Lives of Great Religious Books

A Biography

David Gordon White

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781400850051
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Hinduism

The rise, fall, and modern resurgence of an enigmatic book revered by yoga enthusiasts around the world Consisting of fewer than two hundred verses written in an obscure if not impenetrable language and style, Patanjali's Yoga Sutra is today extolled by the yoga establishment as a perennial classic and guide to yoga practice. As David Gordon White demonstrates in this groundbreaking study, both of these assumptions are incorrect. Virtually forgotten in India for hundreds of years and maligned when it was first discovered in the West, the Yoga Sutra has been elevated to its present iconic status—and translated into more than forty languages—only in the course of the past forty years.White retraces the strange and circuitous journey of this confounding work from its ancient origins down through its heyday in the seventh through eleventh centuries, its gradual fall into obscurity, and its modern resurgence since the nineteenth century. First introduced to the West by the British Orientalist Henry Thomas Colebrooke, the Yoga Sutra was revived largely in Europe and America, and predominantly in English. White brings to life the improbable cast of characters whose interpretations—and misappropriations—of the Yoga Sutra led to its revered place in popular culture today. Tracing the remarkable trajectory of this enigmatic work, White's exhaustively researched book also demonstrates why the yoga of India's past bears little resemblance to the yoga practiced today.

Reading the Yoga Sutra in the Twenty-First Century

MODERN CHALLENGES, ANCIENT STRATEGIES

CHAPTER 1

In the United States, where an estimated seventeen million people regularly attend yoga classes, there has been a growing trend to regulate the training of yoga instructors, the people who do the teaching in the thousands of yoga centers and studios spread across the country. Often, teacher training includes mandatory instruction in the Yoga Sutra of Patanjali. This is curious to say the least, given the fact that the Yoga Sutra is as relevant to yoga as it is taught and practiced today as understanding the workings of a combustion engine is to driving a car.

So the question that must be asked is: why? Why should a string (this is what the word sutra means in Sanskrit, the language of the Yoga Sutra) of 195 opaque aphorisms compiled in the first centuries of the Common Era be required reading for yoga instructors in the twenty-first century? What could an archaic treatise on the attainment of release through true cognition possibly have to do with modern postural yoga, that is, the postures and the stretching and breathing exercises we call yoga today (about which the Yoga Sutra has virtually nothing to say)? The obvious answer, many would say, is in the title of Patanjali’s work: what could the Yoga Sutra possibly be about, if not yoga?

Yoga has been a transnational word for over two hundred years. The French missionary Gaston-Laurent Coeurdoux equated the “yogam” of India’s “yoguis” with “contemplation” in the mid-1700s (although his writings were not published—plagiarized is a more accurate term—until 1816). In his 1785 translation of the Bhagavad Gita, the British Orientalist Charles Wilkins did not provide translations for the words “Yog” or “Yogee,” for reasons that will become clear later in this book. “Der Joga” has been a German word for well over a century, “il yoga” an Italian word, and so forth. Of course, yoga was originally a Sanskrit word, so one would think it would suffice to open a Sanskrit dictionary to know what yoga is. Since its publication in 1899, Sir Monier Monier-Williams’s Sanskrit-English Dictionary has been the standard reference work to which both first-year language students and seasoned scholars have been turning for translations of Sanskrit words. And what is it that we find when we turn to the entry “yoga” in this work? Weighing in at approximately 2,500 words, it is one of the longest entries in the entire dictionary, taking up four columns of print. Seventy-two of those words describe the use of the term “yoga” in the Yoga Sutra. They read as follows:

Application or concentration of the thoughts, abstract contemplation and mental abstraction practiced as a system (as taught by Patanjali and called the Yoga philosophy; it is the second of the two Samkhya systems, its chief aim being to teach the means by which the human spirit may attain complete union with Isvara or the Supreme Spirit; in the practice of self-concentration it is closely connected with Buddhism).¹

