Schools of modern yoga, among them Iyengar Yoga and Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga, honour Patañjali with invocations and shrines, and teacher trainings set his Yoga Sūtras as required reading. Of the text's 195 sūtras, three concern posture, and the first of them asks only that a posture be steady and comfortable. Most of the rest is about the mind. The second sūtra defines yoga as the stilling of the mind's fluctuations; the third says what remains when they are stilled: the one who sees rests in its own nature.
Patañjali did not invent yoga; the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes him as gathering existing traditions into the text that became their standard. His work stands between two neighbours. From Sāṃkhya, the school that divides the conscious self from active, unconscious nature, the sūtras take their picture of what a person is. The fourth chapter replies to Buddhist thinkers, arguing against the view that an object exists only within a single mind. Philipp Maas, an Indologist, reads that passage as a reply to the idealism of Vasubandhu and therefore places the work in the late fourth or early fifth century. Most scholars, according to Edwin Bryant, a scholar of yoga, date the text earlier, to the first or second century CE. The years on this page follow Maas and are an estimate; nothing about the author's life is on record.
Who he was is disputed. A Patañjali of the second century BCE wrote the Mahābhāṣya, the great commentary on Pāṇini's grammar of Sanskrit, and from the eleventh century, beginning with the commentary of King Bhoja, tradition has treated the two as one man. No known text before Bhoja does so. The scholar Louis Renou showed significant differences of language, grammar and vocabulary between the two works. Most scholars now treat the authors as two people, though James Haughton Woods and Surendranath Dasgupta argued that one author remained possible. The tradition also honours Patañjali as an incarnation of Ādiśeṣa, the serpent on whom Vishnu rests, and praises him in a verse as the sage who cleansed the mind by yoga, speech by grammar and the body by medicine.
For most of their history the sūtras were read through the commentary ascribed to the legendary sage Vyāsa, which, in Maas's argument, was composed together with them as a single book. In the early eleventh century the scholar al-Bīrūnī translated the work into Arabic. According to David Gordon White, a historian of religion, the text then fell into relative obscurity for nearly seven hundred years, until Swami Vivekananda built his Raja Yoga of 1896 around a translation of it.
The method is a path of eight limbs: restraints in conduct and daily observances, posture, breath control, withdrawal of the senses, concentration, meditation and absorption, samādhi. The sūtras name the afflictions that keep the mind's fluctuations going, ignorance first among them. Unlike the Sāṃkhya verses, they name a God, a special self untouched by affliction or action, the teacher even of the ancient teachers, and devotion to him is one of several routes to absorption. The goal is kaivalya, "isolation": the conscious self standing apart from the nature it had taken for itself.