The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali: A Biography

Henry Thomas Colebrooke and the Western “Discovery” of the Yoga Sutra

CHAPTER 3

Unlike the Yoga Sutra’s classical commentators, relatively few modern-day Yoga scholars are either Indian or Hindu. Over the past one hundred years in particular, foreign scholars have generated the bulk of the new theoretical perspectives on Patanjali’s work. The story of how foreign scholars backed into—or, more properly speaking, revived—the Yoga Sutra’s ancient traditions is as fascinating and improbable as the strange two-hundred-year clash of cultures commonly known as the British Raj.

Some time in the late eighteenth century, some of the British who had been effectively controlling much of the rich territory of Bengal for several decades were beginning to realize that foreign occupation could have unanticipated consequences. Things had begun swimmingly enough on June 23, 1757, when, in the midst of the Seven Years’ War, an army of three thousand men led by the British colonel Robert Clive had defeated the Nawab of Bengal at the Battle of Plassey. This was a turning point in the formation of what would become the British Empire in India, but at this point, England’s influence in India was indirect. Acting as a proxy for the Crown in eighteenth-century India was the British East India Company, a trading consortium that was but one among several rival companies vying for control over the vast resources and markets of Asia. In Bengal, the Company’s greatest competitor was its French homologue, the French East India Company.

Nearly a year to the day prior to the Battle of Plassey, the same Nawab of Bengal had captured Fort William, the Company’s fortified headquarters near the mouth of the Hooghly River, and allegedly caused the death by suffocation of 123 of its British defenders in the June heat of the “Black Hole of Calcutta.” So it was that the victory at Plassey was doubly sweet for the British, because with its defeat of the Nawab, it had also defeated the French who had sided with him. The Nawab was forced to make major concessions, with the coup de grâce coming in 1765 when the Mughal emperor in Delhi transferred the diwani—the right of civil and revenue administration—over the eastern provinces of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa from the Nawab to the Company. Then in 1772, the Company’s governor, Warren Hastings, chose Calcutta (today known as Kolkata), at the time little more than a swampy village of mud huts, to be its capital.

The Company was first and foremost a commercial enterprise, whose raison d’être was to maximize profits for its shareholders. To this end it recruited very young men from Britain (their average age was sixteen) to oversee its massive plantations and factory operations, which were run by local subcontractors. Many of these young men turned out to be self-serving adventurers, with those who succeeded returning to Britain some years later with vast personal fortunes. Preemployment training was not a high priority in those early years: in order to be hired, a certificate in accounting was sufficient, and all other training—in local languages, business administration, and so forth—was of the on-the-job variety. However, the civil administration of the Company’s territories included the administration of justice, and it was here that a clause in Hastings’s Judicial Plan of 1772 gave rise, albeit indirectly, to the British “discovery” of the Yoga Sutra. That clause proclaimed that rather than imposing British common law upon the people of Bengal, which would have been terribly unfair albeit not without precedent, Hindus would be judged according to Hindu law and Muslims according to Islamic law. Unfortunately for the British, they had no knowledge of either.

Islamic law was a relatively easy fix; since it had been the law of the Mughal Empire in India for hundreds of years, its canon, even if it was written in Arabic and Persian, was at least identifiable. Hindu law, however, was unknown territory. What were the codes of Hindu law, and where were they to be found? From the outset, it was determined that the sources of Hindu law could more easily be ferreted out of Hindu law books than by observing and cataloging contemporary local customs. As the British were made to understand by the brahmin religious specialists known as pandits, the canon of Hindu law had been written in the language known as Sanskrit, the “perfected” language of their scriptures. And so it was that in the final decades of the eighteenth century an unanticipated consequence of the British occupation of Bengal was the urgent necessity to learn Sanskrit, one of the most confoundedly difficult languages on the planet.

In the earliest phases of their learning curve, the British were entirely dependent on the Bengali pandits, whom Hastings actively recruited for unlocking the mysteries of all things Hindu. They identified the primary teachings of sacred Hindu law (Dharma Shastra, shortened to “the Shaster” by the British), and they translated them and interpreted their meaning to the British, generally through the medium of Bengali, the spoken language of the territory. By 1776, Hastings’s Judicial Plan had begun to show results, in the form of Nathaniel Brassey Halhed’s English-language rendering of the Hindu law code, published under the title A Code of Gentoo Laws. This quickly proved insufficient however, and so in 1788 William Jones proposed a second and far more substantial work. In the end, the completion of that task would fall to a Sanskritist named Henry Thomas Colebrooke. Together with Jones, Colebrooke was a founding father of British Orientalism, and their discovery and gradual mastery of many of the wonders of the Sanskrit language and its massive literary tradition may be viewed as a direct and happy side effect of Hastings’s Judicial Plan.

