The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali: A Biography

CHAPTER 9

In his “India,” Alberuni tells the story of an alchemical experiment involving an unnamed king that had taken place “in the city of Dhara, the capital of Malava, which is in our days ruled by Bhojadeva.”¹ Alberuni’s Bhojadeva was none other than King Bhoja, the illustrious author of the “Royal Sun” commentary, and it is an irony of history that the man who had forcibly brought Alberuni to India was later met in battle by an army led by Bhoja himself. That two significant Yoga Sutra commentators should have had but one degree of separation in the eleventh century is, if nothing else, an indication of the popularity of Yoga philosophy in this period. The centuries around the turn of the second millennium were the Yoga Sutra’s high-water mark, only surpassed by its popularity over the past forty years. In addition to the works of Alberuni and Bhoja, the same period saw the appearance of two other classical commentaries: Vachaspati Mishra’s definitive “Expert Guide to the True Principles” and Shankara’s “Exposition of the Commentary on Patanjali’s Yoga Teaching” (if the ninth-century Shankara was in fact its author). Two important Jain adaptations of Yoga philosophy also appeared during these centuries, alongside multiple references to the Yoga Sutra in Kashmir Shaiva and Tamil Shrivaishnava philosophical works, and the continuing fusion of Yoga philosophy with Tantric Yoga, Hindu devotion, and Vedanta philosophy in early works belonging to the canon of the Yoga Upanishads.

The turn of the millennium was also a time of contestation in yogic matters; as we saw in chapter 2, during this period various sectarian groups and philosophical schools began to propose alternate readings of yoga—as “discipline,” “meditation,” even “union”—in conjunction with the particular forms of theism they were espousing. Alternate readings of the “eight-part practice” were also proposed. The most ecumenical among the Yoga philosophers of the time were the Jains Haribhadra and Hemachandra. While Haribhadra presents several alternate systems of Yoga in his eighth-century Yogadrishtisamuccaya (“Collection of Views on Yoga”), the Yoga Sutra served as what Christopher Key Chapple has termed a “template” for his entire system. Three of the Yoga systems that Haribhadra investigates, and generally rejects, are Tantric. However, in his eightfold analysis of Yoga, which comprises over a third of the entire work, we see Haribhadra consciously adapting the eight-part practice into a Jain framework, linking it to the fourteen stages of purification and enlightenment of orthodox Jainism. This he does by identifying the inner restraints, the first component of the eight-part practice, with the first seven Jain stages of purification, with the remaining components, culminating in samadhi, tracking with the ascending trajectory of the Jain practitioner’s progress toward the ultimate goal of omniscience and total inactivity.

We see a similar strategy being adopted by the twelfth-century Hemachandra, a Hindu convert to Jainism who became a highly influential minister to the western Indian Hindu king Kumarapala. The author of another synthetic work, the Yogashastra (“Yoga Teaching”), Hemachandra follows Haribhadra in adapting the eight-part practice as both an organizing principle and a means to the Jain end of the realization of the Three Jewels of correct belief, knowledge, and conduct. This triad recalls the three yogas of the Bhagavad Gita, with which Hemachandra, as a former Hindu, would also have been fully acquainted. In order to realize the second jewel of knowledge, he argues, meditation is necessary, which presupposes the yogic postures. These are the subject of the final portion of Hemachandra’s fourth chapter, which leads into an extended discussion of meditation and its prerequisites (including all of the other elements of the eight-part practice), which take up seven of the remaining eight chapters of the work. Hemachandra’s twelfth and final chapter is based on another work, the eleventh-to twelfth-century “Non-Mental Yoga,” which was, as we have noted, one of the earliest texts to address the distinction between Hatha and Raja Yoga. While the lion’s share of Hemachandra’s “Yoga Teaching” may be viewed as a Jain commentary on the Yoga Sutra, it should be noted that many of its concepts and meditative practices more closely resemble Tantric Yoga traditions. While some of these traditions may be traced back to the Yogi Lords, who shared a number of cult centers with the Jains in western India, others likely originated in Kashmir, far to the north.

