Patañjali

Patañjali is the name traditionally given to the compiler of the The Yoga Sūtras, the foundational text of the classical Yoga (darśana) school of Indian philosophy. Almost nothing is known about him. He may have lived anywhere between the second century BCE and the fourth or fifth century CE; the text itself may be a compilation of older materials. Yet his 196 short aphorisms (sūtras) became one of the most influential texts in the history of Indian thought, and, in the twentieth century, the philosophical charter of a worldwide practice.

Who was Patañjali?

Three Patañjalis, or one?

Indian tradition credits a Patañjali with three great works: the Yoga Sūtras; the Mahābhāṣya (“Great Commentary”) on Pāṇini’s Sanskrit grammar; and a lost treatise on medicine. A famous invocation, recited before yoga classes to this day, praises “Patañjali, the best of sages, who removed the impurity of the mind by yoga, of speech by grammar, and of the body by medicine.”

The grammarian Patañjali can be dated with fair confidence to the mid-second century BCE: his Mahābhāṣya mentions events of the Śuṅga dynasty, such as the Greek siege of Sāketa (Ayodhyā). Whether he also wrote the Yoga Sūtras is doubtful. Most modern scholars think the Sūtras are later, perhaps around 325–425 CE, because they appear to respond to Buddhist ideas of the Yogācāra school; some argue that the Sūtras and their first commentary, the Yoga Bhāṣya attributed to Vyāsa, were composed together by one author. The philosopher Bhoja (11th century) and others identified the two Patañjalis; the scholar J. H. Woods (1914) argued against it.

Legend

In Hindu legend, Patañjali is an incarnation of Ādiśeṣa (or Ananta), the thousand-headed cosmic serpent on whom Viṣṇu reclines. One story says that Viṣṇu, watching Śiva’s cosmic dance, became so heavy with delight that Ādiśeṣa asked to be born on earth to learn it. He fell (pat) as a small serpent into the cupped palms (añjali) of a woman named Goṇikā, who was praying for a son — hence his name, “fallen into folded hands”. Temple images, especially at Chidambaram in Tamil Nadu, show him as half man, half serpent. Another legend has him teaching a thousand students from behind a curtain, because his true serpent form would burn them with its breath.

The teaching

Patañjali’s achievement was to systematise. Ascetic and meditative practices were ancient in India by his day, shared among Vedic, Buddhist and Jain traditions. The Sūtras gathered them into a short, ordered treatise built on the metaphysics of Sāṃkhya: pure consciousness (puruṣa) and active nature (prakṛti). Their opening is perhaps the most famous sentence in Indian philosophy after the Upaniṣads:

atha yogānuśāsanam — Now, the teaching of yoga. yogaś citta-vṛtti-nirodhaḥ — Yoga is the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind. tadā draṣṭuḥ svarūpe ‘vasthānam — Then the seer abides in its own nature. vṛtti-sārūpyam itaratra — Otherwise, it takes the form of the fluctuations.

From there the text maps the kinds of mental fluctuation, the afflictions that drive them (ignorance, egoism, attachment, aversion, fear of death), the means of stilling them (practice and dispassion), the eight limbs of practice, the stages of absorption (samādhi), the supernormal powers that arise on the way, and the final “isolation” (kaivalya) of consciousness. See The Yoga Sūtras for a full account.

Legacy

The Sūtras received a long chain of commentary — Vyāsa, Vācaspati Miśra, Bhoja, Vijñānabhikṣu — and were translated into Arabic by al-Bīrūnī in the eleventh century. Modern interest began with Vivekananda’s Raja Yoga (1896), and since then translations have multiplied: by the twenty-first century, Patañjali had become, as the scholar David Gordon White put it in his “biography” of the Sūtras (2014), the most famous Indian philosopher in the world — mostly among people who practise a kind of yoga he never described.

Patañjali in conversation

Four words carry his whole teaching: yogaś citta-vṛtti-nirodhaḥ — “yoga is the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind.”