I first encountered Patanjali in 2009 on my first 200-hour Yoga Teacher Training in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Specifically, I encountered him as a large painting that stood at the front of the Yoga Shala, overseeing our developing daily self-practice. An imposing looking man from the waist up. Waist down? Snake.

 

Obviously, this was rather intriguing. To say I was ‘green’ when I enrolled in my first YTT is a massive understatement. While I was going to classes multiple times a week, I had pretty much only ever been exposed to Sivananda-type Hatha Yoga and had NO idea about props, philosophy or even active wear. So, to find out that there was actually some strange dude at the top of the Yoga lineage that was half serpent was exciting stuff. I was pleased to discover that over the course of that intense month I’d be learning a lot more about this mystical character.

 

But how much of it did I really understand? How much of it was based on fact? And how much was actually even relevant?

 

Turns out?

 

Not much at all.

 

It is widely accepted that Patanjali wrote his now famous text around 400CE. The work is comprised of 195 very tight aphorisms, so tight that the entire texts contains only 4 verbs and reading it without at least its initial commentary, also written by Patanjali, makes it pretty much impenetrable.

 

(For more background and introductory material about this, check out my Patreon-only Podcast here.)

 

In Australia to have your Yoga teacher training curriculum certified by the peak body, you must teach trainees ‘Yoga philosophy’. One of the key texts you must include in this training is Patanjali’s ‘Yoga Sutra’. I am sure this is the case for other self-declared certification authorities around the world (another blog on that topic to come!). This is problematic on at least two important fronts:

 

1.     As stated just now, the Yoga Sutras is a complex, nuanced and almost impenetrable philosophical text that requires commentary and a depth of knowledge to interpret, and many Yoga teachers simply do not have those skills (me included).

 

2.     Because of Point 1, often times trainees are presented with a really reduced version of the text or–even worse–a subset of the teachings that don’t actually encapsulate the main thrust of the work.

 

In this article I’m proposing three reasons why Patanjali should not be considered as ‘the seminal text’ for Yoga teacher training in 2022. In fact, these reasons, I’ll argue, could make a case for this text not being taught at all.

 

1.     The Eight Limbs as an afterthought

Patanjali’s work is made up of 4 chapters of 195 aphorisms in total. The topics covered are broad and wide-ranging, but boiled down map out a metaphysical model of Purusa and Prakrti plus 24 Tattvas. It’s the author’s mash-up of Samkya (one of the ‘6 Indian Philosophies’) and some emerging ideas from other traditions. In it, there are beautiful teachings about the mind, about Karma, about the purpose of practice. And then – taking up just 16% of the text – there are the ‘Eight Limbs’.

 

According to David Gordon White in his exceptional book, ‘The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali: A Biography’ (Princeton University Press, 2014), ‘Most critical Yoga scholars agree that the eight-part practice was a pre-existing, independent tradition that Patanjali adapted into his Yoga Sutra’.

 

As a professional in the Yoga space, and having worked with Yoga teachers from all over the world, I feel confident here to opine that the mandatory nature of teaching the Yoga Sutras combined with its complexity means many trainers distil out the eight limbs and teach that small component almost exclusively.

 

So, not only do these teachings comprise only 31 verses of the full 195, they likely weren’t written originally by the author at all. Yet they are taught as the main meaning of the text because the rest is simply too hard to understand.

2.     The critics and commentators 

In ancient times teachings including the Yoga Sutra were transmitted verbally from teacher to student. Then the teacher could unpack the teachings more fully so the students could understand their meaning. (Remember the 4 verbs?) Key thinkers would also develop commentaries on these knowledge systems, contributing their thoughts to the arguments of the original author.  These commentaries were kind of like ‘philosophy slams’ and the commentators themselves could receive accolades or financial rewards. Over time, the commentaries could dilute or alter the original meaning of the text (and for modern postural Yoga practitioners, arguably Vivekananda’s ‘Raja Yoga’ is the most important one here).

In his article ‘Patanjali’s Yogasutra: Historical Interpretations and Commentary in the Tradition of Rajanaka Tantra’, Douglas R. Brooks states that ‘The majority of subsequent writers in the yoga tradition view Patanjali’s yoga as a system worthy of consideration primarily in terms of its mistaken notions and somewhat outdated metaphysics’.

In fact, David Gordon White (2014) notes that Patanjali’s work fell so far out of favour that there weren’t any commentaries written at all after the 12th Century. It wasn’t until the Yoga Sutras was rediscovered by British Orientalists in the 1800s – and as somewhat of an oddity – that it was brought back into consideration and scholarship.

 

So, a work developed around 400CE was interesting for a time more for its mistakes than its strengths only to be ‘rediscovered’ by colonisers fetishizing rare texts.

 

 

3.     The body, individualism and modern postural Yoga

Ask people why they go to Yoga these days and you’re likely to get answers spanning a continuum from ‘to de-stress’ to ‘to tone my glutes’. What you’re unlikely to hear is ‘to gradually realize my freedom from the material world, death and rebirth’ and yet that’s what Patanjali’s Yoga is all about.

 

There are no Asana in the Yoga Sutra. Patanjali doesn’t care about your body, let alone your moral code. But could co-opting an ‘ancient teaching’ give us some solace regarding the privilege, consumerism and materialism that is so woven into Yoga as we know it in 2022?

 

In her compelling book ‘Strange Rites’ (PublicAffairs, 2020) Tara Isabella Burton writes scathingly AND accurately of the modern postural Yoga landscape. ‘Contemporary wellness culture implicitly collapses the distinction between the divine self and it’s purely corporeal counterpart… the world revolves around you.’

 

Yet, unlike Patanjali’s Samkhya teachings, she is not referring to the realization of our true nature. Rather, she goes on to say that wellness culture (of which modern postural Yoga is a key component) ‘combines moral relativism with a comforting veneer of metaphysical universalism: an inherently meaningful world where you can still, ethically, do whatever you want’.

 

Again, I’ll confidently opine that most Yoga students don’t go to Yoga classes to escape the body, they go to commit more fully to their inhabitation of it. And I’m not even singling out booty scrunching shorts and bikini Yoga selfies. While I’ve heard many times that postures are to prepare us for meditation (recall the 8 Limbs) is there anything in Surya Namaskar, let alone Titthibasana or a ‘hair balance’ that is going to prepare us for Samadhi?

 

Modern postural Yoga intentionally compounds body-centric individualism. MY SELFcare. MY mat defining MY physical space. Loving MY body. Me. Me. Separate. Separate.

 

To be clear, I’m not making a case for changing this. I’m a huge fan of modern postural Yoga. I’ve got the gear. I’ve got the outfits. The playlists. The memberships. I’m here for it.

 

It’s just that… Patanjali isn’t.

 

How Patanjali became the go-to text for Yoga Teacher Trainings is material for (at least) another blog. In this article I’m strongly suggesting that why it remains the go-to needs to be reconsidered.

 

It is so hard to understand, many trainers simply don’t. Instead, they focus on a small, non-representative sample of simplified teachings that may well have been taken from elsewhere.

 

It was a work that was unpopular with the author’s peers and only re-rose to prominence through some questionable political and cultural landscapes.

 

And finally, it is a work that posits a relentless pursuit of ultimate truth and, as a result, a denial of not only the body, but all material reality. How, in a LuLuLemon-clad, kombucha-sipping, Shakti-mat infused landscape could a book like that be at all relevant?

 

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