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The Yoga-Sutra of Pata?jali: A New Translation and Commentary

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I am presently studying Pantanjali's Yoga Sutras with about sixteen other students. The fact that Patanjali's sutras are, by there very nature, brief to the extreme (sometimes only sentence fragments) presents a real challenge and a dilemma for the student. What is the real meaning of these sutras as intended by Patanjali and how is this meaning to be understood in the larger context of yoga philosophy and practice? One has only to see the large number of translations available in the market, all differing on key points of philosophy and understanding, to experience this dilemma. In Georg Feurstein's book "The Yoga-Sutra of Patanjali" I found the translation and commentary to be straight to the point and very useful. In his book,, Feurstein first examines and exposes the philosophical ground of Yoga philosophy thus helping the student to build a basis on which to understand Patanjali's sutras. Then Feurstein, prior to beginning the translation of the sutras, presents an overview of the topics discussed by Patanjali. And then, in translating and commenting on the sutras, Feurstein first presents the sutra in transliterated Roman script and then gives a word by word translation along with the Sanskrit breakdown and derivation, if important. He then translates the sutra and offers a detailed commentary. At the end of the book he offers two appendices which I found quite useful; "Continuous translation" of the sutras; and Word Index of the Yoga-Sutra. Feursteins understanding of the "language of yoga" is apparent. With confidence, Feurstein easily guides us through bumpy and difficult terrain which are the Yoga Sutras. His translations of the sutras were perceptive and understandable and his commentary was illumined. I continue to find this book to be very helpful in my yoga studies and I highly recommend it to anyone who is interesting in understanding Patanjali's Yoga Sutras.

Georg Feuerstein is one of the great scholar/practitioners of our generation, and he has done tremendous service in the transmission of authentic yoga from India to the West. In the "Yoga Sutra of Patanjali" He shines the sun of his intellect and the moon of his devotion on one of the principle yogic texts. This light has produced an important book which I highly recommend. It is obvious that Feuerstein has studied Patanjali's work extensively, and he shares the results of his labors in a lucid, approachable manner. He reviews the history of the Yoga Sutra and the significant commentaries that have shaped the structure of Classical Yoga. Feuerstein's translation is penetrating and rings with the honesty of a scholar, while his commentary is infused with the insight of a yogi who has struggled with the labors of spiritual growth. I think anyone wishing to deepen his or her knowledge of the yogic tradition will enjoy this book.

I have looked at atleast 8 translations of Patanjali. Dr. Feurstein's is among the best. Particularly appealing is his defining Sanskrit roots, however, I wish he would have had the text in Sanskrit as well as transliteration. At times he gets overly pedantic and I believe misses the meaning of the sutra. It is the problem with all the available translations. Some of his translations don't make sense. Once again a common problem. At times he comes forth with very astute observations. It is not easy to get to Kaivalya from here.

Criticizing other's interpretations of the sutra is not the way to expound your own understanding (or lack of it) of this classic yoga text. Yoga is a practical science, not an academic exposition of your point of view. If you want to gain a working, practical understanding of the sutra to deepen your own personal practice, try a translation by one of the Indian interpreters such as I.K. Taimni.

what's so opaque about the aphorisms that writers start to pre-interpret them for you, invariably tinted with their own precepts and ideas? It's a little like somebody chewing your food for you. The aphorisms are not that opaque and its an enjoyable and useful excercise to read them in their simple, bare and clear form, until the understanding comes - your own realizations rather then someone elses. You could read a book like this over the weekend, but I'm not sure it's supposed to be read like that. It seems better you should do the mental work yourself, aphorism by aphorism. There is an effect to this, which could be lost if it's all been solved and explained for you. Therefore I prefer authors that appeared to be going to great lengths to avoid adding too much of their own coloring, like William Q. Judge's interpretation from 1914. That is regrettably only available from Kessinger in bound photocopy format. I wish somebody would make a decent new print of it.

