The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali: A Biography

THE YOGA SUTRA AND THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY

CHAPTER 6

In 1875 the Russian émigré Madame Blavatsky founded the Theosophical Society in New York City together with fellow occultists William Quan Judge and Colonel Henry Steel Olcott. Accomplished spirit mediums themselves, the three were deeply committed to reforming the spiritualist movement that had been sweeping the Anglo-American world since 1848, when the Fox sisters, a pair of teenage girls from the Rochester area of upstate New York, had begun to hear rapping sounds made by spirits of the dead coming up through the floorboards of their house. Apart from her own exotic background, charisma, and sophistication, what set Blavatsky apart from the American spiritualists were the outstanding personal contacts she had with an international cast of spirits. Towering over all of these polyglot clackers of the ether was an elite group she claimed to have run into in the magnetosphere above Tibet, called the “Himalayan Masters”—one of whom, as she later claimed, had directly dictated Isis Unveiled to her. As it turns out, Blavatsky’s Masters had been reading many of the same books as she: within a year of its publication, William Emmette Coleman, a critical scholar and member of the American Oriental Society and Pali Text Society, denounced Blavatsky for some two thousand instances of plagiarism he had found in her book. The negative fallout from these and other scandals prompted Blavatsky and Olcott to decamp for India in 1878, leaving the leadership of the stateside organization to Abner Doubleday, the legendary inventor of American baseball.

Once on Indian soil, Blavatsky revealed that the “Masters” she had been channeling were in fact “Mahatmas,” a Sanskrit term meaning “Great Souls,” and that the most important among these—Koot Hoomi and Master Morya—were Indian spirits. Blavatsky’s odyssey halfway around the world had brought her nearly within shouting distance of her closest sources from the other side. In 1882, after the society had moved into its new headquarters in Adyar on the outskirts of Chennai, the capital of what would become the southern state of Tamil Nadu, chatter from the Mahatmas increased in both quality and quantity, as hundreds of handwritten letters began to materialize in the shrine room adjacent to Blavatsky’s private living quarters. These, too, alas, turned out to be fabrications, written for the most part in Blavatsky’s own hand and delivered through hidden wall panels. In 1885, the British Society for Psychical Research declared Blavatsky a patent fraud, devoting 174 pages of its Proceedings to arguing its case against her. Under this new cloud of scandal, Blavatsky left India for Europe that same year, but nonetheless soldiered on, publishing The Secret Doctrine in 1885.

In spite of its founders’ misadventures, the Theosophical Society may be credited with having projected yoga onto the magnetosphere of the late nineteenth-century Indian and Western consciousness, since it was through its efforts—far more than those of Colebrooke, Hegel, or Mitra—that a distinction between Yoga and the highly problematic lifestyles of the Indian yogis first began to emerge. In her not uncharacteristic hyperbolic way, Madame Blavatsky took full credit for these developments, asserting in 1881 that “neither modern Europe nor America had so much as heard [of yoga] until the Theosophists began to speak and write.”¹ There was no small amount of truth to her claim. As it happens, the society’s Mumbai publishing house was responsible for bringing out two of the earliest translations of the Yoga Sutra, both of which were composed by Indian members of the society: Tookaram Tatya’s edition of the Ballantyne–Shastri Deva collaboration in 1885, and a translation by M. N. Dvivedi in 1890. Far more influential in Western occult circles was an entirely superficial “interpretation” of the Yoga Sutra that Judge authored in 1888. Yet another translation, also published by the society, would appear in 1907: this was the work of Ganganath Jha, a highly accomplished Sanskrit scholar and purported mentor of Krishnamacharya, about whom more in chapter 12.

Like everything else about her worldview, Blavatsky’s position on yoga was highly convoluted. On the one hand, she glorified what she called “Raja Yoga” over and against the physical practices of Hatha Yoga, which she considered to be inferior. Yet concerning the yogis themselves, she took a contrarian position with respect to the general Western censure of them, showing great respect for their miracles and remarkable physical and psychological abilities. This might explain some of the yogi-type conjuring tricks that her critics accused her of performing herself, as well as a number of infamous “demonstrations” of yogic powers by society-approved disciples of the great Mahatmas, which at times degenerated into full-blown fiascos with blood on the floor. Due perhaps to Blavatsky’s disdain for Hatha Yoga, the society waited until after her demise before it began publishing English-language translations of important late Hatha Yoga texts, including the Shiva Samhita (“Shiva’s Collection,” 1893), the Hathayoga Pradipika (“Little Lamp of Hatha Yoga,” 1893), and Gheranda Samhita (“Gheranda’s Collection,” 1895).

