A road out of the clay

This is the second of six posts in which I work through the six Indian philosophical schools one at a time, writing down what I have understood. The first post covered Sāṃkhya: one inert material, Prakṛti, holding three strands in balance; many conscious witnesses, the Puruṣas; and the story of how a witness gets caught in the material's layers and mistakes them for itself. If you have not read it, the one line you need is this: suffering is consciousness taking the mind and body for its own.

Yoga starts exactly where that post ended. A word on what this page is. I am a compiler, not a scholar of Yoga: these are my notes, written down in the order the subject made sense to me, from the teachers and books listed at the end. Where I add a sūtra number or an attribution my teachers did not give, I say so where it happens. The diagrams are mine.

Where Sāṃkhya stopped

A diagnosis with no prescription

Start with a scene. The Puruṣa, caught in Prakṛti's three strands, works out that if it could get clear of the guṇas it would be clear of every kind of anxiety. So it asks Sāṃkhya for a road. Sāṃkhya answers: we have no road. Go to Yoga.

That is why the Gītā says only children, never the learned, treat Sāṃkhya and Yoga as two: सांख्ययोगौ पृथग्बालाः प्रवदन्ति न पण्डिताः. Yoga is Sāṃkhya's practical side. It accepts Sāṃkhya's whole map of reality and adds a method, plus one more principle we will reach at the end.

You can see the difference in the first word of each school's root text. Vedānta opens with athāto brahma-jijñāsā, "now, the inquiry into Brahman". Mīmāṃsā opens with athāto dharma-jijñāsā, "now, the inquiry into dharma". Patañjali's Yoga Sūtra opens with अथ योगानुशासनम्, atha yogānuśāsanam: "now, the discipline of yoga". Not jijñāsā, the wish to know, but anuśāsana, instruction to be carried out. The gloss: yoga is not an object of knowledge; it is knowledge brought into life. Reading many books on yoga has never made anyone a yogi. There is an old line for it, ācārahīnaṃ na punanti vedāḥ: the Vedas do not purify a man who has no conduct.

The word

Yoga does not mean "to join"

Everyone who does yoga today will tell you the word comes from the root yuj, to join. I was taught otherwise, and the disagreement is the key to the whole school. Sanskrit grammar sorts its verbal roots into ten classes, and a root spelled yuj appears in three of them with three different meanings.

An English analogy: the verb "find" has the past tense "found", and there is a different verb "found", to establish a city. Mix them up and a sentence turns absurd. The same happens with yuj. Patañjali's root is yuj samādhau, the one that leads to samādhi and fixes a restless mind in one place. The other root, yujir yoge, is the one Haṭha yoga uses when it speaks of joining Śiva and Śakti, and it is the one the studios mean.

The sharpest version of the point: a child in the fourth class adds 21 and 33. He has joined two numbers. Is he a yogi? In Patañjali, yoga does not join anything. Yoga produces viyoga, separation. Joined to Prakṛti there is only sorrow; the self standing apart from the body has none. Aristotle, the first philosopher of logic, supplies a rule I keep coming back to: define your terms at the start and hold the definition to the end, or a week later you find that what one of you called God the other was calling Satan. Poetry is allowed to be ambiguous. Philosophy is not.

The book

Four chapters

The Yoga Sūtra is short, about 195 aphorisms in four pādas, chapters. The bluntest summary of what it is about: there is no āsana in it, no exercise. It tells you how to get out of the universe you have entered.

Step 1

The definition, and the thing being stilled

The second sūtra is the whole school in four words: योगश्चित्तवृत्तिनिरोधः, yogaś citta-vṛtti-nirodhaḥ. Yoga is the stopping of the modifications of the citta.

What is the citta? Here Yoga simply borrows Sāṃkhya's tree. Sāṃkhya said that when consciousness comes near Prakṛti, the first thing to emerge is mahat or buddhi, the intellect; from it ahaṃkāra, the I-maker; from it manas, the mind. Yoga takes those three together and calls the bundle citta. It is made of Prakṛti. It is not conscious. Its restlessness, the way it runs from object to object taking each one's shape, is what the vṛttis are: modifications, the waves on it.