Jones, a distant ancestor of Lady Di, had first arrived in Kolkata in March of 1783. Sent there to serve as justice on the Supreme Court of Bengal, he was an unusual judge inasmuch as he had, long prior to studying law in the early 1770s, distinguished himself as a specialist of ancient languages. Soon after taking his post, however, Jones began to suspect that the local pandits had perhaps been snookering him and his colleagues, making up legal rulings on the fly or to their own advantage even as they claimed to be quoting chapter and verse of the Shaster. He said as much in a letter written to Hastings in 1784, but his formal project for a Digest of Hindu Law on Contracts and Successions would not be submitted until 1788. Unlike the 1776 Code, the digest would be an “in-house” translation, fully prepared this time by British Sanskritists.

Jones and his fellow members of the Asiatic Society unabashedly referred to themselves as Orientalists, a term that has been associated, in the wake of Edward Said’s groundbreaking Orientalism (1978), with imperial domination, colonial projects, and the notions of European superiority epitomized in Kipling’s “White man’s burden.” Such charges are altogether justifiable for the Anglicists, whose theories of “Oriental irrationality” came to dominate Britain’s increasingly imperialist policies toward India from the 1830s onward. However, as Rosane Rocher and others have demonstrated, the attitude of the Orientalists, the Company’s scholar-administrators of the early decades of the nineteenth century, was altogether different. Like Jones, as Rocher notes, “many of the early aficionados of Indian culture … had had a classical education. They knew from the accounts of India given in the Greek and Latin classics, of the existence in ancient times of what the Greeks called gymnosophists, or naked philosophers. They knew that Indian culture had a long and distinguished history.”¹

The British Orientalist legacy has continued to burn most brightly in the academic discipline of Indology, which takes as its primary object the literary treasury of Sanskrit, the classical language of one of the world’s great civilizations, with privilege of place given to its religious and philosophical canons. This emphasis is reflected in the earliest publications of the fledgling Asiatic Society, which included, in addition to translations of the ancient Indian law books, Sir Charles Wilkins’s 1785 English-language Bhagavad Gita. It is here that one finds the earliest European reference to the Yoga Sutra: in a footnote, Wilkins mentions “a metaphysical work called Patanjal.”² In addition to translations such as these, the Society’s members also began to publish independent studies treating various aspects of Indian geography, history, philosophy, religion, culture, and science in Asiatic Researches, which commenced publication in 1788.

Volume eight of that journal, published in 1805, contains the earliest authoritative western study of the Vedas, authored by Colebrooke. The son of a baronet who had fallen on hard times, Colebrooke had sailed to Bengal in 1782 to take a position in the Company. It was during his early years of service, as he gradually climbed the Company ladder at several backcountry postings, that he began to study Sanskrit. Quickly drawn into the intimate circle of the British Orientalists, he cofounded the Asiatic Society with Jones in 1794. A year later, he was appointed district magistrate at Mirzapur, an important commercial town located a short way up the Ganges River from the holy city of Varanasi (then known as Benares). In this period he completed the project Jones had proposed in 1788, a monumental four-volume digest of indigenous Hindu and Islamic law, which was eventually published in 1798. A landmark year for him was 1805, when he saw the publication of both his study on the religion of the Vedas and the first volume of his grammar of the Sanskrit language, as well as his appointment to the position of honorary professor of Hindu law and Sanskrit at the recently founded College of Fort William, situated in the heart of the Company’s still humble trading port of Calcutta.

Rightly hailed by Friedrich Max Müller as the founder and father of Sanskrit scholarship in Europe, Colebrooke maintained an active role at Fort William until his return to England in 1814. It was there that in 1823 he authored a groundbreaking essay on Samkhya and Yoga philosophy as the first installment in a three-part survey of the six systems, titled “On the Philosophy of the Hindus.” This, the “first contact” between a European Sanskritist and the Sanskrit-language tradition of the Yoga Sutra, Colebrooke’s reading of Patanjali’s work effectively cut the Yoga Sutra free from its Indian moorings—from which it has been drifting ever since.

