Composed around the first centuries CE, the Yoga Sūtras gathered a millennium of practice into 195 telegraphic aphorisms. Patañjali defines yoga in the second sūtra, yogaś citta-vṛtti-nirodhaḥ, the stilling of the mind’s turnings, and then lays out the technology: the eight limbs from ethics to absorption that this site’s ashtanga pages map in full.
How it reads
A sūtra is a thread, the minimum words needed to hold a teaching, meant to be unpacked by a teacher. “Yoga is restraint of the modifications of the mind-stuff” (Isherwood’s rendering of 1.2) has seeded a thousand commentaries, beginning with Vyāsa’s in the fifth century.
Why it matters here
Posture is thread three of eight; breath is thread four. The modern studio’s inheritance is real but partial, and the Sūtras are where the whole architecture lives.
Related entries
- Mokṣa , Liberation, the fourth and highest aim of life; not a place reached but a case of mistaken identity corrected.
- Light on Yoga , B. K. S. Iyengar's 1966 masterwork, the book that catalogued modern asana practice for the world, pose by photographed pose.
Mentioned in
References
- How to Know God, the Yoga Aphorisms of Patañjali , translated by Swami Prabhavananda & Christopher Isherwood
- Light on the Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali , B. K. S. Iyengar