Clarifying Patañjali: The Pātañjalayogaśāstra

The Pātañjalayogaśāstra, popularly called Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras, is sometimes referred to as Classical Yoga. I often hear people call them ‘the sūtras’, but there are hundreds of collections of sūtras, and Patañjali’s is but one of them.

This article seeks to clarify several misunderstandings about the Pātañjalayogaśāstra, particularly in regard to yoga teacher trainings.

Who Was Patañjali?

Śastra means authoritative commentary, and because of recent, exhaustive research by Austrian scholar Philip Maas, there is now a very strong indication that the Vyāsa who wrote the commentary on this text was Patañjali himself. The word vyāsa means ‘the arranger’, so the compiler and the commentator are most likely one and the same person.

We also now know around what date Patañjali compiled his sūtra-s: 325 – 425 CE, a time when bhaktiyoga was arising.

There’s quite a lot of confusion around this text.

Patañjali’s Yoga is also called “Rāja Yoga” by some, but the term came from Swami Vivekananda in the late 19^th century when he started travelling to the west.

Because the 15^th century Hatha Yoga Pradipika says that hathayoga is a ladder to rājayoga, meaning union with the divine, a path to liberation, modern teachers have inferred that hathayoga aligns to Patañjali.

BKS Iyengar emphasised the teachings of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra in his hathayoga teaching, with the result that Iyengar studios globally teach it. Patthabi Jois also called his system of hathayoga “Așṭānga Yoga”, which caused confusion, because again it links hathayoga to Patañjali, who used the eight-limbed path in the second pada (chapter) of his work.

Differentiating Haṭha Yoga and Patañjali’s Yoga

At the outset, I want to make it quite clear that Patañjali’s text has nothing to do with hathayoga.

The Pātañjalayogaśāstra is about the mind, karma (the conditioning of mind), and meditation. The teachings and practices he gives are for the express purpose of clearing the mind of the imprints of karma.

Hathayoga uses the body; subtle body and physical body including the breath, for the same purpose: to clear the mind of its imprints.

Patañjali’s sūtras are 4^th century CE and hathayoga appears in the 11^th century CE.

We can appropriate parts of his teachings for our own uses in hathayoga, but that doesn’t mean that it is Patañjali’s yoga, because his was a yoga practice of meditation and arises out of a dualistic understanding of creation.

Hathayoga is Śaivite in practice (although we must consider the role of Tantric Buddhism) and has a non-dual understanding of creation.

Patañjali’s yoga and hathayoga are universes apart.

Even though there is a sūtra that mentions ‘āsana’, (YS II.46) this word means to sit: ‘ās’ means “to sit”, (quite easy to remember!), and ana is the neutral ending of the word, like our English ‘ing’. Sitting.

The word is used in the context of meditation.

There is also confusion around sūtra 46 which says that “Posture should be steady and comfortable” (1). This sūtra must be read along with the following sūtra, 47, which states ‘by the relaxation of effort and by absorption in the infinite”. (2) Sūtra 46 and 47 comprise a single sentence.

Yes, we can bring a meditative quality to our āsana, but if mental effort is being made together with physical effort then that’s not going to happen. But it does happen in meditation when there is absorption in the nondual state.

I mentioned before that Patañjali compiled these sūtra-s – there’s nothing original about them – so we need to dive into some historical context.

Patañjali was a Brahmin by birth, and his was the first work by a Brahmin to use teachings from mostly non-Brahmin traditions: the early groups called the Śramana, which included Buddhism and Jainism. Brahmin teachings are from the Vedas but Patañjali clearly thought these non-Vedic teachings of the Śramana were authoritative.

Around 500 BCE, in northern India, an area including some of Nepal and Uttar Pradesh, there was a rise in new groups (about 14 in all, including Buddhists and Jains) of renunciant ascetics, collectively called śramana-s, which means “strivers”.

