We are accustomed to picking up a book and reading it from cover to cover, beginning on page one and consuming the remaining contents in a relatively short period of time. This is not a good model for studying Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras, the foundational text for those wishing to learn more about the underlying philosophy of yoga. Approaching the text in this way is one of the main reasons why contemporary readers sometimes struggle to engage with the Yoga Sūtras in a meaningful way, and even give up. The very format of the text, consisting of one hundred and ninety-six short, densely composed aphorisms or sūtras, suggests the necessity for a different approach. In its time, the Yoga Sūtras was an oral text, and we can imagine that students would have been guided by a teacher who decided on an appropriate order and pace for teaching these sūtras. How should we as contemporary practitioners approach this text, and where to begin?
How to study
Most readers today become interested in the Yoga Sūtras as a result of practicing the yoga postures (āsanas). The way in which we study the āsanas in Iyengar Yoga actually provides a good model for how to study the Yoga Sūtras. In our study of the as̄anas, we have already learned that it is important to begin with the simpler, more accessible āsanas and progress to the more complex and demanding ones. We also learn that the āsanas are connected to each other, that one āsana can shed light on another. We know that āsanas can be sequenced together in meaningful ways, and that some āsanas are basic for understanding a whole group of them. We are familiar with the idea that understanding each āsana can be a lifelong project, and that our understanding deepens with time and practice.
Analogously, when it comes to studying the Yoga Sūtras, it is best to begin with the more accessible sutras and with those that are key to comprehending subsequent portions of the text. Understand that your appreciation of the text will unfold and deepen over time, and you will come back to the same sūtras again and again, discovering new layers of meaning and new connections between them. Like the numbers in a Sudoku puzzle, each sūtra contributes to, and must be compatible with, the overall teaching of the text. Don’t “go it alone.” Instead, equip yourself with a range of interpretive commentaries to help you see the depth of meaning in Patañjali’s work. Prepare for this text to become a lifelong companion, inspiring and helping you to think through some of life’s deepest questions.
Where to begin
I suggest three different, but connected entry points for beginning one’s exploration of the Yoga Sūtras. The first constitutes a natural extension for someone who is already a practitioner of the āsanas. In section II.29–III.3, Patañjali presents a multifaceted and complete yoga practice which includes āsana as one among eight limbs. This allows us to see āsana as one element in the practice of yoga rather than as the whole, and situates the practice of the postures in their broader ethical and contemplative context.
We are still left with the question of why someone would embark on the practice in the first place. What are its theoretical underpinnings and overall goals? This gives us our second entry point into the text, the opening four sūtras. These are a logical place to begin one’s study, not just because they come at the beginning, but because in these opening sūtras Patañjali gives us a definition of yoga along with its ultimate goal. He defines yoga as a practice of stilling the mind (I.2), which will lead to a recovery of a deeper Self, the Seer (I.3). In the absence of realizing our deeper, transcendent Self, we will tend to diminish ourselves by identifying with each of our fleeting thoughts, the so-called cittavṛttis (I.4). Patañjali gives us two alternatives here in sūtras 3 and 4, the implication being that the second of the two alternatives is not something we should aspire to. Ultimately though, we still have questions. Why would we not want to identify with our thoughts cycling through our minds? What exactly is this Seer?
This question leads us to our third entry point into the text and to the fundamental question that motivated Patañjali to compose the Yoga Sūtras. About two thousand years ago, like many of his contemporaries, Patañjali was greatly disturbed by the suffering he saw in his fellow human beings and took this problem to be his most urgent cause. He wanted to know why human beings suffer so much, and whether anything can be done to prevent and alleviate suffering. The answers he found are at the very heart of the Yoga Sūtras, and constitute its central teachings. It is why we continue to read this text today, and we should not lose sight of this as we go deeper into the text. It is all too easy to lose one’s way when reading the sūtras, to become overwhelmed by all of its Sanskrit terminology, or to be dazzled by its explorations of special yogic powers. Yet we should bear in mind that Patañjali’s teachings are anchored in a very practical problem, the problem of human suffering, a predicament that we share with those whom he taught centuries ago.
