The Essential Yoga Sutra Read online

  by the same authors

  The Diamond Cutter: The Buddha on Strategies for Managing Your Business and Your Life*

  The Tibetan Book of Yoga*

  The Garden: A Parable*

  How Yoga Works

  The 18 Books of the Foundation Series

  Asian Classics Institute

  The 10 Meditation Modules

  Asian Classics Institute

  *published by Doubleday

  Dedicated to the memory of Samuel D. Atkins (1911 –2002)

  Professor of Sanskrit;

  Chairman, Department of Classics,

  Princeton University;

  and a good man

  Foreword

  1. Yogi, Dancer, Thinker, Doctor

  First Cornerstone:

  The Chapter on Meditation

  2. It Begins with Meditation

  3. The Power of Humility

  4. To Become Whole

  5. The Seer

  6. A Day in the Mind

  7. Right Seeing

  8. A Leaf in the Road

  9. Pictures in the Mind

  10. Approaching the Door

  11. The Power of Daily Practice

  12. Attachment to Distraction

  13. Attachment to Illusion

  14. Meditation Traps

  15. Bombs that Never Explode

  16. The Five Powers

  17. The Four Stages

  18. The Master

  19. Serving

  20. The Highest of Prayers

  21. Beginning Obstacles

  22. Ultimate Obstacles

  23. Inner and Outer

  24. The Four Infinite Thoughts

  25. Bright and Clear

  26. Freedom from Selfishness

  27. The Deeper Powers

  28. Path of the Diamond

  29. Remember What You Saw

  30. Approaching the Goal

  31. Beyond All Fear

  32. The End of the Seeds

  Second Cornerstone:

  The Chapter on the

  33. Reaching to Reach

  34. The True Enemy

  35. The Four Mistakes

  36. The Beginning of Me

  37. Is It Wrong to Like Things?

  38. Fixing the World

  39. Where the World Comes From

  40. Where Pain Comes From

  41. Why Things Fall Apart

  42. Why Good People Suffer

  43. Everything We See

  44. The Two Realities

  45. The Loneliness of Seeing

  46. Who's in Control?

  47. To See the Illusion

  48. The Eight Limbs

  49. Self-Control

  50. A Code for All of Us

  51. Commitments

  52. Destroying Old Bad Karma

  53. The Four Forces

  54. In Your Presence

  55. Where Money Comes From

  56. How to Succeed in Relationships

  57. Simply Clean

  58. How to Be Happy

  59. Finding Your Guardian Angel

  60. Body Yoga

  61. The Lie of Choices

  62. The End of Breath

  63. How to Breathe

  64. Breathing to a Single Point

  65. Ending the Tyranny of Stimulation

  Third Cornerstone:

  The Chapter on Practice

  66. Focus and Stay

  67. The Clear Light

  68. The Eye of Wisdom

  69. The End of Thoughts?

  70. How Things Begin and End

  71. How Things Neither Begin Nor End

  72. The Power to Save the World

  73. Reading the Minds of Others

  74. The Power of Invisibility

  75. Where It All Leads

  76. The True Source of Power

  77. The Channel of the Sun

  78. The Channel of the Moon

  79. The Channel of the Polestar

  80. Chokepoints and Chakras

  81. Everything from Understanding

  82. Know Thyself

  83. When Two Is One

  84. The Rainbow in a Prison

  85. The Five Primary Winds

  86. The Three Skies

  87. The Four Bodies

  88. The Last One Left

  89. The Body of All-Knowing

  90. Herein Lies Total Purity

  91. Respecting Our Destiny

  92. The Final Moments

  93. All Things in All Ways

  Fourth Cornerstone:

  The Chapter on Total Purity

  94. We Must Become as Gardeners

  95. The Destruction of the Storehouse

  96. Gaining Control of Our Lives

  97. The End of Limits

  98. Dropping the Borders of Time

  99. Beyond but Not Beyond the Mind

  100. How We Hear Ourselves Think

  101. Knives Don't Cut Themselves

  102. The Apparent Self-Awareness

  103. How We Project the World

  104. Learning from Seeing

  105. The End of Seeds

  106. Debts Never Paid

  107. Stepping over a Puddle

  108. And So We Must See

  We encourage readers to study the “Index of Important Ideas” at the end of this book, so that you know immediately where to look for help on any personal needs or interests you may have.

  To help those who might want to chant the Yoga Sutra in its original language, we have included the Sanskrit here in the closest English pronunciation possible without special marks or spellings not found in normal English. Please note that the combination a-a should be read as one long ah sound. Divisions like this are made wherever two words are joined, but only if it would not change the pronunciation or meter in chanting.

  The authors would like to acknowledge the kind assistance of the Asian Classics Input Project and its director, John Brady, for access to its database of several thousand ancient Asian manuscripts for completing this translation of the Yoga Sutra.

