PATANJALI’S YOGA SUTRA. Translated from the Sanskrit with an Introduction and Commentary by Shyam Ranganathan. Penguin Classics India, 2008. 319 pages.
During a recent visit to the Jaipur Literary Festival in India, I was struck, on visiting the Penguin Random House tent, at the plethora of classics translated into English from Sanskrit and other languages of India, ancient and modern. The body of classical literature in India is vast, in fact, vaster than that of Greece and Rome. As the New York Times noted in 2015 about the establishment of the Murthy Classical Library (an analog to the Loeb Classics),
That literary heritage [India’s] can seem daunting in size. While the canon of surviving Greek and Roman classics is fairly small, the literature of India’s multiple classical languages includes thousands upon thousands of texts, many of which, as the writer William Dalrymple recently noted, exist only in manuscripts that are decaying before they can be translated or even cataloged.
Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra is not one of the at-risk texts; he is quite famous, and his text is central to the practice of yoga worldwide. (Yoga as taken in its historically and philosophically rich, traditional sense, not the sequence of flexibility poses and breathing that has been popularized in the West.)
Shyam Ranganathan has done a conscientious job translating (and unpacking) these dense, lapidary statements about the yogi’s journey to Samadhi. A word-for-word attempt would demand several untranslated words and a concentration of language that would render the text unintelligible. So Ranganathan makes sure to give a somewhat full, wordy rendering of each term. This is helpful even for those who speak or are familiar with Sanskrit or modern Indian languages. To someone familiar with Sanskrit’s vernacular descendants, the word “samskara” has a recognized meaning; but to the yogi, it means something more philosophical and more specific. The translator uses “imprint, latent tendency or impression,” which, while losing Patanjali’s compression, keeps the text from becoming transliterated gibberish. To me having grown up with spoken Gujarati–or consulting an online dictionary now–“samskaras” are “purificatory ceremonies or rites marking a major event in one’s life.” But for the yogi, it is something to overcome–for, in Ranganathan’s words, they are “our karmic baggage, and the reason we are in bondage and not liberated.” If he had merely transliterated the word, I would have misinterpreted a whole stretch of the sutra.
He is also careful to help us avoid the dangers of easy equivalences between Western philosophical terms and Indian ones. “Pramana,” he explains, is not the same as “epistemology” or “theory of knowledge,” because knowledge relates to the truth (you “know” a thing means that you know the truth about it) whereas pramana can relate to truth or falsehood, that is, your “pramana” of something could well be a delusion. You can take issue with his choice of “epistemic state,” but hardly with his scrupulousness.
Ranganathan’s commentary throughout is clear without being simplistic. It illuminates without dumbing things down. Patanjali can be hard going, and, I would argue, impossible to understand without commentary, in a way that, say, the Bhagavad Gita is not. It is good to have a guide whose primary focus is the text and not the quest to show off his own wisdom.
The most interesting thing about this Sutra was the description of the yogi’s developing powers as he or she ascends in the practice of yoga. The yogi is said to become aware of past lives and gains special sensory powers and the ability to fly through space. Yet Patanjali actually claims these are side effects of the true progress–they are classed as distractions and annoyances, along with the desire of “people of rank” to bask in the company of the enlightened yogi. The purpose of yoga, for Patanjali, is “kaivalya”–Isolation–in which the self is extricated from its place in the physical/material world. To become pure sentience, outside of time and space, outside of “prakriti” (Nature), and utterly transcendent of body and mind alike: This is the yogi. The various latter-day asanas of Hatha yoga are, in this context, merely testings and stretchings of the ligamentous bonds on the soul; Patanjali does not discuss Downward Dog or Corpse Pose or any such thing, for these developed centuries later. Patanjali is the pure product, the unadulterated and almost cryptically laconic essence of Yoga in its highest and original sense. The Penguin Classics volume is an excellent place to start one’s journey into this tradition.