There is at least one error in this definition, which I will return to later, but first, more on the general meaning of yoga. (Throughout this book, I will capitalize the word “Yoga” when I am referring to Yoga as a philosophical system, whereas I will use the lowercase “yoga” for all other uses of the term.) In keeping with the organizing principles of dictionaries of this type, Monier-Williams begins his yoga entry with its earliest and most widely used meanings before moving into later and more restricted usages. In this ordering, his definition of Yoga appears only after a long enumeration of more general meanings, which, reproduced here, read like a list that Jorge Luis Borges might have dreamed up for his “Library of Babel”:

Yoga: the act of yoking, joining, attaching, harnessing, putting to (of horses); a yoke, team, vehicle, conveyance; employment, use, application, performance; equipping or arraying (of an army); fixing (of an arrow on the bow-string); putting on (of armour); a remedy, cure; a means, expedient, device, way, manner, method; a supernatural means, charm, incantation, magical art; a trick, stratagem, fraud, deceit; undertaking, business, work; acquisition, gain, profit, wealth, property; occasion, opportunity; any junction, union, combination, contact with; mixing of various materials, mixture; partaking of, possessing; connection, relation (in consequence of, on account of, by reason of, according to, through); putting together, arrangement, disposition, regular succession; fitting together, fitness, propriety, suitability (suitably, fitly, duly, in the right manner); exertion, endeavor, zeal, diligence, industry, care, attention (strenuously, assiduously) …

Before we leave Sir Monier behind, it should be noted that postures, stretching, and breathing are found nowhere here (although they are alluded to in his definition of Hatha Yoga, in a separate entry). With this, let us return to our original question of why it is—when the “Yoga Sutra definition” of yoga is not a particularly early or important one, and when the contents of the Yoga Sutra are nearly devoid of discussion of postures, stretching, and breathing whereas dozens of other Sanskrit works with “yoga” in their titles are devoted to those very practices—that instruction in the Yoga Sutra should be compulsory for modern-day yoga instructors?

We may begin by placing this modern appropriation of Patanjali’s work in its historical context. Since the time of its composition, the Yoga Sutra has been interpreted by three major groups: the Yoga Sutra’s classical Indian commentators; modern critical scholars; and members of the modern-day yoga subculture, including gurus and their followers. A fourth group, conspicuous by its absence, should also be mentioned here. For reasons that we will see, the people traditionally known as “yogis” have had virtually no interest or stake in the Yoga Sutra or Yoga philosophy.

A clear fault line divides the groups just mentioned. On the one hand, modern critical scholars, who read the Yoga Sutra as a philosophical work, concern themselves nearly exclusively with the classical commentators and their readings of the work’s aphorisms. On the other, there are the adherents of the modern yoga subculture, who generally read the Yoga Sutra as a guide to their postural practice, but whose understanding of the work is refracted not through the classical commentaries themselves, but rather through Hindu scripture. Here, I am speaking primarily of the great Mahabharata epic and the Puranas (“Antiquarian Books”), massive medieval encyclopedias of Hindu thought and practice. As such, these parallel universes of interpretation converge on but a single point; that point being what Patanjali termed the “eight-part practice” (ashtanga-yoga), his step-by-step guide to meditation. However it turns out that the two constituencies nonetheless have diverged over even this small point, in the sense that the classical commentators and critical scholars have judged this to be the least significant portion of the Yoga Sutra, while the modern yoga subculture has focused almost exclusively on the eight-part practice. As we will see in the next chapter, most scriptural accounts of the eight-part practice actually subverted Patanjali’s teachings, contributing to the virtual extinction of Yoga as a viable philosophical system by the sixteenth century. Then, through a series of improbable synergies, Yoga rose from its ashes in the late nineteenth century to become a cult object for much of the modern yoga subculture.