The Theosophists’ motives for rehabilitating Indian Yoga (as they understood it) were both philosophical and political. Even after its embrace of Eastern spirituality, the society remained committed to the Anglo-American spiritualism that had been responsible for launching the movement in the first place. Already in Isis Unveiled, Blavatsky had asserted that all that existed in the universe was bathed in “ether,” an “astral light” or “magnetic fluid.” This was her channel of communication with the Masters and Mahatmas, as well as the energizing principle of all of matter or nature, which, when controlled, could heal, harmonize, and transform human life. Here, her most obvious inspiration was Mesmer’s Magnetic System, according to which an invisible fluid connected all parts of the universe, both spiritual and material: this is the fluid one sees in “ectoplasmic photographs” linking mediums and the spirits they are channeling during séances. As she became more familiar with Indian terminology, Blavatsky expanded her metaphysical vocabulary to include both “atman” (which she identified as the “universal spirit”) and “prana” (“the active power producing all vital phenomena”) in her 1885 Secret Doctrine. A few years later, the Theosophist Shrinivasa Iyangar would translate prana as “the magnetic current or breath” in his 1893 edition and translation of the “Little Lamp.”

At a relatively early date, Blavatsky and other Theosophists had seized upon Yoga as a prime example of an ancient and authentically Indian science, and so they promoted its teachings through lectures, demonstrations, and the publication of foundational texts. Under the direction of Annie Besant, who succeeded Blavatsky in India in 1893, the society’s activities became increasingly directed against the British colonial and missionary presence in India. As heirs to the Orientalist Renaissance, Romanticism, and spiritualism, the Theosophists were predisposed to anticolonialism and anticlericalism because they believed that India was the original and authentic home of all of human spirituality. The wisdom of ancient Indians also provided a solid scientific foundation for Theosophical spirituality—the séances, ectoplasmic apparitions, and so on. On the first count, many of the Theosophists’ positions meshed with those of the Indian leaders of the rising Indian nationalist movement. In 1916 Besant cofounded Banaras Hindu University with the expressed purpose of countering the effects of the many Christian institutions of higher education the British had established. She became increasingly active in Indian nationalist politics and was interned by the British in 1917 for her involvement in the movement. A decade earlier, in a series of lectures titled “An Introduction to Yoga,” Besant strongly argued for the scientific foundations of Yoga—which she viewed, following Swami Vivekananda, as necessary to reaching the final stage of human evolution, from man to superman—but showed reserve with respect to the applicability of the Yoga Sutra to modern yoga practice:

The other part of the Yoga literature is a small book called the sutras of Patanjali. That is available, but I am afraid that few are able to make much of it by themselves. In the first place, to elucidate the Sutras, which are simply headings, there is a great deal of commentary in Sanskrit, only partially translated. And even the commentaries have this peculiarity, that all the most difficult words are merely repeated, not explained, so that the student is not much enlightened.2

Others were less circumspect. In 1927, the English Theosophist Alice Bailey published a book titled The Light of the Soul: Its Science and Effect. A “paraphrase” of the Yoga Sutra, her book drew on extant translations of and commentaries on Patanjali’s work, even if, as she asserted, the sutras had been telepathically dictated to her by a “Tibetan Brother” of the “Trans-Himalayan School.”³ Bailey identified the Yoga Sutra with “Raja Yoga,” which would, as she prophesied, “find its greatest demonstration in the West” due to the fact that the “fifth root race” of the “fifth Aryan sub-race” would reach its fullest flower among the Anglo-Saxons of Europe and the American southwest, possibly in the year 2026. This evolutionist and fundamentally racist theory was—like many of the improbable links Bailey found between Raja Yoga, Christianity, Theosophy, and other spiritualist systems—Blavatskyan in everything but name.