The best picture for how consciousness relates to this bundle is a mirror. A black object held before a mirror shows black; the mirror has not turned black. A fair face shows fair; the mirror is not fair. Puruṣa has no sambandha, no real relation, with Prakṛti's products. It has saṃsarga, contact that looks like relation. The citta changes constantly; the mistake is the witness thinking "the change is in me." Nirodha, stopping, is the cure for that mistake, and the method for stopping is yoga.

Step 2

Five states of mind, and who is fit to begin

Not every mind can take up the method. The commentarial tradition sorts minds into five bhūmis, grounds. The way I learned them, each one comes with a guṇa and a person you have met.

Kṣipta, the scattered mind, is rajas: it sees a beautiful thing and asks how to enjoy it, sees a car in a neighbour's drive and asks how to buy one. Call it the pleasure principle and anxiety neurosis in the same breath; its people are sunk in enjoyment. Mūḍha, the dull mind, is tamas: it has forgotten what duty is. Why work when you can break an ATM and have fifteen lakh in a day? Who should look after the old parents? They will manage. It is the mind of the rākṣasa, who pulls a knife on whoever tells him to stop taking drugs. Both are unfit.

Vikṣipta is rajas with sattva showing through: restless, but for good things. Build a well, build a temple, feed the hungry, find grooms for poor girls; cannot sleep, writing letters at midnight to get a tubewell for the village. This is the godlike temperament, and it is fit once it is calmed a little. Ekāgra, one-pointed, is sattva: a mind that stays on its study or its satsaṅg. That is the first step of practice. Niruddha, stopped, is the mind of the accomplished yogi. The story that fixes it for me: Vivekananda meditating under a tree, a large snake crossing his feet, people shouting at him to get up, and afterwards "I don't know who passed over my feet. I was in dhyāna."

And the mind that refuses the cure? Take a worm out of a drain and set it in the sunlight, saying "we have freed you from the filth." It writhes and dies. Throw it back and it revives. That is the yoga-bhraṣṭa, fallen from yoga: happy in the gutter, and no business of Patañjali's.

Step 3

Five things a mind does

Every movement of the citta falls under one of five vṛttis. Each can be kliṣṭa, painful, or akliṣṭa, not, and the first job is to turn the painful ones into the other kind.

Two tools work on all five. Abhyāsa is constant practice. Vairāgya, dispassion, is not forcing yourself away from things but seeing their fault, viṣaya-doṣa-darśana, until they lose their pull. One example, a diabetic's, runs through everything that follows: if I eat the khīr my sugar shoots up; so do not even put the khīr in front of me, and in time I will not look. An Urdu couplet gives the finished state: I am in the world but not its seeker; I have passed through the market but am no buyer.

Step 4

Five afflictions, and what cleans them

Why does the mind keep facing the wrong way? Because of five kleśas, afflictions, which Prakṛti supplies as standard equipment. I learned them almost entirely through stories.

Avidyā is the biggest, and it is specific: taking the impermanent for permanent and the unreal for real. The table will break, yet I act as if it stands forever; everyone born dies, yet I assume my son will live always. A story I was told: a prosperous satsaṅgī with an ashram in Sector 7 came to a teacher to argue that the world is wholly real and the Vedāntins are wrong. Ten days later his guru died. At the bier everyone chanted "Rām nām satya hai", only the name of Rām is real. The teacher caught him: you said the ashram, the bungalow and the guru's bench were real. Now only Rām's name is. You took the unreal for real, which is why you grieve.

Rāga, attachment: a man so attached to his cat that when it meowed he asked whether it had been given milk, learned the milk had spilled, and beat his wife. When a dog finally tore the cat apart the family did not eat for three days. Attachment makes us enemies of anyone who criticises the thing we love, and it is the wax in the ear: the Nawab of Awadh limps into court with a hurt foot and the courtiers rise to praise his graceful new walk.

Dveṣa, aversion: we cannot hear anything good about the person we hate. The story of the frogs: an exporter sent Kerala frogs to China; the Chinese wrote back that the boxes had no lids and they would not pay for lids. The ministry asked why. "These are Indian frogs. When one climbs, the one below pulls its leg. None gets out." His son is becoming an IAS officer; I will not let him.

Asmitā, the I: the schoolteacher who failed a shop-boy in internal assessment because the boy did not stand up and greet him in the market, and the policeman who fines a man five hundred rupees for spitting he did not do because the man did not salute. A Rāmāyaṇa allegory fits here: Rāvaṇa's ten heads are delusion; strike delusion and it wakes its brother Kumbhakarṇa, the ego, whose nature on waking is to eat men.

