Key idea of the Yoga Sūtras
antarāya · obstacles
Nine scatterings of the mind that block practice, with their felt companions.
The antarāyas are the nine obstacles of 1.30: illness, dullness, doubt, carelessness, heaviness, craving, false seeing, not reaching a stage, and not staying there. Patañjali calls them scatterings of the mind, not personal failings. They run from illness of the body and dullness of the mind, through attitude, to the problems of progress itself. They come with companions that can be felt: pain, despair, trembling of the body, and disturbed in-breath and out-breath (1.31). These give early warning. The remedies come at once. Repeating Om with its meaning makes the obstacles fall away (1.29). Practice on a single principle prevents them (1.32), and 1.33–1.39 offer a series of ways to a clear, steady mind, from friendliness and compassion to the breath to meditating on whatever you hold dear. Book III later names another kind of obstacle: the powers themselves, which hinder absorption (3.37). Naming the obstacle is already half the remedy.
Vyāsa
“These appear together with the fluctuations of the mind-stuff. And they are not found where the aforesaid fluctuations of mind-stuff are not.”
Vyāsa's Yoga-bhāṣya in J. H. Woods' translation (1914), p. 63.
How it has been read
Vyāsa uses 'practice on a single principle' (1.32) to argue that the mind is one continuing thing, not a series of moments. Vācaspati Miśra takes the single principle to be Īśvara, following on from 1.29; others take it as any one object of attention.
A common misreading
The obstacles are sometimes read as moral failings to feel guilty about. Patañjali treats them as states of a scattered mind (1.30), with practical remedies (1.32–1.39).
Where the text defines it
- 1.29 From that also comes realisation of the inward self, and the obstacles fall away.
- 1.30 Illness, dullness, doubt, carelessness, heaviness, craving, false seeing, not reaching a stage, and not staying there: these scatterings of the mind are the obstacles.
- 1.31 Pain, despair, trembling of the body and disturbed in-breath and out-breath come with the scattering.
- 1.32 To prevent them, practise on a single principle.
- 1.33 The mind becomes clear by cultivating friendliness toward the happy, compassion toward the suffering, gladness toward the good, and equanimity toward the unvirtuous.