The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali: A Biography

CHAPTER 13

According to popular Jewish lore, two Jews will produce at least three opinions on any given subject. So it also is with scholars with respect to the Yoga Sutra. Does kaivalyam (“isolation”), the goal of Yoga practice, mean that the practitioner dies to the world? For Yohanan Grinshpon, the answer is yes: “Yoga requires that the person disintegrate…. It is the absolute, unfathomable end, the end of ends.”¹ For Chris Chapple and Ian Whicher, the answer is no: Yoga entails enlightened engagement with the world; while Shyam Ranganathan goes so far as to say that the Yoga Sutra is a work of moral philosophy, guiding men to become morally perfect in the world. Is the Yoga Sutra an incoherent patchwork of prior Yoga traditions stitched together by Patanjali, or is it a single, homogeneous compilation? Whereas several scholars have argued that the Yoga Sutra was patched together from no fewer than five or six separate texts, Georg Feuerstein has cogently demonstrated that it was a unified discourse on “meditation practice” (kriya yoga) with a long quote on the eight-part practice inserted into its second and third chapters. Was there ever a Yoga philosophy that existed independent of Samkhya? While Feuerstein as argued vigorously in support of this hypothesis, the general scholarly consensus since Colebrooke has been that Yoga philosophy is nothing more than “Samkhya with Ishvara.”

Of late, some of the greatest scholarly controversy has whirled around the identities of Patanjali and Vyasa. In chapter 1, we saw Edwin Bryant echoing what most critical scholars have assumed for nearly two centuries—that since the fourth century, all of Patanjali’s readers have read the Yoga Sutra through the lens of Vyasa’s “Commentary.” Many, including Bryant, have maintained that the Yoga Sutra was learned and transmitted through rote recitation, after the fashion of Krishnamacharya and his followers. Challenging both of these assumptions is the claim, made by a number of scholars since the early twentieth century, but most recently articulated with the greatest clarity by Philipp André Maas, that (1) there never was a Vyasa, only a Patanjali; (2) the sutras together with the “Commentary” formed a single, unified work; and (3) the name of that work was not Yoga Sutra, but rather Yoga Shastra (the “Teaching on Yoga”).

Until 1929, all critical scholars had identified Patanjali’s work as the Yoga Sutra and assumed that Vyasa, its earliest commentator, was a near contemporary of Patanjali—a student perhaps—who composed a skeleton key to his master’s work in order to make it more comprehensible to all. Like Patanjali, Vyasa’s is a name that has been attributed either to several historical figures or to a single individual who lived for thousands of years. According to Hindu tradition, Vyasa—whose name means the “Editor” or “Divider”—divided the original revealed Veda into the four great works of the Vedic canon: the Rig Veda, Yajur Veda, Sama Veda, and Atharva Veda (for this reason, he is also referred to as “Veda-Vyasa”). Some time later—a day? a year? a millennium? ten thousand years?—he composed the Mahabharata epic, writing himself into the plot as the progenitor of both of the warring family lines in that epic’s cataclysmic battle. Finally, midway through the fourth century, Vyasa redacted the “Commentary” on the Yoga Sutra. But was there a historical figure behind this name and the legend that went with it? Seeking to separate this historical Vyasa from the mythic “Divider” of the Vedas and the Mahabharata, a number of critical scholars have argued that the “Editor” of the Yoga Sutra may have been a certain Vindhyavasin, a renowned Samkhya philosopher from the fourth or fifth century.

However, some have suggested that this is not the only possible scenario. Given that Vyasa’s name simply means the “Editor,” they argue, Vyasa may simply have been a title attributed to Patanjali by none other than himself. In other words, Vyasa could have simply been a nom de plume Patanjali adopted for the purpose of writing what is known as an “auto-commentary” on his collected aphorisms. This raises another problem, however, because Patanjali-Vyasa’s interpretations of several sutras (including the sutras on Ishvara) clearly contradict the patent meaning of the sutras themselves. In response to this, Johannes Bronkhorst suggested in 1985 that one could have it both ways by simply revising one’s view of Patanjali’s role in the composition of the Yoga Sutra. This hypothesis, which has been gaining ground among critical scholars, maintains that our author “brought the Yoga Sutra together, perhaps from different sources, and wrote a commentary which in some cases demonstrably deviated from the original intention of the sutras.”² In other words, Patanjali was more a compiler-commentator than the founder of a distinct philosophical school, and more of a theoretician than a person having any practical yogic experience.