Abhiniveśa, groundless fear: of the dark, of heights, "nowadays the corona phobia: not fear, phobia." The test for whether a fear is groundless: avoiding a road where dacoits are known to operate is sense; avoiding one where nothing is known is phobia. At the bottom of every phobia is the fear of death.

What cleans them is a set of attitudes rather than arguments. For the attachment that breeds jealousy, good company, satsaṅg, and friendliness: Vibhīṣaṇa asks to be sent to hell rather than kept among the wicked, since in hell his sins are at least washed away. For the aversion that breeds disgust, compassion: not "he lies in gutters, don't touch him" but "he fell into bad company, let me pull him out." Two stories carry it: Jesus asking at heaven's gate how many you taught and how many you healed, and the Buddha visiting a courtesan over a disciple's objection: if I free her, my attainment is proven; if I start visiting, my tapas has failed. Light the lamp where it is dark. For the wicked, indifference: Rahīm's couplet that a dog's bite and a dog's lick are equally bad for you, so greet him from afar. For those above you, gladness: "all three sons IAS? Congratulations, teach me how." And for anyone who says there is nothing wrong in dancing with women since Kṛṣṇa did, the cobra test: Kṛṣṇa first danced on the serpent's hoods. We will lock you in a room with a hundred cobras. If you are alive in the morning, dance with whom you like.

Order and count. My teachers give the five kleśas in different orders, and the shorter treatments drop avidyā to the end; the Yoga Sūtra (2.3) lists avidyā, asmitā, rāga, dveṣa, abhiniveśa, with avidyā as the field in which the others grow. The four attitudes are sūtra 1.33, addressed to the happy, the suffering, the virtuous and the wicked; the fifth, satsaṅg, is a teacher's addition, not Patañjali's.

Step 5

The moral gate

Patañjali's first condition, stated flatly and worth repeating: no person can be spiritual without first being moral. An immoral man, whatever he does in the temple, is not spiritual as Yoga uses the word. Haṭha yoga has no such condition and starts straight at the body. Patañjali starts at conduct, and those who cannot keep the first two limbs never reach the third.

The five yamas are restraints, things held back; Vivekananda called them the passive virtues. Each applies in thought, word and deed.

The five niyamas are observances, things done; the active virtues.

What gets left out. Some of my sources name only four yamas and three niyamas; the fuller ones give all ten, in different orders. The list above follows the sūtras (2.30 and 2.32). A practical claim from one of my teachers: keep the ten for one or two months and your character changes.

Step 6

Body and breath are small in Patañjali

This is the point where Patañjali parts company with popular yoga most sharply. Patañjali gives the body one sūtra: स्थिरसुखमासनम्, sthira-sukham āsanam, a seat that is steady and comfortable. One āsana, held for half an hour of meditation; if it hurts, change it. The postures the word now brings to mind are from a different tradition. And prāṇāyāma, in Patañjali, is three movements of breath: pūraka, in; kumbhaka, held; recaka, out. Regulated. One minute in, one minute out; when anger rises, breathe like this and it subsides. Vivekananda graded the breath by length: twelve seconds is the lowest grade, twenty-four the middle, thirty-six the best.

That other tradition deserves a look of its own, because the contrast is the clearest way to see what Patañjali is and is not.

The two are not enemies, and the account of Haṭha I learned was respectful of its lineage and its physiology. The point is only that they are different disciplines with different ends, and that the joining one has borrowed the name of the separating one. A story from a yoga camp at Patiala makes it practical: a Haṭha teacher boasted of curing an old heart patient with āsanas. Someone asked what the man ate when he went home. Saturated fat. How will the heart heal? Control the tongue by niyama first.

One attribution. I was taught that Gorakhnāth wrote the Gheraṇḍa Saṃhitā with its 84 āsanas. The text is conventionally ascribed to a teacher named Gheraṇḍa; the Haṭha Pradīpikā, which does credit the Nāth lineage, is ascribed to Svātmārāma. The count of 84 is traditional in both.