Anyways, Patanjali's aphorisms are worth the time in any form and I shall thank any author who spent his time to bring them to more of us, different introductions will appeal to different people.

I had to reorder this book because I wore out my copy. Which, come to think of it, is a mark against the binding. It is glued. But to be fair I really used it a lot.
Feuerstein is a Sanskrit scholar and shows how he interprets each word or phrase into modern usage. He is a spiritual traveler himself and knows what is helpful. His emphasis is on how we can understand ourselves better.
The book is concise but he also gives an excellent overview of the philosophy and history of Raja Yoga.
This book is made especially for ease of use on a very difficult intellectual topic. Patanjali can be confusing and too brief in the sense that he only touches on extremely important topics. For the first time reader F. has made much more of Patanjali's work accessible in this fine book.

This is one of Feuerstein's earliest works, written in the late seventies when he was around thirty years old. It is a young scholar's book, marked by impatience with the scholarly establishment's misconceptions and errors, and filled with enthusiasm for setting the old guys aright. It is vigorously pedantic and refreshingly candid.

Inspired by the great Romanian scholar Mircea Eliade, who, in his monumental Yoga: Immortality and Freedom (1958) (see my review at Amazon), set the standard for all scholarly works on yoga, Feuerstein translates the most important Sanskrit word in Patanjali's scheme, "samadhi" as "enstasy," eschewing the usual and inadequate "ecstasy." Enstasy was Eliade's coinage. Both he and Feuerstein were understandably dissatisfied with "ecstasy" since it does not adequately convey the complex meaning of samadhi. Unfortunately neither does enstasy, and worse yet, the word is practically unknown in English. Webster's Unabridged Second International Dictionary, which was the standard at the time, doesn't even list it.

The solution of course is to avoid any attempt at a direct word-for-word translation of "samadhi" and instead allow the context to define it. That is the usual practice today. I make this point because I think it illustrates the kind of mistake that Feuerstein, who has gone on to become perhaps the world's leading academic authority on yoga, would not make today. Indeed in his The Shambhala Encyclopedia of Yoga (1997), relying upon a number of different yogic traditions, Feuerstein defines "samadhi" using various modifications and qualifications of "ecstasy" and does not employ the word "enstasy" at all.

Also of interest is Feuerstein's use of the esoteric word "nescience" for the Sanskrit "avidya" when the simple "ignorance" would seem to do as well. I hasten to add however that Feuerstein even then was an accomplished scholar, and perhaps his usage is necessary, although I believe "nescience" would be better employed as a translation of "ajnana" and not "avidya" in most cases.

Samadhi in its various forms is the goal and raison d'ętre of yoga with the understanding that in samadhi is liberation ("moksha") and freedom from samsara and what the Buddha termed the "unsatisfactoriness" of life. Samadhi is also understood as meditation itself or (from Ernest Wood) "contemplation." The full truth is that samadhi cannot really be defined. It can only be experienced. And that will come only with time, effort and practice--which is what Patanjali's yoga is all about.


Feuerstein knows yoga the way a mother knows her child--that is, thoroughly with love and devotion. So it is noteworthy that he calls Patanjali's yoga "Classical Yoga" and identifies it as one of several yogic approaches to God-realization. See his Yoga, The Technology of Ecstasy (1989) for a thorough exploration, and see especially page 40 where he presents "the wheel of Yoga" with eight yogas such as karma yoga, bhakti yoga, etc., leading to transcendence.