But this is not all. Already in 1931, Hermann Jacobi had noted that a significant number of early and important Indian scholars and commentators had identified Patanjali as the author of a work entitled the Yoga Shastra. Maas expands on this insight by observing that relatively few Yoga Sutra manuscripts simply consist of Patanjali’s 195 stand-alone aphorisms sans Vyasa’s commentary. Far more often, the aphorisms appear embedded in the text of the original commentary, with nearly all carrying the following notation in their colophon: “This has been Patanjali’s authoritative ‘Teaching on Yoga’ (Yoga Shastra), an exposition of Samkhya (samkhya-pravachana).” Virtually no manuscript colophons ever mention a distinct “Commentary” (Bhashya) or commentator (Vyasa). In other words, most Yoga Sutra manuscripts are Yoga Shastra manuscripts, which means that for the past two hundred years at least, people have been calling this text by the wrong name.

Maas has traced outside references to the Yoga Shastra to as far back as 650 CE. He has also found that prior to Madhava’s 1340 CE “Compendium,” no Indian work had ever evoked Patanjali and Vyasa as separate authors of a root text (called the Yoga Sutra) and a separate “Commentary.” Maas then carries his argument one step further, challenging the notion that the medieval sources had ever viewed Yoga philosophy as distinct from Samkhya philosophy. Prior to the sixteenth century, he argues, the school to which the Yoga Shastra was assigned was never called Yoga, but rather Samkhya-Yoga. At the very most, Yoga was considered to be a subschool of Samkhya, known since the twelfth century, as we have seen, as “Samkhya with Ishvara.” Therefore, the very idea that one could read, recite, or memorize the Yoga Shastra’s 195 aphorisms independent of the roughly 1,100 stanzas of Samkhya philosophy in which they are embedded, is simply misguided.

The divergences that Bronkhorst noted, between the expressed meanings of a dozen sutras and their explanation in the accompanying commentary, open the way to another theory on the relationship between Patanjali and Vyasa. Here I am speaking of a fact I alluded to in chapter 1. To wit, that the language of the sutras is often closer to what has been termed “Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit” than to the classical Sanskrit that was the norm in Hindu scripture and commentary. With this, we must acknowledge the presence of a twelve-thousand-pound elephant in the room, the room being the Yoga Sutra and the elephant Buddhist philosophy, which dominated the Indian philosophical arena throughout the first five hundred years of the Common Era. The Buddhists of the period were quick to contest viewpoints that conflicted with their own, yet they are nearly entirely silent with regard to the Yoga Sutra. Why would this have been the case? Why would the Buddhist heavyweights not have attacked Patanjali’s work?

A possible explanation is that the Buddhists found the sutras to be commensurate with their doctrines—that is, they considered the Yoga Sutra to be a Buddhist work. Since scholars began debating this possibility in 1900, momentum has been building in support of this hypothesis. A very exciting recent development is a tract on the yogic path to liberation recently brought to light by Dominik Wujastyk. Embedded in the Charaka Samhita, this passage likely predates the Yoga Sutra by at least a hundred years. Most interesting, as Wujastyk notes, the Yoga system propounded in this teaching “has closer links to Vaisesika philosophy than to the Samkhya of Patanjali’s system,” and is to be placed “squarely within the tradition of Buddhist mindfulness meditation.”³

An alternative hypothesis, which Dasgupta first voiced in 1922, maintains that the Yoga Sutra’s entire fourth chapter is a late addition, appended precisely in order to “secur[e] the strength of the Yoga [system] from the supposed attacks of Buddhist metaphysics.”⁴ In noting Dasgupta’s position, Gerald James Larson raises another issue, which brings us back to the question of the relationship of the author of the Yoga Sutra to that of its original commentary. As Larson puts it,

my puzzlement has to do with the opposite problem, that is, how this terminology that is common to the Y[oga] S[utra] and Buddhist Abhidharma relates to the old Samkhya philosophy. What is striking is that all of these common terms used in the Y[oga] S[utra] and Buddhist textual environments are totally absent in Samkhya textual environments.⁵