A far more influential publication with respect to the Western reception of Yoga philosophy was the Theosophist Ernest Wood’s 1932 Raja Yoga: The Occult Training of the Hindus, which was later republished under the title The Seven Schools of Yoga: An Introduction. In it, Wood identified the first of these seven schools as the “Raja Yoga of Patanjali.” This was followed by the “Karma and Buddhi Yogas of Shri Krishna,” and the “Jnana Yoga of Shri Shankaracharya.” However, as Wood affirmed, all three of these fell under the heading “Raja Yoga,” while the other four—Hatha, Laya, Bhakti, and Mantra Yoga—were all forms of Hatha Yoga. Wood’s explanation of the term “Raja” was etymological: “It is raja or kingly yoga, because in each case the aspirant aims at becoming completely master of himself and of his own life.”⁴ In 1959 Wood published a widely read Penguin paperback under the simple title of Yoga, in which he identified the Yoga Sutra as a “Raja Yoga manual.” Here, Wood was undoubtedly taking his cue from Swami Vivekananda, who had burst on the late nineteenth-century scene as the greatest Yoga Sutra missionary of all time and who simply equated Patanjali’s system with Raja Yoga. As we will see, Vivekananda’s interpretation would set the mold, for better or for worse, for much of the twentieth century.

Although Wood and Bailey were Theosophists, it is important to note that Madame Blavatsky had herself had a more nuanced understanding of Raja Yoga than they. That is, even as she considered Raja Yoga to be the antitype of Hatha Yoga, she at no time identified it with the teachings of the Yoga Sutra. Blavatsky had delineated her position on Hatha and Raja Yoga in a series of short articles written in the 1880 and 1881 issues of The Theosophist. Although she did mention Patanjali once in these studies, she never explicitly linked his system to Raja Yoga. Rather, she singled out “Shankara’s Dandi[n]s of Northern India, especially those who are settled in Rajputana,” as the sole persons capable of giving “some correct notions about the Raja-Yoga.”5 The Dandins (“Staff Bearers”) are a group of ten orders of high-caste Shaiva ascetics whose monastic institutions, in both north and south India, have ranked among the most powerful in the country for several centuries. While there is no record of any association between these monastic institutions and the propagation of the Yoga Sutra in Rajputana, in India’s northwest, there was a Yoga revival in these milieus in Tamil Nadu, in south India, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In fact, most of the extant post-sixteenth-century commentaries on the Yoga Sutra were written by one or another member of a single intellectual lineage, one of whose founding gurus, Bhavaganesha Dikshita, was a disciple of Vijnanabhikshu himself. These were the Dikshitas, an illustrious line of scholars linked to royal courts, Dandin monasteries, and Shaiva temples in Tamil Nadu throughout this period. Like Vijnanabhikshu, the Dikshitas’ reading of the Yoga Sutra featured an eclectic blend of Yoga and Vedanta philosophy. The same period also saw the compilation of a number of late Yoga Upanishads, as well as a commentary on the same, by a Shaiva preceptor from the same region. Like the Dikshitas’ commentaries, these works also present Yoga as a subsidiary form of either Nondualist or Qualified Nondualist Vedanta philosophy. Another south Indian brahmin, the seventeenth-century Narayana Tirtha, was the first commentator to integrate Hatha Yoga into a commentary on the Yoga Sutra, and to list Raja Yoga as the highest of fifteen different Yoga systems.

For a time, one of Blavatsky’s closest associates was himself a Dandin ascetic. This was Dayananda Saraswati, the legendary founder of the reform movement known as the Arya Samaj, or “Society of Nobles,” with which the Theosophical Society had briefly merged to form the “Theosophical Society of the Arya Samaj” between 1878 and 1882. After taking initiation from a Staff Bearer in 1848, Saraswati had embarked on a nine-year search for authentic practitioners of Yoga. Although he never found them “even in a suicidal hunt,” his autobiography does mention a number of itinerant Staff Bearers who instructed him in the “Science of Yoga” at various hermitages and monasteries scattered across the mountainous regions of the subcontinent, including in the south. These may have been the last remnants of a south Indian “Yoga Sutra revival” that had flourished in these Shaiva milieus in earlier centuries. While Saraswati mentions the writings of Patanjali in his memoirs, he nowhere identifies either the Yoga Sutra or the teachings of the yogis he met as Raja Yoga.

