The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali: A Biography

CHAPTER 8

In 1893, the same year that Vivekananda sailed west into history, a north Indian Sufi master (pir) from the Naqshbandi order initiated two young Hindu brothers with the understanding that one of them would become his successor. When the old pir died, the elder of the two, Ramachandra Chaudhari became Mahatma Ramchandraji Maharaj, cosharer of the office of pir with his master’s brother. At once a Hindu householder, the master of a Muslim religious order, a tax collector for the British Raj, and a budding yoga practitioner, Ramachandra founded a school that he would later call Ananda Yoga (“Yoga of Beatitude”) in the first decade of the twentieth century.

Although Ramachandra had first been initiated into yoga practice by a Hindu holy man named Swami Brahmananda while still in his youth, legend has it that his authority to teach his new form of yoga to both Hindus and Muslims arose out of an experience he had had two years prior to his 1893 Sufi initiation. One evening, while on his way home from his workplace, a violent thunderstorm broke out just as he was passing by his future master’s madrasa. Seeing that his clothes were soaked, the Sufi master covered Ramachandra, the future Hindu Mahatma, with a warm quilt.

Then the Mahatma all of a sudden lost his senses, and without hesitation the Maulawi disclosed his entire spiritual wealth through a flight of subtle energy (shakti-pat) to the heart of Ramcandraji, thus fulfilling the wishes of his own venerable master … according to whom one day a Hindu boy would come to meet the Shah who was to bestow this Divine knowledge on him, since this science originally belonged to the Hindus.¹

This hagiographical account, remarkable in its ecumenism, instructs all who have ears to hear that ancient Hindu wisdom was transmitted by a Muslim master to a Hindu disciple, via the Tantric technique of shakti-pat, in order that that disciple impart said knowledge to Hindus and Muslims alike. And this is what Ramchandraji did, offering instruction in a blend of meditational techniques, Hatha Yoga, and such Sufi practices as visualization (muraqaba) and “the science hidden in the breast” (ilm-i-sina). Because his day job as tax collector often took him on the road, he was able to devote his evenings to instruction to a growing circle of followers, and so Ananda Yoga quickly spread across north India’s Gangetic heartland.

A series of successors furthered the expansion of Ananda Yoga, which today counts some 100,000 adherents across India and around the world. Over the past four decades, the formal links between Ananda Yoga and the Naqshbandi order have fallen away, and while relations between the two groups have remained cordial, the language of yoga that Ananda Yoga and its offshoots employ has become increasingly Hinduized. This has especially been the case with the Sahaj Marg, an international offshoot of Ananda Yoga, which has expressly replaced Sufi terminology with cognate terms from the Yoga Sutra, identified in its teachings as Raja Yoga.

The Islamic embrace of things yogic has not been limited to India. Yoga has been popular across the Muslim world for several decades, with yoga centers thriving in countries across the Middle East—including in Iran, without interference from the Iranian theocracy. However, in recent years, the beast of identity politics has reared its ugly head, with an outright ban on yoga that the government of Malaysia issued (and quickly lifted) in November of 2008, and a fatwa against Muslims practicing yoga that Indonesian clerics emitted two months later. In both cases, it was the perceived Hindu content of yoga practice that was judged anathema to the true Islamic faith. Muslim ideologues have not held the monopoly on religious intolerance, however. In 1989, Cardinal Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict, warned Catholics of the dangers of “non-Christian forms of meditation” while challenging Hindu Nondualist metaphysics from the standpoint of Catholic theology. More recently, Christian fundamentalist personalities like Pat Robertson and Albert Mohler have inveighed against yoga practice by members of their flock, arguing that using the body as a vehicle for achieving consciousness of the divine undercuts one’s commitment to Christ, or that by repeating the names of Hindu gods while practicing yoga, Christians are implicitly denying the one true God. Similar arguments have been used in attempts to prohibit the teaching of yoga in physical education classes in public schools. For its part, the Hindu America Foundation has initiated a “Take Back Yoga” informational campaign aimed at restoring the yoga “brand” to its Hindu source.

