By Abhi Ghosh
Once upon a time, there was a small group of mystical yogis who lived in a hermitage on the bank of a river in India. Across the river from the hermitage as a bustling village the yogis frequented when they wanted to get their supplies, and they would often walk on water on their way there. The villagers were always awestruck by the yogis’ magical feats, and whether it was out of respect or disbelief, no one in the village ever attempted to walk on water. The yogis never bothered to talk about their ability to walk on water to anyone either; they kept the secret of walking on water to themselves.
However, after watching the yogis come and go from his village, a young boy wanted to learn the trick of walking on water. So one day when one of the yogis was visiting the village, this boy took the courage to walk up to him and said that he too wanted to become a yogi and learn to walk on water.
For the sake of walking on water, the boy was willing to give up everything and join the hermitage if necessary. The visiting yogi was quite surprised at the boy’s eagerness and promised to teach him whatever he knew, on the condition that the boy would give proper effort into his practice of yoga. The boy promised to put in diligent effort, and on the instruction of this yogi began to sit and meditate on the bank of the river every day. He was convinced that yoga would give him mystical powers. As he sat on the riverbank on the side of his village, he gazed at the hermitage, determined that one day he was going to make his guru proud by walking on water and visiting his hermitage.
Minutes turned into hours, hours turned into days and days turned into weeks and very soon, months began to pass. Each day after finishing his yogic and meditative practices, the boy tried to walk on water like all the other yogis from the hermitage. And he failed. But rather than turning his failures into frustration, he kept growing determined to walk on water.
While all this was going on with the boy, the chief among yogis on the other side took notice of the boy’s determination and sincerity and called his friends, saying, “I think this boy on the other side has passed the initiation and has mastered the art of yoga. Now shall we tell him where the stones are and how to walk on them?”
Trying to make sense of the Yoga Sutras or any other sutra literatures from ancient India is quite like trying to walk on water when you don’t know where the stones are. The Sanskrit word “sutra” not only sounds very similar to the English “suture,” but means approximately the same as its English cousin, “a strand or fiber to sew” or “a uniting of parts.” The elegance and effectiveness of the sutra literatures lies in their ability to explain the assumptions and conclusions of a philosophical school with brevity and concisesness. The inside joke among the writers of such sutra literatures was that it’s less painful to see the death of one’s son than to have an extra syllable in a sutra sentence. As explained in Sriharsa’s Naisadhiya[a] Carita 9.8, these thinkers believed that “true eloquence” was “essential truths expressed concisely.”
Yet they wrote in a language that to us today would look like code language. Whether we get their joke or not, the fact remains that the grammar of these sutras is extremely complicated, and a literal grammatical translation of these sutras would make no sense at all. For example, the first sutra of this book defines yoga as atha yoga anusasanam, which literally translates as “now/thus yoga discipline/teaching.” That’s it, no explanations.
The lack of explanation is precisely where commentaries, or the “stones in the river,” help as we try to cross the knowledge-stream of yoga. Since the original sutras were written for people who were already longtime practitioners and thus insiders of the tradition, the string of coded ideas would look familiar to them since they knew how to read the code. But for the sake of those who have the sincere desire to master yoga but require some help, the savants have unpacked the meaning of these sutras in their essays, making the secrets of the Yoga Sutras accessible to audiences who were not only far away, but also to ones who could access them beyond the commentators’ own lifetimes. Thus, for many generations of yogis stretching over several centuries, the commentaries on the Yoga Sutras remain an indispensable aid in understanding the meaning of the sutras. My essays on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali are meant to add another rock in alignment with an already existing path, with the intent of making your walk across the river a little smoother.
To further explore how traditional commentaries work, I recommend Edwin Bryant’s translation and essays, Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: A New Edition, Translation and Commentary, published in 2009 by North Point Press. This edition is by far one of the most scholarly editions available today that makes the classical commentaries of the sutra accessible to a contemporary intellectual audience.
The path of yoga is not armchair philosophy. These commentaries are like cookbooks meant to be taken off the shelf, opened, thought about and its recipes experimented with. If after walking all over these “rocks,” you don’t end up practicing anything that gives you a healthy body, clear mind, sharp senses, clarity of thought and a sense of contentment within, you’re treading on the wrong rocks, or just standing on one too long.
Abhi Ghosh has a doctorate in Eastern Religions from University of Chicago. Look for his articles illuminating Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras.
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