Patañjali
Name in Colophons, Chapter of Powers
- First attested
- around 400 CEThe name is known from the colophons of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra, which Philipp Maas's critical edition of its first chapter (2006), collating twenty-five manuscripts and twenty-one printed editions, dates on textual grounds to about 325–425 CE. No manuscript survives from near that date, and no contemporary source attaches the name to a person: the lives begin with Bhoja in the eleventh century and Mādhava's in the fourteenth, and both are hagiography. Sūtra numbers in this entry follow the 196-sūtra vulgate, in which book three has fifty-six aphorisms: 3.16 past and future, 3.18 previous births, 3.21 invisibility, 3.23 the time of death, 3.38 the powers as obstacles to samādhi, 3.43 passage through the air, 3.46 aṇimā and the rest. Woods's Harvard Oriental Series translation of 1914 does not number the sūtra on the disappearance of sound, so his book three runs to fifty-five and every number after iii.21 falls one lower — the obstacles line is his iii.37, the air passage iii.42, aṇimā iii.45. Vivekananda's Raja Yoga of 1896 uses the vulgate numbering, which is how the two can be checked against each other.
- Claimed
- 2nd century BCEasserted by Bhojadeva, king of Dhārā, whose eleventh-century Rājamārtaṇḍa salutes Patañjali as the lord of snakes and then praises Bhoja himself as one who, like that lord of snakes, has cast off the impurity of speech, mind and body — having written a grammar, a commentary on Patañjali, and a medical treatise of his own. The identification of the yoga author with the grammarian of the Mahābhāṣya rides on that comparison rather than being stated outright; the familiar verse that does state it plainly, bowing to a Patañjali who purified mind by yoga, speech by grammar and body by medicine, is a later composition. Bhoja's comparison places the yoga author in the second century BCE, the conventional date of the Mahābhāṣya, and the identification remains standard in popular yoga literature.
The claim runs about 600 years ahead of the evidence.
Most of Patañjali's third chapter catalogues occult powers — previous births at 3.18, invisibility at 3.21, passage through the air — before calling them obstacles to concentration, and a fourth chapter allows that herbs produce them too; Vivekananda's Raja Yoga of 1896, the book that carried him into English, translated every line of that chapter under the heading Powers.
Compiler of the Yoga Sūtras, a name in its colophons; most of his third chapter catalogues occult powers.
Nothing survives of the man but a name in colophons. Philipp Maas's critical edition of 2006 argues that the sūtras and the commentary long credited to Vyāsa are one work of about 325–425 CE, which makes Patañjali his own first commentator; whether he is also the grammarian of the Mahābhāṣya, as Bhoja of Dhārā implied in the eleventh century, is unsettled — the Mahābhāṣya is some five centuries older — and most scholars now keep them apart. Bhoja salutes him as the lord of snakes, and Mādhava's fourteenth-century life of Śaṅkara makes him a portion of Viṣṇu and of the serpent Ananta. Most of his third chapter catalogues siddhis — previous births at 3.18, invisibility at 3.21, passage through the air — then calls them obstacles to concentration; the fourth allows that herbs produce them too. Vivekananda's Raja Yoga of 1896 translated that chapter entire and headed it Powers.
Light
His own first commentator: on Maas's reading the aphorisms and their oldest gloss come from one hand, so the text arrives with its author's own explanation attached rather than a later school's — and the powers, once catalogued, rank below the concentration they interrupt.
Shadow
A name with no verifiable life takes whatever life a reader supplies. David Gordon White argues the text lay in eclipse in India from the twelfth century and reached its present standing only in recent decades; the chapter of powers is the part left behind.