It may be argued that these three fundamentalist constituencies—Muslim, Christian, and Hindu—have seized upon Yoga as a symbol for all things Hindu. In the face of globalization and other forces they can no longer control, fundamentalist leaders have sought to defend the purity of their respective traditions by demonizing (or glorifying, in the case of the Hindus) the wildly successful yoga subculture. In these times of institutionalized bigotry, it is difficult to imagine that things could ever have been otherwise. Yet on the Christian side, Michel Sage, who authored the first French translation of the Yoga Sutra in 1921, was a devout Catholic who nonetheless embraced such unauthorized doctrines as the reincarnation of the soul and the laws of karma, without being disciplined by the Church. One of the most sensitive and sympathetic works on Yoga philosophy was authored by the Jesuit Gaspar Koelmans, and a “Christian” reading of the Yoga Sutra has recently been proposed by a member of the south India–based Carmelites of the Mary Immaculate congregation.

In the Muslim world as well, there have been times when theologians and culture brokers have not embraced the citadel mentality so prevalent today. Two cases worth noting both hark back to periods in which Islam was politically dominant, or rising to dominance, in South Asia. The latter half of the sixteenth century, the apogee of the Mughal Empire in India, was marked by the long rule of its greatest emperor, Akbar. The third in a line of Central Asian conquerors who traced their Timurid lineage back to Tamerlane and Genghis Khan, Akbar consolidated and expanded Mughal rule across nearly all of India, ushering in an era of peace and prosperity. The form of Islam the Timurids had brought to India from their Iranian homeland was Shi’ism, a markedly mystical strain of the faith compared to Sunni orthodoxy. That mystic heritage had a strong effect on Akbar, who had from a very early age also found inspiration in the teachings of such Persian Sufi mystics as Rumi, Hafiz, and others, and who progressively abandoned the ways of Sunni Islam over the course his long reign.

We can trace this trend back to 1573, when Akbar began to consider a proposition made by a heretical theologian named Shaikh Mubarak that he be declared infallible in matters of religion, thereby establishing himself as the imperial head of both church and state. This was enacted in 1579 with the “Infallibility Decree,” but things had already come to a head five years earlier when Akbar had formally renounced Islam and proclaimed a new faith of his own, called the “Divine Religion.” The high priest of the new imperial creed was Shaikh Mubarak’s son Abu’l Fazl, who remained Akbar’s closest ally and confidant throughout the latter half of his long reign.

With Akbar’s new religion came a policy of religious tolerance with regard to his many non-Muslim subjects (Hindus, Jains, Zoroastrians, and Christians), coupled with a persecution of Muslims, most particularly the orthodox Sunnis who staunchly opposed his innovations. In fact, many of these new policies were of Abu’l Fazl’s own making, as was a novel imperial ideology that elevated Akbar to the level of a god on earth. These radical new ideas were woven into Abu’l Fazl’s two greatest works, the Akbar Nama (“Life of Akbar”), a sweeping chronicle of Akbar’s forty-seven-year reign, and the far more readable Ain-i Akbari (“Institutes of Akbar”), an imperial survey and manual for government.

Here, by way of legitimating the emperor’s infallibility and divine right to rule, Abu’l Fazl traced Akbar’s lineage back to Adam, and—via a virgin mother impregnated by a ray of divine light—to a series of conquerors including Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, and Akbar’s grandfather Babur, the founder of the Mughal Empire. Taking his inspiration from a mystic Persian strain of Neoplatonist philosophy, Abu’l Fazl also asserted that Akbar was possessed of a divine effulgence, which, transmitted through the angel Gabriel, afforded him greater esoteric knowledge and authority than not only the Sharia jurists, but also the most saintly Sufi masters, as well as the eagerly awaited Mahdi, the Shi’a Messiah. That same supernatural charisma and wisdom also caused the holy men of other Indian traditions, including the yogis, to gravitate toward Akbar’s imperial person. In this last case, the attraction was mutual, with Akbar often visiting and holding forth with Hindu holy men, and even building a “City of Yogis” for them on the outskirts of the city of Agra.