It was in Kashmir that Hindu Tantra reached its fullest flower in the extensive writings of the early eleventh-century philosopher and Tantra master Abhinavagupta. Often referred to as Kashmir Shaivism, the Tantric system Abhinavagupta’s school elaborated offered three paths to self-divinization: ritual practice, gnosis, and Yoga. Broadly construed, the Tantric Yoga of this system involved an elaborate program of visionary meditation upon Tantric deities and mandalas. In this context Abhinavagupta and others from his school explicitly referred, in several of their works, to various Yoga Sutra aphorisms concerning the supernatural powers and other topics. It is noteworthy that in at least one passage of his masterwork, the Tantraloka (“Elucidation of Tantra”), Abhinavagupta did so in order to dismiss Patanjali’s eight-part practice as useless to the goals of the Tantric practitioner. Abhinavagupta quotes the Yoga Sutra more extensively in another of his works, the Ishvarapratijnanavivritivimarshini (“Critique of the Exposition of the Doctrine of Divine Recognition”). Significantly, he refers to Patanjali himself as Ananta, the divine “Lord of Serpents,” an identification made earlier in the Vishnudharmottara, a Purana from Kashmir. Patanjali was particularly revered in Kashmir, not only because of this cachet of divinity, but also because the grammarian Patanjali mentions in his commentary that he had temporarily resided there. So it is that the Yoga Sutra is cited, for the most part favorably, by at least a dozen other Kashmirian authors from the same period.

Far to the south in Tamil Nadu, the same centuries saw Vaishnava theologians setting down the precepts of the orthodox Shrivaishnava school. Nathamuni, the tenth-century founder of the Shrivaishnava lineage, who will be discussed in another context in chapter 12, left no written teachings on the subject of Yoga. However, his disciple, Yadava Prakasha, who wrote 115 verses on the subject of Yoga in his Yatidharmasamuccaya (“Collection of Ascetic Practice”), cited nine aphorisms from the Yoga Sutra and mentioned Patanjali by name. Third in this lineage was the illustrious Ramanuja, whose long life spanned 120 years of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The greatest of all Shrivaishnava theologians, he evoked the Yoga Sutra’s teachings in all three of his principal works, written on the subject of the Veda, Vedanta philosophy, and the Bhagavad Gita respectively. In contrast to the Advaita Vedanta doctrine of cosmic illusion, Ramanuja, an exponent of the Qualified Nondualist school of Vedanta, maintained that the world was real, and that individual selves did exist. Although they could not be differentiated from their creator or cause (that is, a god with personal qualities such as Vishnu), these selves nonetheless did not possess God’s powers of creation, omniscience, and so forth. By the same token, God, while “holographically” present in every individual self, could not be subject to the suffering or impurity that was the manifest lot of His creatures.

Ramanuja criticized several of the Yoga Sutra’s philosophical positions, including its metaphysical dualism and its goal of the isolation of Spirit from Nature; its view of the nature of the soul and of Ishvara; and the validity of direct yogic perception as a valid cognition and an unerring source of knowledge. He also rejected the Yoga Sutra’s goals, refusing to admit either the supernatural powers or samadhi. A staunch theist and fundamentalist with respect to scripture, Ramanuja’s interest in the Yoga Sutra was practical: how to put its eight-part practice to use as a means to the supreme end of devotion to God. It was to this purpose that he prescribed the techniques of posture, breath control, and retraction of the senses as presented in the eight-part practice. He also prescribed meditation, but with an important caveat: it was not the technique of meditation that led to liberation, but rather its object, which for Ramanuja could only be God himself. No doubt unbeknownst to him, he was agreeing with the Muslim Alberuni, who had taken the same position over a century earlier. He was also agreeing with Vachaspati Mishra, but with an important distinction: for whereas Vishnu’s outer form was, for the latter, a mere instrument to enhanced concentration, for Ramanuja, Vishnu was both the means and end of practice. Here he was simply reiterating the doctrines found in the Puranas and Smriti literature. By meditating on Vishnu, whom Ramanuja identified with the Yoga Sutra’s Ishvara, the practitioner would cultivate a personal relationship with Him, moving God to offer His grace and the practitioner’s release from suffering existence. The sixteenth-century Vijnanabhikshu, who took much of his inspiration from Ramanuja, would identify Ishvara with the god Krishna. In the same period, Gaudiya Vaishnava theologians from Bengal would adapt the eight-part practice in a similar fashion, employing it as a technique leading to the soul’s absorption into the object of meditation, Krishna. However, their source for the eight-part practice was more likely a Vaishnava Purana (such as the Vishnu or Narada) than the Yoga Sutra itself.

