Patanjali's Yoga Sutras

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Literal translation: “The mastered and the master, enabled together, (with) a mastery-experience acquired (by) incitement = blessed yoga”

Meaning: “Your own mastered nature and your master Self, working together, result in a mastery form or event that produces blessings of yoking.”

A chant in English: “Your body and Being, working together with purpose, create gifts of union.”

Definition: Sutras 2.23-2.27 are notorious for being difficult to understand, even in Sanskrit. Many translators turn them into abstract statements of philosophy in which Patanjali says nature and the Self have a close relationship, but success in yoga requires us to turn away from our bodies. However, while in a technical sense some of this may be correct, Patanjali’s patterns of writing throughout his Yoga Sutras suggest something a little different: that Sutras 2.23-2.27 are neither just abstract ideas nor overly-strict, anti-body warnings.

One applicable pattern offered by Patanjali, as discussed from the “Introduction” onward, is that he enjoys using ancient Sanskrit words and their root meanings. A second pattern, also discussed from the beginning of this translation, is that, consistently, almost every sutra offers practical advice that you can apply directly to meditation. Using both of these principles in Sutras 2.23-2.27 yields from them richer, more subtle and useful applications of them.

Examining root words here in the first sutra, 2.23, for example, helps unfold a more practical meaning for meditating. First, the three svas at the sutra’s beginning–in Sva svāmi śaktyoḥ sva-rūpa–are the root from which the Sanskrit and English word “swami” comes. A swami is a master meditator. The beginning of this sutra thus speaks of a mastery of complete mindfulness: what is “mastered” (the body and natural life), who the “master” is (the Self or Being), and the resulting experience of “mastery.”

Then, later in the sutra, the word hetuḥ appears. Its root meaning is “incitement” or “production.”

Finally, saṁyogaḥ ends the sutra. Saṁ means “blessed” or “togetherness.” And yogaḥ is “yoga,” meaning “yoking” or “union.”

The combination of these root meanngs–with the other words in this sutra–is a practical declaration that when you meditate, your True Self/Being (you as a “swami” or “master”) joins together with elements of your body experience or body nature. This fusing or enabling creates an “incitement” or “production” that is a “blessed yoking.”

It is a “union” that bonds spirit and body for that instant or moment in time. Your Self or awareness of Being affects or even changes what your nature–your body–is doing. It is a physical shift, as if you have been involved in an activity that is stressful and, because you have connected for even a second with Self or Being, your body then for an instant says, “Let’s turn on some healing instead.” In this bond of Spirit (Self/Being) with body, your heart may slow, your digestion suddenly might start working, your brain perhaps will stop racing, or your tense muscles may begin to relax. Multiple responses are possible. One of the earliest and most typical is a calming of the body and quieting of the mind.

The change may last for a second or much longer. Sometimes the shift depends on how long in meditation you stay connected to Being or Self. You also may possibly trigger a positive reaction that settles into you for a time. The depth and length of the transformation also can depend on how many distracting thoughts, memories, emotions, and other sensations are swirling around and within you.

Comment: The Christian New Testament clearly echoes this sutra. Its Letter to the Ephesians says your “whole body...will grow into complete union,...closely joined and knit together by the contact of every part with the source of its life [from which it] derives its power to grow, in proportion to the vigour of each individual part; and so [it] is being built up in a spirit of love.”

The “source of its life” in this Letter means, for Christians, Jesus or God. In Patanjali, this same source of life is some aspect of Atman (True Self) or Brahman (Being)–in either case Patanjali’s way of saying “God.” And the Letter’s “power to grow” is this sutra’s “incitement” or “production.” Would Patanjali consider a Christian focus valuable? In Sutra 1.39 he says you should “use what you desire from your own spiritual practices.”

Literal translation: “Its incitement (cause)–apart from sky/daylight”

Meaning: “(However,) this (Sutra 23) union–its incitement or development–can lead us back into a condition of not seeing–of returning to darkness.”

A chant in English: “Watch out when your body is blessed that you return to Being or Self, not just body.”

Definition: The “blessed union” of seer, seen, and seeing is fine: it is good for the Self/Being to join with the workings of your physical nature. However, Patanjali warns, don’t fall into the trap of always staying with the result of this union. The result–a better functioning of your body in nature–is good, but focusing only on the functioning, the pleasure of it, or the workings of it will once again take you away from your union with Being.

Comment: This is a more advanced practical recommendation, well beyond just saying, “In meditation, look for your True Self or Being.” Sutras 2.23-2.24 assumes that you have found Being or your True Self in some way. Next, the first of these two sutras points out that focusing on Self/Being sometimes causes “blessed” changes in your body. Then the second sutra tells you, “When Being causes your body to work better, don’t get stuck in noticing just the physical result; focus again (or stay focused) on Being.”

