The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali: A Biography

CHAPTER 10

For most of the nineteenth century following Colebrooke’s “discovery” of the Yoga Sutra, Patanjali’s work was, for the most part, instrumentalized by various and sundry philosophers, mystics, and reformers for their own ulterior motives. Hegel appropriated selected portions of Colebrooke’s account of the work to knock together the heads of the brothers Schlegel. Madame Blavatsky and W. Q. Judge promulgated their fuzzy notions of Yoga philosophy mainly for purposes of self-promotion. Swami Vivekananda used his teachings on “Raja Yoga” to raise funds and to serve as a platform for his gospel of Indian exceptionalism and the scientific foundations of ancient Hindu thought. As we have seen, none of these individuals, with the exception of Vivekananda, was capable of reading the Yoga Sutra or its original authoritative commentaries in the original Sanskrit. Yet even with his proficiency in that ancient language, Vivekananda gave little heed to the work’s commentarial tradition in composing his own commentary. Like the Theosophists, he trusted his own powers of intuition and reason to gain an immediate, unmediated understanding of a fourth-century text, relegating the intervening history of Yoga Sutra commentary by some of India’s greatest minds to the dustbin of history.

In sharp distinction to this cavalier approach, critical scholars, both Indian and Western, working in the wake of Colebrooke and the British Orientalists, have taken the text and its commentarial traditions as the principal object of their investigation. For much of the nineteenth century following Colebrooke’s 1823 essay, critical scholarship on the Yoga Sutra was limited to the publication of workable editions of the text and its principal commentaries. These included the Ballantyne–Shastri Deva (1852/1885) and Mitra (1883) editions and translations of the Yoga Sutra with Bhoja’s “Royal Sun” commentary; Ramakrishna Shastri and Keshava Shastri’s poorly edited 1884 edition of the Yoga Sutra with Vijnanabhikshu’s “Explanation of Yoga”; Jibananda Vidyasagara’s 1874 edition with Vachaspati Mishra’s “Expert Guide to the True Principles” (a superior edition of the same was published by Rajaram Shastri Bodas in 1890); Ganganath Jha’s 1894 edition and translation of Vijnanabhikshu’s “Short Statement”; and a handful of other editions of the text and various commentaries.

Shortly after the publication of these various editions, a series of new studies began to appear that gradually fleshed out the bare bones of Colebrooke’s original essay, as scholars sought to hone in on the originality, specificity, and possible sources of Patanjali’s teaching. After Mitra, the most important among these was Friedrich Max Müller’s Six Systems, published in 1899. The scion of a German Romantic family of some renown, Max Müller was an Orientalist in the finest sense of the term, combining careful philological analysis with a rigorous historical and critical approach to the study of religion. Trained in Berlin and Paris, Max Müller gravitated to Oxford University in 1851, where he remained until his death in 1900. His scholarly output was staggering, even if not all of his theories—of a universal “solar mythology,” for example—have stood the test of time. An important pivot between the India of the Romantic imagination and the India of critical scholarship, he continues to be renowned in modern-day India by his sobriquet Moksh Mula, a play on words that etymologizes his name as “Root of Liberation” in Sanskrit and other Indo-Aryan languages.

Max Müller was a pivotal figure for a number of reasons. Like Vivekananda, he was attracted to the Brahmo Samaj, and through it to Ramakrishna, about whom he wrote a book and several essays. Vivekananda noted this in an article, published in 1896 after a visit to Max Müller at Oxford, in which he lauded him as “a Vedantist of Vedantists [who] has … caught the real soul of the melody of the Vedanta … the one light that lightens the sects and creeds of the world, the Vedanta, the one principle of which all religions are only applications.”1 For his part, Max Müller appears to be addressing Vivekananda, the Brahmo Samaj, and other proponents of Neo-Vedanta in the preface to his Six Systems, where he despairs at the disappearance of traditional philosophical instruction in India and cautions against false prophets:

But though we may regret that the ancient method of philosophical study is dying out in India, we should welcome all the more a new class of native students who, after studying the history of European philosophy, have devoted themselves to the honorable task of making their own national philosophy better known to the world at large. I hope that my book may prove useful to them by showing them in what direction they may best assist us in our attempts to secure a place to thinkers such as Kapila and Badarayana by the side of the leading philosophers of Greece, Rome, Germany, France, Italy, and England. In some cases the enthusiasm of native students may seem to have carried them too far, and a mixing up of philosophical with religious and theosophic propaganda, inevitable as it is said to be in India, is always dangerous.²

The overview of Indian philosophy that Max Müller presents in his Six Systems is possessed of a clarity that has eluded many who have followed. His discussions of the various schools, lucid and compelling in and of themselves, are greatly enhanced by his ability to recreate the cultural and philosophical contexts within which the schools developed and interacted. Like the classical commentators, as well as Colebrooke and other critical scholars before him, Max Müller identifies the Yoga Sutra’s eight-part practice and its focus on Ishvara as the principal differentiates between Yoga and Samkhya. He also follows Colebrooke in his tepid appreciation of the specificity of Yoga philosophy with respect to Samkhya, comparing it to the popery of the Catholic Church (like nearly all of his Oxford colleagues, Max Müller was a Protestant):

The real relation of the soul to the body and of the senses to the soul is still as great a mystery to us as it was to the ancient Yogins of India, and their experiences, if only honestly related, deserve certainly the same careful attention as the stigmata of Roman Catholic saints. They may be or they may not be true, but there is no reason why they should be treated as a priori untrue. From this point of view it seems to me that the Yoga-philosophy deserves some attention on the part of philosophers, more particularly of the physical school of psychologists, and I did not feel justified therefore in passing over this system altogether, though it may be quite true that, after we have once understood the position of the Samkhya-philosophy towards the great problem of the world, we shall not glean many new metaphysical or psychological ideas from a study of the Yoga.³

Much of Max Müller’s discussion of the Yoga Sutra is devoted to the question of the nature and identity of Ishvara. As we have already seen, this was clearly a major point of contention among the classical commentators, as evidenced by the fact that they, as a group, devoted more space to this matter than to any other topic in the entire work. In short, their debate revolved around the question of whether the first letter of the word Ishvara was an uppercase or a lowercase i. We have already surveyed a number of opinions, by figures ranging from the anonymous authors of the Puranas to Vedanta theologians like Shankara, Ramanuja, and Vijnanabhikshu to such non-Indian interpreters as Alberuni, Weber, and Monier-Williams. In Patanjali’s work, Ishvara is the subject of six sutras, which indicate that a practitioner may stop the fluctuations of his mind through “commitment to Ishvara.” The same practice is also listed as one of the three components of practical yoga (kriya yoga) and as one of the outer observances (niyamas) of the eight-part practice.

The Sanskrit word I have translated here as “commitment” is pranidhana, which critical scholars have variously read as “dedication,” “profound longing,” “contemplation,” and even “meditation.” In the context of Mahayana Buddhism, the term denotes the “vow” a future bodhisattva takes to save all sentient beings from suffering existence. However, as I have already noted, many commentators and no small number of scholars have preferred to read pranidhana as “devotion,” and to construe Ishvara as a transcendent twenty-sixth principle and one of the gods of the new Hindu theism. In support of this reading, some have noted Vyasa’s interpretation of pranidhana as prasada, a word that commonly means the saving “grace” of an all-powerful creator God. This position appears to have been shared by Vachaspati Mishra, who implies that the practice of Yoga, including devotion to God, leads to release. The modern-day yoga guru Swami Venkatesananda takes matters a step further, translating the term as “surrender,” arguing that it alone is sufficient for the realization of the isolation of Spirit from Matter. In this case, Yoga practice simply becomes an alternate form of Hindu devotion pace the Puranas in which surrendering to God is reciprocated by His grace and the promise of salvation.

