# A road out of the clay

*Sāṃkhya explained how consciousness gets caught in matter, and admitted it had no way out. Patañjali's Yoga is that way: a discipline rather than a theory, and the word does not mean what the studios think it means.*

Explainer Oct 8, 2023 [Second in a series on the six darśanas](/darsana)

Sāṃkhya explained how consciousness gets caught in matter, and admitted it had no way out. Patañjali's Yoga is that way. It is a discipline rather than a theory, and the word does not mean what the yoga studios think it means.

Yoga Notes on the six darśanas, 2 of 6 22 minute read

*[Figure: The universe on the left, consciousness on the right, and the mind as a hinge between them that can face only one way at a time]*

***The whole method in one picture.** The mind stands between the world and the witness and can look at only one of them. Yoga is the work of turning it round.*

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.

*[Figure: Three Sanskrit roots spelled yuj: yuj samadhau, leading to samadhi, is Patanjali's; yujir yoge, to join, belongs to Hatha yoga and Tantra; yuj samyamane means restrained practice]*

***Which yuj.** Patañjali took the first root. The Haṭha and Tantra traditions took the second. Most of what English speakers call "yoga" descends from the second, and most of what Patañjali wrote depends on the first.*

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.

*[Figure: Four panels for the four chapters of the Yoga Sutra: Samadhi-pada on the goal state, Sadhana-pada on the means, Vibhuti-pada on powers with a stop sign, Kaivalya-pada on release]*

***Map of the book.** Goal, means, a chapter of warnings, and the end state. The stop sign marks the one sūtra everyone quotes: the powers the method produces are obstacles to the thing the method is for.*

Part one · The diagnosis

## What a mind is, and what it does all day

Before the method, the anatomy. Yoga's first chapter is a working description of the mind: what it is made of, the five states it can be in, the five things it does, and the five afflictions that keep it turned the wrong way.

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.

*[Figure: Samkhya's tree of principles with buddhi, ahamkara and manas boxed together as citta; a Purusha light at the left; and a second light at top right, the special Purusha or Ishvara, which never touches the tree]*

***Sāṃkhya's tree, with Yoga's two additions marked.** The box: the three top evolutes bundled as citta. The second light at top right: the special Puruṣa we reach in step 12. Everything else is unchanged from the first post.*

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.

*[Figure: A horizontal dial of five states of mind coloured by guna, from kshipta and mudha on the left, through vikshipta, to ekagra and niruddha on the right, with a line marking where fitness for yoga begins]*

***Five grounds of the mind.** The first two are unfit to begin, the third can be calmed into fitness, the fourth is the first step of practice, and the fifth is the practice complete.*

*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.

प्रमाण pramāṇa

**Valid knowing.** Perception first: no one needs a mirror to see the bangle on their own wrist, and in a cow one sees cowness, not only four legs. Then inference, from the smoke "seen a thousand times over my own stove": cloud to rain, soaked ground to a storm that has passed, day and night to the sun that causes both.

विपर्यय viparyaya

**Error.** False knowledge taken for knowledge: the rope seen as a snake in the dark, the stick bent in water, the shell taken for silver.

विकल्प vikalpa

**Imagination from words.** Someone says there is a mountain of butter in Vrindavan; we set out to find it, fail, and posit a heaven where it exists. A thing built from language alone.

निद्रा nidrā

**Sleep.** Not just the night's rest but the tendency to put down the burden of experience. It has a guṇa too: wake fresh (sattva), wake tired after riding the elephant you never owned (rajas), wake aching like a log that remembers nothing (tamas).

स्मृति smṛti

**Memory.** The opposite of sleep: experience brought back. "There I was insulted" is painful memory; "the Vice-Chancellor stood up and shook my hand" is pleasant. Practise so that the painful kind stops returning.

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.

*[Figure: Avidya at the root with four afflictions branching from it, each with its story, and four attitudes drawn beneath as the cleaners: friendliness, compassion, gladness, indifference]*

***The afflictions and their antidotes.** One root, four branches, four attitudes. The pairing of attitude to branch is as I learned it; the four attitudes themselves are Patañjali's.*

**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.

Part two · The method

## Eight limbs, one direction

The second chapter gives the means: eight limbs, *aṣṭāṅga*, five of them outer and three inner. My sources agree on the shape and differ in the details, which is itself informative, so the differences are noted as they come.

