The Sutras
Whole philosophies packed into a few hundred lines — threads to be memorised, unwound by a teacher, and argued over for a thousand years. Meet the Brahmasūtra and the Yoga Sūtra.
Some scriptures are vast: the Mahābhārata runs to about a hundred thousand verses. Others are astonishingly small. The two texts on this page — the Brahmasūtra of Bādarāyaṇa and the Yoga Sūtra of Patañjali — would each fit on a few printed pages. Yet each became the foundation of a whole school of thought, because each was written not to be read alone but to be explained. They are sūtras: threads.
What is a sūtra?
The Sanskrit word sūtra means a thread or string — related, distantly, to the English sew. A sūtra text is a string of very short statements, each one a knot on the thread. They were composed to be memorised: a student learned the whole text by heart, then sat with a teacher who unpacked each line, sometimes for hours.
The style is terse to the point of being cryptic. Verbs are often missing; a single word may stand for a whole argument the student was expected to know. A later saying among grammarians jokes that they rejoice at saving half a short vowel as much as at the birth of a son. The model for this style was the grammar of Pāṇini, the Aṣṭādhyāyī (“eight chapters,” perhaps 4th century BCE), which describes the whole of Sanskrit in about four thousand sūtras of almost algebraic compression.
Because the sūtras say so little, everything depends on the explanation. The great explanations are called bhāṣyas, “commentaries,” and they in turn gathered sub-commentaries, glosses and replies. This is where the schools were born. When people speak of Shankara’s Advaita or Ramanuja’s Viśiṣṭādvaita, they mean, in the first place, two different ways of reading the same thread.
Reading a sūtra text alone is like reading only the headings of a book. Almost no one in the tradition ever did it. If you pick up a translation, choose one that includes a classical commentary, or at least explains each line — and notice whose commentary it follows.
The Brahmasūtra
The Brahmasūtra (also called the Vedānta Sūtra or Śārīraka Sūtra) is attributed to Bādarāyaṇa, whom tradition identifies with Vyāsa, the compiler of the Vedas. Historians place the text roughly between the 2nd century BCE and the 5th century CE, and think it gathers up earlier teaching — it names several older teachers whose views it weighs. Its task is to show that the many Upanishads, which can seem to say different things, teach one coherent doctrine of Brahman.
It has about 555 sūtras (the count differs a little between commentators, who divide some lines differently), arranged in four chapters (adhyāyas) of four quarters (pādas) each:
- Samanvaya समन्वय“Harmony” — all the Upanishadic passages, rightly read, point to Brahman.
- Avirodha अविरोध“Non-contradiction” — answering objections from reason and from rival schools: Sāṃkhya, the Buddhists, the Jains and others.
- Sādhana साधन“Means” — the soul’s journeys, meditation, and the disciplines that lead to knowledge.
- Phala फल“Fruit” — liberation, and what becomes of the knower at death and beyond.
It opens with an invitation:
And then, in a few words, it defines its subject:
Notice how much the reader must supply: the bracketed words are not in the Sanskrit. The sūtra echoes the Taittirīya Upaniṣad, where Bhṛgu is taught that Brahman is that from which beings are born, by which they live, and into which they return. Together with the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gītā, the Brahmasūtra forms the prasthānatrayī, the “three starting points” of Vedānta (see the Map of the Texts). To found a school of Vedānta, a teacher had to write — or inherit — a commentary on all three.
One thread, three readings
The oldest complete commentary to survive is Shankara’s; the two most influential replies came from Ramanuja and Madhva. Tap each to see how they read the same opening lines:
Shankara — Advaita (c. 8th century)
Advaita view In his Brahmasūtra-bhāṣya, Shankara reads “now, therefore” as: after a seeker has gained discrimination, detachment, self-control and the longing for freedom. The inquiry is not one more ritual duty; it is knowledge, and knowledge alone liberates.
Brahman is one without a second. “That from which the world arises” is only a pointer — a definition by what is incidental — for in truth the world is an appearance on Brahman, as a snake is seen in a rope. The individual self is Brahman itself, mistaken. See Atman & Brahman.
Ramanuja — Viśiṣṭādvaita (11th–12th century)
Viśiṣṭādvaita view Ramanuja’s Śrībhāṣya reads “now, therefore” as: after the study of the Veda’s ritual portion (Pūrva Mīmāṃsā). Ritual and Vedānta are one continuous science; the inquiry into Brahman crowns the inquiry into dharma.
