Yoga as Philosophy

On The Sutras you met the Yoga Sūtra as a text: its four chapters, its famous definition of yoga as “the stilling of the turnings of the mind,” and the eight limbs from ethics to absorption. This page asks a different question. Why should stilling the mind free anyone? What is the mind, what is doing the freeing, and what is it freed from? Patañjali’s answers make Yoga one of the six classical darśanas, with a theory of its own.

Yoga view What follows is the classical Yoga school’s own account, read with its oldest commentary; how other schools answered is gathered below.

Sāṃkhya with a Lord

Yoga takes over the metaphysics of Sāṃkhya almost whole: many pure consciousnesses (puruṣas), one unconscious nature (prakṛti) woven of three guṇas, and bondage as their confusion. Manuscripts of the text even call it, in their closing lines, a “teaching of Sāṃkhya.” Where Sāṃkhya mainly analyses, Yoga trains: it is the practical laboratory of the same insight.

Its one great addition is Īśvara, the Lord — which is why later writers call Yoga seśvara-sāṃkhya, “Sāṃkhya with Īśvara.” Patañjali first offers devotion to the Lord as one way to samādhi (1.23), then says who he is:

In him, Patañjali goes on, the seed of omniscience is unsurpassed (1.25); unlimited by time, he was the teacher even of the ancient teachers (1.26); his word is the sacred syllable Om, to be repeated with reflection on its meaning (1.27–28). Notice what is not said. Īśvara here is not the creator, nor the material of the world, nor the soul’s final goal. He is a puruṣa who was never bound — the model of freedom, a teacher and an object of devotion who helps the practitioner along. The commentators added more, but the sūtra’s Lord is strikingly modest beside the God of Vedānta.

The mind and its five turnings

The citta, the mind-field, is not consciousness. It is the finest product of prakṛti, so clear and bright that it seems conscious, as a crystal seems red beside a red flower. Its movements are vṛttis, “turnings,” and Patañjali says there are five, each either afflicted or unafflicted — that is, binding or helpful (1.5):

Tap each turning:

• 1प्रमाणValid knowledgePerception, inference and reliable testimony (1.7). Even true knowing is a turning of the mind that must finally be stilled.
• 2विपर्ययErrorFalse knowledge resting on a form that is not the thing’s own (1.8) — seeing a rope as a snake.
• 3विकल्पConceptualisationIdeas that follow words but have no object (1.9) — like “the horns of a hare,” or “the consciousness of puruṣa,” which splits one thing into two.
• 4निद्राSleepA turning whose support is the absence of content (1.10). Dreamless sleep is still a state of mind, not freedom — you wake saying “I slept well.”
• 5स्मृतिMemoryNot letting go of an object once experienced (1.11). Every other turning leaves a trace that memory can revive.

The list is a surprise: right knowledge sits beside error, and sleep beside memory. Yoga is not trying to replace false thoughts with true ones. It aims, in the end, at the stilling of all of them, so that the seer stops identifying with any.

The five afflictions

Why does the mind keep turning? Because of the kleśas, the afflictions:

They are not five separate problems but one root and four branches. Ignorance is “the field” of the others, which may lie dormant, thin, interrupted or fully active (2.4):

1. Avidyā अविद्याIgnorance: taking the impermanent for permanent, the impure for pure, pain for pleasure, and what is not the self for the self (2.5). The root of all the rest.
2. Asmitā अस्मिता“I-am-ness”: treating the power of seeing and the instrument of seeing as if they were one self (2.6). Consciousness mistaken for the mind.
3. Rāga रागAttachment, which follows the memory of pleasure (2.7).
4. Dveṣa द्वेषAversion, which follows the memory of pain (2.8).
5. Abhiniveśa अभिनिवेशClinging to life, the fear of death, which flows by its own momentum and grips even the learned (2.9).

That last phrase is worth pausing on. Philosophy alone does not remove the fear of death; it is carried in the grain of the mind. That is why Yoga is a practice and not just a doctrine.