At about the same time as Larson was expressing his puzzlement, Mikel Burley was offering a possible solution to it. Following a careful reading of the sutras of Patanjali’s fourth chapter, Burley concluded that it was not Patanjali who was taking issue with Buddhist positions but rather Vyasa and his later subcommentators. Here we see Burley driving Patanjali and Vyasa apart, in much the same way as Bronkhorst had done in his 1985 study when he noted divergences between the intended meanings of a dozen sutras and their accompanying commentary. On the basis of these data, one can only conclude that the author of the Yoga Sutra and its “Commentary” could not have been one and the same person.

Of course, this flies in the face of Maas’s demonstration that Vyasa never existed, and that Patanjali composed a work titled the Yoga Shastra, which comprised both the “Yoga Sutra” and an auto-commentary. Maas is one of the two current Yoga Sutra specialists most capable of thinking out of the box: the other is Michel Angot, who presents his counterhypothesis in the strongest of terms. Briefly stated, Angot has theorized that the first three chapters of the Yoga Sutra were a “Buddhist” work written by Patanjali, perhaps no later than the first century of the Common Era; but that the work’s final chapter was written in its entirety by a Hindu named Vyasa, perhaps as late as the sixth or seventh century. (Although Angot does not mention it, this might also explain why the Arabic and Old Javanese versions omit the Yoga Sutra’s fourth chapter.) Angot begins with the language of the Yoga Sutra aphorisms, noting that “the work becomes quite coherent if one works from the meaning that certain words have in ‘[Buddhist] Hybrid Sanskrit,’ but not in classical Sanskrit.”⁶ For Angot, Vyasa’s would not even have been the earliest commentary on the Yoga Sutra: it is simply the earliest surviving commentary.

Why was it [the earlier commentary] replaced? Since we do not have it, we can only offer a set of hypotheses. Vyasa’s commentary has two features that are interesting in this regard: it is overtly hostile toward Buddhism in a time of open war between Brahmins and [Buddhist and Jain] Sramanas … clearly, it is offered to Brahmins and to Brahmins alone. Vyasa speaks of Brahmins as the users and therefore the target audience of the work…. So I can imagine that the original commentary, which would have been more ecumenical, was replaced by a commentary written by a Brahmin for Brahmins, when this latter group, seeing its primacy being challenged by these [Buddhist and Jain] latecomers, counterattacked.7

In other words, Vyasa’s was not so much a commentary as a “translation”—if not a “hostile takeover”—of a fundamentally Buddhistic work into a Hindu, if not orthodox brahmin, idiom. If Patanjali was addressing himself to Yoga connoisseurs in an effort to synthesize distinct but well-founded and legitimate views, Vyasa’s goal was to explain the Yoga Sutra to brahmins who were not necessarily familiar with Yoga.

Patanjali’s references are entirely non-Hindu: in fact, he neglects, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, the entirety of their sacred literature (the Vedas) … Vyasa’s are entirely different: he lived in the sixth, or perhaps the seventh century…. Vyasa’s references come from the Puranas…. In short, between Patanjali and Vyasa, one passes from the end of the Vedic period to that of Hinduism in its brahminical form. Furthermore, Patanjali did not live at “the end of the Vedic period,” but rather at a time in which new spiritual idioms, most notably those of Buddhism and Jainism, were emerging and taking shape. And yoga, which was neither Vedic nor Hindu in its origins, had now forced its way into the Hindu world [through Vyasa’s fourth chapter and “Commentary”].8

There is no way to square the circle between Maas’s and Angot’s positions. Vyasa could not have both been Patanjali’s alias and a person from an entirely different time and religious background. At the same time, if one proceeds from the premises to the conclusions of their respective arguments, both are entirely plausible. In either case, we can be certain of a number of things: that the book you have been reading is the reception history of a work that may or may not be titled the Yoga Sutra; that the author of that work may or may not have been named Patanjali; and that that work may or not have been the subject of an original and separate commentary by a person probably not named Vyasa.

