Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras may be understood best using similar pure, simple words he offers, and especially by applying a deep understanding of the inner meditation experiences about which he wrote. Unfortunately, many translations do not adhere to the simpler meanings of Patanjali, they add philosophical shadings he didn’t intend, and they haven’t had the benefit of Patanjali’s experiences.

 
Four Reasons to Reinterpret Patanjali

First, Patanjali’s original words were written in simple, practical language for a wide audience, without excess philosophical or theological abstractions. Eminent Sanskrit scholar Barbara Stoler Miller (see the “Bibliography”) argues that many translators miss the direct meaning of the original Sanskrit. She said that in her own translation of the Yoga Sutras, she worked to use “consistent equivalents in English for Patanjali’s core vocabulary, rather than perpetuating the loose array of incomprehensible technical inventions on which translators have too often relied” (xii).

Stoler believes Patanjali’s words were simple and basic. She adds that the Yoga Sutras is written with Patanjali’s “precision” in a prose style tight and highly efficient, using as few words as necessary.

Second, Patanjali’s writing deserves an update. Most of the translations of his work are from the mid-twentieth century or earlier, some of them from the medieval ages in India. Most translations tend to favor one particular school of Indian philosophy or another. Many of them also tend toward academic or scholarly language.

This present book uses ordinary concepts to describe Patanjali’s sometimes impressively clear descriptions. He was a plain speaker who carved his sutras into simple chants with metaphors from nature and from simple living. Stoler describes Patanjali’s prose style as practical and sensible with “basic insights [that] have a self-referential clarity that is independent of knowledge outside the text” (xiii). In other words, you don’t need to be a scholar of Sanskrit or Hindu theology and religion to understand Patanjali.

Third, Patanjali intended each sutra to be understood, not as a philosophical concept, but rather an experience that happens in or related to meditation. If you like your talk of spirituality to be abstract concepts, Patanjali is not for you. If you prefer to hear about real experiences, Patanjali should appeal to you.

It is true, on the one hand, that some of Patanjali’s sutras can be thought of as both experience and philosophy. However, those who see the sutras as only philosophy are missing something important: the “Invisible Gorilla” in the room.

The “Invisible Gorilla” experiment was conducted at Harvard University. Researchers showed a video to research subjects in which six people, three in white shirts and three in black, pass around basketballs. The job of the research subjects watching the film was to count the number of passes by the people in white shirts. During the video, a gorilla (a person in a gorilla suit) enters the scene, faces the camera, thumps its chest, and then walks off. After the test, subjects were asked if they had seen the gorilla. Half of them did not remember noticing it. (See www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/gorilla_experiment.html.)

This test, says its authors, shows that you easily can miss what is happening around you without realizing it. In the Yoga Sutras, it means that some translators may be so busy studying the philosophical, theological, and linguistic meanings that they miss seeing Patanjali’s inner experiences and simple practices.

Fourth, an ideological war about Patanjali is ongoing among historians. Some say he wrote in India’s ancient times, which were c. 500-0 BCE or earlier, but others insist he wrote at the beginning of the Hindu “classical” era (0-800 CE). Unfortunately, all translations come from this later classical era or later, and translators often assume that Patanjali’s statements resemble those of one or two specific schools of Hindu thought that existed in those classical times.

However, Patanjali’s sutras, when translated plainly and simply, appear to model more closely and directly the concepts of ancient times as exemplified in the earliest written Hindu scripture, the Rig Veda, and similar ancient texts. This preference in Patanjali’s writing (no matter the era in which he actually wrote) creates a guiding beacon for understanding that his language is like that of the Rig Veda. The spiritual and mystical meanings of many of his sutras appear to come directly from these earlier texts, as do the root meanings of many of his key words.

It is easy to conclude that Patanjali–no matter what era in which he lived–had a clear preference for the ancient texts and their meanings. This current book honors Patanjali’s apparently preferred original meanings from ancient Sanskrit.

        
Was Patanjali a Samkhya?

