The first major commentary after the Yoga- Bhâshya is Vâcaspati Mishra’s Tattva-Vaishâradî (“Clarity of Truth”). Vâcaspati Mishra, who lived in the ninth century, was a pundit through and through. He wrote outstanding commentaries on the six classical systems of Hindu philosophy—Yoga, Sâmkhya, Vedânta, Mîmâmsâ, Nyâya, and Vaisheshika. But his knowledge appears to have been theoretical rather than practical. Hence, in his gloss on Vyâsa’s Yoga-Bhâshya, he tends to expand on philological and epistemological matters, while leaving important practical considerations unexplained. A story that is told about Vâcaspati Mishra shows how much of a scholar he was. When he had completed his major work, the Bhâmatî commentary on the Brahma-Sûtra, he apologized to his wife for neglecting her for so many years by naming the commentary after her, a truly scholarly recompense. Nonetheless, his work offers many useful clues to some of the more difficult passages of the Yoga-Bhâshya.
From the eleventh century, we have two important works. The first is the Arabic translation of the Yoga- Sûtra prepared by the renowned Persian scholar al-Bîrûnî—a rather free rendering that may well have exercised a lasting influence on the development of Persian mysticism. The other work is the subcommentary known as Râja-Mârtanda (“Royal Sun”), or Bhoja- Vritti, by King Bhoja of Dhârâ, an adherent of Shaivism, who lived from 1019 to 1054 C.E. The value of this work is more historical than exegetical. Although Bhoja criticized previous commentators for their arbitrary interpretations, his own efforts are often no less capricious and perhaps less original than he made them out to be. King Bhoja was an accomplished poet and a great patron of the arts and spiritual traditions, and we must assume that his interest in Yoga was not purely theoretical either.
The next major commentary is Shankara Bhagavat- pâda’s Vivarana (“Exposition”) on the Yoga-Bhâshya. Although this is a subcommentary, it is a remarkably original work showing the uncommon exegetical independence of a Bhâshya. According to some scholars, its author is none other than the famous adept Shankara cârya himself, who lived in the eighth century C.E. and was the greatest spokesman ever for Advaita Vedânta. The German indologist Paul Hacker was the first to propose that prior to Shankara’s conversion to the nondualist philosophy of Advaita Vedânta this great preceptor had been a Vishnu devotee and an adherent of the Yoga tradition. He must then have met his teacher Govinda, who expounded to him the “intangible Yoga” (aspar- sha-yoga) of nondualism taught by Gaudapâda, the author of the Mândûkya-Kârikâ. It is certainly interesting that of all his writings, Shankara’s commentary on the Mândûkya-Kârikâ contains the most references to the Yoga tradition. The British translator of the Vivarana, Trevor Leggett, tentatively accepted Hacker’s proposal, remarking, “I have not found anything which would, as far as my knowledge goes, absolutely rule out Śankara as the author.”8
However, this identification of Shankara cârya with the author of the Vivarana has by no means been universally accepted. In fact, recently it was seriously challenged by the Sanskrit scholar T. S. Rukmani, who has just completed a new English translation of this rare text. She judged the style of the Vivarana to be “un-Shankarâcârya … tedious, laboured, and careless.”9 Since Vâcaspati Mishra was a great Shankara scholar, his silence about the Vivarana is weighty and suggests a post-Vâcaspati date. Rukmani did, however, discover a single reference to the Vivarana in Vijnâna Bhikshu’s Yoga-Vârttika (3.36), where the expression vivarana-bhâshye (“in the Vivarana commentary”) can be found. This favors a date between the ninth and the sixteenth century for Shankara Bhagavatpâda. More specifically, Rukmani proposes that the author of the Vivarana was the Shankara who belonged to the scholarly Payyur family of Kerala who lived in the fourteenth century C.E. Further research is needed on this issue, though it looks increasingly probable that Shankara cârya had no hand in the composition of the Vivarana.
From the fourteenth century we also have an admirable systematic account of Classical Yoga in Mâdhava’s Sarva-Darshana-Samgraha, which, as the title indicates, is a compendium (samgraha) of all (sarva) major philosophical systems (darshana) of medieval India.
“When a yogin becomes qualified by practicing moral discipline (yama) and self- restraint (niyama), he can proceed to posture and the other means.”