Step 7

Pratyāhāra is the exam

After the moral limbs, the seat and the breath comes the fifth limb, and it is better treated as a test than as a technique: have you got anywhere? Now the exam comes, how many marks out of a hundred. Pratyāhāra is the withdrawal of the senses from their objects. The word has two derivations: prati plus āhāra, cutting off the senses' food (form for the eye, sound for the ear, which is why the ṛṣis went to caves), or āharaṇa, pulling them in. Until here the practitioner was bahirmukha, outward-facing. From here, antarmukha.

The withdrawal is not suppression. It is the dispassion of step 3 applied at the sense itself: rabṛī and rasgullā on the table, the diabetic knows what they do to him, his hand does not go there. The grand example is Arjuna. Indra, afraid that a victorious Arjuna with the gāṇḍīva might take his throne, sends Urvaśī to break his tapas at midnight. She comes with the clothes off her body and tells him she wants a son like him. Arjuna replies that he can promise her a son but not that the son will be an ascetic like him, and that there is one way to keep both promises: take me as your son, be my mother. You have broken your manhood, she says; no man is unmoved by such a woman in solitude. I have practised yoga, he answers. I am pratyāhāra. Thousands like you could not move me. Gold and woman, kanak and kāminī, are the two things a man cannot leave lying; the man of pratyāhāra leaves thousands of maunds of them on the road.

With that the outer practice is complete. Everything after it happens inside.

Step 8

Saṃyama: fixing, flowing, dissolving

The three inner limbs are three depths of one act, and Patañjali names the three together saṃyama. An analogy I like is a seminar. Before the professor arrives the hall is chattering: that is your ordinary mind, tangled thoughts. The professor walks on stage and you look at him: dhāraṇā, fixing the mind on one object. He speaks, you listen and understand and forget the people around you: dhyāna, the mind kept there in an unbroken flow, one in form with its object. He speaks so well that you forget yourself too: samādhi. A homelier version is a businessman who eats his dinner thinking about business; the mind has given the object the whole contract.

One more image for samādhi, because it fixes what the state is not: it is like dreamless sleep, suṣupti, except that consciousness remains. In a dream only the mind is left and objects are absent; in deep sleep the world dissolves entirely. In samādhi the world dissolves and the witness is awake to its absence. The citta, seeing that it has no object, empties. Puruṣa gets its chance and drops it at once.

My sources cut the inner ladder differently. The simpler cut has two rungs. Samprajñāta samādhi is sabīja, with seed: no distraction can pull you, but the saṃskāras, the latent impressions, are still there and can sprout. We are not eating the khīr, but the wish for khīr remains. Asamprajñāta is nirbīja, seedless: the impressions are burnt, a thousand attractions cannot trap you, all five vṛttis stop, and inside there is only light. The finer cut is Vivekananda's, within the seeded kind: savitarka to nirvitarka to savicāra to nirvicāra, and the same seedless end.

Step 9

The third chapter is a warning

Saṃyama is a tool, and a tool aimed at an object yields something. The third chapter catalogues what: aim it at the navel centre and you know the body's workings; at the sun, the solar system; at the senses, and three powers follow that the Paraśurāma story turns on. Manojavitva: the body gains the speed of the mind. Vikaraṇa-bhāva: the senses work apart from the body, so that you are here and know what is far away. Pradhāna-jaya: mastery over Prakṛti's root, "as if everything were written in a code, like programs in binary, and you had learned the code." The Brahmāṇḍa Purāṇa has Paraśurāma, after bathing in the Narmadā, reach Kailāsa at the speed of thought.

The story's real point is the sequence. On the day Kārtavīrya's sons came to his father's hermitage and killed him, Paraśurāma was away gathering firewood and arrived too late. The man who later blinked from the Narmadā to Kailāsa could not reach his own father. The texts place the mind-speed after the father's death, won by tapas and Śiva's grace, not possessed from birth. And when he does reach Kailāsa, Gaṇeśa stops him at the door, and when Paraśurāma boasts of being the greatest yogi, Gaṇeśa wraps him in his trunk and carries him through the fourteen worlds in an instant. The remover of obstacles became the obstacle, because of pride in a power.

That is what sūtra 3.37 says in plain words, and it is the sūtra everyone quotes: the siddhis are obstacles on the way to samādhi. Those who stop at them are yoga-bhraṣṭa, fallen: the raw yogi who shows miracles to draw a crowd, the one who can turn brass into gold and so forgets what he was doing. Near the end, the powers come to tempt the practitioner to stay: to become minute like Hanumān turning into a mosquito, to become vast, to have whatever one wishes. The finished yogi is simply not interested. The powers are real, in this telling, and beside the point.