Brahman is Nārāyaṇa, personal and full of auspicious qualities. The world truly comes from him and is real: souls and matter are his “body,” wholly dependent on him as a body on its self. The self is never lost in God, but rests in him in loving service. Liberation is reached by devotion and surrender, through his grace.
Madhva — Dvaita (13th century)
Dvaita view Madhva’s Brahmasūtra-bhāṣya (with his longer Anuvyākhyāna) reads Brahman as Viṣṇu, the one independent reality, “full of qualities.” Everything else — souls and matter — is real but dependent on him.
Difference is eternal: between God and souls, between soul and soul, between God and matter. “That from which the world arises” is God as its controller and efficient cause; he shapes a real, eternal primal matter rather than becoming the world. Liberation is the soul’s joyful nearness to Viṣṇu, by knowledge, devotion and grace — never identity with him.
- Śrīkaṇṭha (perhaps 12th century) read the Brahmasūtra as a Shaiva text: Brahman is Shiva. His Śaiva-viśiṣṭādvaita lies close to Ramanuja and was championed in the 16th century by Appayya Dīkṣita, a Tamil scholar.
- Nimbārka taught difference-and-non-difference (bhedābheda); Vallabha, in his Aṇubhāṣya, a “pure” non-dualism in which the world is Krishna’s real self-expression.
- Gauḍīya Vaishnavas long held the Bhāgavata Purāṇa to be the natural commentary on the Brahmasūtra; in the 18th century Baladeva Vidyābhūṣaṇa wrote their formal one, the Govinda-bhāṣya.
- Historians generally doubt that Bādarāyaṇa himself held any one of these systems in full; the sūtras are too terse to settle it.
Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra
The Yoga Sūtra is attributed to Patañjali. Tradition often identifies him with the grammarian Patañjali of the 2nd century BCE; most scholars think the Yoga Sūtra is later, and many now date it to around 400 CE. Its philosophy is close to Sāṃkhya: an eternal witnessing consciousness (puruṣa) and changing nature (prakṛti), whose confusion is the root of suffering. Unlike classical Sāṃkhya, it also gives a place to Īśvara, the Lord, as a special self untouched by affliction and karma, and to devotion to him as one path. Its roughly 195 sūtras fall into four pādas:
समाधिSamādhi pādaOn absorption · 51 sūtras
What yoga is, the kinds of mental activity, practice and detachment, devotion to Īśvara and the sacred syllable Om, and the stages of meditative absorption.
साधनSādhana pādaOn practice · 55 sūtras
The afflictions (kleśas) that bind us — ignorance first among them — the yoga of action, and the first five of the eight limbs.
विभूतिVibhūti pādaOn powers · 55 sūtras
The last three limbs, their combined discipline (saṃyama), and the extraordinary powers it is said to bring — with the warning that they are obstacles to the final goal.
कैवल्यKaivalya pādaOn aloneness · 34 sūtras
Mind, karma and impressions, and the goal: kaivalya, the “aloneness” of pure consciousness, free of entanglement with nature — Yoga’s name for liberation (compare Samsara & Moksha).
Its definition of yoga, in the second sūtra, is perhaps the most quoted line in all of Indian philosophy:
The citta is the mind-field; its vṛttis are its constant movements — knowing, mistaking, imagining, sleeping, remembering. When they settle, the witness that was always there is no longer confused with them.
The oldest commentary, the Yoga-bhāṣya attributed to Vyāsa, is inseparable from the text; some scholars now argue that sūtra and bhāṣya were composed together as a single work. Later commentators include Vācaspati Miśra, King Bhoja and Vijñānabhikṣu.
The eight limbs
The sūtra’s best-known teaching is its eightfold path, aṣṭāṅga. The limbs move from the outer to the inner — from how we treat others to the stillest depth of the mind:
Step through them:
Notice that the path begins with ethics, and that posture takes up only a handful of sūtras. The last three limbs, practised together on one object, are called saṃyama.