For example, you may find, at some point in your meditations, that your focus on the True Self or Being reaches to your body itself, bringing relaxation to some part of it, warmth, better physical working, or other gifts of spirit-in-nature. You very well may first experience such physical blessings by noticing with surprise, watching them unfold as you enjoy their fruits. But letting your whole attention bathe solely in the experience, however unique or pleasurable, takes you away from your focus on the Self/Being–and away from receiving more of the experience. To keep the body receiving such gifts–and to follow yoga thoroughly–you should learn to return to your focus on Self/Being as soon as you are able.

Mystic scholar Teilhard de Chardin describes this as the need actually “to desire being–that...the access to the great waters may open within” you. The result, he says, creates a “sacramental action...precisely because it sanctifies matter” (italics his). You are arranging to have Being or your Self reorder, or bring to the fore, certain of your body’s activities and resulting sensations.

However, again, you must return your focus to Being or the Self, rather than becoming focused only on the results. Regarding this, a famous story about Jesus of Nazareth occurs in the Christian Bible’s New Testament Gospel of Matthew. Whether you believe in the physical event described in it, or only in its symbolic meaning, the lesson is the same.

In this story, Jesus has sent his disciples off, ahead of him, on a boat on the Sea of Galilee so that he can go alone to pray on a high hill. The wind has come up, creating waves on the nearby inland lake, which is large. The disciples, still on the Sea as it grows choppy, then see Jesus walking on water toward them. Terrified, they cry out, “It is a ghost.” But Jesus calls to them:

“Courage!” he said, “It is I; do not be afraid!”
“Master,” Peter exclaimed, “if it is you, tell me to come to you on the water.”
Jesus said, “Come.”
So Peter got down from the boat, and walked on the water, and went towards Jesus; but, when he felt the wind, he was frightened, and, beginning to sink, cried out, “Master! Save me!”
Instantly Jesus stretched out his hand, and caught hold of him.
“You of little faith!” he said, “Why did you falter?”

The lesson is the same as Patanjali’s. When you focus on your True Self/Being, don’t let what happens physically stop your focus.

Sutra 2.25: Tad abhāvāt saṁyoga-abhāvo-hānaṁ tad dr̥śeḥ kaivalyam

Literal translation: “That returning to darkness, no longer being: blessed-yoking no longer being; leaving that, seer/seeing alone”

Meaning: “When you stop your returning to darkness, then the seer-seen union no longer makes you aware of the darkness. Then you as seer alone–your Self/Being aware of none other than just itself–liberates you.

A chant in English: “Don’t see yourself as the seen; keep looking to yourself as the Seer!”

Definition: This is a continuation of the previous two sutras. Patanjali likely is emphasizing that it doesn’t matter how wonderful, exciting, or surprising are the things that happen to you in this phenomenal world–this physical world of reality. Even if they are caused by your being with the True Self or Being as you meditate, these physical results of meditation will distract you. Then you’ll lose these benefits, being unable to maintain or perhaps even find them again.

Instead, Patanjali states here, you can stop returning to the “darkness” of seeing just the physical world, or seeing it more often than the world of Self/Being. You can do this by maintaining your focus on Self/Being. Keep returning to it. Then you also will keep whatever physical benefits that may occur from such union.

Comment: A story: A man was pulling a small cart by hand to the top of a hill. But the hillside was filled with stones. He knew he had to avoid the sharpest and highest rocks, so he turned to look back at his cart behind him, especially the front wheels. He jerked the cart this way and that. But then he tripped and fell. He stood and began once again to pull and to watch the wheels behind him. Once more his foot encountered a stone, and he staggered, this time bruising his toes. He raised himself up, shook his head, and set his eyes forward. Not looking back, he moved himself around the sharpest and tallest rocks. The cart followed.

Another example is learning to ride a bicycle. If you let yourself feel wildly and happily successful every time you stay up for one second, you’re likely to wobble or fall down again. Instead, you must focus on whatever you were doing that made you stay up.

You might have the best day of life, but if you keep reliving it in memory rather than actually focusing in the same way on whatever made it happen, you are doomed to never meet or exceed the bounty of that event again. When you engage in simply remembering a past occasion or, worse, recalling and longing for it, you lose what you gained from it. The exception is that sometimes your recall of a very specific, Self/Being-touched moment can help you find Spirit again. Otherwise, though, you gain more by using the techniques that best help you find deeper inner experiences in meditation.

