Key idea of the Yoga Sūtras
saṃskāra · latent impressions
Traces left by experience and action, which seed future thought and behaviour.
Saṃskāras are the traces every experience leaves in the mind. They are latent: not present as thoughts, but ready to give rise to them, and memory works from them (4.9). Vāsanās, latent tendencies, are the patterns they form. These have no beginning, because the wish to be is permanent (4.10), and only those that match a ripening karma come forth (4.8). Patañjali's practical insight is that impressions can be used against impressions. In the absorption without an object only latent impressions remain (1.18). The impression born of truth-bearing wisdom blocks other impressions (1.50). In the transformation of stilling, impressions of going outward give way and impressions of stilling appear (3.9). By directly perceiving latent impressions comes knowledge of former births (3.18). Even late in practice, other thoughts arise from old impressions in the gaps of discernment (4.27), and they are removed in the same way as the afflictions (4.28).
Vyāsa
“But this mind-stuff like a fish-net made in different shapes on all sides and having, from time without beginning, a form-fixed (sammūrchita) by subconscious impressions, which are like knots, … is spread abroad.”
Vyāsa's Yoga-bhāṣya in J. H. Woods' translation (1914), p. 124.
How it has been read
Vyāsa uses saṃskāra and vāsanā closely together, and translators separate them in different ways; Woods has 'subliminal-impressions' for the first and 'subconscious-impressions' for the second.
A common misreading
Saṃskāras are sometimes treated simply as bad habits. In the text impressions are not bad in themselves: those of stilling and of wisdom are tools of release (1.50, 3.9).
Where the text defines it
- 1.18 The other absorption follows practice in letting thought cease; only latent impressions remain.
- 1.50 The impression born of it blocks other impressions.
- 3.9 The transformation of stilling: impressions of going outward give way, impressions of stilling appear, and the mind is pervaded by the moment of stilling.
- 3.18 By directly perceiving latent impressions comes knowledge of former births.
- 4.9 Even when separated by birth, place and time, they follow without a gap, because memory and impressions have one form.
- 4.24 Though patterned by countless latent tendencies, the mind exists for another, because it works by combination.