PATANJALI'S YOGA SUTRA

Shyam Ranganathan

Description

A contemporary interpretation of the foundational text for the practice of yoga. Pata jali s Yoga Sutra (second century CE) is the basic text of one of the nine canonical schools of Indian philosophy. In it the legendary author lays down the blueprint for success in yoga; now practised the world over. Pata jali draws upon many ideas of his time; and the result is a unique work of Indian moral philosophy that has been the foundational text for the practice of yoga since. The Yoga Sutra sets out a sophisticated theory of moral psychology and perhaps the oldest theory of psychoanalysis. For Pata jali; present mental maladies are a function of subconscious tendencies formed in reaction to past experiences. He argues that people are not powerless against such forces and that they can radically alter their lives through yoga a process of moral transformation and perfection; which brings the body and mind of a person in line with their true nature. Accompanying this illuminating translation is an extended introduction that explains the challenges of accurately translating Indian philosophical texts; locates the historical antecedents of Pata jali s text and situates Patanjali s philosophy within the history of scholastic Indian philosophy.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie

Informations

• Publié par: Penguin Books Ltd
• Date de parution: 30 mai 2008
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9788184750096
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

SHYAM RANGANATHAN
Pata jali s Yoga S tra
Translated from the Sanskrit with an introduction and commentary by

PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
About the Author
Dedication
I NTRODUCTION
Part I: Why a New Translation?
1. Common problems with translations of Indian Philosophy: Failure to recognize the invariant, moral significance of dharma
2. Problems with translations of Pata jali s Yoga S tra
3. A new translation
4. Translation theory and translating a s tra
5. Overview
Part II: Historical Roots of the Yoga S tra
1. Pata jali s non-Yoga historical sources: S khya, Vedas, Jainism and Buddhism
Part III: Further Comparison of S khya, Yoga and Jainism
1. S khya and Yoga: Similarities
2. S khya vs Yoga: Differences
3. Jainism: How far does the overlap extend?
Part IV: The Originality of Pata jail
PATA JALI S YOGA S TRA
Book I ( Sam dhi-p da )
Book II ( S dhana-p da )
Book III ( Vibh ti-p da )
Book IV ( Kaivalya-p da )
Glossary
Acknowledgements
Footnotes
Book II: (S dhana-p da)
Book III: (Vibh ti-p da)
Book IV: (Kaivalya-p da)
Copyright Page
PATA JALI S YOGA S TRA
Shyam Ranganathan has an MA in South Asian Studies and an MA in philosophy from the University of Toronto, and wrote a PhD dissertation at York University in analytic philosophy on the topic of translating philosophical texts across languages. His areas of research include Indian philosophy, theoretical ethics and the philosophy of language. He is the author of Ethics and the History of Indian Philosophy .
For Andrea
Introduction
P ART I: W HY A NEW TRANSLATION?
The Yoga S tra is one of the major, classical works of Indian philosophy codified sometime around the second or third century CE . Little is known about its author, Pata jali, or even if there is an author by that name. We can only assume that there was indeed a sage-philosopher named Pata jali who authored the text attributed to him. The Yoga S tra is certainly not the first text in the history of Indian philosophy to speak of yoga. 1 The idea of yoga can be found in texts as early as the Vedas; and meditation, an integral part of yoga, was practised by the Buddha and the Fordmakers of the Jain tradition. The Bhagavad G t too displays a great interest in the topic of yoga, as do many less popular works from the history of Indian thought. But the Yoga S tra stands out among all such texts in being explicitly about the topic of yoga and in attempting to provide a formal, systematic and philosophical elaboration of the practice. It was to become the classic work on yoga in the Indian philosophical tradition, inspiring later philosophers from contrary schools, such as Jainism and Advaita Ved nta, to incorporate many of the features of yoga as Pata jali conceived it.
Of the classical texts of formal Indian philosophy, it is no doubt the most commonly translated and widely read in the English-speaking world. The recent, global popularity of yoga, as a practice of posture flows (misleadingly called sana , and sometimes also hatha yoga ), is to be credited with the ubiquitous interest in the text. While the concept of YOGA is important to the Indian philosophical tradition on the whole, and shows up in formal philosophies of many of India s traditions, the Yoga S tra is the most definitive account of yoga. In light of the importance and popularity of the Yoga S tra , and the wealth of translations of this text, one is compelled to ask the question: Is another translation really necessary?
I came to believe in the necessity of a new translation when I first started teaching the Yoga S tra to students in short workshops. I was faced with the challenge of finding a translation that I could make do with, and I could find none. In my research in South Asian Studies and philosophy, I had found that historians of Indian thought had systematically failed to properly translate the moral philosophical content of Indian philosophy into contemporary languages. I was deep into my doctoral research in philosophy, working on a dissertation on the problem of translating value talk and philosophy across languages and cultures. Given this background, and the convictions that I had arrived at through my research, I found that the available translations of the Yoga S tra suffered from two drawbacks. One problem is common to most translations of Indian philosophy into western languages. The second problem is more particular to translations of the Yoga S tra . The common problem with translations of Indian philosophy is that they fail to retain the moral philosophical significance of the Indian philosophical tradition. The problem with translations of the Yoga S tra in particular is that they often read into the writing of Pata jali contrary systems of philosophy from the history of Indian thought, thus blurring the distinction between Yoga and other schools.
1. Common problems with translations of Indian philosophy: Failure to recognize the invariant moral significance of dharma
One of the most serious problems affecting contemporary scholarship on Indian philosophy is the marginalization of the ethical or moral content of Indian philosophy. At a political level, it would be a mistake to ignore the fact that the contemporary study of Indian philosophy in the context of the modern academy began and was fostered in the west during a period of western colonial domination of India. The marginalization of the moral philosophical content of Indian philosophy has thus always been in the interest of western domination, whether in the explicitly political context of colonialism, or in the more pervasive influence of western cultural imperialism. If it could be authoritatively concluded that Indian intellectuals and philosophers had no clear ideas on ethics, western intervention could be justified as filling an ostensible moral void in South Asia s intellectual and practical life. While such political interests have exercised some influence in the course of scholarship in Indology, to rest content with such a political explanation of the marginalization of ethical content from accounts of Indian philosophy would be both lazy and ineffectual. The problem with such a colonial discourse analysis is not that it imputes to western and eastern scholars nefarious intentions. Such an explanation says nothing about what the personal motivations are of scholars who argue that ethics is poorly represented in Indian thought. It merely argues that there would be political and monetary support for such a marginalization of ethics in accounts of Indian philosophy, within the context of western political domination of South Asia, and correlatively that contrary views would not receive the same type of wider institutional backing for political reasons. Such an analysis does not actually tell us why this view-that ethics is poorly represented in the history of Indian philosophy-is historically wrong. It may give us reasons to suspect, from a moral and political perspective, those who would argue such a thesis, but does nothing to explain to us that the contrary view is historically accurate. Thus, while we cannot ignore the political convenience of the view that ethics is poorly represented in Indian philosophy for the west, we cannot for a moment pretend that recognizing this fact corrects the opinion that Indian philosophers did not contribute significantly to moral philosophy.
One promising inroad to the problem of the marginalization of ethical content from accounts of Indian philosophy is the recognition that scholars who have studied and translated Indian philosophy have typically exemplified a myopia in their learning that is a simple function of specialization. Scholars who study and translate works of Indian philosophy are usually Indologists, who are trained expertly in classical Indian languages, the rigours of philological research and Indian history studied on the basis of the sciences of linguistics and archaeology. Or such scholars are experts on religion. Such expertise, while invaluable to scholarship in general, is insufficient for the challenges of translating and reporting on philosophy of the Indian tradition.
If one wishes to compare the history of western philosophy with that of Indian philosophy, one must have the relevant expertise in both fields. But training in Indology at best gives one expertise in the history of Indian philosophy. Thus, comments that scholars of Indian thought are apt to make about the comparative worth of the Indian philosophical tradition are likely to be wrong not because the scholars have failed to properly study the Indian tradition, but because they get the western tradition wrong. This is no small problem. It is superficially borne out in facile comparisons between the western and Indian traditions that tend to paint over diversity within these respective traditions and rely upon stereotypes of what western philosophical thought is like, which no serious scholar of the history of western philosophy could agree with. But the problem is even more profound. I shall put the problem rather simplistically in the following manner. If one wishes to translate or explain a certain term, from Sanskrit into English, one needs to understand not only the meaning of the Sanskrit term, but also the meaning of possible correlates in English. And if the terminology is philosophical, in order to translate Indian philosophy into English one must have a grasp of the meaning of philosophical terms in English. With respect to moral terminology and concepts, there is an entire field of contemporary western, analytic philosophy dedicated to this topic, called metaethics . Few philosophers, trained in contemporary analytic philosophy, are even conversant with this literature. Scholars of Indian thought, whose primary training is in Indology, remain unaware of the issues discussed in this specialist area and its absolute relevance to the study of Indian philosophy. T