Why is this? It is, in part, because when you first find Self/Being, it may seem to stand in the murk and darkness like a brightly attractive central post, a lighthouse among the rocks, or the top of a great mountain climbing to the sky. However, as you begin to depend on it regularly, it descends or blossoms as a flower into the midst of our life’s activities. In this guise, Self/Being vibrates in or around you as a live, ever-evolving event. You then need to pay attention to its core, its source, as you might listen to music, following the leading edge through time, not just remembering one catchy phrase.

And as you ride the crest of its wave, it changes you. Often the changes are small, occasionally big. They all add up. Mystic Thomas Merton says, “The contemplative [meditator] enters into God in order to be created.... If we attach too much importance to...accidentals [such as surprising sensations in our bodies, which may come and go] we will run the risk of losing what is essential.”

In other words, gradually learn, ever better, to return your focus to Self/Being. If you are more likely to return to Self/Being by first celebrating and treasuring your new and great experiences, then by all means, do so: but not for long. Patanjali is saying you can learn to let Self/Being mold you.

Literal translation: “Recognition by learning to flow: eliminating the reflection”

Meaning: “Recognize, through awareness continuously maintained, how to stop paying too much attention to the results.”

A chant in English: “Learn to be in the flow by staying in the Source.”

Definition: This sutra is the positive expression of the more negative viewpoint offered in 2.25. The previous sutra, 2.25, essentially tells you to avoid getting stuck in the “seen” and stay with the “seer” (as described in 2.17).

This sutra, 2.26, states that you can accomplish this by watching your process of going in and out of Self/Being. The typical pattern as you build mastery in meditation is, as an early step, to become aware of Self/Being; and then, in a middle step of focusing more on it, to reflect on the results you gain; then starts a more profound and advanced third step, which is to muse about effects less and keep returning or adhering to Self/Being more.

Meditators often are, through important parts of their meditation careers, ponderers. Your self-reflection about what you have experienced is fine, especially if it helps you bend ever more toward focusing on Self/Being. However, in this sutra, Patanjali is saying that we need to gradually give up our musings. They are memories–mirroring images of what already has happened–that also keep us from fully engaging in our goal of simply staying attached to Self/Being.

Comment: People often imagine that jumping into Self/Being entirely will create a loss of consciousness of everything but spirit itself: a submerging into the ocean where you no longer can see safe dry ground. Sometimes initial mystical experiences may feel exactly like this. However, one of the great mysteries–and paradoxes–of ultimate mystical experiences is that they are not an “either/or” event–lose the earth to gain heaven–but rather develop into a “both/and” blend or fusion. This is in part why some descriptions of mystical union use contradictory opposites like “darkest blinding light,” “awe-ful,” “soundless Word,” etc.

Thus in daily life, increasing mystical consciousness provides you with a more constant awareness of Self/Being and, simultaneously, it issues a continuing awareness of nature, the body, and your surroundings. Physician, professor, and longtime meditation expert Culadasa, also known as Dr. John Yates, offers one explanation for this dual nature of inner perception. He says,

Conscious experience takes two different forms, attention and peripheral awareness [emphasis his]. Whenever we focus our attention on something, it dominates our conscious experience. At the same time, however, we can be more generally aware of things in the background [such as] other sights, sounds, smells, and sensations in the periphery.... It’s important to realize attention and peripheral awareness are two different ways of “knowing” the world.

In this manner, your peripheral awareness remains even as your focused attention holds itself to Self/Being.

Many religions believe in an initial descent of spirit into human consciousness that awakens and welcomes you to the life of spirit. This first experience may be a Christian “born again” event of a dove, a Hindu reaching down of a “thousand-petalled lotus,” or very many other movements downward, often involving white light from above. Or you may find a sense of Being in nature, art, or the presence of a master meditator, which can then descend or move into you.

Patanjali and other mystics say that such descents are common in middle-stage and later mystical life. If you simply wait within the mystical core of Self/Being, a descent or blossoming from it can enter into your body in a variety of ways. This transforms you in small steps, daily, weekly, building over time.

Twentieth-century Hindu mystic Sri Aurobindo calls this type of mystical awareness the “superconscious.” He says, ““There is above the mind, as the old Vedic sages discovered, a Truth-plane, a plane of self-luminous, self-effective Idea, which can be turned in light and force upon our mind, reason, sentiments, impulses, sensations and use and control them....”

It is this superconscious that moves your meditation practice beyond the “either-or” of human spiritual truths to the “both-and” awareness in which, bit by bit, your Self/Being takes over the transformation of your individual self into a new self, still individual, still in many ways like the old smaller selves, but calmer, more intuitively rational, more healing, and more filled with peace, consciousness, and joy/bliss/love.