Colebrooke’s 1823–27 study is a model of economy and clarity, remarkably comprehensive in both scope and depth. In it Colebrooke shows himself to be highly sympathetic to Indian philosophy, as he presents the systems in an objective and evenhanded way. With a single exception, he shows great respect for his subject, allowing in some cases that India may have been the source of several ancient Greek philosophical doctrines. This was but one aspect of his broader vision of the history of human thought. At his inaugural speech to the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, presented on March 15, 1823, he flatly asserted that all of civilization had its origin in Asia, for which the West owed that continent a debt of gratitude. Here he was simply reiterating the position of the British Orientalists, and while it is true that the voices of the Orientalists would soon be drowned out by those of the jingoist Anglicists who won the day in terms of British policy, their appreciation of all things Indian would in later decades be elevated to a matter of faith among the European Romantics, who viewed ancient India as the lost paradise of humanity and the fountainhead of all human wisdom and spirituality. This rosy vision would gradually morph into a more muscular gospel of Indian exceptionalism, whose themes may be found in the writings and teachings of the Theosophical Society, Swami Vivekananda, and modern-day Hindu nationalists.

Colebrooke’s study of the six systems appears to have been exclusively based on his own exhaustive study of Sanskrit-language manuscripts, undertaken without recourse to the Indian pandits. (As we will see, his personal collection of such manuscripts was legendary.) Colebrooke’s 1823 study, far shorter than those he would later publish on Nyaya-Vaisheshika and Mimamsa-Vedanta, is not titled “Samkhya-Yoga,” but rather simply “Samkhya.” Colebrooke explains the omission of “Yoga” from his title by arguing that Yoga is but a variant form of Samkhya philosophy. In this, he is simply following the commentarial tradition mentioned in the last chapter, which speaks of Yoga as simply “Samkhya with Ishvara” (seshvara samkhya)—with Ishvara, the “Master” of Yoga, taken by many commentators to mean “God.” In Colebrooke’s words,

the one school (Patanjali’s) recognising God, is therefore denominated theistical (Séśwara sànc’hya). The other (Capila’s) is atheistical (Niríśwara sànc’hya)…. Such is the essential and characteristic difference of Capila’s and Patanjali’s, the atheistical and deistical, Sànc’hyas. In less momentous matters they differ, not upon points of doctrine, but in the degree in which the exterior exercises, or abstruse reasoning and study, are weighed upon, as requisite preparations of absorbed contemplation.3

Colebrooke dwells but little on the distinctiveness of the Yoga school, devoting fewer than five pages of his study (compared to the twenty-eight given over to Samkhya) to its doctrines, commentators, and traditions. One might attribute this seemingly dismissive attitude as simply flowing from the fact that the Yoga Sutra is often called an “interpretation of Samkhya” (samkhya-pravachana) in its manuscript colophons. Noting this, Colebrooke chose to focus on the primary source of Samkhya philosophy, the Samkhya Karika, which he attributed to Kapila, the legendary founder of the school, rather than to its author Ishvara Krishna. But Colebrooke’s treatment of Yoga philosophy goes beyond the dismissive, as his few salient observations on it make clear:

Besides the Sànc’hya of Capila and his followers, another system, bearing the same denomination, but more usually termed the Yóga-śàstra or Yóga-sútra… is ascribed to a mythological being, Patanjali…. An ancient commentary on this fanatical work is … entitled Pàtanjala-bhàshya. It is attributed to Véda-Vyàsa…. The tenets of the two schools of the Sànc’hya are on many, not to say on most, points, that are treated in both, the same; differing however upon one, which is the most important of all: the proof of existence of supreme God … Patanjali’s Yoga-śàstra is occupied with devotional exercise and mental abstraction, subduing body and mind: Capila is more engaged with investigation of principles and reasoning upon them. One is more mystic and fanatical. The other makes a nearer approach to philosophical disquisition, however mistaken in its conclusions.4

While it is clear that Colebrooke is not enthralled by the precepts of Samkhya philosophy, he nonetheless appreciates it as philosophy. The same holds for his accounts of the four other schools, for which his general attitude of respect far outweighs the occasional disparaging remark. In his entire study of the six systems, the sole instances in which Colebrooke uses the word “fanatical” or employs any other such loaded term are those quoted here on the topic of the Yoga Sutra. His choice of words would continue to resonate throughout much of the nineteenth century. In his 1855 translation of the Bhagavad Gita, the British Orientalist J. Cockburn Thomson applauded the sobriety of Krishna’s teaching, saying “in this there is no fanaticism, as there may be in the asceticism taught by Patanjali.”⁵ The American Orientalist Fitzedward Hall was of a rather stronger opinion, as evidenced in an 1859 publication with the regrettable title A Contribution towards an Index to the Bibliography of the Indian Philosophical Systems. Note, however, that Hall’s criticism is directed against the entire canon of Yoga philosophy, which extended well beyond the purview of the Yoga Sutra and its commentaries:

As few of the twenty-eight Yoga works which have fallen under my inspection are at present read, so, one may hope, few will ever again be read, either in this country or by curious enquirers in Europe. If we exclude the immundities [sic] of the Tantras and of the Kàma-sastra, Hindu thought was never more unworthily engaged than in digesting into an economy the fanatical vagaries of theocracy.⁶

Rajendralal Mitra, who quotes Hall in the introduction to his 1883 translation of the Yoga Sutra, next makes a move that would be widely followed for much of the following century: he separates Yoga philosophy from India’s yogis, placing the onus of the fanatical not on the Yoga Sutra itself but rather on its abuse by its supposed practitioners: “In judging, however, of the nature of Patanjali’s doctrine it is unfair to associate it with the vagaries of fanatical, deluded mendicants, or with the modifications and adaptations which it has undergone in the hands of the Tantrics and the Puranics.”⁷ So, too, in 1889, Romesh Chunder Dutt would write that “the philosophy of the Yoga system has been completely lost sight of, and the system has degenerated into cruel and indecent Tantrika rites, or into the impostures and superstitions of the so-called Yogins of the present day.”⁸ Max Müller would follow suit in his 1899 study, The Six Systems of Indian Philosophy, referring to Hatha or Kriya Yoga as “pathological,” with its modern-day proponents, the “modern Yogins or Mahatmans” as “frauds.” It may well be that Colebrooke also had India’s yogis in mind when he dismissed Patanjali’s system as fanatical, since in one of his longer discussions of the Yoga Sutra he explicitly linked their practices to its doctrines:

The notion, that … transcendent power is attainable by man in this life, is not peculiar to the Sànc’hya sect: it is generally prevalent among the Hindus, and amounts to a belief in magic. A Yógí, imagined to have acquired such faculties, is, to vulgar apprehension, a sorcerer, and is so represented in many a drama and popular tale. One of the four chapters of Patanjali’s Yóga-śàstra (the third), relates almost exclusively to this subject…. It is full of directions for bodily and mental exercises, consisting of intensely profound meditation on special topics, accompanied by suppression of the breath and restraint of the senses, while steadily maintaining prescribed postures. By such exercises, the adept acquires the knowledge of every thing past and future, remote or hidden; gains the strength of an elephant, the courage of a lion, and the swiftness of the wind; flies in the air, floats in water, dives into the earth, contemplates all worlds with one glance, and performs other strange feats.⁹

While the Yoga Sutra has been called many things by many people, fanatical is not the first that comes to mind. Why, then, so much sound and fury regarding India’s fanatical yogis? Most of us in the twenty-first century view India’s traditional yogis as peaceful, forest-dwelling sages, living in harmony with bird and beast and passing their days and nights in rapt meditation on the Absolute within. This is how the forest sages are portrayed in India’s ancient literature, and in that timeless land of unchanging tradition, that is how they have remained. While these persons are nowhere referred to as yogis in the ancient literature, the Yoga Sutra and other works from the early centuries CE (the Hindu Bhagavad Gita and Maitri Upanishad and the Buddhist Miliandapanha, for example) do; in them, for the first time, practitioners of the various types of Yoga they espouse are called “yogis.”

How interesting, then, that not a single nineteenth-century account, by either Europeans or Indians—or by the yogis themselves—portrays them as peaceful ascetics practicing meditation pace the Yoga Sutra. Instead, the overwhelming majority of accounts from the sixteenth century onward depict yogis as either beggars or ragtag mercenary fighters. On the first count, a multitude of eyewitness reports speak of marauding bands of yogis behaving like shake-down artists, mobbing entrances to temples, pilgrimage sites, and public markets, staging freak shows (the “mango trick” and infamous beds of nails), or simply creating a ruckus until harassed merchants would pay them off simply to go away and hector someone else. On the second, they were viewed in much the same way as the modern-day Taliban, as part religious fanatic and part terrorist, fighting gangs of warriors known to poison their enemies or cut their throats to drink their warm blood.