Yoga is a practice specifically formulated to alleviate human suffering. As human beings, we suffer for many of the same reasons as have caused people to suffer throughout history. The specifics may differ, but the generic causes of suffering transcend the particularities of time and place—a shared litany of personal insecurities and unfulfilled desires, illness, loss of loved ones, and fear of one’s own mortality. It is these shared predicaments that make ancient insights about suffering as relevant for us today as they were in their time.
In many global philosophical traditions, we see a close connection between philosophy and healing (in its broad sense), but perhaps nowhere is this more pronounced than in classical India. Patañjali viewed human suffering through the lens of disease, as opposed to seeing it as a form of punishment or as having some redemptive significance. As with any disease, he believed that the appropriate response to suffering is to seek its cure. At the time of the composition of the Yoga Sūtras, the medical sciences (āyurveda) were well established in India and were founded on a fourfold model of healing, which provided a sort of floor plan for healers to follow in their practice. It consists of the following four steps:
1. An initial description of disease (what is wrong with the patient?)
2. Diagnosis (what is the cause of the patient’s ailment?)
3. Cure (what will bring an end to the patient’s ailment?)
4. Treatment (what treatment must the patient pursue to bring an end to the ailment?)
This fourfold model provided Patañjali with his therapeutic response to human suffering, and the sūtras of II.15–II.26 are structured according to this model. II.15 represents the first step in the fourfold model—a description of the disease. What is wrong with the human condition? The human condition is described at the end of II.15 as an all-pervasive suffering (or dis-ease) that pervades all empirical human experience, summed up in the phrase given in this sūtra as “sarvam duḥkham” (“all is suffering”). The statement, as it stands, seems at first glance to be overly pessimistic and melodramatic, even patently false. It seems to speak from a place of despair. We may accept the idea that some suffering is an inescapable part of human existence, but this is a weaker statement than the idea that everything in life is tainted by suffering. This is because the statement that everything is suffering does not seem to adequately capture how a good many of us, the lucky ones perhaps, experience our lives as a mixture of a few peak experiences of unmitigated joy, some troughs of grief and despair, but mostly a gentler landscape of moderate pleasures and pains. We may be tempted to set the Yoga Sūtras aside at this point and search for a teaching with a less pessimistic outlook.
This reluctance to accept Patañjali’s description of our lives, that it is all suffering, is understandable. Any life that fits such a description would surely be an exceptionally tragic life, and such lives must be held in stark contrast to the average life. To describe all lives as lives of suffering, if not just plain false, at the very least seems disrespectful to those who have to endure a great deal of pain and suffering. The statement “sarvam duhkham” seems to imply that suffering is ubiquitous and equally spread out among all human beings, thereby overriding the particularity of suffering and ignoring how societal inequalities place extra burdens on some groups of people.
We should first note that Patañjali qualifies his statement in II.15—it is only for the person of discrimination (vivekinaḥ) that the statement, everything is suffering, is true. Presumably, such a person understands or sees something that the rest of us don’t, and that the rest of us would be better off to see the world as the wise, clear-sighted person does. If discrimination is required to understand the truth of the statement “sarvam duḥkham,” then its message must have a subtlety beyond what we might initially think. It implies that there are forms of duḥkha that are less obvious and immediate than paradigmatic cases of suffering. It implies that this phrase isn’t claiming that we spend our whole existence writhing in pain or existential agony.