Meaning: “In it [in your practice of staying with Self/Being in the previous sutra], seven layers help you maintain true knowing.”

A chant in English: “Use the seven methods to keep up your liberation.”

Definition: This Sutra, 2.27, is the final one in this Kriya yoga section. Typical of Patanjali, he ends with a grand, positive flourish. Most translators agree that here he is saying, “You are discovering and regularly practicing oneness with Self/Being: there are seven ways or layers for continuing it.”

However, Patanjali does not tell us what his “sevenfold” group is. This may be so, posits scholar and practitioner Georg Feuerstein, because “presumably,...it stands for a yogic theme well known to his contemporaries.” Translators differ regarding the nature of the sevenfold group.

Comment: What are the seven? Intelligent guesses abound among translators. Before discussing them, it is helpful to set three guidelines for choosing: (1) Are the seven well-known as a group in Patanjali’s time, as Feuerstein suggests? (2) Are they common among more advanced meditators’ experiences? (3) Are they practical suggestions, as in almost all of Patanjali’s sutras?

In Hindu Sanskrit tradition from Patanjali’s time, no historical studies (at present) clearly and obviously can meet the burden of all three of these requirements. However, Buddhist tradition does offer a well-known, natural, and practicable “yogic theme.” It is described frequently in part of an important early Buddhist text, the Tripitaka (Pali: Tipitaka). As such, it very likely was passed down orally from Buddha himself and first collected in writing during the first century BCE. This set of practices is called “The Seven Factors of Enlightenment.”

But would Patanjali use a Buddhist teaching? He has done so in other passages, especially in his extensive 43 sutras about Astanga (“Eight-limbed”) Yoga: six of its eight “limbs” were developed from Buddha’s famous “Eightfold Path to Enlightenment” (“Middle Way”) or came from an even earlier source upon which both Patanjali and Buddha were drawing.

Buddhist literature’s “Seven Factors of Enlightenment” meet all three of the expectations above. They often were shared among people throughout India in Patanjali’s time, they are obvious and natural results of meditation, and they were quite practical for applying:

Scholars generally recognize that some schools of Buddhism believe the Seven Factors exist to help you develop yourself before you find enlightenment (nirvana), whereas other schools teach them as qualities to continue developing after you have first discovered such liberation. You certainly may treat them as both. However, in this sutra, the latter interpretation appears to fit Patanjali’s intention in this, his final grand summary of his Kriya yoga system.

Also noteworthy is that in Buddhism, the Seven Factors often are contrasted with “The Five Hindrances.” The Hindrances and how they appear as energy forms are listed in Sutra 1.30.

Several other interpretations of this set of seven methods are worth noting. One is that Patanjali simply is offering an introduction to Astanga Yoga, which comes immediately after this sutra. Astanga’s first seven “limbs” are the material basis for the eighth limb, which is entirely nonmaterial and is called samadhi (enlightenment).

A second option exists in some translators’ gathering of seven important practices–which differ among translators–from Patanjali’s other sutras. Many are worthy organizational summaries of key thoughts in Patanjali. One of the most notable is Iyengar ‘s in this particular sutra. He thoroughly charts several useful possibilities. And in a following sutra, he also diagrams the kosha (discussed here in Sutra 1.2) as seven in number, rather than the traditional five, thus allowing for yet another set of seven that Patanjali could have meant.

A third possibility is the many sets of seven mystical symbols that the earliest ancient Vedic scriptures offer. One set in particular is interesting for probably being the source of the medieval and modern Hindu system of chakras (or cakras), the seven Kundalini Yoga energy centers contiguous with the human spine. Another possibility is the seven basic metric beats of Vedic scriptures: if Patanjali who wrote the Yoga Sutras is the same as the famous grammarian Patanjali, then it would make sense that the seven metrical devices of the ancient Hindu holy books would be important to him. For more on these Vedic roots, see Endnote 2.27.

Finally, Vyasa, who wrote the first commentary on the Yoga Sutras c. 400 BCE (up to six centuries after Patanjali), offers a formula for the seven folds. Several well-respected translators (e.g., Feuerstein, Geer, Iyengar, and Satchidananda) include these in their translations. See Endnote 2.27.

Ch. 2-A on Kriya Yoga ends here. Astanga Yoga begins in Chapter 2-B with Sutra 2.28.

Sanskrit Text: Patanjali, c. 400 BCE-400 CE

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See also Meditationary.org, a Meditation Dictionary; and BodyMeditation.org, Introducing Yoga Meditation.

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