Esoteric Texts
The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali
Also Known As Yoga Sutras · Patanjali Yoga Sutras · Yoga Sutras of Patanjali Short form. The atlas files this entry under a longer name and readers reach for the shorter one.
Vedantic and Yogic Texts
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The classical text of Yoga philosophy, a set of one hundred ninety six terse aphorisms defining yoga as the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind and laying out the eightfold path of practice. It systematizes meditation, ethical restraints, posture, breath control, and the stages of absorption leading to liberation. It remains the authoritative source for the philosophical school of Yoga.
Facts
Disputed
How Its Legacy Is ContestedWhether the received text is the work of a single author or a later compilation of separate sources is an open question among scholars. 1 Some scholars, most notably Philipp Maas, argue from shifts in terminology and structure that the received text is a compilation stitched together from at least two originally separate treatises by a later redactor rather than a single sustained composition, while other scholars continue to defend single authorship and read the apparent breaks as changes of subject rather than seams between sources. No manuscript evidence from before the surrounding commentarial tradition survives to settle the question either way. Structure
StructureOne hundred and ninety-five (or ninety-six) 1 StructureSutras in four chapters: samadhi, sadhana, vibhuti and kaivalya 1 Transmission
Manuscript TraditionSurvives embedded in an unbroken chain of Sanskrit commentary beginning with Vyasa's Yogabhashya, and no manuscript of the bare sutras without a commentary attached has come down independently, so the base text is known today only through the commentarial tradition that carried it forward. 1 Origins
Era of Composition Attributed Author / Compiler Text
Literary Form Scholarship and Forensics
Scholarly NoteIts terse, aphoristic verses were never meant to stand alone, and nearly all traditional and modern understanding of the text depends on the commentary tradition built up around it rather than the sutras by themselves. 1 Learn More
Patanjali, and the Eight Limbs
The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali are the classical text of the Yoga school of Hindu philosophy: a set of about 196 terse aphorisms (sutras) in four chapters that define yoga as citta-vritti-nirodha, "the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind," and lay out the means to it. Its best-known scheme is the eight limbs (ashtanga): the ethical restraints (yama) and observances (niyama), posture (asana), breath-control (pranayama), withdrawal of the senses (pratyahara), concentration (dharana), meditation (dhyana) and absorption (samadhi).
The text is generally dated to around the early centuries CE (commonly the second to fourth), and it systematises meditative practice within a dualist metaphysics, the Samkhya distinction of consciousness (purusha) from matter (prakriti), so that liberation is the disentangling of the seeing self from the mental and material processes it mistakes for itself.
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.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Attests
Named the fifth and final of the five kleshas at Yoga Sutra 2.9.
Asmita, Vices Named the second of the five kleshas at Yoga Sutra 2.6.
Named the first and root of the five kleshas at Yoga Sutra 2.3 and 2.4, the misidentification the other four (asmita, raga, dvesha, abhinivesha) are said to grow from; a related but distinct use of the same term from the Advaita Vedanta account of avidya as Shankara's superimposition, given as a link rather than a restatement or a duplicate of it.
Named the fourth of the five kleshas at Yoga Sutra 2.8.
Named the third of the five kleshas at Yoga Sutra 2.7.
Attributed To
Why this is disputed. Tradition ascribes the Yoga Sutras to a sage named Patanjali, and some later Indian tradition further identifies him with the grammarian Patanjali who wrote the Mahabhashya centuries earlier, treating the two as one long lived or divinely continuous author. Modern scholarship on the text's date and composition is divided: some treat it as the work of a single compiler working from older material, others read it as an anthology assembled in stages, and the identification with the grammarian is widely doubted for want of any independent evidence connecting the two names beyond their shared name.
Originates in Language
Related To
The Yoga Sutras, the raja yoga the Pradipika presents hatha as the ladder to.
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