Vyāsa, who composed the first commentary on the Yoga Sūtras, compares the sensitivity of the wise person to that of the eyeball, a particularly sensitive part of the body, easily irritated by the smallest of things not felt by the rest of the body. Likewise, the wise are sensitive to a dimension of life that the rest of us are not seeing. The question then is what are the wise seeing that the rest of us don’t? What are they sensitive to that the rest of us are not? What is the justification for classifying seemingly happy times as duḥkha? If the phrase “sarvam duḥkham” is not making the dubious claim that we spend our entire lives in a state of misery, we will need to dig deeper in order to understand the concept.
In II.15, but also throughout the Yoga Sūtras, Patañjali lays out in meticulous detail all the ways we are prone to suffer in our lives, ways in which human existence is blighted and unsatisfactory. This makes for hard reading, but once we have come to understand his analysis, once we have been moved by it to want something better for ourselves, we will be receptive to seeing how he picks up the pieces, showing us a way towards a more fulfilled existence. Since the problem of human suffering was Patañjali’s motivation for composing the Yoga Sūtras, it is a natural point of entry into the text. Next time we will explore the full meaning of “sarvam duḥkham” and how it connects with Patañjali’s definition of yoga given in the second sūtra of the opening pāda.
Further Study
For the contemporary reader, there are many translations and commentaries on the Yoga Sūtras to choose from. As noted above, it is good to own at least two or three commentaries to support your studies. Here are some initial recommendations.
Edwin Bryant, The Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali: A New Edition, Translation and Commentary (North Point Press) 2009
Bryant has achieved a good balance in his translation and commentary, giving his readers both a sense of the transformative potential of Patañjali’s teachings, as well as setting them in their broader cultural and historical context. If you are interested in exploring the philosophical landscape that formed the backdrop for Patañjali’s work, this is a great text.
Jaganath Carrera, Inside The Yoga Sūtras (Integral Yoga Publications) 2006
This translation is very much slanted towards helping its readers apply Patañjali’s teachings to the reality of our lives. Carrera has provided us with a good translation and a user-friendly format. He includes sūtra study pathways which are very useful.
Christopher Key Chapple, Yoga and the Luminous (SUNY) 2008
A translation of the Yoga Sūtras is contained within Chapple’s book about yoga. His translation is helpful for someone who already knows a little Sanskrit and wants to increase their knowledge of the language, as he includes a grammatical analysis of each sūtra in addition to providing a word-by-word translation.
B.K.S. Iyengar, Light on the Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali (Thorsons) 2002
B.K.S. Iyengar offers us a translation of The Yoga Sūtras that builds on his two earlier works, Light on Yoga and Light on Pranayama. His translation is infused with the wisdom of his pioneering and lifelong practice of yoga.
Popsi Narasimhan, The Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali: A Collection of Translations (2018)
This book (available through the IYNAUS website) groups together translations, including those from B.K.S. Iyengar, Bryant, Carrera, Feuerstein, Swāmi Vivekānanda, Swāmi Hariharānanda Araṇya and Ravi Ravindra. It is useful to see these different translations side-by-side. It allows you to see the variety of ways in which each of the sūtras can be translated and reminds us that translation is always in part an interpretive act.
Swāmi Hariharānanda Āraṇya, Yoga Philosophy of Patañjali (SUNY) 1984
At some point, a serious student of The Yoga Sūtras will want a translation that includes a translation of Vyāsa’s commentary on The Yoga Sūtras, known as The Yoga Bhāṣya. Patañjali’s text is very compressed, written as it is in the sūtra (aphoristic) style. Traditionally, sūtra texts were interpreted with the aid of commentaries. Vyāsa’s commentary on The Yoga Sūtras is the first extant commentary on the text, and our understanding of Patañjali’s philosophy has been very much shaped by Vyāsa’s reading of it. Swāmi Hariharānanda’s translation is not an easy text, but one that will sustain years of study.
Rāma Prasāda, The Yoga Darśana of Patañjali (Logos Press 2005, originally published in 1912)
Rāma Prasāda’s work includes a translation of Vyāsa’s commentary, along with that of another important classical commentator, Vācaspati Miśra.