Significantly Feuerstein makes a distinction between what he calls "kriya yoga" and the eight limbs of yoga usually associated with Patanjali. This is curious because it is this asta-anga yoga that is celebrated today as being the essence of Patanjali's yoga and is the basis for the practice of hatha and raja yoga. The famous eight limbs are yama (abstentions); niyama (observances)--these first two are the moral commandments of yoga--asana (posture); pranayama (breath control); pratyahara (sense withdrawal); dharana (concentration); dhyana (meditation); and samadhi (contemplation). The first five are usually thought of as part of the hatha yoga practice leading to the final three as the essence of raja yoga. Feuerstein believes that the second chapter of the sutra (Sadhana-Pada) "is a composite of two independent traditions, viz. the Kriya-Yoga of Patanjali and the asta-anga-yoga of whose systematic model Patanjali availed himself." (p. 59) Contrary to what some other commentators and translators believe, Feuerstein asserts that one of the central ideas of the sutra, that of devotion to God (Isvara), which he sees as part of Kriya-Yoga, is part of Patanjali's expression and not an interpolation. This is an important point since without such an expression, Patanjali's yoga can be seen as purely secular without the need of God for deliverance.

Since there are many translations and commentaries on Patanjali's famous aphorisms, the question arises, what is the value of Feuerstein's book in relation to the others? I have read and studied several, and have to say that I would not recommend Feuerstein's work for the beginner nor would I recommend it as the exclusive source. The great value of this youthful work is in its thoroughness of approach. Feuerstein not only defines each word in the text, he explains each aphorism, some in considerable depth, while sometimes haggling over which expression best conveys Patanjali's meaning. Additionally, the book contains a "continuous translation" sans commentary, a Sanskrit word index (unfortunately for me, at least, in Sanskrit alphabetical order!), an overview of topics discussed by Patanjali, a regular index, and a couple of introductory essays.

But the problem for the student is exactly this plethora of information. Consequently I would recommend that the reader begin with a simpler and more straightforward text such as that by Ernest Wood, or Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood, or Shree Purohit Swami (with help from the poet W.B. Yeats), or some others, and after a first reading then use Feuerstein's book as an aid to study.

Feuerstein offers a solid translation and interpretation, except that he misses the point of the central teaching of Patanjali: yogascittavrttinirodha. He takes it to mean that yoga aims at the dissolution of life and the human being. This is not true. As Ian Whicher expounds in his "The Integrity of the Yoga Darsana" (SUNY), cittavrttinirodha can be taken to mean the cessation of misidentification with modifications of the mind, not the total cessation of the modifications of the mind. This renders Yoga a life-affirming and positive philosophy and practice as opposed to Feuerstein's thesis that it is inherently aimed at the destruction of the whole human being who practises it. The translation in this book is still great, but for explanation of the meaning, look somewhere else, e.g. Whicher's "The Integrity of the Yoga Darsana".

Eminent scholar Georg Feuerstein offers an incredibly lucid, thorough rendering and commentary on Pantanjali's opaque Yoga Sutras. The introduction to the book is particularly useful to the newer student of yogic philosophy as it offers a historical context to situate the philosophical paradigms of Classical Yoga. As a teacher of yoga, I suggest that all my students read the book to familiarize themselves with the true essence of the yoga practice. However the most important contribution of Dr. Feuerstein's translation of the Yoga Sutras is his faithfulness to the dualist ideology indicated by Patanjali. There is some contemporary scholarly debate whether Patanjali indicates the necessity to leave the body in order to find true liberation, and Feuerstein fearlessly translates the ideas set forth in the scripture. According to Feuerstein's translation (and others) it is undoubtedly suggested that Pantanjali indicates the necessity for the advanced practioner to relieve him or herself from the suffering induced by the clinging to life (Sutra 2. 3) and so it is a logical and philosophically sound conclusion to understand that Patanjali indicated a full cessation of the physical body in order for the aspirant to realize true liberation. Facing this clinging to life (abhinivesa) or will to live as a source of suffering can induce a kind of denial, even on the scholarly level. Yet Feuerstein, as in all of his other books, investigates the subjects with compassion and without trepidation. Feuerstein's contributions to the study of yoga are of inestimable wealth to 21st century yoga practioners and scholar. One certain point to start the deep study of authentic yoga philosophy is with his transformational rendering of Pantajali's Yoga Sutras.