Yoga (darśana)

Yoga, as one of the six classical schools (darśanas) of Indian philosophy, is the system founded on the The Yoga Sūtras attributed to Patañjali (c. 2nd century BCE–5th century CE). It is closely paired with Sāṃkhya, whose metaphysics it largely shares — the dualism of pure consciousness (puruṣa) and active nature (prakṛti) with its three guṇas — but it adds two things: a personal God, Īśvara, and, above all, a detailed practical method for achieving liberation through the discipline of the mind. Its famous definition, “yoga is the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind” (yogaś citta-vṛtti-nirodhaḥ), and its scheme of eight limbs (aṣṭāṅga) — from ethical restraints through posture, breath control and withdrawal of the senses to concentration, meditation and absorption — have become the most widely known parts of Indian philosophy in the world. But classical Yoga is not primarily about the body. It is a philosophy of mind and a path of liberation: when the restless activity of the mind is completely stilled, consciousness, which was never really involved, “abides in its own nature”.

The word “yoga”

Yoga comes from the root yuj, “to yoke, harness, join” — the same root as English yoke and Latin iugum. In the The Ṛg Veda it is used of yoking horses to a chariot. By the time of the Kaṭha Upaniṣad (c. 5th century BCE) it means the harnessing of the senses and mind: “When the five senses, together with the mind, are still, and the intellect does not stir — that, they say, is the highest state. This firm holding of the senses is what they call yoga” (2.3.10–11). The Katha also gives the image of the chariot: the self is the rider, the body the chariot, the intellect the charioteer, the mind the reins, the senses the horses.

The word came to mean any disciplined spiritual practice. The The Bhagavad Gītā speaks of karma-yoga (the discipline of action), jñāna-yoga (of knowledge) and bhakti-yoga (of devotion), and defines yoga as “skill in action” and “evenness of mind”. Buddhists and Jains had their own yogas. The darśana called Yoga is one specific systematisation.

History

Meditative and ascetic practices in India are very old. A famous seal from the Indus Valley civilisation (c. 2500 BCE) shows a figure seated in what looks like a cross-legged posture, sometimes called “proto-Śiva” — though its interpretation is uncertain. The Vedic hymns mention long-haired ecstatic sages (keśins) and austerity (tapas). In the śramaṇa movements of the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, Jains and Buddhists developed sophisticated meditation; the Buddha’s teachers taught formless meditative attainments. The Upaniṣads, the Mahābhārata (whose philosophical chapters often pair “Sāṃkhya and Yoga”) and early Buddhist texts all contain yogic theory.

The Yoga Sūtras gathered this material into a system. Their date is disputed — anywhere from the second century BCE to the fifth century CE — and some scholars think they combine earlier texts. Their oldest commentary, the Yoga Bhāṣya attributed to Vyāsa (c. 5th century), is inseparable from them and may be by the same author; together they are sometimes called the Pātañjala Yogaśāstra. Later commentators include Vācaspati Miśra (9th–10th century), King Bhoja (11th century) and Vijñānabhikṣu (16th century). In the medieval period, haṭha yoga — a different tradition emphasising the body, breath and subtle energies — developed among the Nāth yogis, codified in texts like the Haṭhayogapradīpikā (15th century).

The philosophy of mind

Citta and its fluctuations

The key term is citta, “mind-stuff” or consciousness in the sense of the mental apparatus: the intellect, ego and mind of Sāṃkhya taken together. Citta is material — a product of prakṛti — and constantly changing. Its modifications are vṛttis, “turnings” or “fluctuations”, often compared to ripples on a lake. When the water is disturbed, one cannot see the bottom; when it is still and clear, one can.

The Sūtras (1.5–11) classify the fluctuations into five kinds: valid knowledge (perception, inference, testimony), error, conceptualisation (verbal ideas without real objects), sleep and memory. Notice that even valid knowledge is a fluctuation to be stilled: the goal is not better thoughts but the cessation of the identification with thought itself.

The seer and the seen

Behind the fluctuations is the seer (draṣṭṛ), pure consciousness, puruṣa. Normally the seer identifies with the fluctuations — “I am angry”, “I am thinking” — just as the moon seems to tremble when its reflection in water ripples. “Then the seer abides in its own nature. Otherwise, it conforms to the fluctuations” (1.3–4). The confusion of the seer with the seen is the cause of suffering, and its removal is liberation.

The afflictions

Why is the mind disturbed? Because of the five kleśas, “afflictions” (2.3–9):

1. Avidyā — ignorance: “taking the impermanent, impure, painful and not-self as permanent, pure, pleasant and self”. It is the field in which the other four grow.
2. Asmitā — “I-am-ness”, egoism: identifying the seer with the instrument of seeing.
3. Rāga — attachment, which follows pleasure.
4. Dveṣa — aversion, which follows pain.
5. Abhiniveśa — clinging to life, the fear of death, “present even in the wise”.