Unlike the Mahabharata and the Puranas, which are anonymous compilations of ancient Hindu sacred lore, the classical commentaries on the Yoga Sutra are “signed” works by historical figures. Most scholars believe that the earliest among these, a certain Vyasa, wrote his commentary within decades of the appearance of the Yoga Sutra. However, others argue he lived as many as six hundred years after Patanjali: we will re-visit the question of Vyasa’s dates in the final chapter of this book. The Yoga Sutra’s other major commentaries date from between the ninth and sixteenth centuries; however, no commentary was written in defense of the Yoga system after the twelfth century, which may be taken as a tipping point following which the school began to fall into decline (apart from a limited Yoga “revival” in south India, between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries).

We know from their writing that the great classical commentators were brilliant, immensely cultivated individuals possessed of a thorough grasp of India’s traditional treasury of knowledge. Nearly all were philosophers and schoolmen who, writing in the Sanskrit medium, sought to unpack the meaning of Patanjali’s aphorisms and defend their readings of its message against the claims of rival thinkers and schools, of which there were many. In addition to educating their pupils in royal courts, brahmanic colleges, hermitages, temples, and monasteries, they would have also taken part in debates on the great questions of the time, carrying forward a practice that dated back to the Vedas (ca. 1500–1000 BCE), the most ancient sources of Hindu revelation. This we know because many of their commentaries retain a debate format, setting forth their adversaries’ perspectives in order to subsequently rebut them with their own arguments. Debates could be lively affairs in these contexts, “philosophy slams” whose victors were often rewarded with wealth, position, and glory.

Every great text in India has been the object of one if not several such commentaries. Generally speaking, these are highly technical treatises that analyze the terms and concepts presented in original scriptures such as (for Hindus) the Vedas, Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita, and major philosophical works. Here, the mark of a good commentator is his objectivity, his ability to dispassionately make his points about a text in the light not only of the language of the text itself but also of other commentaries that have preceded his own. As such, commentaries are, in addition to being transcriptions of contemporary debates, conversations with their past, where earlier points of discussion are analyzed through careful precedent-based argument. While outright innovation is a rarity in classical commentary, changing philosophical and real-world contexts make for gradual shifts in the perceived meanings of the words and concepts being interpreted, such that over time—and here I am speaking of hundreds, if not thousands of years—the commentarial “big picture” of a given work is gradually altered, sometimes beyond recognition.

One finds a similar situation in Western legal traditions, in what is known as judicial review in the United States. Judicial review assumes that the principal sources of the American legal system—English common law, the Magna Carta, and most importantly, the Constitution—form a living tradition in which judicial precedents are reinterpreted in the light of changing real-world contexts. Fundamental concepts, such as “free speech,” “citizenship,” and the “right to bear arms,” are constantly being tested and retested through judicial review, changing even as they remain the same. As with Patanjali’s work, there is no way to go back t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Dramatis Personae
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Reading the Yoga Sutra in the Twenty-First Century: Modern Challenges, Ancient Strategies
• Chapter 2: Patanjali, the Yoga Sutra, and Indian Philosophy
• Chapter 3: Henry Thomas Colebrooke and the Western “Discovery” of the Yoga Sutra
• Chapter 4: Yoga Sutra Agonistes: Hegel and the German Romantics
• Chapter 5: Rajendralal Mitra: India’s Forgotten Pioneer of Yoga Sutra Scholarship
• Chapter 6: The Yoga of the Magnetosphere: The Yoga Sutra and the Theosophical Society
• Chapter 7: Swami Vivekananda and the Mainstreaming of the Yoga Sutra
• Chapter 8: The Yoga Sutra in the Muslim World
• Chapter 9: The Yoga Sutra Becomes a Classic
• Chapter 10: Ishvara
• Chapter 11: Journeys East, Journeys West: The Yoga Sutra in the Early Twentieth Century
• Chapter 12: The Strange Case of T. M. Krishnamacharya
• Chapter 13: Yoga Sutra 2.0
• Notes
• Suggestions for Further Reading
• Bibliography
• Index