The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali: A Biography

Livre très érudit, qui contient quelques perles sur Krishnarcharia notamment, sur Vivekananda tout autant et nous confronte à ce que veut dire la transmission d’un texte “pur” à travers les siècles…

Titled either as we know them, or as a part of a larger work called the Yoga Shastra, the 195 aphorisms are compiled in “Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit” from as many as six sources within a several century range straddling the Common Era by an editor who may or may not be a commentator on Panini’s grammar or the serpent-boy lauded in the Shiva temple of Chidambram. Whether he was a scholar or a god impacts the reception of the Sutras as smriti or sruti (written or “heard”), which in turn would shed light on whether they were ever chanted or not.

The text has often been thought to utilize the “older” vocabulary of Samkhya metaphysics, but it’s becoming clearer that the two systems are chicken-and-egged, with the further complication that the sutra’s first commentator, Vyasa – who may have been

a) Patanjali himself,

b) a contemporary of the composition or

c) could have written several centuries later to subvert the supposedly “more original” Buddhist message of the text– unduly emphasized Samkhya terms such as “prakriti” and “purusha”, perhaps to the neglect of the more repeated Buddhist terms like “shunya”. Of course, “Vyasa” is a recurrent nom de plume throughout Indian literature, so there’s also that.