—Yoga-Bhâshya-Vivarana 2.29
From the fifteenth century stem the Yoga-Siddhânta-Candrikâ (“Moonlight on the Yoga System” and Sûtra-Artha- Bodhinî10 (“Illumination of the Meaning of the Aphorisms”), both authored by Nârâyâna Tîrtha. The former work is an independent commentary, or Bhâshya, while the latter text is a Vritti. Nârâyâna Tîrtha was a scholar of the Vallabha school of Bhakti-Yoga, and his commentaries interpret Classical Yoga from the point of view of Vallabha cârya’s Shuddha (“Pure”) Vedânta. His works are of great interest not only because of their devotional element but also because they mention Hatha-Yoga and certain Tantric concepts such as the cakras and kundalinî.
In the sixteenth century, outstanding commentaries on Vyâsa’s Yoga-Bhâshya were written by Râmânanda Yati, Nâgojî Bhatta (or Nâgesha), and Vijnâna Bhikshu. Râmânanda Yati’s work, entitled Mani-Prabhâ (“Jewel Lustre”), comments directly on the Yoga-Sûtra. Nâgojî Bhatta wrote two original commentaries, the Laghvî (“Short [Commentary]”) and the Brihatî (“Great [Commentary]”). The declared purpose of the latter work is to resolve the differences between (dualistic) Yoga and (nondualistic) Vedânta. He has been hailed as “perhaps the greatest learned man of the latter part of the sixteenth century.”11
This also was the avowed goal of Vijnâna Bhikshu, who lived in the second half of the sixteenth century. He authored an elaborate commentary called Yoga-Vârttika (“Tract on Yoga”) and the Yoga-Sâra- Samgraha (“Compendium of the Essence of Yoga”), which is a digest of his voluminous treatise. Vijnâna Bhikshu was a renowned scholar who interpreted Yoga from a Vedântic point of view. At the end of the nineteenth century, Max Müller spoke of him as “a philosopher of considerable grasp, [who] while fully recognising the difference between the six systems of philosophy, tried to discover a common truth behind them all, and to point out how they can be studied together, or rather in succession, and how all of them are meant to lead honest students into the way of truth.”12
Nothing is known about Vijnâna Bhikshu, who “seems to have shunned any kind of identity with name and form.”13 However, some scholars have speculatively associated him with Bengal, and T. S. Rukmani, who undertook a complete English translation of the Yoga- Vârttika, suggested that he must have taught in or near Varanasi (Benares) because his chief disciple, Bhava Ganesha (author of the Dîpikâ, “Torch”), resided there. Vijnâna Bhikshu is credited with the authorship of eighteen works, which include commentaries on Classical Yoga, Sâmkhya, several Upanishads, and the Brahma-Sûtra, two of which commentaries may have been wrongly attributed to him. All his works are infused with his particular type of Vedânta, which is of the epic Sâmkhya- Yoga kind and which stands in stark contrast to Shankara’s mâyâ-vâda (“illusionism”). Vijnâna Bhikshu, in fact, often becomes quite passionate and not a little derogatory when he criticizes Shankara and his school. For him, Yoga is the preferred path to realization.
Among the later commentaries on the Yoga- Sûtra, mention must be made of Sadâshiva Indra’s Sudhâkâra (“Mine of Ambrosia”), the nineteenth-century scholar Anantadeva’s Pada-Candrikâ (“Moonlight on Words”), Râghavânanda’s Pâtanjala-Rahasya (“Secret of the Pâtanjala [School]”), and Râmabhadra Dîkshita’s Patanjali-Carita (“Patanjali’s Life”), as well as Baladeva Mishra’s Pradîpikâ (“Lamp”) and Hariharânanda’s Bhasvati (“Elucidation”), both composed in the twentieth century. Swami Hariharânanda (1869-1947) was the spiritual head of the Kapila Matha in Madhupur (Bihar) and an adept of Sâmkhya-Yoga.