Classical yoga and modern yoga
Today “yoga” usually means a class of postures and stretches. That practice is real and valuable, but it is not quite what Patañjali taught:
For Patañjali and his commentators, yoga is a path of mental discipline toward liberation: ethics, a steady seat, breath, and ever deeper meditation, ending in the separation of consciousness from nature. Postures as physical training are barely mentioned. The elaborate postures, locks and breath techniques came later, in the haṭha yoga texts, such as Svātmārāma’s Haṭhayogapradīpikā (15th century) — and even there they served an inner, often tantric, goal.
Modern reading Swami Vivekananda’s Raja Yoga (1896) presented the Yoga Sūtra to the West as a universal science of the mind. In the 20th century, teachers such as T. Krishnamacharya in Mysore and his students B. K. S. Iyengar and K. Pattabhi Jois built the posture-centred yoga now practised worldwide, mixing haṭha yoga with modern physical culture. Scholars such as Mark Singleton and David Gordon White have traced this history, and White shows how the Yoga Sūtra, little studied for centuries, was rediscovered in the colonial era and became the “classic” text of yoga.
Other sūtra literatures
Almost every classical school set out its teaching in sūtras. A few of the most important:
- Mīmāṃsā Sūtra of Jaimini — the science of interpreting Vedic ritual, and the largest of the philosophical sūtras. It begins with words the Brahmasūtra echoes: athāto dharma-jijñāsā, “Now, therefore, the desire to know dharma” (1.1.1).
- Nyāya Sūtra of Gautama (Akṣapāda) — logic, debate and the valid means of knowledge.
- Vaiśeṣika Sūtra of Kaṇāda — the categories of reality and an early atomism.
- Dharma Sūtras and Gṛhya Sūtras — rules of conduct and household rites, and the Nārada Bhakti Sūtra, a short, much-loved treatise on devotion.
Behind them all stands Pāṇini, whose grammar showed how much could be held in a thread.
Check your knowledge:
The word “sūtra” literally means…
A thread or string — a string of short, memorable statements.
“Yoga is the stilling of the turnings of the mind” is Yoga Sūtra…
Yoga Sūtra 1.2: yogaś citta-vṛtti-nirodhaḥ.
Which commentator read “now, therefore” as “after studying the ritual portion of the Veda”?
Ramanuja saw Mīmāṃsā and Vedānta as one continuous science.
Which limb of Patañjali’s path comes first?
The restraints — beginning with non-harming. Ethics come before posture.
Questions people often ask
Is the Yoga Sūtra a Hindu text?
Yes — it is the root text of Yoga, one of the six classical darśanas that accept the Veda. It shares much vocabulary with Buddhism and Jainism, and it can be practised by anyone, but its home is the Hindu philosophical tradition.
Should I read the Brahmasūtra first?
Probably not. It was always the last of the three foundations a student met, after the Upanishads and the Gītā. See How to Start Reading for a gentler route.
Is Patañjali the same person as the grammarian?
Tradition says so, and a well-known invocation praises Patañjali for purifying speech by grammar, the body by medicine and the mind by yoga. Most historians think they were two different people, centuries apart.
॥ Pause and reflect
- Watch your mind for one minute. What are its “turnings” right now?
- Patañjali puts non-harming and truthfulness before any posture or meditation. Why might that order matter?
- Three great teachers read the same short line in three ways. How do you read a text that could mean more than one thing?
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Key terms on this page
Sources & further reading
- George Thibaut (trans.), The Vedânta-Sûtras with the Commentary by Śaṅkarâkârya, Sacred Books of the East 34 and 38 (1890, 1896); and with the Commentary of Râmânuja, SBE 48 (1904).
- Swami Gambhirananda (trans.), Brahma-Sūtra-Bhāṣya of Śrī Śaṅkarācārya (Advaita Ashrama, 1965).
- S. Subba Rau (trans.), The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Sri Madhwacharya (Madras, 1904).
- Edwin F. Bryant, The Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali: A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary (North Point Press, 2009).
- David Gordon White, The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali: A Biography (Princeton University Press, 2014).
- Mark Singleton, Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice (Oxford University Press, 2010).
- Philipp A. Maas, “A Concise Historiography of Classical Yoga Philosophy,” in Eli Franco (ed.), Periodization and Historiography of Indian Philosophy (Vienna, 2013).
- M. Hiriyanna, Outlines of Indian Philosophy (George Allen & Unwin, 1932).