Central Text, Then Eclipsed, Then Revived

The later history of the Yoga Sutras is more surprising than its content. Authoritative in the first millennium, the text then fell into relative neglect for centuries within India, overtaken by the very different body-centred practices of Hatha and Tantric yoga, and by the medieval period it was little studied. Its return to prominence as "the" classical yoga text is substantially a modern development: it was taken up by Swami Vivekananda and other reformers around 1900, and by the twentieth-century teachers who created modern postural yoga, in a revival documented by scholars such as David Gordon White and Mark Singleton. A crucial and often-missed point follows from this: the asana (posture) of Patanjali means simply a stable seat for meditation, and the elaborate system of physical postures now called "yoga" worldwide is largely a twentieth-century creation that reads its own practice back into the ancient aphorisms.