This was the Europeans’ outsider view of India’s yogis. But what do insider Indian accounts tell us? In the medieval scriptures known as the Tantras, the term yogi most often referred to a Tantric specialist who had received various initiations that empowered him to practice Tantric Yoga, which involved, among other things, the power to take over other people’s bodies and to consort sexually with ferocious female predators called Yoginis. Woe to the uninitiated who might attempt the same, however: the Yoginis would tear them apart and eat them, which certainly puts a new wrinkle on the “Yogini” Gonika of Iyengar mythology. In much of India’s medieval and modern fantasy and adventure literature, the evil villain is called a yogi, and even today, when naughty children will not go to sleep at night, their parents will threaten that “the yogi will come and take you away.” Regarded with dread and fear by the Hindu populace, India’s yogis assert that their supernatural powers flow directly from empowering initiations and extraordinary feats of self-discipline. Yet while these powers often align with those described in the Yoga Sutra’s third chapter, very few Tantric schools or sects have ever explicitly linked their theory or practice to Patanjali’s legacy.

Having said this, there is likely more behind Colebrooke’s references to the “fanatical” than simply a philosophical distaste for a profligate lifestyle. Here, a nineteenth-century collection of legends, compiled by a yogi belonging to the powerful order known as the Kanphata Yogis (“Split-Eared Yogis”) or Nath Yogis (“Yogi Lords”), is highly instructive. In it, we read of a historical figure named Mastnath (the “Lord of Intoxication”) whose many supernatural feats included calling down plagues on villages that refused to offer him alms, turning camel bones into gold, and raising a besieged prince named Man Singh to the throne of the kingdom of Marwar in the modern-day western Indian state of Rajasthan. In this last case Mastnath produced a series of miracles culminating in the sudden death of the young prince’s rival, in return for which the Yogi Lords were granted a network of temples and monasteries throughout the kingdom. James Tod, a Company agent, also chronicled the same tumultuous chapter in Marwar history, but he put an altogether different spin on things. According to his 1820 report, Mastnath’s “miracle” was the result of “a dose of poison.” In other words, a Yogi Lord had infiltrated the rival camp and assassinated its leader. Tod’s rage at the yogis’ subterfuge is palpable:

During the few years he held the keys of his master’s conscience, which were conveniently employed to unlock the treasury, he erected no less than eighty-four mandirs [temples] … with monasteries adjoining them, for his well-fed lazy chelas [disciples]…. This [Cardinal] Wolsely of Marudes [the western desert] exercised his hourly-increasing power to the disgust and alienation of all but the infatuated prince.10

Here, Tod’s righteous indignation at this yogi pontiff of the western desert reminds us of Hall’s diatribe against the “fanatical vagaries of theocracy” in his assessment of Yoga philosophy. To be sure, the British viewed the yogis, with their beggary, Tantric sorcery, and debauched sexuality as morally repugnant—but there was more going on here than first meets the eye. The case of Marwar is especially instructive, because the historical record shows that Man Singh’s rival Bhim Singh—whose sudden death, perhaps by poisoning, opened the way for the young prince to take the throne in 1803—was the very man whom the Company had been backing. In other words, the all-powerful Company had been outmaneuvered by a homicidal band of yogis, who were now ruling a vast territory of western India by proxy. Shades of Mullah Omar.

This was not an isolated incident. Time and again, from the late eighteenth well into the nineteenth century, a variety of mendicant orders—variously called Yogis, Gosains, Fakirs, or Sanyasis by the British, who had difficulty distinguishing between them—stymied Company designs through guerilla warfare, shrewd political maneuvering, and commercial savvy. Then, too, there were the yogis’ sheer numbers. Already in the middle of the seventeenth century, the French merchant Jean-Baptiste Tavernier had estimated there to be some two million of them in India. Tavernier also noted that many of these were armed, and as Dirk Kolff has shown, the bulk of the eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century north Indian military labor market was made up of armed ascetics, with a single religious order (the Nagas) alone counting for some 300,000 warriors. Throughout the final three decades of the eighteenth century, the Company had found itself pitted against a yogi insurgency in Bengal, which came to be known as the “Sanyasi and Fakir Rebellion.”

For much of the eighteenth century, the Company also found itself countered by the yogis in its attempts to regulate and exploit north Indian commerce. Here, groups that Christopher Bayly has called “corporations of Hindu ascetics and mercenaries” leveraged their status as “holy men” to transform pilgrimage routes into trading networks. The British may well have viewed them as marauders and robbers, but the fact remained that the yogis had, by the 1780s, become the dominant moneylenders, property owners, and pillars of the merchant communities of Allahabad, Varanasi, and Mirzapur, the principal trading centers of the rich Gangetic plain.