How bondage reproduces itself

The Karma page shows how desire becomes action and action becomes habit. Yoga gives that cycle a sharper analysis, with the afflictions at its centre. Afflictions motivate actions; actions leave a store of residues (karmāśaya, 2.12); while the root remains, the store ripens as a birth, a span of life and experiences (2.13); experience lays down fresh impressions; and impressions feed the afflictions again. Step round it:

Where can the wheel be broken? Patañjali’s answer is precise. Gross afflictions are weakened by meditation (2.11); subtle ones are destroyed only when the mind itself dissolves back into its source (2.10). And the root, ignorance, is cut by unwavering discrimination between seer and seen (2.26). Pain that has not yet come, he says, is what can be avoided (2.16) — the past has ripened, but the future is still open.

Practice and letting go

Abhyāsa, practice, is effort towards steadiness, and it becomes firm only when kept up for a long time, without a break and with devotion (1.13–14). Vairāgya, dispassion, is mastery over thirst for objects seen or merely heard of — including the heavens promised by ritual (1.15). Its highest form is indifference to the guṇas themselves, born of seeing puruṣa (1.16). The Yoga-bhāṣya’s image is a river that flows two ways, towards good and towards harm: dispassion slows the current towards objects, and practice opens the channel of discernment.

The kinds of samādhi

The eight limbs culminate in samādhi, absorption, but Patañjali distinguishes its forms carefully. Tap through them:

Who wrote what?

Classical Yoga has always been read through the Yoga-bhāṣya, attributed to Vyāsa. Later layers include Vācaspati Miśra’s Tattvavaiśāradī; King Bhoja’s Rājamārtaṇḍa (11th century); a Vivaraṇa ascribed to Shankara, though scholars dispute the ascription; and Vijñānabhikṣu’s Yogavārttika (16th century), which reads Yoga in harmony with Vedānta.

Scholarly debate Tradition holds that Patañjali composed the sūtras and Vyāsa, much later, explained them. The Indologist Philipp Maas, building on earlier work by Johannes Bronkhorst, has argued from the manuscripts that sūtras and bhāṣya were transmitted as one work, the Pātañjalayogaśāstra, composed by a single author around 325–425 CE, who gathered older sūtras and wrote his own explanation beside them. Others still read them as two works. The question matters for how we read Īśvara, samādhi and much else — but either way, the bhāṣya is our oldest guide.

Not haṭha, not the studio

Three things share the name “yoga,” and it helps to keep them apart:

• Pātañjala Yoga (c. 4th–5th century) is a discipline of the mind for the sake of discrimination. Posture is a steady seat; breath a support; the goal is kaivalya.
• Haṭha yoga, set out in texts such as Svātmārāma’s Haṭhapradīpikā (15th century), works through the body: postures, breath-retentions, seals and locks, the awakening of kuṇḍalinī. Its metaphysics owes more to Tantra and Shaiva traditions than to Sāṃkhya, though it calls itself a ladder towards the “royal yoga” of samādhi.
• Modern Modern postural yoga, shaped in the 20th century, blends haṭha with gymnastics and health culture. It is real and valuable — but its “Patañjali” is often a modern rediscovery (see The Sutras).

The classical eightfold scheme also lived on in other voices. The Tamil Tirumantiram of Tirumūlar teaches an eight-limbed yoga (aṣṭāṅga) within Shaiva devotion, and the Yoga-Yājñavalkya presents its eightfold yoga as a teaching given by the sage Yājñavalkya to Gārgī, a woman philosopher.

Check your understanding:

Questions people often ask

Key terms on this page

Sources & further reading

• Edwin F. Bryant, The Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali: A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary (North Point Press, 2009).
• James Haughton Woods (trans.), The Yoga-System of Patañjali, with the Yoga-bhāṣya and Vācaspati Miśra’s Tattvavaiśāradī, Harvard Oriental Series 17 (1914).
• Swāmi Hariharānanda Āraṇya, Yoga Philosophy of Patañjali, trans. P. N. Mukerji (State University of New York Press, 1983).
• Philipp A. Maas, Samādhipāda: Das erste Kapitel des Pātañjalayogaśāstra zum ersten Mal kritisch ediert (Shaker, 2006).
• Philipp A. Maas, “A Concise Historiography of Classical Yoga Philosophy,” in Eli Franco (ed.), Periodization and Historiography of Indian Philosophy (Vienna, 2013).
• Ian Whicher, The Integrity of the Yoga Darśana: A Reconsideration of Classical Yoga (State University of New York Press, 1998).
• James Mallinson and Mark Singleton, Roots of Yoga (Penguin Classics, 2017).