Key idea of the Yoga Sūtras
sāṃkhya · Sāṃkhya and Yoga
The older philosophy whose picture of seer and seen Yoga shares, with key differences.
Yoga and Sāṃkhya share one picture of the person: an unchanging seer and a seen made of the three guṇas, joined by not-seeing and set free by discernment (2.17–2.25). The work's own chapter endings call it a Sāṃkhya teaching (sāṃkhya-pravacana), and Vyāsa quotes sayings that Vācaspati assigns to Pañcaśikha, a Sāṃkhya teacher. Dasgupta calls the two 'different modifications of one common system of ideas', and names the main differences. Yoga admits Īśvara, a special self untouched by affliction (1.24), and puts its weight on practice, where Sāṃkhya relied on discriminating thought. Yoga takes ignorance as a positive error, seeing the impermanent as permanent and the not-self as self (2.5), where Sāṃkhya takes it as a failure to tell nature and self apart. The two map the unfolding of nature differently: in Yoga two lines branch from the great principle, one to the senses and mind, one through the subtle elements to the gross. And Yoga sets out the theory of change in more detail (3.9–3.13).
Vyāsa
“Of these [four], the Round-of-Rebirth with its mass of pains is that which is to be escaped; the conjunction of the primary-cause and of the Self is the cause of this which is to be escaped”
Vyāsa's Yoga-bhāṣya in J. H. Woods' translation (1914), p. 135.
How it has been read
Readings differ on how theistic Yoga is. Mitra thought Patañjali brought in devotion to God as 'a sort of compromise' that 'plays only a very subordinate part'; Dasgupta thought Īśvara began as the protector of yogins and that his cosmic role was added later. Vyāsa and Vācaspati give Īśvara a real part (1.23–1.26).
A common misreading
Yoga is sometimes taught as no more than the practical side of Sāṃkhya. It shares Sāṃkhya's picture of seer and seen, but differs on Īśvara, on what ignorance is, and on the place of practice.
Where the text defines it
- 1.24 Īśvara is a distinct self, untouched by afflictions, actions, their ripening and their residues.
- 2.5 Ignorance is taking the impermanent, impure, painful and not-self to be permanent, pure, pleasant and self.
- 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.
- 2.17 The cause of what can be avoided is the joining of seer and seen.
- 2.19 The stages of the guṇas are the specific, the non-specific, the merely marked and the unmarked.
- 2.23 The joining of the owned and the owner is what lets the own nature of both powers be known.