A most striking testimony to the prestige of the Yoga system in this period is a tenth-century work likely composed on the Indonesian island of Java. By the middle of the first millennium CE, Shaivism, the cult of the god Shiva whose mythology frequently casts him as a god of yoga, had emerged as the most important theistic system on the Indian subcontinent. (Shaivism still predominates in south India, whereas in the north, bhakti has, since the fifteenth century, evolved in a Vaishnava mode.) As we have seen, the most powerful and early sectarian proponents of the Shaiva system, both institutionally and philosophically, were the Pashupatas. Already mentioned in the Mahabharata, they were responsible for the composition and reworking of several Puranas, and their institutional presence in South Asia is documented in nearly a hundred inscriptions that identify them as beneficiaries of land grants and other types of institutional support between the fifth and twelfth centuries.

During the same centuries, Hinduism came to be spread—through trade, conversion, and conquest—from India into much of Southeast Asia: a Javanese translation of the Mahabharata has been dated to the eleventh century. And so it was that for several hundred years, kings from “Greater India” recruited Shaiva priests, many of them from the Pashupata order, to serve as their royal chaplains. During the same period, Shaiva priests and ascetics carried Pashupata teachings into rural areas where they fused with regional traditions to form new and original synergies. One of those regional traditions, which emerged in the ninth century on the Indonesian islands of Java and Bali, revolved around a group called the Five Rishis (“Five Seers”), whose mythology portrayed them as both sons of Shiva and practitioners of Yoga responsible in part for the ordering of the universe. With a single exception, the names of these five figures were identical to those listed in the Shaiva Puranas and other early Indian traditions as the founding gurus of the Pashupata order: Kushika, Garga, Kurushya, and Maitri. In Indonesia, however, Lakulisha—the mythic founder of the Indian Pashupata lineage—was replaced by a figure named Patanjala. While it is tempting to see in the Rishi Patanjala’s name a variant reading of Patanjali, this was not the case. Rather, the name was most likely derived from that of a south Indian cultural hero named Agastya, one of whose epithets was Pitanjala, “He Who Drank the Waters,” a reference to a Puranic myth in which Agastya drank the entire ocean dry.

Regardless of the origin of his name, the mythic Indonesian Rishi Patanjala’s prestige was so great that an important and unique tenth-century work written in Old Javanese came to be attributed to him. This work, titled Dharma Patanjala (“Sacred Teaching of Patanjala”) has been preserved in a single fifteenth-century manuscript, which was discovered in western Java in the nineteenth century. In 2011, a critical translation and study of that manuscript was completed by the young Italian scholar Andrea Acri as his doctoral dissertation at Leiden University. I briefly summarize the remarkable content of that thesis here.

The “Sacred Teaching,” which is cast as a dialogue between Shiva and his son Kumara, is, for the most part, a Pashupata treatise enshrining many elements of archaic Shaiva doctrine. The first two-thirds of its content, all presented along straightforward Pashupata lines, is devoted to such issues as epistemology, metaphysics, the nature of the soul, cosmology, embryology, physiology, theology, and doctrines of karma, rebirth, and liberation from rebirth. In the context of this last discussion the dialogue shades into the topic of Yoga as the optimal path to release from suffering existence—and then, quite suddenly, becomes a paraphrase of much of the Yoga Sutra. Of the 161 verses of the Yoga Sutra’s first three chapters, all but thirty-seven are treated in the “Sacred Teaching”; however, the Yoga Sutra’s final chapter is entirely absent. Significantly, Patanjali is nowhere named as the source of this teaching on Yoga. Like the work translated by Alberuni in his “Book of the Indian Patanjali,” the version of the Yoga Sutra paraphrased into Old Javanese in the “Sacred Teaching” diverges on several points from Patanjali’s work as it was known to its classical Indian commentators. This has led scholars to surmise that like Alberuni, the Javanese author of the “Sacred Teaching” was working from an earlier and now lost version of the Yoga Sutra. Some have concluded that independent of the evidence found in these two foreign translations, the entire fourth chapter of the Yoga Sutra was a late addition. I will return to this matter in the final chapter of this book.

The Yoga of the Pashupata and later Shaiva systems was not the same as that espoused in the Yoga Sutra, and the early Shaiva scriptures took great pains to make this distinction. Rather than the isolation of Spirit from Nature, the Pashupatas defined the goal of Yoga as the union or contact of the individual soul with God, by virtue of which the human yogi could come to manifest the attributes—that is, the eight supernatural powers—of Shiva himself (without actually becoming God or losing himself in God). While this was the orthodox Shaiva position, later Shaiva treatments of Yoga, as found in the Puranas as well as the Shaiva scriptures known as the Agamas and Tantras, came to diverge from those of the original Pashupata Sutras on a number of points. Many of these divergences reflected an attempt to synthesize Shaiva Yoga with elements of the eight-part practice. However, as was the case with the Puranic and other systems, the sole effective object of Shaiva meditation remained the god Shiva himself.

