Key idea of the Yoga Sūtras
bauddha · the Buddhist conversation
Patañjali wrote among Buddhist thinkers and shares much of their meditation vocabulary.
Patañjali wrote in a world full of Buddhist teachers, and the text shows it. The four attitudes of 1.33, friendliness, compassion, gladness and equanimity, are the Buddhist brahmavihāras, and muditā is a Buddhist Sanskrit form rather than a classical one. The 'cloud of dharma' (4.29) is the name of the last stage of the bodhisattva path. Vyāsa's fourfold scheme on 2.15, suffering, its cause, release and the way to it, mirrors the Four Noble Truths, and his examples of change on 3.13 rework arguments reported by the Buddhist philosopher Vasubandhu. The five sources of powers in 4.1 match a list in Vasubandhu's work. From 4.14 on, the text argues against Buddhist idealists who held that things exist only in the mind, and 4.18–4.21 defend an unchanging seer that Buddhist schools denied. The sūtras name no school; the commentators do. For practice this means much of the method is shared ground, while the account of the self is where Patañjali parts company.
Vyāsa
“'There is no intended-object dissociated from a mental act, but percepts are dissociated from intended-objects and imagined as in dreams and similar states,' … how in the very act of prattling it away can their own words be worthy of belief?”
Vyāsa's Yoga-bhāṣya in J. H. Woods' translation (1914), p. 319.
How it has been read
Woods dated the sūtras after Vasubandhu because of the idealist debate. Wujastyk, following Maas, dates Patañjali's work to about 375–425 and argues that Vācaspati and later commentators sometimes misread sūtras such as 1.11, 2.47 and 4.29 because they had lost touch with the Buddhist thought behind them.
A common misreading
The Yoga Sūtras are sometimes presented as untouched by Buddhism, or as its source. Current scholarship holds that the borrowing ran mostly from Buddhism to Patañjali, who reworked it inside a Brahmanical framework.
Where the text defines it
- 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.
- 2.15 To one who discerns, everything is nothing but suffering: through the sufferings of change, anguish and conditioning, and because the movements of the guṇas conflict.
- 3.13 This explains the transformations of quality, time and condition in the elements and the senses.
- 4.1 Powers come from birth, herbs, mantras, discipline or absorption.
- 4.14 Because the transformation is one, a thing is a single reality.
- 4.29 For one who seeks no return even from the highest insight, discernment is constant, and from it comes the absorption called the cloud of dharma.