Patanjali

The Yoga Sutras is about 195 aphorisms in four short chapters, and it is famously terse: sutras are memorisation aids and were never meant to be read without a teacher or a commentary. The second one states the whole aim: yoga is the stilling of the movements of the mind. When those movements stop, the third adds, the seer rests in its own nature.

The metaphysics behind it is broadly that of Samkhya, with a fundamental division between purusha, consciousness, and prakriti, everything else including thought and personality. Suffering arises from mistaking one for the other, and liberation, kaivalya, is the disentangling. The path is set out in eight limbs: restraints, observances, seat, breath regulation, withdrawal of the senses, concentration, meditative absorption and samadhi, with the third chapter cataloguing the extraordinary powers that arise along the way and warning that they are obstacles.

One point is worth stating plainly because the modern association is so strong. This is not a text about physical postures. Asana means seat, it gets three aphorisms, and what they require is that the position be steady and comfortable so that it stops being a distraction. The sequences of postures that the word yoga now denotes in most of the world are a later and largely modern development, and they cannot be found in this book.

Two things about Patanjali are usually stated with more confidence than the evidence permits.

The first is his identity. A grammarian called Patanjali wrote a major commentary on Panini, probably in the second century BCE, and Indian tradition has often held the two to be one man, sometimes adding a medical treatise to make him the author of works purifying speech, mind and body. The philosophical text is normally dated considerably later, somewhere between the second and fourth centuries CE, on the basis of what it engages with, which makes the identification difficult. There is also a live question about whether the Sutras are the work of a single author at all, since the third and fourth chapters sit somewhat oddly against the first two, and some scholars treat the text as a compilation from existing material by an editor who supplied its frame.

The second is its standing. It is natural to assume that a text this central to the modern idea of yoga was always central in India, and recent scholarship has argued that it was not. It attracted commentaries and then, for a long stretch of the medieval and early modern period, comparatively little attention, with other yoga literature more widely used. Its present authority owes a great deal to the nineteenth and twentieth century revival, and particularly to Vivekananda, whose Raja Yoga of 1896 presented it to a Western audience as the definitive statement of yoga philosophy.