*[Figure: The eight limbs in a row from yama to samadhi; a bracket marks the first five as outer and the last three as inner, called samyama; a second bracket shows Vivekananda's grouping into warm-up, transition and peak]*

***The eight, and two ways of grouping them.** Patañjali's own cut is five outer, three inner. Vivekananda's cut, as it was put to me, is a gym's: warm-up, transition, peak.*

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.

अहिंसा ahiṃsā

**Harm no one**, including in speech: if you must scold, scold so lovingly that the boy does not go and hang himself. Gandhi turned it into a political method.

सत्य satya

**Truth**, held to the point of dying for it. The one person one of my teachers will grant actually did so is Socrates. Joined to ahiṃsā by the rule *satyaṃ brūyāt priyaṃ brūyāt*: if the truth wounds, silence is better; speak it sweetly, and it is both.

अस्तेय asteya

**No wish for what is not yours**, even in thought. Bhartṛhari, having renounced his kingdom, reaches for a red diamond gleaming on the moonlit sand "for the poor" and comes up with his hand in someone's pān spit; Gorakhnāth, who had followed to test him: for the public good only your hand got dirty. Gandhi: paid for seven hours and working three is theft from society.

ब्रह्मचर्य brahmacarya

**Not the narrow sense.** Conduct that moves toward Brahman, the highest knowledge, and refuses whatever obstructs it; not being the slave of one's senses. Stopping on the way to the exam hall to watch the singing and dancing, and arriving when the paper is over.

अपरिग्रह aparigraha

**No hoarding.** Four shirts serve me and I have twelve made. Gandhi in a house with ten pairs of shoes: four or six men walk barefoot because of you. A stethoscope hung as decoration in a non-doctor's house means some doctor cannot examine patients. Keep only what your duty needs.

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

शौच śauca

**Cleanliness**, outer, inner and environmental. Gandhi in a spotless bungalow smells a stench: the pond behind the house. Sweeping your rubbish to the neighbour's door is not śauca; the smell comes back.

संतोष santoṣa

**Contentment** within what your effort earns. Desire is a blind well no one fills. God gave me a thousand rupees today; I will work toward a lakh, but not by weeping and not by stealing.

तप tapas

**Hardiness.** The strength to bear cold, rain and heat and to hold a resolve through obstacles. The rich man who faints twice walking a short way in the sun has none.

स्वाध्याय svādhyāya

**Study**, of good texts and of oneself. Spend one percent of the price of your wife's saree on books for the children. Vijñānabhikṣu's reading: before sleep, count the day's good and bad deeds.

ईश्वरप्रणिधान Īśvara-praṇidhāna

**Dedicating every act to God.** Two shops sell okra at forty and at twenty rupees; you buy the cheap okra and it is full of worms. Had you thought "this is for God, I must offer it first", you would never have bought wormy okra. A soldier at Kargil and a robber commit the same act, killing; one is decorated and one hanged, because of what the act was for.

**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.

at rest

  

One full breath in three equal parts: **pūraka** in, **kumbhaka** held, **recaka** out. Pick a grade and follow the circle.

That is the whole of Patañjali's prāṇāyāma as I learned it. Everything else you have been taught under the name, the bellows breath, the humming breath, alternate nostrils, is Haṭha yoga, which calls this one "the simple prāṇāyāma" and builds dozens more on top of it.

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

|  | Patañjali's yoga | Haṭha yoga |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Root | *yuj samādhau*, to reach samādhi | *yujir yoge*, to join |
| Lineage | Patañjali | Ādināth (Śiva) to Matsyendranāth to Gorakhnāth; the Nāths |
| Aim | *citta-śuddhi*, purifying the mind | *kāyā-śuddhi*, purifying the body; a healthy mind needs a healthy body first |
| Starts with | yama and niyama; the unfit are turned away | āsana; everyone is let in; no yama or niyama |
| Āsanas | one: steady and comfortable | traditionally 84, now well over a hundred, held a few minutes each |
| Breath | three movements, balanced | bhastrikā, bhrāmarī, anuloma-viloma and more, to open iḍā and piṅgalā into suṣumṇā |
| Mechanism | still the vṛttis, drop the kleśas | ṣaṭkarma to clean the nāḍīs, then kuṇḍalinī rising through the cakras |
| What goes wrong | the five kleśas | a kuṇḍalinī that stalls; the wrong cleansing done without a master |
| The end | *kaivalya*: the witness alone, apart from Prakṛti | Śiva and Śakti joined at the crown; the whole world become bliss |

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*.