An Indian “Mirror of Kings,” Abu’l Fazl’s “Institutes” stands as an encyclopedic account of every aspect of Akbar’s realm, from its physical and human resources to its indigenous systems of knowledge. As such, much of the fourth book of his work is devoted to the six Hindu philosophical systems, concluding with a short disquisition on Patanjali’s school, which comprises an erudite synopsis of the Yoga Sutra as both a metaphysical treatise and a blueprint for a type of psychological training. Although Abu’l Fazl relied heavily upon the Hindu pandits for his data, his greatest challenge was to translate Hindu concepts and Sanskrit terms into an Islamic idiom. So, for example, referring to sutra 3.51, he defines a person who has reached the second “honey stage” of yogic practices as one who “effaces rust from the mirror of the heart,”2 an expression foreign to Hindu parlance. On the subject of celibacy, one of the inner restraints of the eight-part practice, his expression that the practitioner “must also avoid the society of women lest his brain be distracted and melancholy ensue”³ appears to have originated entirely from Abu’l Fazl’s own brain. On the other hand, his use of the Persian equivalent of the Sanskrit aishvarya (“mastery”) to denote the occult powers that are the topic of much of the Yoga Sutra’s third chapter probably drew upon the Shaiva and Vaishnava traditions of his pandit informants, since it is not found in either the Yoga Sutra or its commentarial literature.

In his discussion of asana, the third component of the eight-part practice, Abu’l Fazl numbers the postures at eighty-four, a canonical number from the late Hatha Yoga traditions that were so prevalent in his time, but not found in the Yoga Sutra. Clearly sharing Akbar’s fascination with India’s yogis, he also demonstrates his familiarity with broader yogic traditions concerning breath control and the “subtle body,” concluding his overview with a show of admiration that testifies to his own open-mindedness with regard to non-Islamic traditions:

The ascetics of this country can so hold their breath that they will breathe but once in twelve years…. Although this language may seem incredible in the eyes of those affected by the taint of narrow custom, those who acknowledge the wonderful power of God will find in it no cause of astonishment.4

Akbar and Abu’l Fazl were not the last Mughals to be attracted to India’s yoga traditions and practitioners. Imperial Mughal interest in Hindu mysticism peaked in the tragic person of Akbar’s great-grandson, Dara Shukuh, a weak heir apparent to the throne who was assassinated in 1659 at the order of his notorious younger brother, Aurangzeb. An established Sufi scholar, Dara Shukuh maintained that at the time when the Prophet Muhammad had received the revelations of the Qur’an, he was also engaged in the practice of repeating the name of God (zikr) to the accompaniment of postural practice, breath control, and concentration. Dara Shukuh called this body of practice the “King of the Zikrs,” which as Craig Davis has noted is uncannily similar in several of its details to a particular sequence of Hatha Yoga exercises. The “Little Lamp,” a work likely known to Dara Shukuh, ranges these practices under the heading of “Raja Yoga.” As Davis suggests, Dara Shukuh may well have named his “King of the Zikrs” after Raja, the so-called King of Yogas. Postures and breath control were not the sole areas of overlap between Sufi and Hindu theory and practice, and Dara Shukuh also drew explicit links between Sufi accounts of the spiritual centers and the chakras of Tantric Yoga. The Sufi Naqshbandis would further elaborate on these, identifying the inner “centers of light” (‘ilm-i-lata’if) of their system with the chakras.

We see traditions such as these being carried forward into the modern age through Ramachandra’s late nineteenth-century Naqshbandi pir, but in fact, Islamic interest in India’s yoga traditions in general, and the Yoga Sutra in particular, predated the imperial Mughals by several centuries. In this regard, the authors of the authoritative Oxford History of India note Abu’l Fazl’s debt to an Islamic scholar who preceded him by some five hundred years. This was Abu al-Rayhan Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Biruni—known to the West as Alberuni—whose work titled Tahqiq–i–Hind (“India”) was “unique in Muslim literature, except in so far as it was imitated without acknowledgement … by Abu-l Fazl in the Ain-i Akbari.”⁵

Born in the city of Gurganj on the shore of the Aral Sea in what would be modern-day Turkmenistan, Alberuni was one of the greatest minds in what S. Frederick Starr has identified as a Central Asian “zone of genius.” From 800 to 1100, the principal cities of the region—from Gurganj in the west to Samarkand, Ghazni, and Kashgar in the east—were cosmopolitan centers rivaling the Baghdad of the Abbasid Caliphate for world leadership in the fields of mathematics, chemistry, medicine, astronomy, philosophy, and music. From a very early age, Alberuni enjoyed the support of powerful Central Asian rulers whose patronage allowed him to debate the leading scientific ideas of his day with the greatest lights of the Islamic world: the philosopher Ibn Sina (known to the West as Avicenna) and the Persian poet Firdausi among many others. Then, in his late forties, Alberuni’s life changed forever, when he was forcibly exiled from his homeland and installed in the court of Mahmud of Ghazni, who, while a generous patron of the arts and sciences, was also a ruthless autocrat ruling over an ever-expanding empire.