  We would also like to thank Dr. M. A. Jayashree and Dr. M. A. Narasimhan, of the University of Mysore and University of Bangalore, India, for sharing with us their research on alternate readings from early handwritten and palm-leaf manuscripts of the Yoga Sutra. Ven. Brian K. Smith, PhD, a professor who teaches these materials at the University of California, Riverside; Loyola Marymount University; and Diamond Mountain University, carefully collated for us the variations of the Sanskrit text.

  Finally, we would like to express infinite thanks to our many teachers from India, Tibet, and the West, who have spent thousands of hours patiently passing these teachings on to us.

  A sutra is a short book that tells us the very crux of something— ideas tied tight together, with a stitch of thread. The Yoga Sutra is the mother book of all yoga. It was written about two thousand years ago by Master Patanjali.

  Master Patanjali was a great yogi; he knew the physical poses of yoga and the art of breathing: yoga of the body. He was also a great thinker and meditator—a master of the yoga of the mind. He wrote as well famous books on medicine and on Sanskrit, the ancient tongue from which almost all our languages come. He is recognized too as the father of the classical dance of India.

  Dancer, doctor, yogi, thinker, master of ancient words. What do they all have in common?

  Yoga, as we shall see, has many meanings. One is the union of the winds within our inner body. We unite these winds with our yoga, when we think and understand. The winds will sing within us, the very first words of all. They will flow free, and force us to dance, and to run to heal others.

  The Yoga Sutra has four chapters: four cornerstones upon which it stands, lik
e a table on four legs.

  The first chapter describes five crucial steps that we all pass through during our spiritual journey. This journey always begins from pain: we see death, we see people suffer, we dream of saving them. And the journey ends when we change, finally, into a sacred being who actually has the power to save them.

  In between its beginning and its end, the road we travel has five parts: five paths, each one leading into the next, each one marked by its own special milestones. Stepping up to each new path from the one before it can only be done in one way. We must be in deep meditation; we must learn to meditate.

  Thus it is that the first chapter, the chapter on the five paths, is called the Chapter on Meditation.

  Another meaning of yoga is to become whole. Ultimately we only become whole when we are truly capable of helping others with the things that really matter: when we can help them understand how they came into this world, and what life is for, and whether it has to end with losing everything.

  This then, says Master Patanjali, is why I write my short book. He wants us to know, from the very beginning, that his book contains something of ultimate importance, something worth the precious hours of our life.

  And I will only review, says the Master, what I have heard from my holy teachers. He attacks his own pride: I have nothing new to tell you, and there is nothing here that I have made up myself. I am only a vessel for the wisdom of the ages, and I pass it on to you—tried, tested, and unadulterated.

  And he says “I will” write this book, for once a Master promises to do something, he does it—or dies trying.

  All the great books of India begin with these three noble themes. Their power, their karma, stops all obstacles to the work we now begin.

  These are perhaps the most important words of the entire Yoga Sutra. Here the Master tells us another meaning of yoga, which is learning to stop the Great Mistake.

  And what is the Great Mistake? Our mind turns; meaning it turns things around the wrong way. A mother takes her small child to a movie. On the screen, a man is hurting a puppy.

  The child cries out, and reaches to stop the man. Perhaps the child can even get up to the screen, and try to hit the man.

  But this doesn't stop the man; it has nothing to do with the man. And the child hurts her own hand in the process.

  Our mind makes this same kind of mistake, every day, every moment of every day. We need to stop the mistake, and that is yoga. Pain is real—yes—and it really hurts people. But we can only stop it if we can stop misunderstanding where it comes from. And this is what the Yoga Sutra teaches us to do.

  The most important day in our spiritual journey is the day that we first stop the Great Mistake. We stop seeing things the wrong way. The child realizes that the bad man is not really on the movie screen.

  It only lasts for a brief time, the first time. And then, despite ourselves, we go back to making the same old mental mistake. But for a few minutes, we see the way we really are: we see that we are not at all the way we always thought we were.

  These precious minutes, our first contact with the ultimate reality, are thus called the Path of Seeing. Not because we see these things with our eyes, but because we see them in very deep meditation, with our mind.

  Until the day we see, our life continues to follow after the tragic mistake our mind is making, turning things around the wrong way. Until the child sees how things really are, she strikes out at the bad man on the screen, hurting herself and her mother too.

  In a general sense, the mind turns or operates in many different ways: the ancient books of India list hundreds of different mental functions. Here though the Master chooses to deal with only five states of mind because, in a typical twenty-four-hour day, our mind will always be in one of these five states.

  That is, we are usually seeing most things correctly, throughout the day. (It's true that I may misunderstand how I am, but not that I am.) Occasionally though we do make mistakes about what we see, and we bang the car.

  We use our imagination to plan or to daydream, and we spend a good part of each day in sleep. We constantly call on our memories.

