We do not know when Patanjali lived. We do not know where. We do not know whether he was one person.
For the author of the foundational text of classical yoga, the biographical record is close to empty, and what fills the gap is mostly legend, including a charming story that he descended from the heavens into the palm of a praying sage in the form of a small snake.
What survives instead is 196 sentences.
Aphorisms, Not a Book
A sutra is a thread. As a literary form it means a statement compressed to the absolute minimum, designed to be memorised and then unpacked by a teacher, and the Yoga Sutras take this to an extreme.
Some run to four words. They are not difficult in the way a dense argument is difficult; they are difficult in the way a folded object is difficult. Everything is inside, and it needs opening.
This has a consequence people often miss. The Yoga Sutras have essentially never been transmitted alone. They travel with commentary, and the earliest, the Yoga Bhashya attributed to Vyasa and dated around the fifth or sixth century, is so bound up with the text that some scholars now argue the sutras and that commentary were composed together by one author.
When somebody says they have read the Yoga Sutras, they have read a translator’s decisions about a commentator’s reading of a compressed text.
The four chapters are: Samadhi Pada on contemplation, Sadhana Pada on practice, Vibhuti Pada on the powers that arise from practice, and Kaivalya Pada on liberation.
The Sentence Everything Rests On
The second sutra of the first chapter defines the subject.
Yogash chitta vritti nirodhah. Yoga is the stilling of the movements of the mind.
Every word carries weight. Chitta is the whole mental field, not just thought. Vritti means turnings or fluctuations, the churning of that field. Nirodhah is restraint, cessation, settling.
And the third sutra says what follows: then the seer rests in its own nature.
That is the entire proposition. Yoga is not an activity that produces a state. It is the removal of the disturbance that was obscuring something already there.
The metaphor the tradition reaches for is a lake. Still the surface and you do not create the bottom. You simply stop preventing yourself from seeing it.
What Patanjali Did Not Do
He did not invent yoga. The practices in the Sutras were already circulating in ascetic, Buddhist, Jain and Upanishadic contexts for centuries.
What he did was organise. He took a diffuse field of technique and philosophy and imposed a structure on it, borrowing the metaphysics of Samkhya, one of the six classical schools, with its distinction between purusha, pure consciousness, and prakriti, everything material and mental.
Dating is genuinely unsettled. Estimates have ranged from the second century BCE to the fifth century CE, and the current weight of scholarly opinion sits somewhere around 350 to 450 CE, though this is not universally accepted.
The confusion is partly self-inflicted by tradition. Indian sources have long identified this Patanjali with the grammarian Patanjali who wrote the Mahabhashya in the second century BCE, and sometimes with a writer on medicine as well, producing an elegant scheme in which one man purified speech, body and mind. Most modern scholars treat this as a later composite rather than history.
The Part That Surprises People
Of 196 sutras, three mention posture.
Sutra 2.46 gives the definition in three words: sthira sukham asanam. The seat should be steady and comfortable. The two that follow describe how that steadiness is achieved and what it produces.
There is no downward dog. No warrior sequence. No sun salutation. Not one physical posture is described anywhere in the text.
Asana here means the seat you take for meditation, and the requirement is that it be stable enough not to distract you and comfortable enough that you are not fighting it.
This is worth sitting with if you came to yoga through a studio. The classical text at the centre of the tradition devotes roughly 1.5 percent of itself to the body, and treats it as a precondition for the real work rather than as the work.
Physical yoga as a developed system belongs mainly to the later hatha tradition, from around the eleventh century onwards, and the specific sequences familiar today owe an enormous amount to twentieth-century teachers, particularly Krishnamacharya and his students.
The Five Things in the Way
Chapter 2 identifies what actually obstructs practice, and this section has aged unusually well.
The kleshas, five afflictions, are:
- Avidya, ignorance, specifically mistaking the impermanent for the permanent and the not-self for the self. This is the root; the other four grow from it.
- Asmita, egoism, identifying awareness with the instrument it looks through.
- Raga, attachment, the pull toward what has previously given pleasure.
- Dvesha, aversion, the push away from what has previously given pain.
- Abhinivesha, clinging to life, described as arising even in the wise.
That last one is striking. Patanjali does not present fear of death as a failure of practice or a weakness to be scolded out of someone. He lists it as structural, present even in the accomplished, and simply names it as one of the things that is there.
The Chapter About Superpowers
The third chapter is the one nobody expects.
Patanjali describes samyama, the combined operation of the last three limbs, applied to particular objects, and lists what results. Knowledge of past and future. Understanding the speech of all creatures. Knowledge of previous births. Invisibility. Strength. Lightness of body.
Modern readers tend to react in one of two ways: embarrassment, or excitement.
The text itself does neither. Having listed the powers across many sutras, Patanjali says plainly that they are accomplishments from the standpoint of ordinary awareness and obstacles from the standpoint of absorption.
He spends a chapter describing them and then tells you they are in the way. That is a strange thing to do unless the audience needed both the description and the warning.
Lost, and Then Found Again
Here is the part of the story that surprises almost everyone.
The Yoga Sutras were not continuously central to Indian religious life. Through much of the medieval period the text was relatively marginal, overshadowed by devotional traditions, by Vedanta, and later by hatha yoga literature.
Its return to prominence is a nineteenth and twentieth-century event, and it is entangled with colonialism. Swami Vivekananda’s Raja Yoga, published in 1896, presented Patanjali to Western audiences in terms deliberately chosen to sound rational, systematic and compatible with science, and it was enormously influential in both directions.
The Yoga Sutras as most people now encounter them, as the classical authority of yoga, are partly a modern reconstruction. That does not make the text less valuable. It does mean that the phrase “yoga has always taught” deserves scrutiny whenever it appears.
A Man Made of Sentences
We are unlikely ever to learn who Patanjali was, and there is a certain fitness in that.
A text whose central claim is that the self is not the personality has come down to us with the personality of its author entirely erased. What remains is the argument, unattached to a biography, which is more or less what it recommends.
Common Questions
Who was Patanjali? The compiler of the Yoga Sutras. Almost nothing is known about him, including his dates, and traditional identifications with a grammarian and a medical writer are generally regarded as later composites.
When were the Yoga Sutras written? Estimates range from the second century BCE to the fifth century CE. Current scholarly opinion tends toward roughly 350 to 450 CE, though this remains debated.
What does yogash chitta vritti nirodhah mean? Yoga is the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind. It is sutra 1.2 and functions as the text’s definition of its subject.
Do the Yoga Sutras describe physical postures? No. Three of 196 sutras mention asana, defining it only as a seat that is steady and comfortable. No specific postures appear.
Did Patanjali invent yoga? No. He systematised practices and ideas already circulating for centuries, organising them within a Samkhya philosophical framework.
What are the kleshas? Five afflictions that obstruct practice: ignorance, egoism, attachment, aversion and clinging to life.
Sources consulted: Edwin Bryant, The Yoga Sutras of Patañjali (2009); Georg Feuerstein, The Yoga Tradition (1998); Swami Vivekananda, Raja Yoga (1896); Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Yoga Sutras”.
Related reading
Sources and further reading
Primary texts are linked in public-domain translations where one exists; modern scholarship is linked to the publisher.
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