Such attempts at synthesis are documented not only in the Shaiva Puranas but also in many of the post-ninth-century Shaiva Agamas and Tantras, as well as in several Agamic and Tantric commentaries. Regardless of whether the Yoga Sutra was their source, this adaptation of the eight-part practice was no small thing, because it supplanted the earlier Pashupata sequence, which had been limited to six parts. This sequence, first attested in the Maitri Upanishad, usually comprised breath control, retraction of the senses, meditation, fixation, and pure contemplation, with philosophical reflection (tarka) replacing posture (asana). Breaking ranks with all other Old Javanese texts (and possibly all earlier Shaiva works from India), the “Sacred Teaching” not only presented the Yoga Sutra’s eight-part practice in its entirety, but also appropriated the first three chapters of Yoga Sutra in such a way as to fit Patanjali’s Yoga system into an archaic Shaiva framework. Here, the Yoga Sutra aphorisms were presented in their original sequence, but they were re-shaped into a commentary that, like that of Alberuni’s work, was cast in a dialogue format, in this case between Shiva and his divine son Kumara.

While orthodox Shaiva doctrine is Dualist (one can become like Shiva, but never become merged into Shiva, or become Shiva himself), several Tantric schools (including that of Abhinavagupta) were Non-dualist. In the case of the “Sacred Teaching,” both positions are entertained. Central to its reworking of the Yoga Sutra is its identification of Patanjali’s Ishvara with Shiva himself, who teaches Kumara that He lives from one cosmic cycle to the next by manifesting His divine powers in a yogi whose concentration is pure. In fact, earlier Pashupata works had already identified Rudra with the transcendent twenty-sixth principle, paralleling trends found in the Mahabharata and other works, as mentioned in chapter 2. However, the pure contemplation of the realized yogi is equated here not with the samadhi of the Yoga Sutra, but rather with the Pashupata definition of Yoga. It is a level of omniscience and omnipotence equal to that of God himself—with the important difference being that while this is God’s innate and eternal nature, for the yogi it can only be acquired at the end of many lives of practice. Even so, the “Sacred Teaching” identifies the ultimate goal of the Yoga Sutra’s eight-part practice as union with Shiva and the attainment of His supernatural powers, reflecting the normative devotional Hindu reading of yoga as “union.”

Elsewhere, the “Sacred Teaching” introduces the Yoga Sutra’s discussion of the postures by prescribing a set of purifying mantras unique to Pashupata traditions. Certain elements of its account of the supernatural powers of the yogi draw on Shaiva and Tantric traditions unknown to either Patanjali or Vyasa. One of these, the fantasy of every seminary student, is the power of fully knowing the sacred scriptures without having to read them first: this is not found in the Yoga Sutra, but is commonly listed in Puranic presentations of the Yoga system. Most interesting is its innovative adaptation of Yoga Sutra 3.38, which deals with the ability of a realized yogi to enter into the bodies of other creatures. Unlike the classical commentaries, our Javanese text links this power to the classic form of Tantric initiation in which a Tantric guru fuses his breath channels together with those of his pupil, after which he enters his body to initiate him from within.

In his “India”: Sachau 1983, 191–92; White 1996, 49–50.

the canon of the Yoga Upanishads: Ruff 2012, 97–116.

Alternate readings of “eight-part yoga”: Birch 2011, 541n103.

While Haribhadra presents several alternate systems of yoga: Chapple and Casey 2003, 15.

we see Haribhadra consciously adapting Patanjali’s: Chapple and Casey 2003, 26–38.

Hemachandra follows Haribhadra: Qvarnström 2003, 9; Chapple and Casey 2003, 119.

Hemachandra’s twelfth and final chapter: Qvarnström 2003, 135–35.

many of its concepts and meditative practices: Qvarnström 2003, 181–86.

Abhinavagupta and others from his school: Raghavan 1980, 78–83; Vasudeva 2012, 284–85.

dismiss Patanjali’s eight-part practice: Tantraloka 4.86–94, in Dwivedi and Rastogi 1987, 709–17.

Abhinavagupta quotes the Yoga Sutra: for a list of his quotes from this work, see Maas 2006, 111, under the abbreviation IPVV.

he refers to Patanjali himself as Ananta: Raghavan 1980, 85; Mitra 1883, lxviii.