Patanjali
Yoga is the stilling of the mind. He codified a practice that had existed for centuries into a system of eight limbs.
Patanjali compiled the Yoga Sutras, 196 short aphorisms that systematize the philosophy and practice of yoga. Drawing on older traditions, he defined yoga as the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind. His eight-limbed path moves from ethical restraints through physical postures and breath control to progressively deeper states of meditation, culminating in samadhi, a state of complete absorption. The text is terse, almost mathematical. Centuries of commentary have grown around it.
Places
Ideas
Words
“Yoga is the stilling of the changing states of the mind.”
Works
Life & Moments
Born in Classical India
Little is known of his life beyond the work attributed to him. He compiled what others had practiced for centuries into a single thread of aphorisms.
Composes the Yoga Sutras
Patanjali compiled and organized centuries of yoga philosophy into 196 brief aphorisms. The text does not invent yoga but gives it a coherent structure for the first time, drawing on older practices and weaving them into a single thread.
Systematizes the Eight-limbed Path
Patanjali laid out yoga as an eightfold discipline: ethical restraints, observances, posture, breath control, withdrawal of the senses, concentration, meditation, and absorption. The path moves from outward conduct to inward stillness, each limb supporting the next.
Yoga Is the Stilling of the Mind
Defined yoga in a single line: the cessation of the fluctuations of consciousness. Not posture alone, but the quieting of thought until the seer rests in its own nature.
Influence
Influenced by
- Kapila
Patanjali's Yoga took its metaphysics of witnessing spirit and active matter directly from Kapila's Samkhya.
- The Buddha
The eight limbs of Patanjali's yoga and the Buddha's eightfold path come out of the same ascetic world and share much of their language about restraint, attention and absorption, whatever each tradition later made of the other.
Influenced
- Adi Shankara
Advaita found room for yogic discipline as preparation while denying that it could itself produce liberation, since on Shankara's account what liberates is knowledge of what was always already the case.
