XII · Patanjali: The Yoga Sutras

I read Patañjali (पतञ्जलि) through Pāṇini (पाणिनि). The purification of speech and the purification of mind are intimately connected, and the ways and means by which Panini built his grammar are, I believe, the very ground of Patanjali’s work. Yoga is concerned with the mind; Vyākaraṇa, the Mahābhāṣya, is concerned with speech; and there is an old invocation, which may descend from Bhartṛhari or from Bhojadeva, that bows to Patanjali as the one who purifies mind, body, and speech together. This is why those who, in the last hundred years, have taken the Yoga Sutras for a manual of physical culture have made a plain error. Physical culture belongs to the Charaka Saṃhitā and to Ayurveda, to the longevity of the body; the Yoga Sutras are about the removal of ignorance, the obtaining of Ātma Jñān, the knowledge of the Self, and liberation from the suffering of the world.

Before going further I set aside an assumption we carry, especially in the post-Enlightenment West: that we began as ignorant primitives and climbed, slowly, to the pinnacle of culture we imagine ourselves to occupy. The traditional culture of India reads the ages of man almost the other way, as a descent from an original fullness down to the present Kali Yuga, the lowest state. I do not offer this to convince you of it, but as an observation that changes how we see the grammarians. It is not that Panini composed a text, Patanjali refined it, Bhartṛhari built a philosophy upon it, and Abhinavagupta perfected it. As my tradition informs me, Panini did not need to compose a self-commentary on the Aṣṭādhyāyī (अष्टाध्यायी), nor to explain the Māheśvara Sūtras (माहेश्वर सूत्र) in the detail later commentators would, because in his time it was assumed that everyone understood; the knowledge he gave was common a couple of thousand years before him. As the ages turn and knowledge weakens, more and more commentary is required to carry it into the circumstances of the day. The commentary does not enlarge the knowledge. It marks its decrease.

And I want to resist the monoliths. We speak of Indian thought, Indian philosophy, Indian religion as though each were a single great structure, and Ādi Śaṅkara is held up to represent the whole of traditional culture; yet Śaṅkara represents a particular and elite thinking, the social order of the Brahmins, not the breadth of India. What is fascinating to me about Indian culture is exactly its diversity, for the reality of the tradition is that it is local: local to the family, to the relationship of guru and disciple, to the sect and the sampradāya. The authority on almost any matter is not a scripture and not a text but a person, the guru, the lineage, the house of the lineage. That is the true authority of the tradition.

This bears directly on Patanjali. He is accepted across India as the great authority, whether the subject is speech or yoga, and yet the classical commentators, Vyāsa, Śaṅkara, Madhvācārya, were themselves in long debate over him: was he a follower of Sāṅkhya, holding spirit and matter as two ultimate things, or an Advaitin, a non-dualist for whom the apparent world is illusion? The question was never settled. So when we pick up a translation of the Yoga Sutras and hear an interpretation from this or that school, we must ask how an interpretation is to be arrived at honestly, when the greatest commentators of a thousand and fifteen hundred years ago could not agree, and when so many modern translators do not even command Sanskrit. I read Patanjali instead through the jargon of my own oral tradition, in which the sutras were never dead on a page; my gurus would pull them from the sky in the middle of a conversation, with their commentary already attached, and only over the years did I come to see how much of it descended from the Yoga Sutra itself.

With the ground laid, I take up the architecture of the Yoga Sutras themselves. Patanjali, who worshipped Panini and his sutras, who said that to save even half of a short vowel is worth the birth of a son, composes with the same brevity, a hundred and ninety-five sutras shorter than our English sentences. He builds the work in four parts. The Samādhipāda sets the stage and brings forward its main character, citta, and the movement of citta, the cittavṛtti. The Sādhanāpāda takes up practice. The Vibhūtipāda shows the powers and potentials that the application of sacred speech makes possible. And the Kaivalya brings it to its close, where the seer no longer identifies with what is seen but with the act of awareness itself. Consider these as a story paradigm and Act II is the act of conflict, and the conflict has a name, the kleśas, the hindrances. I should say at once that citta is not the mind, as it is so often translated. As I have always understood it, citta is consciousness, and the famous opening, yogaha cittavṛtti nirodha, is not four words but two: yoga, and a single compound of cittavṛtti and nirodha.

