A READER’S REVIEW by Rebecca Weisman
THE YOGA SUTRAS OF PATANJALI
A NEW EDITION, TRANSLATION AND COMMENTARY:
WITH INSIGHTS FROM THE TRADITIONAL COMMENTATORS
BY EDWIN F. BRYANT
North Point Press, 2009

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   The first time I met Edwin Bryant was at a Yoga Teacher Training in 2006.  When I walked in the room he was seated cross-legged dressed in traditional swami gear, his dhoti wrapped neatly around his legs and the bag for his tulsi japa beads dangling from his wrist.  When he opened his mouth to speak to us aspiring yogis on the matter of Yoga Philosophy, a difficult assignment indeed, his level of comprehension on the subject was immediately evident.  His language was clear and concise with a willingness to go as deep as the student’s questions required.  His dedication to the subject was obvious as his eyes, set behind wiry spectacles, would light up and become animated at the slightest question.
    That first weekend he lectured to us for hours, revealing a stamina and tenacity that I’ve come to understand as his de facto mode of operation.  While he did not hide his personal practice as a bhakta, devoted to worshipping Krishna, he was easily able to discuss the finer subtleties of other traditions: jnana and raja yoga, Vaisista and Advaita Vedanta and all the major schools of Indian thought.  It became quite clear that Bryant was equally comfortable with acting the part of scholar, speaking to Western minds with varying degrees of cognitive dissonance with the material, as he was with infusing his own practice with devotion and worship.  He was equal parts academic and yogi, a balance of approaches that is difficult to maintain and even more difficult to communicate.
   It is not my intention to pit these two approaches, or frameworks of knowledge, against each other or to set up a false binary that in Western culture can sometimes prove to be divisive and unhelpful.  However, as both an aspiring yogi and a scholar I have experienced the difference between learning a subject from experiential practice versus textual or didactic approaches.  Indeed there are many ways to study.  I can study yoga through the act of meditating on the actions of the body in asana (as is taught by B.K.S. Iyengar) and I can also study texts, scriptures, and information passed down through history as a way of understanding (and critiquing) the traditions in which I participate.        Recently at a yoga event I had the pleasure of meeting a fellow yoga scholar.  It was a serendipitous meeting where I found myself enjoying deli sandwiches and splendid conversation with a woman writing her dissertation on yoga.  I had recently tried reading Elizabeth De Michelis’ A History of Modern Yoga but had difficulty with its dry, detached language.  Although self-admittedly a practitioner of yoga, De Michelis seemed to resist locating herself and her own experiential practice within her investigation, and thus seemed to miss something essential about the nature and tradition of yogic knowledge.  My new friend, (who also teaches a course on yoga history and uses De Michelis’ text in the course) urged me to try the text again, mainly because it is a solid sourcebook and unique in its academic approach and scope.  That being said, we both agreed that an experiential, phenomenological, and integrated approach to understanding yoga is essential.
    Bryant is an expert in this kind of interdisciplinary play and it is this elasticity that he brings to his current translation and commentary on The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali.  The Sutras, for those who have not had the pleasure of studying them, are an ancient collection of 195 statements on the practice of eight-limbed (astanga) yoga compiled by Patanjali, a sage, yogi, and grammarian, dated sometime around the second century B.C.  They form the basic foundational text for the whole Yoga school, one of the 6 heterodox schools of Indian Philosophy.  The Sutras are concise, sometimes to the point of incomprehension for a modern mind, and contemporary readers rely on the vast history of commentary that accompanies the sutras in order to understand them.  Without the commentaries (most notably by Vyasa, Vacaspati Misra, Sankara, Bhoja Raja, Vijnanabhiksu, Hariharanda, and others) modern readers would have an impossible time understanding the contextual and metaphysical basis of Yoga and the practical instructions that are laid out by Patanjali.
    While in this new translation Bryant also adds his own commentary I must underscore the extent to which he has gone in order to avoid sectarianism.  The history of commentary on scriptures within any tradition is ripe with texts spun to satisfy presuppositions about a given practice.  Here, Bryant has done the work of sifting through sectarianism to present the commentaries embedded within their religious and historical contexts while simultaneously pointing to where commentators have added different flavorings and leanings.  Bryant’s clear intention is to “attempt to bridge…two worlds of discourse” (lvix) to make the Sutras accessible to modern yoga practitioners and non-specialized audiences as well as scholars of Indian Philosophy.  If I can find anything that is essentially Bryantian about this commentary it is precisely this ability to act as a bridge and to allow knowledge to exist in multiple, parallel, and sometimes contradictory interpretations.
    There are several illuminating aspects of Bryant’s commentary that elucidate the practice of Patanjali’s yoga and are worth mentioning here.  As we learn from the second sutra Yoga is citta-vrtti-nirodha, the stilling of the changing states of the mind.  Once the mind is still, purusa, the ultimate self or soul can be reflected back to itself rather than be bound up with prakrti, the material world and all that is in it including the citta itself.  The ignorance that keeps the self identifying with citta and with prakrti is avidya, the first and foremost klesa, or cause of suffering.  The etymological root of the word yoga is yuj which is often translated as “yoke” or “union”; the idea being that through Yoga the self is united with the absolute, Brahman, God.  Bryant points out in his discussion of the first sutra that the other meaning of this root is to “contemplate” and this is a more accurate etymology in the context of the Sutras because “the goal of yoga is not to join, but the opposite: to unjoin, that is, to disconnect purusa from prakrti” (5).  It is this disconnect, this un-entangling of purusa from all that it is bound up in, that is the real goal presented here by Patanjali.  Avidya then is not ignorance of some higher reality or something outside of our selves but the inherent confusion of our own self identifying with citta or prakrti. 