In the years around 1795, Colebrooke was working in the Company’s employ at Mirzapur. By now an accomplished Sanskritist, he no doubt traveled down-river to the holy city of Varanasi—which was at that time in the midst of an economic and religious renaissance—for access to Sanskrit manuscripts to add to his growing collection. There, the powerful western Indian trading houses of Sindhia and Holkar were patrons of a conservative brand of Hinduism, which they fostered by establishing brahmin “colleges” for the training of pandits. The policy worked so well that by 1810 there were more than 40,000 brahmins living on charity there, accounting for nearly 20 percent of the city’s total population. But the yogis were also an important presence. The 1827–28 census data indicate that “Hindu Fakirs”—that is, yogis—made up 4 percent of the city’s entire population, but this only referred to members of the mendicant orders living there permanently, as opposed to the hordes of itinerant yogis that were constantly passing through.

With the Sanyasi and Fakir Rebellion a recent memory in Bengal, and the highly visible presence of wandering ascetics in Varanasi and Mirzapur a contemporary reality, Colebrooke would have been altogether familiar with the yogis and their “fanatical” ways. Given that none of these yogis had any interest whatsoever in the philosophical and meditative teachings of the Yoga Sutra, one must ask whether there remained some other group from Indian society that had continued to cultivate its ancient traditions. The obvious candidate would have been the pandits, the masters of the brahmin colleges—of Varanasi in the Gangetic heartland and Nadia in Bengal—whose stock in trade was the transmission of traditional Hindu knowledge from generation to generation. A precious data source for the early nineteenth century are the writings of William Ward, a British Baptist clergyman who for several decades ran the important Serampore Mission a short distance upriver from Kolkata. While he had no training as a Sanskritist and adopted a missionary attitude toward Bengal’s “heathen” population, which he sought to convert with very limited success, Ward is noteworthy for having written an early survey of Hinduism titled View of the History, Literature, and Religion of the Hindoos. First published in 1810, his study included a long descriptive account of Patanjali’s system, which he ostensibly based on Bhoja’s commentary on the Yoga Sutra.

At the end of Ward’s expanded 1820 third edition of the work is a long chapter on the state of traditional brahmanic education in the various colleges and monasteries of Varanasi. In it, he provides detailed lists for the year 1817 of the “convents of ascetics, at Benares” where the various branches of traditional learning were taught. For Vedic study, no fewer than forty-eight establishments are listed. These figures decline for all other branches of learning, with no more than seven for any one of the philosophical schools. He summarizes these findings in the following terms:

Amongst one hundred thousand brahmins, there may be one thousand who learn the grammar of the Sanskrit [language]; of whom four or five hundred may read some parts of the kavya [belles lettres], and fifty some parts of the alamkara shastras [treatises on poetics]…. Three hundred may study the Nyaya, but only five or six the Mimamsa, the Samkhya, the Vedanta, the Patanjala [Yoga], the Vaisesika shastras, or the Veda.11

It was in no small part for want of specialists in the “Patanjala” branch of Indian philosophy that Ward was unable to provide an adequate account of the Yoga Sutra in his early survey. A cursory reading of his translation shows it to be an adaptation at best. This was noted by Colebrooke, who gently chided Ward in his own 1823 study, writing that descriptions of the text “seem to have been made from an oral exposition through the medium of a different language, probably the Bengalee…. The meaning of the original is certainly not to be gathered from such translations.”¹²

This state of affairs would continue well into the twentieth century: there were no pandits to be found anywhere in north India who were capable of transmitting or elucidating the teachings of the Yoga Sutra. In the middle of the nineteenth century, when James Ballantyne, the principal of the Varanasi (Benares) Government Sanskrit College, set about to produce the first English translation of the work, he noted that “no pandit in these days professes to teach the system.”¹³ Thirty years later, Rajendralal Mitra found himself at the same impasse, writing in the introduction to his 1883 Yoga Sutra translation that “I had hopes of reading the work with the assistance of a professional Yogi … but I could find no Pandit in Bengal who had made the Yoga the special subject of his study.”14 Writing on the cusp of the twentieth century, Max Müller would observe in his classic Six Systems that among the pandits, “the Vaiseshika [philosophy] is neglected and so too is the Yoga, except in its purely practical and most degenerative form.”¹⁵

Even before Max Müller had penned these words, however, interest in Yoga philosophy was already in the process of being revived—or perhaps reinvented—in the United States by the charismatic Indian orator Swami Vivekananda. Also prior to the close of the nineteenth century, a new explanation for the disappearance of Yoga philosophy from the Indian heartland was being proposed. Here, the story went that the “true” yogis who had not eschewed Patanjali’s teachings in favor of the fanatical practices associated with Tantra, the begging bowl, or the weapons of the warrior could still be found in the seclusion of the Himalayas and beyond.

