The authorship of the Yoga Sutra and its oldest commentary

The SOAS Centre of Yoga Studies is delighted to welcome our distinguished colleague, PD Dr Philipp André Maas (University of Leipzig) to present, 'The authorship of the Yoga Sutra and its oldest commentary'.

With more than 40 translations into modern languages, the Yoga Sutra is likely the best-known Sanskrit text in the modern world. In any case, Patañjali’s work is the most famous yoga text of all time; it has been studied and interpreted in South Asia since it was composed around 400 CE – long before it gained recognition as the foundational text of yoga in the modern world, alongside the global spread of postural yoga, about which the Yoga Sutra has astonishingly little to say. In less than 200 brief phrases, the Yoga Sutra sketches a complex philosophical system that teaches how human suffering in the cycle of rebirth can end through a meditation-derived insight into the universe’s metaphysical structure. 

As is to be expected in a work of the sutra genre, the meaning of individual phrases often remains obscure because of their brevity and abundant semantic ambiguity. To understand the text in detail, ancient commentators (and modern scholars) need to consider the oldest commentary on the Yoga Sutra, the so-called Yoga Bhāṣya, whose authorship is frequently ascribed to the mythical person Vyāsa or Vedavyāsa, whereas the Jaina philosopher Vādirāja attributed the sutras to Patañjali and the ancient commentary to the early Sāṅkhya philosopher Vindhyavāsin. However, some relatively early sources attribute both the Yoga Sutra and the commentary to Patañjali.

This external evidence, combined with additional text-immanent evidence, supports the hypothesis, first expressed by the late Johannes Bronkhorst in 1985, that the so-called Vyāsabhāṣya may, in fact, be an autocommentary, composed by an author-redactor who may have collected older textual materials from various, no longer extant sources to compose the Pātañjalayogaśāstra as an authoritative exposition of Sāṅkhya-Yoga. If so, the bhāṣya part of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra would provide the best available evidence for how the Yoga Sutra was meant to be understood in its original intellectual milieu. 

Pradeep Gokhale recently criticised the single-authorship hypothesis on the basis of doctrinal discrepancies between the sutras and their explanations. He argues that single authorship could only be accepted if there is a uniformity of thought between the sutras and the commentary, and then discusses several cases where the commentary deviates from what the sutra says or implies. This presentation, after briefly presenting the above-mentioned evidence for a single author-cum-redactorship of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra, will critically review Gokhale’s basic assumptions and reexamine alleged doctrinal incompatibilities between sutras and their commentary.