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WorkPatañjali

Yoga Sūtras

The classical handbook of yoga: 195 aphorisms on stilling the mind, from posture and breath to the self's final freedom.

by Patañjali195 passages held

  • Sanskrit, the original language
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Original title
Yogasūtra
Original language
Sanskrit

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Overview

In the early eleventh century the scholar and historian al-Bīrūnī translated this text into Arabic, and a manuscript of his version was found in Istanbul in the 1920s. What he translated is the classical statement of yoga: 195 sūtras, terse aphorisms meant to be memorised and explained by a teacher, in four chapters, ascribed to Patañjali. The text here gives the sūtras alone, with their traditional numbers. The second sūtra defines yoga as the stilling of the mind's fluctuations, and the third says what remains when they are stilled: the one who sees rests in its own nature. The sūtras then sort those fluctuations into kinds, name the afflictions that keep them going, with ignorance first among them, and lay out a path of eight limbs. It runs from restraints in conduct and daily observances through posture, breath control, withdrawal of the senses and concentration to meditation and absorption, samādhi. The goal is kaivalya, "isolation": the conscious self standing apart from the nature it had mistaken for itself, a picture the Yoga school shares with Sāṃkhya. Unlike the classic Sāṃkhya text, Īśvarakṛṣṇa's Sāṃkhyakārikā, the sūtras name a God — a special self untouched by affliction or action, the teacher even of the ancient teachers — and devotion to him is one route to absorption. They also argue against the view that an object exists only within a single mind, which Philipp Maas, an Indologist, reads as a reply to the Buddhist idealism of Vasubandhu. On that ground Maas places the work in the late fourth or early fifth century, and argues that the sūtras and the commentary handed down with them, ascribed to the legendary sage Vyāsa, were composed together as one book. Other scholars date the sūtras earlier, many to the first centuries CE. Tradition identifies Patañjali with the grammarian of the same name, of the second century BCE, an identification that most scholars now doubt and some still defend. According to David Gordon White, a historian of religion, the text later fell into relative obscurity for nearly seven hundred years, until Swami Vivekananda built his Raja Yoga of 1896 around a translation of it.

Key concepts

What are the mind's fluctuations, the vṛttis?

The vṛttis are the movements of the mind, the forms it keeps taking. The sūtras count five: correct knowledge, error, imagination built on mere words, sleep and memory. Some are painful and some are not, but all of them cover the one who sees, and yoga is the stilling of every one.

What are the kleśas, the afflictions?

The kleśas are five deep-seated causes of suffering: ignorance, the feeling 'I am' that confuses the seer with the mind, attachment to pleasure, aversion to pain, and clinging to life, which the sūtras say holds even the wise. Ignorance is the soil the other four grow in, so weakening it weakens them all.

What are the eight limbs of yoga?

They are the eight stages of the path: restraints toward others (non-violence, truthfulness, not stealing, chastity, not grasping); personal observances (purity, contentment, austerity, study, devotion to God); posture; breath control; withdrawal of the senses from their objects; concentration; meditation; and absorption. The first five prepare, the last three are one practice in three depths.

What is samādhi?

Samādhi, absorption, is meditation so complete that only the object shines in the mind and the mind seems empty of its own form. The sūtras distinguish absorption that still has content, accompanied by reasoning, reflection, joy or the sense of 'I am', from a further absorption in which only latent impressions remain.

What is kaivalya, the goal of the Yogasūtra?

Kaivalya means 'isolation' or aloneness: the conscious self, the seer, standing apart from nature and its three qualities, which have nothing left to do for it and fold back into their source. The last sūtra calls it the power of awareness established in its own nature, no longer mistaking the mind's movements for itself.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Stilling the Mind

The mind never stops moving, and every movement colours what we take ourselves to be. The sūtras ask what is left when the movement ends, and how anyone gets there.

Yoga is defined in a single line as the stilling of the mind's fluctuations, and Patañjali means all of them: correct knowledge as well as error, imagination, sleep and memory. Two forces do the work together, practice and letting go, and practice holds firm only when kept up over a long time, without breaks and with devotion. The obstacles are ordinary, sickness, doubt, laziness, and so are some remedies: friendliness, compassion, gladness and calm toward others steady the mind.

  • mind
  • meditation
  • concentration
  • attention
  • mental activity
  • mental discipline
  • cognition
  • memory
  • perception
  • consciousness
  • effort
  • yoga practice
  • latent impressions

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The Eight Limbs

Stilling the mind sounds like an inward task, yet the path begins with how a person treats others and how they sit. The sūtras ask why conduct and body come before meditation.

Behind the mind's restlessness lie five afflictions: ignorance, the sense of 'I am', attachment, aversion and clinging to life, and ignorance feeds the rest. Against them Patañjali sets a path of eight limbs: restraints such as non-violence and truthfulness, observances such as contentment and study, posture, breath control, withdrawal of the senses, concentration, meditation and absorption. Kept without exception, the restraints become a 'great vow', and the aim is practical throughout: pain that has not yet come can still be avoided.

  • afflictions
  • ignorance
  • ethical discipline
  • discipline
  • posture
  • pranayama
  • breath
  • senses
  • austerity
  • suffering
  • body
  • karma
  • spiritual practice
  • self-knowledge

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Powers, God and Final Freedom

Deep absorption is said to bring extraordinary powers, and the sūtras list them at length. They then ask whether such powers help at all, and what freedom finally is.

Concentration, meditation and absorption practised on one object together yield knowledge and powers of many kinds, and Patañjali treats them as distractions for anyone seeking absorption. God, a special self untouched by affliction and named by the syllable Om, offers another route through devotion. The last chapter defends the reality of objects against the view that they exist only in one mind, and argues that the mind, being itself seen, cannot be the seer. Freedom, kaivalya, is the seer standing in its own nature.

  • samadhi
  • siddhis
  • supernatural powers
  • liberation
  • devotion
  • seer and seen
  • discriminative knowledge
  • discrimination
  • self
  • knowledge
  • epistemology
  • gunas
  • nature
  • change
  • transformation
  • time
  • rebirth

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Within this work

passages held
195
distinct concepts
206
by passages held, corpus-wide
#360

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “meditation” and “mind”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 24 pairings. 83 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
meditationmind9
meditationsamadhi9
knowledgemeditation6
meditationyoga6
mindperception6
consciousnessmeditation5
consciousnessmind5
knowledgeperception4
liberationmind4
meditationperception4
liberationmeditation3
consciousnessliberation2
consciousnessperception2
consciousnesssamadhi2
consciousnessyoga2
knowledgeliberation2
knowledgemind2
liberationsamadhi2
consciousnessknowledge1
knowledgesamadhi1
liberationyoga1
mindsamadhi1
mindyoga1
perceptionsamadhi1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. Yoga Sūtras (Yogasūtra) you are here SA
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