There are a number of other, less popular works, mostly known by name only. On the whole, the secondary commentaries do not excel in originality and rely largely on Vyâsa’s old scholium or one of the other commentaries. The com
mentarial literature of Classical Yoga tends to be dry and repetitive, scarcely reflecting the fact that Yoga has always primarily been an esoteric discipline taught by word of mouth and perpetuated through intensive personal practice rather than scholastic achievements. As Dattâtreya states in his Yoga-Shdstra:
There will be success for the practitioner (kriyâ-yukta). [But] how can there be [success] for the nonpractitioner? (83)
Success is never gained through mere reading of books. (84)
Those who [merely] talk about Yoga and wear the apparel [of a yogin] but lack all application and live for their bellies and their dicks (shishna)—they cheat people. (92-93)
If the Yoga tradition, by comparison with Vedânta or Buddhism, appears somewhat weak in philosophical elaboration, it is definitely rich in experiential knowledge. For the yogins, perhaps more than for the adherents of the other classical Hindu systems of thought, philosophical understanding has always been only a compass to guide the initiate’s inner experimentation. It was never intended to replace personal realization of the ultimate Truth, or
Reality. Possibly because of their intensive preoccupation with the higher octaves of consciousness, yogins were extremely sensitive to the chimerical nature of conceptual thought and trusted it only up to a point. They found philosophy just for the sake of intellectual comprehension an unattractive proposition, as it cannot lead a person beyond the maze of opinion. As Sage Yâjnavalkya instructs Paingala in the Paingala-Upanishad14 (4.9):
Of what use is milk for one who is satiated with nectar? Likewise of what use are the Vedas when one’s [innermost] Self is known? For the yogin who is satisfied with the nectar of wisdom there is nothing that remains to be accomplished. If there is, then he is not a knower of Reality (tattva).
“The undisciplined (atapasvin) [person] does not succeed in Yoga.”
—Yoga-Vârttika (2.1)
I. THE CHAIN OF BEING-SELF AND WORLD FROM PATANJAU’S PERSPECTIVE
When describing the Buddhist approach to life, the German-born Lama Anagarika Govinda ventured the following observation:
Psychology can be studied and dealt with in two ways: either for its own sake alone, i.e. as pure science, which leaves entirely out of account the usefulness or non-usefulness of its results—or else for the sake of some definite object, that is, with a view to practical application … 1
These remarks apply equally to Yoga as to Buddhism. As a form of psychotechnology, Yoga deals first and foremost with the human mind or psyche. But, according to the yogic visionaries, our inner world parallels the structure of the cosmos itself. It is composed of the same fundamental layers that compose the hierarchy of the external world. Hence, the “maps” put forward by Patanjali and other spiritual authorities are psychocosmograms, or guides to both the inner and outer universe. Their principal purpose, however, is to point beyond the levels, or layers, of psyche and cosmos, for the essential nature of the human being, the Self or Spirit, is held to be utterly transcendental.
The idea of a multilayered or hierarchical cosmos is alien to the reigning paradigm of scientific materialism, yet it is a vitally important notion in ancient and modern religious and spiritual traditions.
Vast chain of being! which from God began,
Nature’s aethereal, human, angel, man,
Beast, bird, fish, insect …
… from Infinite to thee,
From thee to nothing. — On superior pow’rs
Were we to press, inferior might on ours;
Or in the full creation leave a void,
Where, one step broken, the great scale’s destroy’d;
From Nature’s chain whatever link you strike,
Tenth, or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike.
Thus Alexander Pope, in his Essay on Man, gave poetic expression to the premodern intuition of the hierarchic connectedness of things—the chain of being. Yoga philosophy shares the same view: The cosmos is a vast structure of interlocking and nested wholes.
On one end of the “Scale of Nature” are the material forms; on the other end is the transcendental ground of Nature itself. Beyond that lies the dimension (or rather “amension”) of Consciousness as the formless transcendental Selves (purusha). Yoga philosophy in its function as ontology—“science of being”—provides yogins with a map that allows them to traverse the different levels of existence until, at the moment of liberation, they leave the orbit of Nature altogether.
Various schools have devised different maps of the cosmic hierarchy. Patanjali’s particular map has frequently been belittled as a mere borrowing from Classical Sâmkhya, as formulated about 350 C.E. by Îshvara Krishna in his Sâmkhya-Kârikâ. The historically accurate view, however, is that Classical Yoga and Classical Sâmkhya are both extreme rationalistic expressions of divergent developments that occurred in the centuries preceding the Common Era. As we have seen in connection with the Mahâbhârata (notably the Moksha-Dharma section), it was in the period around 300-200 B.C.E. that Yoga and Sâmkhya assumed separate identities from their common Vedântic base. Moreover, the Yoga-Sûtra is older than the Sâmkhya-Kârikâ, and therefore if any borrowing has occurred it must surely be on the part of Îshvara Krishna.