This particular section on Hindu Samkhya philosophy gets a little technical. Feel free to skip to the end if this technical discussion doesn’t interest you.

In particular, many translators claim that Patanjali was an adherent of the Samkhya School of Indian philosophy, especially in its classical-era form. Certainly, some of his explanations in the Yoga Sutras use Samkhya-like expressions: for example, the existence of a Purusa or divine self, and the contrasting reality of Prakriti or independent matter.

However, many other descriptions in his book are from other sources. Edwin Bryant, for example, demonstrates this in four points he explains in the “Concluding Reflections” chapter of his translation of the sutras.

First, says Bryant, Samkhya tends to reject that each person’s basic Awareness (the Purusa) has freewill. However, the Yoga Sutras imply that freewill does, indeed, exist. And its home is in the Purusa.

Second, adds Bryant, Patanjali appears to believe that the tattvas–direct forms of the basic stuff of the universe–are psychological in nature: we can perceive them psychologically. Samkhya, on the other hand, considers them irrelevant and at a far distance in the universe, simply cosmological principles that are not helpful in psychologically freeing or developing yourself in yoga.

Third, Bryant tells us, Samkhya yoga argues that the ultimate condition of kaivalya, or “singular aloneness,” means that once a yogi fully achieves this state, he slowly dies, leaving the human body and human life behind. However, Patanjali appears, instead, to suggest that, at the least, a kaivalya yogi can decide to die or to stay in one’s body and serve humankind.

In fact, Patanjali’s final state for a meditator–which he discusses in his last several sutras–is called dharma megha. There is a tendency among Samkhya translators to think that dharma megha is a final stage that leads into death. However, plenty of evidence in Buddhist and Vedic literature from Patanjali’s time, and from earlier Vedic literature, suggests a meditator who finds dharma megha is not dying but rather starting an important new stage of both his meditation life and outer actions. Patanjali makes strong, sweeping statements in these final sutras about how grand dharma megha is. So, it is unlikely he thinks, as do followers of Samkhya, that the ultimate state of meditation is to fade away and die.

Fourth and–according to Bryant, “most intriguing”–is the meaning of “Patanjali’s mysterious Isvara–a state of Being or “yogic Godhead.” Samkhya yoga does not believe in a God that is above all others or exists behind or in everything in the universe. Patanjali’s Isvara apparently does fill this role. It is similar to (though possibly somewhat different from) another Hindu idea of God, which is Brahman. In a sense, both Brahman and Isvara serve in Patanjali’s meditation system in some important ways as the Western equivalent of “God” serves in Christianity, Islam, and Judaism.

                
Useful Translations

            Thus this current translation, here, was helped most by translators who (1) provided a variety of possible English meanings of Sanskrit words, and (2) included older meanings from ancient Indian times, not just adopted meanings from classical Hinduism. The translations that most provided these qualities were by David Geer, B.K.S. Iyengar, Swami Vivekananda, and best of all, Georg Feuerstein and Sri Swami Satchidananda. However, almost all translations in the “Bibliography” provided a helpful variety of contexts.

            Especially helpful, too, were three sets of dictionaries and glossaries. The Monier-Williams Sanskrit-English Dictionary, a massive and masterful work, always is useful. An online project at the University of Texas-Austin, Ancient Sanskrit Online, was a wonderful resource of definitions of ancient words in the first written Hindu scripture, the Rig Veda. The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots also was very helpful. 

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So, how should Patanjali be translated? The answer is “simply.” Harry Truman, President of the United States at the end of World War II, was legendary for being “plain speaking.” So should be the words of Patanjali. He uses the easiest-to-understand language he can, from nature and the human senses, to describe the states of meditation. He offers them in a list of steps. He hands you an extensive menu of alternatives and tells you, “Pick what works.” If you practice his simple instructions, you’ll find a glimmer–and then a gradually burgeoning dawn–of new experience. He knows it well, draws a map, and gives you the compass for going into the light.
           

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Most recent revision: 27 Dec. 2021