While we cannot know for certain whether Blavatsky’s avoidance of identifying the Yoga Sutra with Raja Yoga arose from things Saraswati had told her, her reason for broaching the subject at all is announced in the title of her 1880–81 Theosophist articles: “Comment on A Treatise on the Yoga Philosophy.” Hers is in fact the review of a book that had been written some thirty years earlier by an Indian surgeon named N. C. Paul. Paul’s choice of a title for his book (of which the third edition was published by the Theosophical Society in 1888) was unusual inasmuch as it contained no discussion whatsoever of Yoga philosophy. Rather, what Paul focused on nearly exclusively were the salutary qualities of Hatha Yoga techniques, as well as the documented practices of illustrious yogis, all viewed from a medical perspective.

In his Treatise, Paul divided yoga into two types. The first of these he termed Raja Yoga—which he identified with the eight-part practice—and the second Hatha Yoga. However, his description of Raja Yoga concentrated nearly exclusively on breath control techniques as discussed in Hatha Yoga and Tantric Yoga traditions, but not found anywhere in the Yoga Sutra itself. Paul’s confusion concerning the relationship (if any) between Raja Yoga and the contents of the Yoga Sutra has been widely shared. In fact, in the annals of the history of yoga, few terms have been as nebulous (and abused) as “Raja Yoga.” Since the eleventh century, the period that saw the appearance of the earliest Hatha Yoga texts, the semantic field of Hatha Yoga has remained relatively stable, denoting breath control, inner locks and seals, practices of bodily purification—and, particularly in later works, postures. Also figuring in Hatha Yoga works are discussions of the networks of energy centers (chakras) and breath channels (nadis) of the yogic body: for the most part, these are borrowed from earlier works on Tantric Yoga.

What most early writings have in common in their accounts of these two types of yoga is their casting of Raja as the antitype of Hatha. None of these, however, identifies Raja Yoga with the system of the Yoga Sutra; rather, they link it to teachings from the Tantras and Nondualist Vedanta philosophy. A case in point, which anticipated Paul’s transposition of the meanings of Hatha and Raja Yoga, was the 1363 Sharngadhara Paddhati (“Sharngadhara’s Step-by-Step Guide”). For Sharngadhara, Raja Yoga denoted the practices of raising the kundalini, the female “serpent energy,” through the chakras, by means of which the practitioner’s body would become flooded with nectar, transforming him into a Siddha, a “Perfected Being.” As for Hatha Yoga, it was of two sorts, of which the second was none other than the eight-part practice. However, as had been the case with the Puranas, the early Hatha Yoga canon did not acknowledge Patanjali as the source of its practice: the thirteenth-century Dattatreyayogashastra (“Dattatreya’s Teaching on Yoga”), the first text to truly expound on Hatha Yoga and call it as such, teaches that the techniques of hatha are supplementary to the eight-part practice as taught by Yajnavalkya and others—but not by Patanjali.

The earliest work to contrast these two forms of yoga was the eleventh-to twelfth-century Amanaska Yoga (“Non-Mental Yoga”), which maintained that Hatha Yoga was simply a preliminary to Raja Yoga, so-called because “it is the king of all Yogas.”6 Vidyaranya’s fourteenth-century commentary on the Aparoksanubhuti (“Unrivaled Bull of Knowledge”), one of a legion of works spuriously attributed to Shankara, identified Raja Yoga as the “Yoga of Vedanta,” with no relationship whatsoever to Patanjali’s system. As for Hatha Yoga, for Vidyaranya this was Patanjali’s Yoga system: in other words, Raja Yoga was the Yoga not found in the Yoga Sutra. It would not be until the fifteenth century, with Svatmaraman’s “Little Lamp,” a late but highly influential work, that the Hatha-Raja distinction became codified in ways similar to modern-day usages, with Hatha referring to physical techniques and Raja to meditative practice. The “Little Lamp” identified Raja Yoga with samadhi, the final goal of the eight-part practice, but, like the Puranas and “Yajnavalkya’s Yoga,” equated it with the union or identity of the individual and universal Soul. In fact, the pattern that emerges out of some eight hundred years of classifying these yoga systems is the more or less constant equation of the eight-part practice with Hatha Yoga, and a general disregard of the other 164 verses of the Yoga Sutra. All of this would change, however, in the final years of the nineteenth century.