The afflictions produce karma, whose impressions (saṃskāras) produce further fluctuations and further births. “All is suffering to the discerning,” the Sūtras say (2.15) — a phrase very close to the Buddha’s — and “the suffering yet to come is to be avoided” (2.16).

Practice and dispassion

The mind is stilled by two means: abhyāsa, steady practice over a long time, and vairāgya, dispassion or non-attachment (1.12). The Gītā gives the same pair (6.35): the mind is restless, hard to control, “but by practice and dispassion it can be held”.

The eight limbs

The second and third chapters of the Sūtras set out the famous eight limbs (aṣṭāṅga), which is why classical Yoga is also called aṣṭāṅga yoga:

1. Yama — five ethical restraints: non-violence (ahiṃsā), truthfulness (satya), non-stealing (asteya), sexual restraint (brahmacarya), non-possessiveness (aparigraha). When they are practised universally, regardless of class, place, time or circumstance, they are the “great vow” (2.31). The list is identical to the five Jain vows.
2. Niyama — five observances: purity (śauca), contentment (santoṣa), austerity (tapas), self-study or recitation (svādhyāya), and devotion to Īśvara (īśvara-praṇidhāna).
3. Āsana — posture: “steady and comfortable” (sthira-sukham āsanam, 2.46). Classical Yoga means a sitting posture for meditation; the elaborate postures of modern yoga come later.
4. Prāṇāyāma — regulation of breath.
5. Pratyāhāra — withdrawal of the senses from their objects, “as a tortoise draws in its limbs”.
6. Dhāraṇā — concentration: binding the mind to one place.
7. Dhyāna — meditation: an unbroken flow of attention toward the object.
8. Samādhi — absorption: when the object alone shines forth, as if empty of the meditator’s own form.

The last three together are called saṃyama, and the third chapter claims that saṃyama on various objects yields supernatural powers (siddhis): knowledge of past and future lives, of other minds, invisibility, the strength of an elephant, the ability to become as small as an atom. The Sūtras warn that these powers are obstacles to liberation (3.37).

Samādhi and liberation

The Sūtras distinguish levels of samādhi. Samprajñāta samādhi, “with cognition”, still has an object — gross, subtle, bliss, or the sense of I-am. Asamprajñāta samādhi, “without cognition”, has no object; only latent impressions remain. The highest is nirbīja samādhi, “seedless”, in which even those impressions are exhausted.

Through it arises discriminative discernment (viveka-khyāti), the unwavering knowledge of the difference between consciousness and nature. Finally comes kaivalya, “isolation”: “Kaivalya is the return of the guṇas to their source, having no more purpose for puruṣa; or it is the power of consciousness established in its own nature” (4.34) — the last sūtra of the text.

Īśvara: the God of yoga

Unlike classical Sāṃkhya, Yoga accepts Īśvara, the Lord. But Īśvara is not a creator: he is “a special self (puruṣa-viśeṣa), untouched by afflictions, actions, their fruits and their impressions” (1.24), the teacher of even the ancient teachers, unlimited by time, the seed of omniscience. His word is the sacred syllable Oṃ (praṇava), whose repetition with meditation on its meaning leads to inward consciousness and removes obstacles (1.27–29). Devotion to Īśvara is offered as one route to samādhi (1.23). Why does a dualist system need a God? Commentators suggest that Īśvara serves as a model of the liberated state and as an object of meditation; Vācaspati Miśra adds that he oversees the association of prakṛti with puruṣas.

Relations with other schools

Yoga’s vocabulary overlaps strikingly with Buddhism: suffering, afflictions, impressions, the sevenfold or eightfold path, friendliness, compassion, joy and equanimity as attitudes (1.33 — the Buddhist brahmavihāras). Scholars debate the direction of borrowing; both draw on a shared śramaṇa culture. With Advaita Vedānta, Yoga disagreed about the self: for Śaṅkara, there is one Self, not many, and liberation is knowledge, not the cessation of mental activity; yet Advaitins adopted yogic meditation as a means of preparing the mind. Tantra and haṭha yoga later reinterpreted yoga as the awakening of a coiled energy, kuṇḍalinī, through bodily practice.

Modern yoga

In 1893, Swami Vivekananda spoke at the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago, and his Raja Yoga (1896) presented the Yoga Sūtras to Western audiences as a science of the mind. In the twentieth century, teachers such as T. Krishnamacharya and his students B. K. S. Iyengar, K. Pattabhi Jois and T. K. V. Desikachar, together with Swami Sivananda and others, created the posture-based practice now known worldwide — drawing on haṭha yoga, but also on modern physical culture. Scholars like Mark Singleton (Yoga Body, 2010) have shown how new much of it is. The Yoga Sūtras have nevertheless remained its philosophical charter, and are now probably the most translated Indian text after the Gītā.

Yoga in conversation

The first lines are the whole system in brief: “yoga is the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind; then the seer abides in its own nature.” And it is worth remembering that Patañjali’s only instruction about posture is that it be “steady and comfortable”.