A series of military campaigns that Mahmud launched against western India have left an indelible mark on the modern Hindu psyche, such that together with the seventeenth-century Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, Mahmud stands as the perennial poster boy for Islamic plunder and iconoclasm. Operating out of his stronghold in the Hindu Kush, Mahmud began in the year 1000 to mount a series of invasions that took his armies deeper and deeper into the Indian subcontinent, from which he extracted increasingly fabulous spoils of war. His 1026 plunder of the fabulous Somnath Temple of Shiva on the southern coast of the Kathiawar peninsula is the stuff of legend, and accounts of the endless camel caravans that carried the gold and jewels of the temple’s treasury out of India have been a major rallying cry of Hindu nationalists for over a century. Mahmud’s military campaigns were not limited to the South Asian subcontinent, however. In 1017, his armies conquered Chorasmia and its capital of Gurganj, far to the west. It was on this occasion that Mahmud took Alberuni captive, bringing him back to Ghazni as a spoil of war before posting him to the Punjab region of modern-day Pakistan for a twelve-year period—sufficient time for him to become an accomplished Sanskritist. There, his observations on Indian life, learning, society, and religion issued in the remarkable volume titled “India.”

Alberuni’s work is an exceptional window into both high and low Hindu culture of eleventh-century India. Given his own special expertise in astronomy and time reckoning, Alberuni devoted a large portion of his work to a detailed survey of cognate Hindu systems, about which he was generally contemptuous. But Alberuni was also interested in India’s philosophical systems, and in this context he has emerged as an important witness to the early history of the Yoga Sutra. In his “India,” he refers on several occasions to the work, as well as to a commentary he says was translated by his own hand into the Arabic language. In 1922, while carrying out research in an Istanbul archive, the Islamicist Louis Massignon stumbled upon Alberuni’s lost translation, which had been scrawled in the margins of the manuscript of another unrelated text. His version—which is cast as a dialogue between Patanjali and an “ascetic roaming in the deserts and the forests”⁶—is of particular interest because it diverges on many points from the extant Sanskrit-language commentaries of its time, and because a number of the sutras contained in Patanjali’s “original” work are missing. This and other data have led some scholars to conclude that the version of the Yoga Sutra upon which the commentary translated by Alberuni was based was earlier than the one used by Vyasa, and that that commentary had “probably [been] written at a time when the Bhashya of Vyasa had not yet attained any great sanctity and authority.”7

Translated into English, Alberuni’s Arabic rendering of the commentary’s title is the “Book of the Indian Patanjali on Liberation from the Afflictions”: critical scholars generally refer to it by the abbreviated name Kitab Patanjal (“Patanjali’s Book”). The Yoga system presented in this commentary diverges significantly from that of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra and Vyasa’s “Commentary” inasmuch as it presents union with God as the final goal of Yoga practice. There are two possible explanations for this shift. One hypothesis, first broached by the great Bengali historian of Indian philosophy, Surendranath Dasgupta, is that this commentary reflects an authentic modification of Yoga philosophy in its early development and is perhaps the work of a different Patanjali than the author of the Yoga Sutra as we know it. A second, and to my mind more plausible, explanation is that Alberuni was influenced by epic and Puranic accounts of Yoga, which, as we have seen, identified Ishvara with either Vishnu or Shiva, and defined Yoga as union with that God.

Although Alberuni indicates that he was assisted in his translation by Indian schoolmen, there is much that appears to be the product of his own powers of reason and his training in Aristotelian and Islamic philosophy. So, for example, in translating sutra 2.15, he interprets the Indian philosophical question of what constitutes the individual self in terms of a central issue of Islamic philosophy: whether the essence of Man is the body or the soul. Unique to Alberuni’s version is the inclusion of alchemy (rasayana) as a means to salvation. Elixir alchemy was a cultural fashion in India between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, as Alberuni himself documents in his “India.” It is also mentioned in Bhoja’s commentary on Yoga Sutra 4.1.

