The Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali

Eight Limbs, All Seated

Earliest record: around 400 CEPhilipp Maas's critical edition of the first chapter (2006), collating twenty-five manuscripts and twenty-one printed editions, treats sūtras and commentary as one composition, the Pātañjalayogaśāstra, and dates it to around 400 CE. No early manuscript survives; the earliest evidence is quotation in Vātsyāyana's Nyāyabhāṣya, about 450 CE, and the vṛtti on Bhartṛhari's Vākyapadīya, followed by Vācaspati Miśra about 950, Bhoja in the early eleventh century and al-Bīrūnī's Arabic version of about 1030.
Said to date from: 2nd century BCEasserted by Bhoja's Rājamārtaṇḍa, an eleventh-century commentary, whose fifth introductory verse praises Bhoja as one who, like the lord of snakes, cast off the impurities of speech, mind and body by works on grammar, on Patañjali and on medicine, taking the yoga author to be the grammarian of the Mahābhāṣya, conventionally placed around 150 BCE. The identification is still standard in popular yoga literature.

On David Gordon White's account (2014) the text was virtually forgotten in India for centuries after its heyday, and iconic only in the last forty years. Its sūtras name no posture.

David Gordon White, The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali: A Biography (Princeton, 2014), publisher's description and table of contents; Yoga Sūtras 2.46-2.48, trans. Woods (1914).

Patañjali's 195 or 196 Sanskrit aphorisms on yoga, composed around 400 CE.

More context

Patañjali's aphorisms number 195 or 196, depending on the recension. They define yoga at 1.2 as citta-vṛtti-nirodha, the stilling of the mind's turnings, and set out the eight limbs at 2.29. Philipp Maas's critical edition of the first chapter (2006) argues that the sūtras and the commentary long ascribed to Vyāsa are one work. It argues that this work is the Pātañjalayogaśāstra, composed around 400 CE. It also argues that it was not written by the second-century-BCE grammarian with whom Bhoja's eleventh-century commentary implicitly identifies its author. David Gordon White (2014) traces a heyday from the seventh century to the eleventh. He then traces a long eclipse from the twelfth, and a return by way of Colebrooke's paper of 1823 and Vivekananda's Raja Yoga of 1896. Posture gets three sūtras and no name; the commentary names about twelve, all seated save the bedstead, which Vācaspati glosses as lying down.

Light

A precise psychology of attention, naming and classifying the mind's fluctuations; its īśvara is a special Self for devotion, not a creator.

Shadow

Its goal is isolation, not union; a chapter of powers, levitation included, sits in a text White says the West first maligned.

Sources8 sources

Primary source

Patañjali, Pātañjalayogaśāstra — the Yoga Sūtras with the Bhāṣya, trans. James Haughton Woods as The Yoga-System of Patañjali, Harvard Oriental Series 17, 1914, 1.2; 1.27–1.28; 2.29; 2.46–2.48; 3.29; bhāṣya on 2.46Yoga is defined at 1.2 as citta-vṛtti-nirodha; the eight limbs are listed at 2.29; āsana occupies 2.46–2.48, is defined only as steady and comfortable and names no posture, while the commentary on 2.46 lists about twelve, all seated or reclining; praṇava (OM) is named as īśvara's designator at 1.27 and its repetition prescribed at 1.28; cakra appears of the navel wheel at 3.29 (3.30 in the 196-sūtra numbering). Woods prints sūtra, bhāṣya and Vācaspati's gloss together, but predates Maas and still presents sūtra and bhāṣya as separate works.

Scholarship

Elizabeth De Michelis, A History of Modern Yoga: Patañjali and Western Esotericism, 2004, ContinuumModern yoga as a category begins with Vivekananda's encounter with Western esotericism, New Thought and Transcendentalism; 'Rāja Yoga' in its modern sense is his construction rather than a classical one.
Philipp A. Maas, Samādhipāda: Das erste Kapitel des Pātañjalayogaśāstra zum ersten Mal kritisch ediert (Shaker Verlag, Aachen); the same finding in English in 'A Concise Historiography of Classical Yoga Philosophy', in Eli Franco (ed.), Periodization and Historiography of Indian Philosophy, Vienna, 2013, 2006, critical edition of the first chapter, from 25 manuscripts and 21 printed editions; 2013 essay pp. 53–90 (record)The Yogasūtra and the so-called Vyāsa-bhāṣya are one work, the Pātañjalayogaśāstra, datable to around 400 CE, not to the second century BCE.
Mark Singleton, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice, 2010, Oxford University Press (record)Standing āsana sequences of the kind popularised from Mysore in the twentieth century are thinly attested before then; Singleton argues modern postural yoga was shaped by European gymnastics, Indian physical culture and nationalism. The claim is about posture practice specifically, and is cited here alongside Mallinson, whose later work establishes a deeper pre-modern āsana tradition.
David Gordon White, The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali: A Biography (Princeton University Press, Lives of Great Religious Books), 2014, whole book; the periodisation and the Colebrooke and Vivekananda material taken from the publisher's description and published reviews, not from the book itself (record)The text's heyday ran from roughly the seventh to the eleventh century, the period of Vācaspati Miśra's and Bhoja's commentaries; it fell into obscurity after the twelfth, was returned to European attention by Henry Thomas Colebrooke's paper on Sāṃkhya and Yoga of 1823, was maligned on first Western contact, and reached its present iconic standing only in recent decades.
James Mallinson and Mark Singleton, Roots of Yoga, 2017, Penguin Classics; the āsana chapter (record)Āsana in the Pātañjalayogaśāstra means a seated posture for meditation; the elaboration of non-seated postures belongs to the haṭha corpus and its successors, not to Patañjali.

The tradition itself

Bhojadeva, king of Dhāra, Rājamārtaṇḍa, a commentary on the Yogasūtra, introductory verse 5; trans. Rajendralala Mitra, The Yoga Aphorisms of Patañjali (1883), p. 2The tradition's authorship claim: Bhoja praises himself as one who, like the lord of snakes (Patañjali), cast off the impurity of speech, mind and body by works on grammar, on Patañjali and on medicine, implying one Patañjali wrote on all three.

Where this claim originates

Swami Vivekananda, Raja Yoga, or Conquering the Internal Nature, 1896, New York; the sūtras with his own translation and commentaryCited for what Vivekananda asserted, not as evidence it is what the text means: he presented his own synthesis as Patañjali's sense, and his wording lies behind much modern English usage about yoga, prāṇa, kuṇḍalinī and realising the Self.