They were concerned with finding ways to end the cycle of rebirth and the karma-driven suffering that characterises human existence. They realised we are bound by karma and this bondage leads to samsāra, the wheel of reincarnation. To address this, they developed techniques of meditation, with the goal of mokșa, or liberation, which entailed the complete eradication of karma.

Clarifying Karma

This concept of karma is the basis for the practices in Patañjali’s text, and it is frequently misunderstood, so let’s take a quick look at it.

The original meaning of karma is the effect our memories have on us. Our past shapes how we see things; we are conditioned by how we see things, and therefore we are not free. We live our lives through our subconscious.

So, two points are pertinent to karma:

1. We are the products of our subconscious
2. Unless we do something about it, we become set in our ways and accept our conditioning, our karma.

Karma is not a system of retribution. What drives our long, individual journey of evolution is karma – the conditioning we acquire through memory. But memory imprints or samskāra are not actually the issue – samskāra are simply a built-in function of consciousness. We need that memory function.

What we want to do to burn off karma is diffuse the charge of the memory: the vāsanā. If we can remember things without an emotional charge, then the vāsanā are cleared, and karma is cleared.

Yama and Niyama: Not Moral Principles

This becomes a very important consideration when we come to yama and niyama in the second pada of Patañjali’s sūtras.

I’d like to emphasise here that yama and niyama are not moral or ethical principles. They have been appropriated to function as moral principles, but this is an overlay of modern religious dogma on what is really a practice of avoiding karma.

There are no ethical arguments at all in Patañjali’s sūtra-s. We are simply practicing the elimination of things that will disturb us inside, things that won’t allow us to meditate. There is no discussion of morality.

However – and this is an important distinction – we do become more ethical when we practice yoga. Virtue comes from inside, it’s a by-product of the practice of clearing karma.

Yoga is from the inside-out. If we direct efforts to external behaviour without developing self-awareness, then our efforts are from the outside-in.

The five yama come from Jainism – they are things you don’t do. The five niyama are things you need to do to avoid creating karma. We mustn’t project religion onto these.

The Intersection of Traditions and Philosophies

Karma is not part of the Vedic tradition. Their tradition was to do with ritual, and it had a very positive world outlook. A glass half full outlook.

The Śramana outlook on the world was rather negative. As ascetic renunciants, theirs was a glass half empty outlook, but when the Brahmins of the Vedic tradition encountered the Śramanas, they began to take on their ideas. The ideas of the Śramanas began to be incorporated into the Upanishads, which deal with concern for the inner life, or knowledge of the reality underpinning the external world.

In a nutshell, the idea was if the senses are not brought under control, the result is rebirth, but if you can control the senses by means of the mind, you can attain the highest state, which is identified as purușa, the indwelling person, sometimes referred to as the individual soul.

As well, the Śramanas had a practice called tapas, meaning austerity or toil, used for the purpose of stilling the mind or annihilating past karma.

Throughout this period there were other attempts to codify and systematise the practice of yoga, but because by nature it is alive, constantly growing and evolving, it proved difficult – until Patañjali came up with his authoritative statement of the techniques and doctrinal traditions of yoga, drawing heavily on Buddhism and Jainism.

There was, however, already a systematised, codified metaphysics, called Sāmkhya. Metaphysics refers to a philosophy of being and knowing, and Sāmkhya seems to have been the earliest such philosophical system to take shape in the late Vedic period. It is concerned with the path of reasoning to attain liberation: jñānayoga. It wasn’t about practices.

While the followers of yoga rely on experiential methods, those of Sāmkhya rely on scriptural interpretations. Sāmkhya analysed the manifold material elements of prakrti (material nature), with the goal of extricating purușa from its bondage in the material world of things, thoughts and other mind-stuff.

You might have knowledge of the Tantric tattva-s as a system that describes the principles of reality beginning with Paramaśiva, then Śiva/Śakti, and on down through Māyā and her handmaidens until we get to prakrti and purușa.

