Yoga

All that one might say about him is that he was a great philosopher and grammarian. Some also believe him to have been a physician and attribute a certain medical work to him. But even if such a medical treatise did exist, it has been lost to us through the passage of time. Scholars tentatively put his time somewhere around three centuries before Christ and though the date of the Yoga Sutra's composition is also a controversial issue, place it within that broad time frame.

Patanjali's Yoga Sutra, which outlines the sovereign path of Raja Yoga, is composed of a total of 195 sutras or aphorisms. These sutras are structured around four padas or chapters:

• Samadhi Pada,
• Sadhana Pada,
• Vibhuti Pada and
• Kaivalya Pada.

Unlike Western theoretical texts, which are often self-explanatory, Indian classical texts are mostly composed in the form of extremely terse and self-contained aphorisms or sutras. Sutras literally mean 'threads'—the idea being that each individual blossoms of thought are bound together to form the eventual wreath of a complex philosophy. Such pithy aphorisms, by their very nature invite a host of commentaries and annotations for their appropriate comprehension by the average learner—and that has been the tradition of ancient Indian scholasticism.

In this case, the six basic commentaries on the Yoga Sutra are:

• Yoga Bhashya by Vyasa,
• Tattva-Vaisharadi by Vachaspati Mishra,
• Yoga-Varttika by Vijnana Bhikshu,
• Raja-Martanda by Bhojaraja,
• Bhasvati by Hariharananda Aranya and
• Patanjala-Rahasya by Raghavananda Saraswati.

Beside these, there exist a number of tikas or expositions on this exemplary text.