There are many significant differences between Classical Yoga and Classical Sâmkhya, which can conveniently be grouped as follows:
Methodology: Classical Sâmkhya relies chiefly on the person’s innate capacity for discernment (viveka), which is a function of the higher mind, or buddhi. It is through the exercise of discernment that the transcendental Self (purusha) is recognized as separate from the nonself, that is, the insentient world ground (prakriti) and its evolutes, which includes the human mind (citta). Discernment is followed by the renunciation of that which has been revealed as pertaining to the nonself (anâtman), as not constituting the essential nature of the human being. By contrast, Classical Yoga stresses the necessity for ecstatic realization, or samâdhi, as a vital means of transforming and ultimately transcending the world-bound consciousness. Rational knowledge alone is not deemed sufficient for exposing the false identity that is the ego-sense. Rather, true gnosis (vidyâ) is required to uncover the depths of the human psyche where the real roots of our habitual misidentification lie.
Theology: Classical Sâmkhya is practically atheistic in that it denies the existence of a sovereign who is superior to the many transcendental Selves. The Selves are the Divine. Classical Yoga, on the other hand, is emphatically theistic, even though the “Lord” (îshvara) has only a very slight role to play in the scheme of things. He is considered a primus inter pares, “first among many”—“a special Self,” as Patanjali puts it.
Ontology: Classical Sâmkhya proposes a model of the categories of existence, or ontic principles (tattva), that is distinct from the model of Classical Yoga. The latter appears to be more holistic, which is best seen in the concept of citta comprising buddhi, ahamkâra, and manas.
Terminology: The technical vocabularies of the two schools are quite independent.
These differences appear to be primarily due to the contrasting methodologies of Sâmkhya and Yoga. The psychocosmological map put forward by Patanjali is profoundly informed by the territory he discovered in the course of his own explorations of the human psyche—the vast spaces of consciousness which are correlated to the dimensions of Nature. On the other hand, Îshvara Krishna’s map gives one the impression of having been sketched on the basis of theoretical considerations and with the hindsight of many centuries of metaphysical speculations within the Sâmkhya tradition.
Both maps, of course, are intended to guide the practitioner to Self-realization. In the case of Patanjali’s map, however, we have a device whose ingenuity becomes obvious only when we follow the psychoexperimental path of Yoga and begin to discover the landscapes of our own consciousness through regular meditation and (if we are so fortunate) occasional plunges into the unified condition of samâdhi. It is then, contrary to the atomistic ideology of scientific materialism, that we dev
elop an appreciation for the ancient notion of the chain of being as fact, not as merely gray theory.
The Transcendental Self and the Mind
At the apex of the hierarchy of being is the transcendental Reality, the Self or Spirit (purusha). For Classical Yoga, as for the other schools of Indian spirituality, the Self is the principle of pure Consciousness (cit), or sheer Awareness (citi). It is absolutely distinct from the ordinary consciousness (citta), with its turbulence of thoughts and emotions, which Patanjali explains as the product of the interaction between the transcendental Self (purusha) and insentient Nature (prakriti): The Self’s “proximity” to a highly evolved psychophysical organism creates the phenomenon of consciousness. But Nature itself—the human body- mind on its own—is utterly unconscious.
How this absolutely transcendental Self, or pure Awareness, could have any effect at all on the ongoing processes of Nature is a philosophical conundrum that none of the spiritual traditions of the world has solved. In particular, Patanjali’s metaphysical dualism does not lend itself to such a solution, and yet he tries to overcome the problem by suggesting that there is some kind of connection, which he calls “correlation” (samyoga), between the Self and Nature—that is, between pure Awareness and the complex of the body and personality.
That connection is made possible because at the highest level of Nature we find a predominance of the sattva component. The transparency of the sattva factor of Nature is analogous to the innate transparency or luminosity of the Self. Therefore, Nature (in the form of the psyche or mind) in its sattvic state acts like a mirror for the “light” of the Self.
Since both the Self (or, if we can trust the commentaries, the many Selves) and Nature are eternal and omnipresent, the connection between them also is without beginning. For Patanjali this correlation is the real source of all human malaise (duhkha), because it gives rise to the illusion that we are the individuated body-mind, or personality complex, rather than the transcendental Self. Thus, spiritual ignorance (avidyâ) is at the root of our mistaken identity as the finite egoic body-mind. It is, secondarily, also the source of our attachments and aversions as well as our general hunger for life (the survival instinct). Their attenuation and ultimate transcendence is the objective of the psychotechnology of Yoga.
The Yoga Tradition Page 47