*[Figure: A tortoise with five limbs labelled as the five senses and their objects, arrows pulling each limb into a shell labelled sadhana]*

***The tortoise verse.** The Gītā's line is quoted wherever Yoga is taught: as the tortoise draws its limbs in on every side, so the yogi draws the senses from their objects. The limbs are the senses; the shell is practice.*

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.

*[Figure: A staircase from dharana through dhyana to samadhi, then up through four samadhis with seed, each with a small seed icon, to nirbija at the top where the seed is gone and only light remains]*

***The staircase.** Dhāraṇā, dhyāna and samādhi are depths of one attention. Inside samādhi there is a further ladder, and the thing that changes on each rung is whether a seed remains.*

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.

A note, and sources

**I am a compiler, not an authority.** This page is my learning, set down in the order it made sense to me. Where I have added something my teachers did not give (sūtra numbers, the textbook order of the kleśas and the limbs, the authorship of the Haṭha manuals), the text says so in place, and where my sources disagree with each other or with the textbooks, I have noted the disagreement rather than smoothed it over. Every diagram is my own.

**The lectures I learned from.** Ten lectures on YouTube, about five and a half hours in all. From The Quest, Dr. Himmat Singh Sinha: [योग दर्शन की सरल और व्यावहारिक व्याख्या](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyFsOBWV9uM) (15 min), [योग दर्शन, विस्तृत विवेचना](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FO6MwPDLoYs) (99 min; the upload titled [Yoga Sutra: A Detailed Explanation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYb2zQ2leLg) is the same recording), [Hatha Yoga vs Patanjali Yoga](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XrHVs_drpw) (47 min), [योग दर्शन में मोक्ष की अवधारणा](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ivCF181_qc) (14 min), [Is Chitta a part of the Prakriti?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oO3wV2776n8) (10 min) and [Patanjali Yoga Darshan in English](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bn2OTpu8vVQ) (8 min). From Hyper Quest, Vishal Chaurasia: [क्या है राजयोग?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nk9hFB0E0Kw) (16 min), [Schrödinger vs Patanjali](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZ1I12Nb5_s) (19 min) and [Parashurama's Insane Speed Explained](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tddrTh8lMtk) (14 min). The lectures are in Hindi; the English restatement, and any error in it, is mine. None of them dates Patañjali beyond a round "2500 years ago", and this page does not try to.

**Texts and books these lectures draw on.** Primary texts: Patañjali, *Yoga Sūtra*, with Vyāsa's *Bhāṣya*, which is where the five grounds of the mind come from, and Vijñānabhikṣu's *Yogavārttika*; J. H. Woods, *The Yoga-System of Patañjali* (Harvard Oriental Series 17, 1914), for text and translation of the sūtras with Vyāsa; the *Bhagavad Gītā*, for the line on Sāṃkhya and Yoga as one, the tortoise verse and the verse on equanimity; the *Mahābhārata*, Vana Parva, for Arjuna and Urvaśī and for Kārtavīrya; the *Brahmāṇḍa Purāṇa*, for Paraśurāma's journey to Kailāsa; the *Rāmāyaṇa*, mostly as Tulsīdās retells it in the *Rāmacaritamānas*, for Vibhīṣaṇa's plea and the allegory of Rāvaṇa's heads; the dohās of Rahīm; and, on the Haṭha side, the *Gheraṇḍa Saṃhitā* and Svātmārāma's *Haṭha Pradīpikā*. Modern studies and translations: Swami Vivekananda, *Raja Yoga* (1896; in *The Complete Works*, vol. 1), for the grades of breath, the passive and active virtues and the finer ladder of samādhis; S. Radhakrishnan, *Indian Philosophy*, 2 vols (1923, 1927), for the line on change in nature; Arthur Avalon (Sir John Woodroffe), *The Serpent Power* (1919), on kuṇḍalinī and the cakras.

All diagrams on this page are my own.

In this series

-   [**Sāṃkhya** 1 of 6 The clay before the pot](/darsana/samkhya)
-   [**Nyāya** 3 of 6 Where there is smoke](/darsana/nyaya)
-   [**Vaiśeṣika** 4 of 6 An inventory of everything](/darsana/vaisheshika)
-   [**Mīmāṃsā** 5 of 6 The act keeps its own books](/darsana/mimamsa)
-   [**Vedānta** 6 of 6 The seer who saw both](/darsana/vedanta)

[All six, in order](/darsana)

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https://emergence.live/darsana/yoga