The Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali
Eight Limbs, All Seated
- First attested
- around 400 CEPhilipp Maas's critical edition of the first chapter (2006), collating twenty-five manuscripts and twenty-one printed editions, dates the Pātañjalayogaśāstra — sūtras and commentary as one composition — to about 325–425 CE on textual grounds. No manuscript survives from anywhere near that date, and the text's early reception has to be read off later work: al-Bīrūnī's Arabic version of about 1030, and the commentaries of Vācaspati Miśra (Tattvavaiśāradī) and of Bhoja in the eleventh century.
- Claimed
- 2nd century BCEasserted by Bhoja's Rājamārtaṇḍa, an eleventh-century commentary, opens by saluting one Patañjali who removed the impurities of the mind by yoga, of speech by grammar and of the body by medicine — identifying the yoga author with the grammarian of the Mahābhāṣya, conventionally placed around 150 BCE. The identification is still standard in popular yoga literature.
The claim runs about 600 years ahead of the evidence.
Modern yoga's charter text is a modern charter: on David Gordon White's account the sūtras lay in eclipse in India from the twelfth century until Vivekananda's Raja Yoga of 1896, and they name not one of the postures now practised in their name.
Not union but kaivalya, isolation — the seer standing free of the world, with restraint the first limb.
Patañjali's aphorisms — 195 or 196, depending on the recension — 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, the Pātañjalayogaśāstra, composed around 325 to 425 CE, and not by the second-century-BCE grammarian whom Bhoja, writing in the eleventh century, saluted as its author. David Gordon White (2014) traces a heyday from the seventh century to the eleventh, 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 lists about twelve, every one of them a seat.
Light
A precise psychology of attention: the mind's movements named and classified, ethical restraint placed first among the eight limbs rather than last. Its īśvara is an object of devotion, not a creator — a theology light enough for readers of very different persuasions to use.
Shadow
The goal is kaivalya, isolation — the seer standing free of the world, not joined to it, which readers taught that yoga means union do not expect. A chapter of powers, from levitation to mind-reading, sits in a text White says the West first maligned.