   While this nuance may be subtle it is a bone that Bryant continues to pick in this work, understandably given the profusion of diverse terminology within modern Western yoga practices.  In particular his reading sets Patanjali’s Yoga as something quite distinct from the traditions of the Upanishads and the Vedanta school that is more concerned with Brahman, ultimate reality.  This distinction is of particular importance considering the resurgence and recent popularity of neo-Advaita Vedanta in which the self is seen as part of ultimate reality, which in and of itself has no personal expression.  Any language then of “merging into” or “becoming one with” some kind of ultimate reality must be circumspect within the context of Patanjali’s Yoga.  Rather, it is this goal of disconnecting and redirecting purusa away from prakrti that is the real focus for Patanjali.
   This is not to say that yoga is non-theistic, another point that Bryant makes clear.  While modern western yoga asana practices may be all but stripped of talk of God or devotional worship, Patanjali makes it quite clear in II.45.  Here he lists isvara pranidhana, devotion to God, as the final niyama or ethical guideline necessary for practicing yoga and for attaining samadhi.  Bryant points out in his discussion of this sutra and throughout his commentary that although the text does not dwell extensively on this aspect of Yoga it is not due to its unimportance but rather to the very focused intention of Patanjali’s project.  Within the religious-philosophical milieu of the time bhakti practices abounded and those looking for further guidance in this area would have certainly found it elsewhere.  So, while it is understandable that a modern reader might disregard isvara pranidhana as being less vital to the practice, the context and commentary make it clear that it is indeed integral.
   Also of note is Bryant’s treatment of the usually elusive parts of the Sutras, namely the sections in the first pada on samadhi and in the third pada on the siddhis. Both of these sections can be confusing due to a lack of understanding of Sankhya metaphysics, a vast topic that Bryant covers well.  If at times overwhelming, his discussion of these subtleties serves only to help the reader get a better handle on the complex levels of samadhi.  It is sometimes frustrating for me as an earnest student that any discussion of samadhi will inevitably fall short; it is impossible to put into words that which is beyond reason, language, and cognition.  Yet the logic behind what might otherwise seem like an unnecessary schema of samadhis (there are seven levels altogether) makes much more sense given the progression of the mind and its meditative abilities based upon Sankhyan metaphysics.  This is even more true of Bryant’s discussion of the siddhis, or special powers, that can be attained by yogis after much practice.  Rather than trying to persuade or prove, Bryant instead takes us step by step through his explanation of the yogic understanding of the constraints of nature and the mind, and its correlation to the yogi’s ability to learn to push, pull and move beyond the constraints, helping to demystify and make accessible an otherwise unbelievable or confusing section of the Sutras.
   To say something more of Bryant’s approach, his treatment of the whole text is quite thorough, exhaustive maybe for a non-specialized reader, and indeed repetitive.  However, I have come to view this last attribute as being entirely intentional and necessary.  The commentators have interpreted the Sutras almost quantitatively proportional to their importance within Patanjali’s mapping ; in other words, more important sutras get more air time.  So, what could be construed as repetition in Bryant’s writing is in fact a continuation of this tradition.  He thus makes quite clear and unavoidable the foundational aspects of his treatment, and in the end the reader will appreciate this clarity.  I would also suggest to readers to read the entire commentary sequentially—while the Sutras themselves can be used as reference, the commentary builds on itself in a well-constructed and helpful way.
     Despite Bryant’s thoroughness, I have one major critique of the text (one that I hope finds its way to Bryant’s desk by the time the next edition is issued) and that is the lack of a comprehensive index.  While Bryant has given us an index of terms found in the Sutras themselves, there is nothing that helps the reader to reference his own commentary.  This is especially regretful considering the contributions Bryant has made to not just the commentary on the Sutras but to the whole history of yoga and its relationship to other schools of Indian thought (the Introduction itself is a gem for those looking for a concise history of yoga). Given the scale of the text it is difficult for readers without substantial previous knowledge of the location of particular sutras and their commentary to use the text for reference as it is currently published.  
   Finally, as a yoga practitioner it is important for me to be able to understand the Sutras in light of the asana-focused practice found in the West, rather than discarding modern practices in favor of some kind of original yoga that may or may not actually exist in its intended form.  For this reason I particularly appreciate Bryant’s commentary on sutras I.39:  Or [steadiness of the mind is attained] from meditation upon anything of one’s inclination.  Can we perhaps understand asana to be a doorway into the practice of meditation, an alambana or support for the mind to enter into samadhi?  Within the tradition of yoga developed by B.K.S. Iyengar the body is certainly seen as an object for meditation, and the practitioner learns to become more and more refined in sensing the discreet actions and movements within the body down to the cellular level.  This kind of observation or meditation, it could be said, is eventually applied to the fluctuations of the citta itself and creates mastery over the constraints of nature and the mind.  Indeed, Bryant is willing to concede this point in his discussion on I.39:
   Approaching asana in this way—as a bona fide support for fixing the mind (and one for which many people in the West might be best suited)—is thus fully defensible within Patanjali’s system, provided it is performed with this intent rather than some other superficial motive.

   It is exciting to consider that contributions can still be made to a tradition that is thousands of years old, a fact that Bryant himself must surely be confident about to attempt to tackle such a weighty text.  His efforts will ensure that readers can continue to learn and benefit from the practice of Yoga.