The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali

Book Summary

Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, compiled sometime in the first centuries of the common era, are the founding text of classical Râja Yoga and one of the six orthodox darshanas of Indian philosophy. Composed as roughly 195 extremely terse aphorisms, they function less as a self-contained treatise than as a set of memory-pegs meant to be unpacked by a teacher — which is exactly the role Charles Johnston, an Irish-born Sanskrit scholar and former Indian Civil Service officer, sets himself in this 1912 interpretation, subtitled ‘The Book of the Spiritual Man.’ Johnston prefaces each of the four traditional books with his own extended introduction before giving the sutras themselves with commentary.

Book I, the Samadhi Pada or Book of Spiritual Consciousness, defines yoga itself as the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind, and describes the obstacles — and the successive stages of absorption (samadhi) — involved in reaching that stillness. Book II, the Sadhana Pada or Book of the Means of Soul Growth, sets out the practical discipline for reaching that goal: the eight limbs (ashtanga) of yoga, from the ethical restraints (yama) and observances (niyama) through posture, breath control, and sense-withdrawal, that later chapters of Book III complete with concentration, meditation, and absorption proper.

Book III, the Vibhuti Pada or Book of Spiritual Powers, catalogues the siddhis — extraordinary psychic and spiritual powers Patanjali holds can arise from mastering these disciplines — while cautioning that they are byproducts to be set aside, not the goal of practice. Book IV, the Kaivalya Pada or Book of Liberation, closes the work with what Johnston calls ‘the mechanism of salvation’: the cosmic law governing how the spiritual man comes to birth, growth, and the final freedom (kaivalya) of consciousness resting in its own true nature, disentangled from matter.