Patañjali

Who they were

Patañjali is the name attached to the Yoga Sūtra, the foundational systematic text of yoga philosophy, composed somewhere between roughly the second century BCE and the fifth century CE — with most scholars now favouring the later end, around 350–450 CE.

Beyond that, essentially nothing is known.

Where they came from

The biographical tradition is thin and legendary. He is sometimes said to have descended as a small snake into the cupped hands of a woman named Goṇikā — pata (fallen) and añjali (cupped hands) — and is depicted in iconography as half-human, half-serpent, an emanation of the cosmic serpent Śeṣa. That is theology rather than biography.

Indian tradition has often identified him with Patañjali the grammarian, author of the Mahābhāṣya, a major commentary on Pāṇini from the second century BCE, and sometimes with a medical writer as well — one man giving humanity right speech, right body and right mind. Modern scholarship generally regards these as different people separated by centuries.

What can be said is that whoever wrote the Yoga Sūtra was a compiler and systematiser rather than an originator. The practices described were already in circulation; the achievement is the organisation — a compressed, ordered, philosophically coherent account of a path.

What they taught

The eight limbs (aṣṭāṅga), in order:

1. Yama — restraints: non-violence, truthfulness, non-stealing, continence, non-grasping
2. Niyama — observances: purity, contentment, discipline, self-study, surrender to the divine
3. Āsana — posture
4. Prāṇāyāma — regulation of breath
5. Pratyāhāra — withdrawal of the senses from their objects
6. Dhāraṇā — concentration on a single point
7. Dhyāna — sustained meditative absorption
8. Samādhi — complete absorption

The proportions matter enormously and are almost never mentioned. Of roughly 195 aphorisms, three concern posture. They say that the seat should be steady and comfortable, that this comes through relaxation of effort and absorption in the infinite, and that from it the pairs of opposites cease to trouble. No postures are named or described. Āsana here means, quite literally, a seat — a position you can hold still in for a long time without distraction.

The first two limbs are ethics, and precede everything. The last four are meditation. Yoga in this text is a discipline of the mind with a physical prerequisite, and the modern inversion — physical practice with an optional mental component — reverses it.

The metaphysics is Sāṃkhya dualism, and it is severe. Reality divides into puruṣa, pure witnessing consciousness, and prakṛti, nature — which includes not only matter but mind, intellect and the sense of self. The goal, kaivalya, is the complete isolation of consciousness from nature. This is not integration or wellbeing. It is disentanglement, permanently.

And he includes the powers. Book III catalogues siddhis arising from advanced practice: knowledge of past and future, understanding the speech of animals, invisibility, knowledge of former births, entering another's body, levitation, immense strength. Patañjali treats them matter-of-factly as by-products, and then warns that they are obstacles to the actual goal. Modern teaching almost universally omits this material.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the text is a genuine landmark of Indian philosophy and that its analysis of attention — the movement from concentration to absorption to unification with the object — is precise enough that contemplative researchers still find it useful.

We can say the man is unrecoverable, and that confident claims about his intentions should be treated with the same caution as claims about Pythagoras.

We can say his text was less central historically than it is now. As the Yoga Sūtra sets out, it fell into relative obscurity in India for centuries before being revived in the modern period — partly by Western orientalists, partly by Indian reformers.

We cannot say what he would make of a yoga studio, but the text permits an inference. A system in which posture is three lines, ethics is the foundation, the powers are warned against, and the goal is the permanent isolation of consciousness from all of nature, is not describing a practice for feeling better on a Tuesday evening. That does not make the modern practice illegitimate. It makes the attribution inaccurate.

Further reading

• Edwin Bryant, The Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali (2009) — translation with the traditional commentary.
• David Gordon White, The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali: A Biography (2014) — on the text's reception history, and bracing.