Before we leave Colebrooke and his brief, unfavorable reading of the Yoga Sutra behind, we need also to consider two quantifiable data sources to which the great Orientalist would not have been indifferent. Throughout his study of the six systems, Colebrooke makes reference to the commentarial traditions of each respective school, noting the “innumerable” works on Nyaya and Vedanta in particular. In fact, between 100 and 1660 CE, no fewer than 511 commentaries and subcommentaries were written on the Nyaya and Vaisheshika Sutras alone. For the same period, only a dozen commentaries and subcommentaries were written on the Yoga Sutra—and of these, none, with the exception of Bhoja’s “Royal Sun,” can be said to have been composed by a proponent of Patanjali’s system. At bottom, there never was, properly speaking, a “Yoga School” of philosophy. Between Vijnanabhikshu’s two sixteenth-century works and Colebrooke’s time, only seven commentaries were written on the Yoga Sutra. Of these, two were Jain, and the other five, composed by authors living and writing in south India, generally subverted, rather than elucidated, its Yoga teachings. Reading Patanjali’s work through the lens of Vedanta and Hindu devotional piety, they were, in effect, dismantling it. Outside of these, only a smattering of authors even referred to the Yoga Sutra in their writings. All of these data lead one to conclude that by the sixteenth or seventeenth century Patanjali’s Yoga system had largely become the abandoned stepchild of Indian philosophy.

Another sort of metric further supports these conclusions. Colebrooke was a pioneer in the collection of Indian manuscripts, which were the sole data source for written traditions in precolonial India. Apart from manuscripts of the Yoga Sutra, the oral traditions of India’s yogis and pandits would have been the sole living links to Yoga philosophy, and as we have seen, these too had apparently disappeared by Colebrooke’s time. This may not have troubled him particularly, since as a man of letters, he would have felt more at home with manuscripts, and so he was. So much so that when the India Office Library, the first British archive of Indian manuscripts, was founded in Kolkata in 1818, Colebrooke’s personal donation of some 2,749 manuscript bundles or “codices” accounted for nearly two-thirds of the total collection. Within that collection, 772 codices were classified under the heading of “Philosophy,” and of these, 502 were from Colebrooke’s personal collection. Out of those 772 codices, only fourteen contained “Yoga” manuscripts. Eight of these were donated by Colebrooke, but of these eight, only five were copies of the Yoga Sutra or one of its commentaries: these were the sources he had used to write his groundbreaking 1823 study. The other three titles Colebrooke donated and listed under the “Yoga” heading were two copies of a work on Hatha Yoga and a codex containing a number of works on Tantric Yoga.

What is most significant here are the relative numbers: the Yoga Sutra counts for less than 1 percent of Colebrooke’s total collection of 502 manuscripts on the six systems. This figure may be compared with those tabulated for manuscript codices comprising the root texts and commentaries representative of the five other schools:

Samkhya: ten codices (2 percent of total)

Yoga: eight codices (1.6 percent), of which five are Yoga Sutra and commentaries (1 percent)

Nyaya: 156 codices (32 percent)

Vaisheshika: forty-five codices (9 percent)

Mimamsa: fifty-three codices (10 percent)

Vedanta: 230 codices (46 percent)

Colebrooke’s collection of Yoga Sutra manuscripts was minuscule in comparison to those representing the other five schools. I would argue that as much as any historical reconstruction of influences, transmissions, lineages, oral traditions, and so forth, such a quantitative assessment is, for the period we are looking at—that of the first contact between European Sanskritists and Indian philosophical works in Sanskrit—the most precise data source that one might draw upon to recreate the broad outlines of the Indian philosophical landscape. Bearing in mind the relatively short life spans of manuscripts in most south Asian climates, extant manuscript collections offer windows into which texts scribes were copying at the behest of their patrons from, in most cases, no earlier than the seventeenth century. Generally speaking, those patrons would have been royalty, members of the aristocracy, wealthy merchants, brahmin pandits, and temple and monastic institutions. These were the major sources of the manuscript collections that European Orientalists began to amass in the nineteenth century, and so they can provide us with a quantitative evaluation of the relative importance of the various schools.