The Sāmkhya system starts with prakrti and purușa and provides the metaphysical infrastructure for Patanjali’s sūtra-s. The Tantric sages added the additional 11 tattva much later. The purușa sits at the top of the hierarchy of tattva-s in the Sāmkhya system and the classical yoga of Patañjali. It is the ultimate principle, a transcendent reality: spirit as opposed to matter/energy.

The system proposes that there’s a plurality of divine souls, meaning that each sentient being has their own, but they’re not part of one, over-arching conscious entity as in non-dual systems such as Tantra. This means that Pātañjali’s yoga can never be about complete union. Rather, it is about separation: separating purușa from its bondage in the material world of prakrti.

But in Tantric metaphysics, the purușa isn’t the highest principle. The purușa is understood as a contracted form of Universal Consciousness, Paramaśiva. Our practice is to realise that we’re already ‘It’. Tantra rejects the goal of Pātañjali’s yoga, that of retreating to and dwelling in a divine soul that is cut off from the world.

What we discover in our Tantric practice is that instead of learning to walk a path to reach a specific destination, we are and always have been walking it. Yoga it is a path of remembrance, not renunciation.

The Nature of Patañjali’s Practice

Patañjali’s method was different from Sāmkhya; he presents a path of meditation focusing on the nature of mind and consciousness, and on the techniques of concentration, or meditative absorption, to provide a practical method to isolate the purușa, or soul, from the material elements of nature.

It is radically dualistic in its description of reality. It explains the real self as pure spirit that cannot be found in the body or mind. In fact, Patañjali describes the body as distasteful (3), particularly bodily secretions.

If the material world, nature or prakrti, is radically separate from purușa, or spirit, we have a fundamental dilemma of being entangled in a world in which we can never realise our true nature. So, the system of Patañjali requires the practitioner to transcend the human condition entirely, through the practices described. And these practices were for serious and advanced practitioners, requiring an enormous degree of asceticism and renunciation, so they weren’t for the householder, or for women.

However, like the Buddha, Patañjali was pragmatic, scientific and methodical. He is very consistent, and he sifted through centuries of philosophy and technique to distil these 195 sūtra-s in which every word is rich and redolent.

As we know, the Sanskrit word sūtra denotes a thread to connect the readers’ mind to a world of associations and meanings. Aphorisms lend themselves to a wide variety of interpretations, so we need a teacher to unpack them, and that teacher helps us understand from the perspective that they hold. Then, in time, we understand how to apply the sūtra-s to our lives.

It is important to remember that it’s an oral tradition. Information is made so concise that it can be memorised. So in order to study or teach the Pātañjalayogaśāstra, it’s best to find – first – a translation by a scholar, not an interpretation from someone who has their own agenda. Secondly, find a teacher who can unpack the sūtra-s in a scholarly way, but at the same time is able to make them accessible to all.

My teacher, Carlos Pomeda, is one such teacher, and there are others.

Recommended texts:

• Edwin F Bryant: “The Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali”, 2009.
• Swāmi Hariharānanda Āranya: ‘Yoga Philosophy of Patañjali”, 1983.

1. “The Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali”, by Edwin F Bryant, 2009, North Point Press, P 283, II 46
2. “The Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali”, by Edwin F Bryant, 2009, North Point Press, P 287, II 47
3. “The Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali”, by Edwin F Bryant, 2009, North Point Press, P 287, II 40

With gratitude to Carlos Pomeda for his gracious teachings.

About the Author

Christine du Fresne, Registered Level 3 Teacher with Yoga Australia, is passionate about the non-dual view of yoga and its associated practices. She began regular yoga practice during her last year of art school in Sydney in 1986, and within three years had completed the teacher training requirements for Iyengar certification. Having later become certified in the Anusara method of teaching, she ran a yoga studio in Sydney for some years, and eventually moved up to the Mid North Coast of NSW. She teaches classes here, facilitating retreats and workshops, travelling occasionally to soak up the knowledge of Tantra and hatha yoga from global teachers, including Carlos Pomeda, whose generous teaching has provided valuable tools of illumination and direction.