Asteya

Asteya looks like the easiest yama, since most people are not thieves. The commentarial tradition spent its effort closing that comfortable loophole. Steya, stealing, is defined in Vyasa's commentary as the unauthorized appropriation of things belonging to another, and asteya as the refusal of that appropriation even in the form of desire. The last clause does the work: the yamas restrain thought and word as well as deed, so coveting is already a lapse, and the vow is broken in the mind long before anything is picked up. From there the tradition widens the inventory of what can be stolen. Time can be stolen, by the idle consumption of another's labor.

Credit can be stolen, by claiming work one did not do. Opportunity can be stolen, by hoarding beyond need while others lack, an argument that brings asteya to the edge of aparigraha, the non-possessiveness that follows it in the list. Jain ethics, holding the same vow as the third mahavrata, adds its own refinements: a mendicant may not take even a blade of grass that has not been explicitly given, and adulteration, false weights and dealing in stolen goods are enumerated as lay violations. What began as a prohibition on theft becomes, fully unfolded, a discipline of taking nothing, materially or subtly, that has not been freely offered.

Each yama in the Yoga Sutras carries a fruit, a sign by which its perfection is known, and the one attached to asteya at sutra 2.37 is the strangest in the list: for one established in non-stealing, all jewels present themselves. Commentators ancient and modern have circled the paradox. The plain reading is thaumaturgic, of a piece with the third book's catalogue of powers: the perfected yogin finds wealth arriving unsought, as if the world no longer bothered to guard its valuables against someone who has stopped reaching for them. The ethical reading, preferred by most later teachers, inverts the image.

Grasping is a kind of poverty: the acquisitive mind experiences the whole world as withheld from it, every unowned good a lack. The mind that has genuinely ceased to appropriate experiences the same world as abundant, every good simply present, enjoyable without being possessed. On this reading the jewels were always there; theft was the tax that hid them. A third reading is social. A person known never to take what is not given becomes the person to whom things are entrusted, the treasurer, the arbiter, the keeper of others' valuables, so that non-stealing ends, by reputation, with jewels literally in one's keeping. The sutra is short enough to sustain all three, and the tradition has never forced a choice.