Having said this, we must ask whether the same proportions would hold up if we were to look at a broader sampling (with sampling numbers being inversely proportional to margins of error). I spent a good part of the summer of 2010 engaged in the curious task of quantitative analysis, which in my case consisted of reading manuscript catalogs from India, Europe, and North America. All in all, I perused over fifty catalogs and other related sources, with special focus on India’s eleven largest and most representative manuscript collections, as indicated in Philipp André Maas’s recent extensive survey of Yoga Sutra manuscript traditions. This I did in order to tabulate: (1) numbers of Yoga Sutra–related manuscripts, including commentaries, that predated Colebrooke’s 1823 study; (2) total numbers of Yoga Sutra–related manuscripts, both pre-and post-1823, including undated manuscripts; (3) total numbers of manuscripts on Hatha and Tantric Yoga classified under the heading of “Yoga” philosophy; and (4) total numbers of manuscripts, including commentaries, from the other philosophical schools, with a special focus on Vedanta and Nyaya-Vaisheshika manuscripts.

In the end, I found that the proportions obtaining in Colebrooke’s 1818 donation to the India Office Library generally held up. Out of a total of some twenty thousand manuscripts listed in these catalogs on Yoga, Nyaya-Vaisheshika, and Vedanta philosophy, a mere 260 were Yoga Sutra manuscripts (including commentaries), with only thirty-five dating from before 1823; 513 were manuscripts on Hatha or Tantric Yoga, manuscripts of works attributed to Yajnavalkya, or of the Yoga Vasistha; 9,032 were Nyaya manuscripts, and 10,320 were Vedanta manuscripts. The following list breaks down these figures on a percentage basis:

Yoga Sutra manuscripts: 1.27 percent of total manuscripts

Yoga Sutra manuscripts: 33.6 percent of total Yoga philosophy manuscripts

Yoga philosophy manuscripts: 3.79 percent of total manuscripts

Nyaya-Vaisheshika manuscripts: 44.2 percent of total manuscripts

Vedanta manuscripts: 50.6 percent of total manuscripts

What does this quantitative analysis tell us? For every manuscript on Yoga philosophy proper (excluding Hatha and Tantric Yoga) held in major Indian manuscript libraries and archives, there exist some forty Vedanta manuscripts and nearly as many Nyaya-Vaisheshika manuscripts. Manuscripts of the Yoga Sutra and its commentaries account for only one-third of all manuscripts on Yoga philosophy, the other two-thirds being devoted mainly to Hatha and Tantric Yoga. But it is the figure of 1.27 percent that stands out in highest relief, because it tells us that after the late sixteenth century virtually no one was copying the Yoga Sutra because no one was commissioning Yoga Sutra manuscripts, and no one was commissioning Yoga Sutra manuscripts because no one was interested in reading the Yoga Sutra. Some have argued that instruction in the Yoga Sutra was based on rote memorization or chanting: this is the position of Krishnam-acharya’s biographers as well as of a number of critical scholars. But this is pure speculation, undercut by the nineteenth-century observations of James Ballantyne, Dayananda Saraswati, Rajendralal Mitra, Friedrich Max Müller, and others. There is no explicit record, in either the commentarial tradition itself or in the sacred or secular literatures of the past two thousand years, of adherents of the Yoga school memorizing, chanting, or claiming an oral transmission for their traditions.

Given these data, we may conclude that Colebrooke’s laconic, if not hostile, treatment of the Yoga Sutra undoubtedly stemmed from the fact that by his time, Patanjali’s system had become an empty signifier, with no traditional schoolmen to expound or defend it and no formal or informal outlets of instruction in its teachings. It had become a moribund tradition, an object of universal indifference. The Yoga Sutra had for all intents and purposes been lost until Colebrooke found it.

The Nawab was forced to make major concessions: Kopf 1969, 16.

The Company was first and foremost: Rocher 1993, 217.

That clause proclaimed: Rocher 1993, 220.

In the earliest phases: Rocher 1993, 236–37.

Hastings’s Judicial Plan had begun to show results: Rocher 1993, 221, 229.

Jones began to suspect: Ludden 1993, 255; Rocher 1993, 235.

“many of the early aficionados: Rocher 1993, 225.

Wilkins mentions “a metaphysical work: Wilkins 1785, 142, note to p. 73.

Colebrooke had sailed to Bengal: Rocher and Rocher 2012, 14.

he was appointed district magistrate: Rocher and Rocher 2012, 35

Colebrooke’s 1823–27 study: Colebrooke 1837, 227–419.

India may have been the source: Colebrooke 1837, 419.