However, as Arion Roşu and Olivier Lacombe have notably argued, prasada would have been understood by Patanjali and his contemporaries as “serenity,” or a “state of trans-luminous peace,” and ishvara-pranidhana as “the serenity one acquires through the help of a Master of Yoga.”⁴ Commitment to such a Master would in no way have implied devotion to a deity of any sort. Indeed, in the centuries prior to the Yoga Sutra’s time, the word “ishvara” had never denoted a god, but was rather applied to a human lord or king: this was the meaning adduced by Patanjali the grammarian in his “Great Commentary.” Then, in the centuries around the time of our work, its usage was expanded and came to be employed as an epithet or descriptor of this or that god. Nonetheless, in his commentary on Yoga Sutra 1.25, Vyasa clearly intends ishvara in the earlier sense of the word, identifying Kapila, the legendary founder of Samkhya philosophy, as an exemplary ishvara. Barbara Stoler Miller’s interpretation of this sutra respects that of Vyasa: “the Lord [Master of Yoga] is not a creator god who grants grace; rather, he is a representation of the omniscient spirit as the archetypal yogi.”⁵ In this context, pranidhana means “commitment to the discipline represented by the Lord of Yoga.” This, as Max Müller explained over a hundred years ago, was undoubtedly Patanjali’s understanding of the term:

The Isvara, with the Yogins, was originally no more than one of the many souls, or rather Selves or Purusas, but one that has never been associated or implicated in metempsychosis, supreme in every sense, yet of the same kind as all other Purusas. The idea of other Purusas obtaining union with him could therefore never have entered Patanjali’s head.⁶

Many modern-day scholar-practitioners take issue with this reading, following the leads of Ramanuja, Vijnanabhikshu, and other proponents of a theistic reading of the term. A case in point is Edwin Bryant, who, in his recent splendid commentary on the Yoga Sutra, notes that Vijnanabhikshu considered ishvara-pranidhana to refer to the practice of devotion to Krishna, the Lord of the Bhagavad Gita. Bryant clearly aligns himself with this interpretation of the term, reading ishvara-pranidhana as submission to a personal god and asserting that most yogis over the past two millennia have been associated with devotional sects. It should be noted here that the Bhagavad Gita and other Vaishnava scriptures frequently identified Krishna as the “supreme Purusha” (purushottama) and maintained that He creates, maintains, and destroys the worlds out of his love for His creatures. Furthermore, the Gita also referred to Krishna as a Master of Yoga, a yogeshvara (a compound composed of yoga + ishvara). In it, Krishna’s characterization of the ideal yogi as a person who “sees me in everything and sees everything in me” could be read as a rewording of Patanjali’s ishvara-pranidhana.

Now, if, as Bryant implies, Patanjali was a practitioner of Yoga and a devotee of a personal god like Krishna, he may well have been thinking of “devotion to God” when he employed the term ishvara-pranidhana. This being said, we cannot know whether or to what extent Patanjali or Vyasa were aware of the Bhagavad Gita and its doctrines. While our best evidence indicates that the Yoga Sutra was compiled at about the same time as the Bhagavad Gita, neither work makes any explicit reference to the other. Of course, both likely drew on oral traditions that circulated, perhaps in the same circles, for some time (decades? centuries?) before they were committed to writing, and it was precisely in the first centuries of the Common Era that oral traditions began to be committed to writing in South Asia. In the Mahabharata’s twelfth book, which was likely compiled within a century or two of both of these works, we encounter the term ishvara yet again, but this time in the plural. Here, ishvaras are yogis who, by virtue of their power of yoga are “masters” capable of simultaneously entering into the bodies of multiple creatures—gods, sages, and great beings—in much the same way as the Master of Yoga Krishna is seen doing in the Bhagavad Gita. Centuries later, the Linga Purana and several Tantric works would elevate such Masters of Yoga to the level of deities able to function as savior figures to their disciples, through initiation and teaching. Subverting all of these interpretations, however, is the reading suggested by Arthur Berriedale Keith, who argued that Patanjali’s definition of Ishvara as “the one in which the seed of omniscience reaches the highest degree”⁷ was a direct reference to concepts found in Mahayana and Yogacara Buddhism! In the light of these conflicting interpretations, it is unlikely that there will ever be a final word on what Patanjali meant by ishvara-pranidhana.