Step 10

Kaivalya, and the one thing Yoga adds

The end is the same word Sāṃkhya used: kaivalya, from kevala, alone. The link with Prakṛti breaks and Puruṣa stands in its own form: pure light, caitanya, "not a conscious thing but consciousness itself." Prakṛti goes on changing; it cannot move the one who has stood apart from it. The Gītā's line about being equal in pleasure and pain, gain and loss, victory and defeat is the classical statement; Radhakrishnan's version of the same point is that nature's rule is that there shall always be change in nature, but through yoga a person can acquire the power not to be moved by it. Someone dies, a child is born, two stars fall and the sun bursts: nothing to the one who is kevala. After kaivalya there is no return.

One of my teachers sets the same idea against Schrödinger. The citta sits between the universe and consciousness and can face only one of them. Turned toward the universe it never understands consciousness; to understand consciousness it must leave the universe. Two sūtras from the fourth chapter carry the argument. Objects are one in essence, all of them results of the three guṇas in different proportions (4.14). And no object depends on any one mind, or it would vanish when that mind did (4.16): this microphone remains if I die. So the universe is not made by the citta; it is made by Prakṛti. Consciousness touches the world only through the mind and cannot change the world; what it can change is which way the mind faces. In that reading, Schrödinger's entangled cat makes the same point about the macroscopic world: America does not vanish because I am not looking at it.

Which leaves the one place where Yoga adds to Sāṃkhya rather than applying it. Sāṃkhya needs no God: creation starts when Prakṛti comes near a Puruṣa and ends when the nearness breaks. Yoga accepts an Īśvara, and this is the only real difference between the two. But look at how carefully Īśvara is defined. He is पुरुषविशेष, puruṣa-viśeṣa, a special Puruṣa: the ordinary Puruṣas have all come near Prakṛti and enjoyed it, which is how they got caught and why they can be reborn; this one never did. Beyond the guṇas, without qualities, without form. He does not create; the whole Sāṃkhya account of creation stands untouched. What he is for is the last niyama. Īśvara-praṇidhāna, dedicating every act to him, is how karma stops binding the one who acts. Sāṃkhya is the theory, then, and Yoga the discipline; Yoga has no theory of its own, and the Puruṣa that Sāṃkhya left trapped, Yoga pulls out and stands on its feet. Together, one system.

In one piece

The argument, start to finish

As with the Sāṃkhya post, each line below depends on the one before it. The first two are inherited.

1. Suffering is consciousness taking the mind and body for its own.Sāṃkhya's diagnosis
2. Knowing that does not free anyone. A road is needed, and Sāṃkhya has none."go to Yoga"
3. Yoga is a discipline, not an inquiry, and its word means reaching samādhi, not joining.atha yogānuśāsanam · yuj samādhau
4. The thing to still is the citta, Sāṃkhya's top three evolutes bundled, a product of matter that the witness mistakes for itself.citta-vṛtti-nirodha · the mirror
5. The mind has five states; only the one-pointed can begin, and the scattered and the dull must first be calmed.the five bhūmis
6. It does five things, each painful or not; practice and dispassion turn the painful ones.the vṛttis · abhyāsa and vairāgya
7. It is kept facing the world by five afflictions rooted in one mistake, and cleaned by four attitudes.the kleśas · sūtra 1.33
8. No one is spiritual who is not first moral, so the method begins with ten rules of conduct.yama and niyama
9. Body and breath get one seat and three movements; the rest of what is called yoga is another tradition with another end.sthira-sukham āsanam · Haṭha
10. The outer practice is examined by whether the senses will withdraw on command.pratyāhāra · the tortoise
11. Attention then deepens through fixing, flow and absorption, until no seed is left to sprout.saṃyama · nirbīja
12. The powers that appear on the way are obstacles, and pride in them is the last trap.sūtra 3.37 · Gaṇeśa at the door
13. The mind, emptied, turns toward the witness, which stands alone: kaivalya, with one special witness, never caught, to whom all action was dedicated.kaivalya · puruṣa-viśeṣa

Terms

Glossary

The school and its text

योग yoga

In Patañjali, from yuj samādhau: what leads to samādhi. Not from yujir yoge, to join.

