The Yamas

Patanjali does something unusual immediately after listing the five yamas. Having named nonviolence, truthfulness, non-stealing, continence and non-possessiveness at sutra 2.30, he adds at 2.31 that these restraints, when not conditioned by class, place, time or circumstance, constitute the great vow, the mahavrata. The qualification is the point. Most duty in the classical Indian world was indexed to who you were: a soldier's obligations differed from a priest's, a householder's from a renouncer's, and the lawbooks spent enormous care on those differences.

The yamas cut across all of it. Nobody, in any station, at any time, in any emergency, is released from them. The commentators spell out what this rules out with uncomfortable examples: a fisherman may reason that his violence is confined to fish and is his livelihood, but the great vow admits no such carve-out. This universality is what makes the yamas the foundation of the eight-limbed path rather than merely its first step. The postures, breath control and meditative absorptions that follow are technical accomplishments; the yamas are the moral bedrock beneath them, and the tradition is blunt that technique without restraint produces power without safety. A practitioner who has not stopped harming, lying and grasping is, on Patanjali's account, building on sand.

The list Patanjali gives at sutra 2.30 is not his invention, and the clearest evidence is that Jainism holds the same five vows in almost the same order. The Tattvartha Sutra, the closest thing Jainism has to a universal creed, defines the vow as abstention from violence, falsehood, stealing, unchastity and possession, and Jain mendicants take these five as the mahavratas, the great vows, in full strictness; the laity take gentler forms called anuvratas. The overlap is too exact to be a coincidence. Both lists descend from the shared ascetic culture of ancient India, the world of wandering renouncers from which Buddhism also drew its five precepts, four of which match.

Comparing the traditions shows what each valued. Jainism placed ahimsa so absolutely first that the other four vows are sometimes read as its elaborations: lying, stealing, sexual predation and acquisitiveness are all ways of doing harm. Patanjali keeps the same priority, and his commentators derive the ordering the same way. The divergence is in the fifth member, where Buddhism substitutes abstention from intoxicants for non-possessiveness, a difference that marks Buddhism's middle way against the sharper renunciation the Jain and yogic lists both encode. The five yamas are thus a window into the common inheritance of three religions.