Everything turns on what we make of vṛtti. The modern yoga schools give it a dark color, as though the vṛtti were the obstruction, the monkey mind to be stilled and gotten rid of. I read it the other way. Vṛtti is not negative and it is no obstruction; the very commentaries on Patanjali are themselves called vṛttis and vārtikas, for a vṛtti is a compounding, an unfolding, an explaining, and it is through the vṛttis that the world is made. Patanjali is not moralizing, not telling us the vṛttis are bad. He is showing that they are the keys, that the flow of awareness which runs out into a mistaken attachment to the world can be reversed and carried back to its source. This is what divides the Yoga Sutras from the Mahābhāṣya: in his commentary on grammar Panini describes speech, while here Patanjali makes an application of it. As a programmer of a computer language raises a whole virtual reality on the screen, speech manifested raises the apparent world, the world we perceive and grasp and suffer; and Patanjali begins from that manifested world and breaks it down, so that we may see that we are the ones constructing it, and in that awareness be freed.

He gives two means of working, and they are twins. The first is abhyāsa, practice, and the question is what it is we practice. The second, and to my gurus the greater, is vairāgya, which we render as dispassion though it is more than that: it is the bearing of the ascetic, of the rishi, of Shiva Himself, and its mark is the vibhūti, the ashes, which give the third pāda its name. Ask any of my gurus what the real sādhana of yoga is, the actual physical practice of it, and they will tell you it is vairāgya, it is tapasyā. Into the Samādhipāda Patanjali also brings the word Īśvara. Any Hindi speaker will tell you it means God, and it does, but he uses it in a sense that answers to the metaphysics of the grammar and the phonetics, not to the deity of the marketplace.

In the Sādhanāpāda he sets out the eight limbs, the Aṣṭāṅga, and among them is āsana, which he defines in three words, sthiram sukham āsanam. Nearly every translation tells us that Patanjali is advising us to be comfortable when we take a posture. But for a man who will not spend a syllable he can save, did he need to tell us to sit in comfort? When we come to āsana I read it very differently than posture, closer to non-violence and to non-activity, the āsana of the mouth being my own metaphor for it; I cannot see how it belongs to physical culture at all. The first of the eight limbs, the yama, is the playing field, and Patanjali rests it on two things. The first is satya, truth, and it is not a moral rule, not the boy who confesses to the cherry tree, but a strategic necessity: if you would find the truth of yourself you must operate within a world of truth, for if anything goes, then what you find in the end is that anything goes. The second is ahiṃsā, non-violence, which reaches far past not treading on insects. I call it epistemic violence: to do violence to an episteme, the basic element of knowledge as the phoneme is of articulation, is to change the very thing you were studying, so that whatever truth you then arrive at is no longer the truth of it. These are descriptions, not prescriptions; nothing in Patanjali or Panini tells you what to do.

So I do not offer you another translation. I have my favorites, some I love to read and yet disagree with on nearly every page, and the trouble with almost all of them is that they were made in the last seventy-five years out of the very assumptions we have been examining. Read them, but read them not for their information, rather to watch how a given interpreter presents it; let the translator serve you as a mirror in which to find your own assumptions and your own kleśas, the hindrances in the way of understanding this tradition and, more than that, of understanding who you are. The danger is to take a commentary for satya, for the truth itself, instead of for the lens through which one person saw. The marketplace wants an ideology to house Patanjali in, something to believe; the real debate was never ideological but a debate about interpretation, about how the reading answers to speech and language themselves. That is where I will take you next, into the sutras one at a time.