoga Sutra as a classic of religious literature and cultural icon.