  Our states of mind are sometimes stained by negative thoughts, thoughts that afflict us and make us unhappy. The ultimate negative thought is that same Great Mistake.

  The goal of our yoga is not to stop all thoughts—that would be like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. We simply want to stop the mistake, and all the unhappiness it causes. We want to make our minds ultimately clear, and happy, and loving.

  The vast majority of all that we see we see correctly. Even in the first few minutes out of bed in the morning, we have already had hundreds of correct perceptions: the sun is shining, these are my socks, breakfast smells good.

  Correct perceptions are strong. Once we see something with a correct perception, we can truly say that thing exists.

  These correct perceptions come in three types. Most of them are the direct type. I see a color, I hear a sound, I smell or taste or touch something. Hearing our thoughts in our own minds is also a direct type of correct perception.

  Deduction is another kind of correct perception: I may not be able to see my socks on the floor in the morning, if they're covered by my pants. But if I dropped them there last night and I've had no visitors in the meantime, I know the socks are there, as surely as if I see them.

  The last kind of correct perception is based on authority: I'm in my bedroom and can't see the kitchen, but Mother tells me there's still some breakfast left. And I know it's there, because she's a truthful person.

  In between hundreds or thousands of correct perceptions, we might miss-see something completely. I'm driving down the road at dusk on a windy autumn day, and a small mouse scurries across the road under my tires. I slam on the brakes with a screech.

  Then I realize that the “mouse” was only the false appearance of a mouse: it was really only a dry leaf blown across the road. And then there's this momentary sense of emptiness—the mouse is gone, it was never there—followed by a slightly foolish feeling as I continue down the road.

  Now it's absolutely essential to realize that, on one level, even our correct perceptions are all incorrect. That is, the socks in my hand are socks—that's correct. But deep in my heart is this belief that they are socks that are in my hand because I own them, because I found them at the store, and because I bought them.

  All of these ideas about my socks are completely incorrect. There are no socks like that—no more than the man in the movie. It's all the Great Mistake, a mistaken perception that causes all the pain in the world.

  When we plan a dinner, we see in our minds the finished meal, although that meal doesn't yet correspond to any concrete thing. The words “What's for dinner?” inspire this picture in our imagination.

  Most of our perceptions during the day are triggered by some outside object: seeing an apple is set off by the apple—in a sense the seeing depends, or hinges upon, the apple. When we sleep or dream there may not be any such outer object, but still the mind is turning, or operating, at a low level.

  When we have a memory of something, again there is no outer object: just an approximate picture in the mind, sort of a shorthand note to remind us of something.

  And so in the course of an entire day, our mind wends its way through different outside objects and inside images or thoughts. But unless we truly understand things—unless we understand what yoga really means—then every single perception and imagination we ever have is infected by the Great Mistake. Feelings, strong feelings, come up about the things we think we see—and the child beats her fist against the bad man on the screen.

  The way to stop the Great Mistake is to work our way through all five of the paths. We reach the first path by giving up our attachments, and this requires developing the habit of constant practice.

  In a general sense, “constant practice” here means the willingness to work very hard to reach our perfect destiny, far beyond the mistakes our mind now m
akes. Quite simply, we will never be able to complete all the hard work needed to reach our destiny if we don't have a very strong motivation for doing so.

  This motivation comes to all of us at some point in our lives. Most often it is some kind of personal disaster or tragedy: the person we most love dies or leaves us, we find out we have cancer—anything that wakes us up to what really matters. People are in pain, and it's up to us to help them. It is our destiny to be the one who helps them.

  We begin with a daily inner practice. It will always include three essential elements: being careful never to hurt others; learning to pray or meditate; and relentlessly exploring the question of where things really came from.

  Changing the mind, the heart, is infinitely more difficult than anything else we do—more demanding than education or work or raising a family. It takes time, and we need to give it that time, for as long as it takes.

  And the time must be given daily: our spiritual practice must become a regular part of our day, as important as eating or working or sleeping. Our minds are infinitely powerful. We can learn to be good at anything, if only we give it an hour or two of practice a day. But every day.

  We all know that there are right ways of fixing a car and wrong ways too. If you try to fix your car but you don't know what you are doing, you can really make expensive mistakes.

  Fixing heart and mind are no different. We need to know what we're doing—we need good, clear instructions on what to do, from someone who's already done it.

  Learning how to maintain a really effective daily practice creates a perfect foundation for entering the first of the five paths.

  It is our destiny, each one of us, to save the world. Yes, we can, and we will. Deep inside of us we know this is what we want to do, and why we came to this world in the first place. On some level we dream of this all the time; it is why almost all the novels and movies created by our culture have a heroine or hero who saves the day. Because we ourselves want to. We need to.

  And so we step onto the first of the five paths. It's called the Path of Accumulation—piling up enough goodness, enough power, to change ourselves and our world. We take this step by deciding that we can no longer bear the pain all around us.