Key idea of the Yoga Sūtras
puruṣa · the seer, the self
Pure awareness: the seer, which only sees and never changes.
Puruṣa is the self in Patañjali's system, and he usually calls it the seer (draṣṭṛ). It is seeing alone: pure, yet it looks on through the mind's ideas (2.20). It does not change, which is why the mind's movements are always known to it (4.18). It is not the mind, the body or the personality; those belong to the seen. The trouble is that the two seem to be one. I-am-ness is the seeming oneness of the power that sees and the instrument of seeing (2.6), and outside stillness the seer seems to take the form of the mind's movements (1.4). There are many puruṣas, since the seen does not end for others when one is free (2.22), and Īśvara is a distinct puruṣa, never bound (1.24). Saṃyama on what exists for its own sake gives knowledge of the self (3.35). The text's last word on it is the power of awareness established in its own nature (4.34).
Vyāsa
“For the Energy of Intellect (citi-śakti) is immutable and does not unite [with objects]; it has objects shown to it and is undefiled [by constituent-aspects] and is unending.”
Vyāsa's Yoga-bhāṣya in J. H. Woods' translation (1914), p. 8.
How it has been read
Sāṃkhya and Yoga hold that there are many selves. Advaita Vedānta, a different school, teaches one self identical with brahman, and many modern readers bring that view to the Yoga Sūtras. The text itself implies many seers (2.22).
A common misreading
Puruṣa is often equated with a higher mind or a true personality. In the text the mind and its sense of 'I' belong to the seen (2.6, 2.18); the seer is seeing alone (2.20).
Where the text defines it
- 1.3 Then the seer rests in its own nature.
- 2.6 I-am-ness is the seeming oneness of the power that sees and the instrument of seeing.
- 2.20 The seer is seeing alone; though pure, it looks on through the mind's ideas.
- 3.35 Experience is an idea that fails to tell apart the mind and the self, which are utterly distinct. Since that experience exists for another, saṃyama on what exists for its own sake gives knowledge of the self.
- 4.18 The movements of the mind are always known to their master, the self, because the self does not change.
- 4.34 Liberation is the return of the guṇas to their source, now that they have no purpose left for the self; or it is the power of awareness established in its own nature. Thus it ends.