अथ योगानुशासनम् atha yogānuśāsanam

The first sūtra: "now, the discipline of yoga." Instruction rather than inquiry.

योगसूत्र Yoga Sūtra

Patañjali's text, about 195 aphorisms in four pādas: samādhi, sādhana, vibhūti, kaivalya.

राजयोग rāja yoga

Vivekananda's name for Patañjali's eight-limbed path; also the usual name for it when set against Haṭha.

हठयोग haṭha yoga

The Nāth tradition's yoga of the body: ha the sun current, piṅgalā, plus ṭha the moon current, iḍā. A different root, a different end.

The mind

चित्त citta

Buddhi, ahaṃkāra and manas taken together; a product of Prakṛti; the instrument between Puruṣa and the world.

वृत्ति vṛtti

A modification of the citta. Five: pramāṇa, viparyaya, vikalpa, nidrā, smṛti.

निरोध nirodha

Stopping. Yoga is the nirodha of the vṛttis.

संसर्ग · सम्बन्ध saṃsarga · sambandha

Contact that looks like relation, versus real relation. Puruṣa has only the first with Prakṛti.

चित्तभूमि citta-bhūmi

A state of mind: kṣipta, mūḍha, vikṣipta, ekāgra, niruddha.

क्लिष्ट · अक्लिष्ट kliṣṭa · akliṣṭa

Painful and not painful, said of any vṛtti.

अभ्यास · वैराग्य abhyāsa · vairāgya

Constant practice, and dispassion through seeing the fault in the object.

क्लेश kleśa

Affliction. Five: avidyā, asmitā, rāga, dveṣa, abhiniveśa.

संस्कार saṃskāra

A latent impression; the "seed" that can sprout again.

The eight limbs

अष्टाङ्ग aṣṭāṅga

The eight limbs: yama, niyama, āsana, prāṇāyāma, pratyāhāra, dhāraṇā, dhyāna, samādhi.

बहिरङ्ग · अन्तरङ्ग bahiraṅga · antaraṅga

The five outer limbs and the three inner ones.

यम yama

Restraint: ahiṃsā, satya, asteya, brahmacarya, aparigraha.

नियम niyama

Observance: śauca, santoṣa, tapas, svādhyāya, Īśvara-praṇidhāna.

स्थिरसुखमासनम् sthira-sukham āsanam

"A seat that is steady and comfortable." Patañjali's whole statement on posture.

प्राणायाम prāṇāyāma

Regulation of breath: pūraka in, kumbhaka held, recaka out.

प्रत्याहार pratyāhāra

Withdrawal of the senses from their objects; the tortoise.

बहिर्मुख · अन्तर्मुख bahirmukha · antarmukha

Outward-facing and inward-facing; the turn pratyāhāra makes.

धारणा · ध्यान · समाधि dhāraṇā · dhyāna · samādhi

Fixing the mind on one object; keeping it there in an unbroken flow; absorption in which the meditator is forgotten.

संयम saṃyama

The three inner limbs together, directed at one object.

सम्प्रज्ञात · असम्प्रज्ञात samprajñāta · asamprajñāta

Samādhi with seed (sabīja) and without (nirbīja).

Powers and release

विभूति · सिद्धि vibhūti · siddhi

Powers produced by saṃyama; obstacles on the way to samādhi (3.37).

मनोजवित्व manojavitva

The body moving at the speed of the mind.

विकरणभाव vikaraṇa-bhāva

The senses acting apart from the body.

प्रधानजय pradhāna-jaya

Mastery over Prakṛti's root.

योगभ्रष्ट yoga-bhraṣṭa

Fallen from yoga: the one who will not keep the discipline, or who stops at the powers.

कैवल्य kaivalya

Aloneness: Puruṣa in its own form, apart from Prakṛti. Yoga's word for mokṣa.

वियोग viyoga

Separation. "In Yoga, yoga causes viyoga."

पुरुषविशेष puruṣa-viśeṣa

The special Puruṣa that never came near Prakṛti: Īśvara. Yoga's one addition to Sāṃkhya.

ईश्वरप्रणिधान Īśvara-praṇidhāna

Dedicating every act to Īśvara; the last niyama, and how action stops binding.