Sanatana Dharma - Aka Hinduism (1st Bin)

[Bodhi]

|| namaH bhagavate pata~njalaye ||



“…we know little about the yoga author Patanjali. We know of Patanjali the grammarian and have good reason to date him to the 2nd century BC. Apart from the name, we have no solid reason for assuming that he was the author of the famous Yoga Sûtra as well.”, so says Dr. Koenraad Elst in one of his blog entries.



This has remained for long the majority Indologist view which rejects the traditional Hindu position in identifying the author of the famous mahAbhAShya and yogasUtra to have been one and a single person, the brilliant sage-scholar pata~njali. So there is nothing new as far as the above statement goes, but what is new follows: “Possibly an anonymous author tried to give his own book a wider readership by attributing it to an ancient authority…”



So far, even those who are opposed to the traditional Hindu position on the subject only thought it as a simple case of eponymy of two authors having confused the later commentators into merging them into a single personage. But Dr. Elst breaks new grounds with his novel suggestion! That the real author of the yogasUtra, his own name being something else, simply stuck the famous name of the renowned mahAbhAShya-kAra to his own petty product in order to attract better prospects of readership! Dr. Elst goes further and supposes the case to be like that of “the Manu Smrti, completed in the early Christian age but attributed to the pre-Vedic patriarch Manu”!



Anyone familiar with the yogasUtra-s would be shocked by the preposterous remarks which not only border with being slanderous towards the author of the yoga-sUtra, but also try to trivialize the essential worth of his work, which is that cornerstone of Hindu philosophy which although tiny in comparison, can sit next only to the bhagavad-gItA on the copious shelf of all the saMskR^ita philosophical works ever composed. At least the popularity of the yoga-sUtra is indirectly conceded by Dr. Elst himself in a book-review earlier, when he wrote, “While numerous Asian philosophical texts remain untranslated, a few suffer from a surplus of translations: the Bhagavad-Gītā, the Yijing, the Daodejing, and also Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra (YS).”



The popularity, and even more the practical and philosophical worth of the work account for and fully justify, not only its numerous translations, but also the width and diversity of various commentaries produced on it from ages old to modern. Indeed like the numerous translations, in the matter of commentaries too, yoga-sUtra can be comfortably placed next only to the bhagavad-gItA, since except probably the latter no other book of philosophy has been commented upon so many times in so many ways and by so many people as diverse as vyAsa to AchArya rajanIsha and shaMkara to Vivekananda, and rAjA bhoja deva to Aurobindo, so that there is not a single class of commentary known in the saMskR^ita universe, from TIkA to vyAkhyA, vArtika to vR^itti, bhAShya to bodhinI, and vivaraNa to dIpikA, that has remained not utilized in the study of the pAta~njala yoga-sUtra-s.



But we are asked to believe that the author of the yoga-sUtra, counted in the same class of the dArshanika-s as kapila, gautama, kaNAd, jaiminI and bAdarAyaNa, was simply ignorant of, or lacked confidence about, the true worth of the work he was writing, so that he resorted to such a marketing tactic as to fake it as having come from another person!



But let us evaluate Dr. Elst’s suggestion a bit more technically.



First off, if the “real author” of the yoga-sUtra-s had to use another’s name, wouldn’t it be natural for him to pick up the name of an “authority” from the same subject matter to which his own work belongs? Why would a yoga author pick up a grammarian’s name?



There are of course better known situations where authors just apply another’s name to make their work popular, but at least the name thus used belongs to a recognized authority of that field. The best example would be some collections of nIti that come with the name of chANakya, although the author of artha-shAstra had nothing to do with these books. His name is chosen by the real authors/editors of these books, as chANakya is an established authority of nIti. Similarly, shaMkara, vyAsa, even manu as Dr. Elst points out, are other such authorities of their fields whose names are found used on other’s works. We can see this more clearly in the medieval Hindi literature, where we find some spurious works bearing the names of “Tulasidas” and “Bhushan”, clearly written by others but given their renowned name. However, even in these cases, such works at least belongs to their respective subject matters or genres. The point being, if an author of yoga had to, at all, utilize someone else’s name for propagating his own petty work, why would he use the name of a “grammarian” rather than that of an established authority on yoga (or sAMkhya whence it came)? Wouldn’t, say “kApilya-yoga-sUtra” or even “shaiva-yoga-sUtra”, serve his purpose more satisfactorily?

There is yet another possible issue in accepting the view that yoga-sUtra author deliberately picked the grammarian’s name for his work. It is known to the students of the saMskR^ita vyAkaraNa, that after the initial century of popularity, mahAbhAShya had gradually lost its readership and went largely out of circulation, until later when it made a comeback. kalhaNa records in rAjataraMgiNI this rise and fall of pata~njali-the-grammarian’s popularity, where he says that unlike his own times when mahAbhAShya was widely popular, in the “old days” the circulation of pata~njali’s bhAShya was limited to (some) schools only of South India, so that it was hardly even heard of in any other regions until being reintroduced in North by efforts of a certain scholarly-king whom he mentions by name. Now, this implies that, the yogasUtra author either lived chronological close to the mahAbhAShya author in the period when bhAShya was massively popular, or came in the later times when it had been again introduced, otherwise he is likely to select some other more popular name. And, later periods he could not have come, since bhartR^ihari already mentions both the authors as the same person, and if we consider him to have been in the earlier periods close to the grammarian, most objections which Indologists have against accepting the traditional view, fall flat.



With this, we have to at least reject the preposterous conjecture of Dr. Elst that the author of yoga sUtra was not named pata~njali, and used this name only to deliberately attribute his work to pata~njali the grammarian. Now whether these books are written by one person named pata~njali, or two different eponymous persons, is next for us to examine.



Let us now turn to reviewing the traditional Hindu position and see whether the objections to this position are really sound in light of new findings since the debates on the subject originally took place in the last century?



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