Key idea of the Yoga Sūtras
duḥkha · suffering
Suffering, which the discerning find in all experience, and which can be avoided.
Duḥkha is the problem the whole system answers. Patañjali's claim is hard: to one who discerns, everything is suffering (2.15). He gives reasons. Pleasure changes and ends. It brings anguish, and the conditioning it leaves seeds more craving. And the guṇas that make up every experience pull against each other (2.15). The claim is not that life holds no joy. Joy is real (2.14), but to the discerning it is never free of pain. Then comes the hopeful turn: suffering that has not yet come can be avoided (2.16). Its cause is the joining of seer and seen (2.17), the joining is caused by ignorance (2.24), and the means of release is discernment (2.26). Vyāsa lays this out like medicine: disease, cause, health and remedy. Duḥkha appears in Book I too, among the companions of a scattered mind (1.31), and compassion is the attitude to cultivate toward those who suffer (1.33).
Vyāsa
“Just as a system of medicine has four divisions, … so this system also has four divisions, [on] the Round-of-Rebirth [and on] the Cause of the Round-of-Rebirth [and on] Release [and on] the Way to Release.”
Vyāsa's Yoga-bhāṣya in J. H. Woods' translation (1914), p. 135.
How it has been read
This fourfold scheme of disease, cause, health and remedy closely parallels the Buddha's four noble truths, as Woods' running head on the page notes. How far Yoga and Buddhist thought shaped each other is debated.
A common misreading
'Everything is suffering' is often heard as pessimism. The point is diagnostic, and the very next sūtra says that suffering still to come can be avoided (2.16).
Where the text defines it
- 1.31 Pain, despair, trembling of the body and disturbed in-breath and out-breath come with the scattering.
- 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.
- 2.16 Suffering that has not yet come can be avoided.
- 2.17 The cause of what can be avoided is the joining of seer and seen.
- 2.34 Harmful thoughts such as violence, whether done, caused or approved, arising from greed, anger or delusion, mild, middling or intense, bear endless fruit in suffering and ignorance. Reflecting on this is cultivating the opposite.