No doubt critical scholars will go on grinding the Yoga Sutra and their own interpretive models down to a powder. They cannot help themselves: Descartes’s principle of methodological skepticism, first articulated in a 1641 work titled Meditations, is part of scholarly DNA. It is nonetheless worth noting that Descartes chose the unusual term “meditation” for the process by means of which the philosopher should eventually come to an introspective understanding of the very grounds for true cognition. In this, his project was uncannily similar to Patanjali’s: the quest for authenticity is to be carried out through introspection.

This message clearly resonated with South Asian populations between the seventh and twelfth centuries, the period in which the Yoga Sutra enjoyed the status of a classic. And now, after a hiatus of nearly a millennium Patanjali’s work has—improbably, miraculously—recovered that status. This being said, Yoga Sutra 2.0 has little in common with the original version. Its readership is no longer restricted to those who know Sanskrit: at the time of this writing (summer 2013), the work has been translated into no fewer than forty-six languages. Its readership is not restricted to an intellectual elite, the persons who debated its teachings in their commentaries, but is rather open to anyone with what is called “a yoga practice.” Furthermore, as we have seen, many in the massive, vibrant yoga subculture have no use for translations or commentaries (to say nothing of the writings of critical scholars), preferring to read—or more properly speaking, recite—Patanjali’s work in the original Sanskrit. Its truth, and by extension the authenticity of their own yoga practice, lies in the simple fact that it exists and that its words are there, recoverable across space and time through the simple act of performance. For many of my friends in the yoga subculture, this is a source of solace and inspiration.

In the course of the three years during which I have been working on this book, a new development, perhaps the most significant development in the modern history of Yoga, has been taking shape—in India. There, a charismatic homespun yoga guru named Yog Rishi Swami Ramdev has been transforming a north Indian yoga center featuring large-scale “yoga camps” into a populist political movement. Called the “Patanjali Yoga Shrine and Heavenly Yoga Temple,” the center’s website contains links to sister organizations in Britain and the United States, to a Patanjali Research Park, a Patanjali Food and Herbal Park, and so forth, and to videos of Ramdev’s many Hindi-language sermons on the Yoga Sutra. Millions of his followers also follow his sermons and yoga demonstrations on television, both in India and abroad (including in Los Angeles, where I live).

Over the past three years, Ramdev has often journeyed—with the backing, it is rumored, of various Hindu nationalist organizations—to Delhi where he has organized massive anticorruption rallies and undertaken highly publicized hunger strikes to reform India’s political system. He explains his newfound transition, from the yogic body to the body politic, in the clearest of terms: “We clean up our bodies … Then we will clean up our democracy!”⁹ At long last, the Yoga Sutra has been returned to its north Indian homeland, and this time the revolution is being televised.

For Yohanan Grinshpon: Grinshpon 2002, 1.

For Chris Chapple and Ian Whicher: Bryant 2009, 176; Ranganathan 2009, 62–63.

Whereas several scholars have argued: Larson and Bhattacharya 2008, 62–65; Feuerstein 1979, 36–89.

Feuerstein has argued vigorously: Feuerstein 1980, ix–x. Whicher (1998) and Chapple (2008), who, like Feuerstein, are scholar-practitioners, also adhere to this hypothesis.

Many, including Bryant: Bryant 2009, xxxiii; Chapple 2008, 219; Sarbacker 2005, 103.

Seeking to separate this historical Vyasa: Larson and Bhattacharya 2008, 39–41.

This hypothesis, which has been gaining ground: Bronkhorst 1985, 203.

Already in 1931: Maas 2006, xii–xix; Maas 2011, 4–10; Jacobi 1931, 81–89.

“This has been Patanjali’s authoritative: Maas 2011, 5.

Maas has traced: Maas 2011, 4–9; Bronkhorst 1981, 315–17.

debunking the notion: However, Apararka (ca. 1125–1150) calls Patanjali’s system “Yoga” and distinguishes it from Samkhya proper by calling it seshvara-samkhya: Apte 1903, 11. Cf. Bronkhorst 1981, 315.

which dominated the Indian philosophical arena: Franco et al. 2009, 8.