In many places, Alberuni finds himself obliged to coin new technical terms in Arabic to do justice to such Sanskrit concepts as klesa (“taint,” “affliction,” which he translates as “burden”) and buddhi (“intellect,” for which he provides the reading of “heart”). Elsewhere, he translates a Sanskrit term denoting nondiscursive intuitive knowledge with a Sufi term for mystical cognition: “the eye of the heart.” In the same spirit, he translates the title of the Yoga Sutra’s first chapter (“On Pure Contemplation”) as “Making the Heart Steadfastly Fixed.” Posture (asana) is translated as “quietude,” ether is either “air” or “sky,” and the Hindu deities (devas) become “angels.” The earliest documented translator of the Yoga Sutra, we see Alberuni grappling with the same problems that have beset the many modern scholars, teachers, and dilettantes who have attempted to respect the original intent of its terminology and concepts while translating them into foreign languages and idioms.

Since the original Sanskrit-language commentary from which Alberuni generated his translation has been lost, we cannot know whether it was structured along the same lines as his version. How to explain the fact, for example, that Alberuni introduces his translation with the discussion of a topic that is only mentioned in sutras 1.7 and 2.45, and which is relatively peripheral to the philosophical preoccupations of the Yoga Sutra and its classical commentaries? This is the topic of the perception or cognition of things hidden from normal sense perception, either due to their minute size, great distance from the viewer in space or time, or the existence of a barrier. This is a theme that receives far greater attention in other schools of Indian philosophy. That it should be given pride of place in Alberuni’s commentary is yet another indication that his source may have belonged to an otherwise “lost tradition” in the annals of Yoga philosophy.

Another area in which the commentary Alberuni translated diverges from those of Vyasa and other early schoolmen is its discussion of sutra 3.26, which reads “from perfect discipline of the sun, knowledge of the worlds.” Beginning with Vyasa, it had been a commentarial convention to present a traveler’s guide to the Cosmic Egg, which contains all of the “worlds” evoked in the sutra. As a result, this sutra was the object of one of the most extensive commentaries of the entire work, because the Cosmic Egg is a mighty egg with many, many worlds inside of it. This elaborate cosmology had first appeared in its fullness in the Puranas, of which Alberuni was clearly aware, noting in his “India” that his source differed from the latter on several points. It also diverged significantly from Vyasa’s commentarial description, all of which leads to the conclusion that the details of the wondrous landscapes of the Cosmic Egg had not yet been entirely standardized by the end of the first millennium of the Common Era. Vyasa concluded his commentary on this sutra by instructing yogis to concentrate on the sun, or on any other cosmic zone, until all of these worlds were clearly seen. This would indicate that his purpose in detailing them was to aid advanced practitioners to visualize those worlds in all their complexity. Unlike Vyasa and later commentators, however, Alberuni’s commentary does not contain this final injunction. As was the case in the Puranic traditions, God was the sole proper object of meditation, since He alone was capable of granting salvation to his creatures.

Alberuni concludes his translation by addressing his Muslim readership on the question of “the impossible (things referred to) in this book.” Here, he sounds much like a modern-day professor of comparative religion, evoking the “impossible” nature of the manifest miracles of the Muslim prophets as well as the powers attributed by Christians to the relics of their saints and martyrs. Then, adopting a condescending—or one might say, Hegelian—attitude, he says of the Hindus whose impossible things these are, that they are incapable of distinguishing between science and fantasy.

Ramachandra founded a school: Filippi and Dahnhardt 2001, 350–51.

Then the Mahatma: Dahnhardt 2002, 84.

offering instruction in a blend of meditational techniques: Dahnhardt 2002, 170–82, 268, 314.

Over the past four decades: Filippi and Dahnhardt 2001, 352–53.

This has especially been the case with the Sahaj Marg: Dahnhardt 2002, 354–55.

an outright ban on yoga issued (and quickly lifted): Moaveni 2008; Tedjasukmana 2009.

In 1989, Cardinal Ratzinger: Cullen 2005.

More recently, Christian fundamentalist personalities: Waldo 2007; Mohler 2010.

a “Take Back Yoga” informational campaign: Vitello 2010; Nanda 2011.

Yet on the Christian side: Ceccimori 2001, 85–88; Koelmans 1970; Kochumuttom 2010, 233–57.

That mystic heritage had a strong effect on Akbar: Smith 1958, 268.

We can trace this process back to 1573: Smith 1958, 348–49, 360.