Patanjali Wrote 195 Sutras. Only Three Are About Posture — And "Posture" There Means How You Sit

A library in Philadelphia, a page daubed with orange

The University of Pennsylvania holds the largest collection of South Asian manuscripts in North America. One of them, copied in the eighteenth century in Devanagari script, is a Yogasutra — the yoga rules of Patanjali. Open it and the first thing you notice is colour. The sutras, the short rules themselves, are smeared with orange-saffron powder. Everything around them, in the same hand, is commentary. Without the powder you could not tell where the ancient text ends and the explanation begins.

That is the first fact about this book. It was never meant to be read alone. A sutra — the word means "thread" — is a line compressed until almost nothing is left: "sthirasukham āsanam", two words, one of them a compound. The tradition read each thread with a bhāṣya, a commentary, which untied it. The oldest surviving commentary is attributed to Vyasa, and the tradition read Patanjali through him.

The second fact is how short it is: four chapters and, in the standard edition of 1904, 195 sutras — 51, 55, 55 and 34. The third is what is in it. Chapter one defines yoga and describes the mind. Chapter two explains why the mind suffers and lays out the eight-limbed method. Chapter three describes the powers the method produces and tells you to ignore them. Chapter four ends in liberation. Physical posture gets three sutras, and the word for it, āsana, means "sitting".

In 1914 a Harvard professor, James Haughton Woods, published the Sutras, Vyasa's commentary and a second commentary by Vachaspati Mishra in one English volume. Two years earlier, in Allahabad, Rama Prasada had done the same. Sixteen years before Rama Prasada, Swami Vivekananda had given a "rather free translation" to a New York audience. All three were opened for this Investigation.

At a glance

• 195 sutras in four chapters — 51, 55, 55, 34 — in the Anandashrama edition of 1904 used by the GRETIL digital text; some later editions count 196. (GRETIL text, ed. Agashe 1904)
• The word āsana occurs in exactly two sutras, 2.29 (the list of limbs) and 2.46 (its definition); three sutras, 2.46–2.48, deal with it. (GRETIL text)
• Sutra 1.2 defines yoga in four words: "yogaś cittavṛttinirodhaḥ", "Yoga is the restriction of the fluctuations of mind-stuff." (Woods 1914, i. 2)
• The commentary's list of postures is a list of ways to sit: lotus, hero, "the staff-posture", "the bedstead", and "[the posture] with the rest", which means sitting on a cloth or skin. (Vyasa on ii. 46, trans. Woods; Vachaspati, trans. Rama Prasada)
• The powers are "obstacles": "In concentration these are obstacles; in the emergent state they are perfections (siddhi)." (Sutra 3.37, trans. Woods)
• Woods dated the Sutras to A.D. 300–500 and Vyasa's commentary to A.D. 650–850; recent scholarship puts both near A.D. 400 as one work. (Woods 1914, Introduction §§4–5; Maas, as summarised)
• Modern postural yoga has a date and an address: the Jaganmohan Palace yoga school, Mysore, opened 11 August 1933 under T. Krishnamacharya. (secondary; see Sources)

First, the words a beginner needs

Sutra. Literally "thread". A rule compressed into the fewest possible words so that it can be memorised. Sutras were written to be unpacked by a teacher, not read cold.

Bhāṣya. A commentary that unpacks sutras. The one attributed to Vyasa is the oldest on Patanjali and is treated here as part of the text, as the tradition treated it.

Pāda. A "foot" or chapter. The four are Samādhi (concentration), Sādhana (the means), Vibhūti (powers) and Kaivalya (isolation, or liberation).

Citta. The mind-stuff: thinking, memory, perception and the sense of "I", all together. Woods says "mind-stuff"; Rama Prasada "mind".

Vṛtti. A movement or wave in the citta. Woods says "fluctuation"; Rama Prasada "modification"; Vivekananda "taking various forms". Every thought, perception, dream and memory is one.

Nirodha. Restriction, stopping. Not destruction: Vachaspati, in Rama Prasada's rendering, says the restrained mind is one in which the modifications "exist only as potencies".

Kleśa. An affliction: a built-in cause of suffering. Patanjali names five.

Aṅga. A limb. Woods translates the word as "aids"; nothing in the text calls them stages.

Āsana. From the root "to sit": a seat, or the way one sits. Vachaspati Mishra gives both meanings on sutra 2.46.

Samādhi. Concentration so complete that the mind seems "emptied of itself" and only the object remains (3.3).

Sāṃkhya. The older philosophy Patanjali builds on: consciousness (puruṣa) and matter-plus-mind (prakṛti), the latter made of three strands (guṇa).

The claim we are testing

The popular version: "Yoga is an ancient Indian system of physical postures, laid down by the sage Patanjali, and the eight limbs are steps a student climbs, starting with the poses." The counter-version: "Patanjali has nothing to do with physical yoga, which was invented in the twentieth century." This is a dispute about what a text says, so the layers are about reading:

1. Patanjali is the foundational text of classical yoga, and the eight limbs come from it. True. Sutra 2.29 lists them; Vyasa explains each.
2. The Sutras are a manual of mind-training in which the body is a precondition, not the subject. True from the text. Yoga is defined on the mind (1.2); posture gets three sutras of 195; its definition is "stable and easy"; the commentary's examples are ways of sitting.
3. "The eight limbs are steps you climb, beginning with postures." Partly. The limbs are in order, and 3.7 calls the last three "more internal" (Vivekananda) than the five before. But the first limb is ethics, not posture, and Vyasa says the others are "rooted in" non-harm.
4. "Postural yoga is a modern invention with no Indian roots." Overstated. The exercise-led yoga of studios was assembled in Mysore in the 1930s, and its leading historian says so. But seated postures are in Vyasa, and medieval hatha texts, not opened here, describe non-seated ones.
5. "Patanjali wrote the Sutras in the second century BCE." Unsupported. The identification with the grammarian is not traceable before the tenth century; Woods dates the Sutras to the fourth or fifth century CE.

The four words everything hangs on

The Sutras open with a formality: "atha yogānuśāsanam" (1.1), "Now the exposition of yoga." Then comes the definition, best read one word at a time, because every later argument about yoga is an argument about these four words.

"yogaś cittavṛttinirodhaḥ" — Sutra 1.2, GRETIL text

Yogaḥ — yoga. Vyasa, on 1.1, gives a provisional gloss before the definition arrives: "yoga is concentration; but this is a quality of the mind-stuff (citta) which belongs to all the stages." He lists five stages of the mind — "the restless, the infatuated, the distracted, the single-in-intent, and the restricted" — and says the first two "have nothing to do with yoga". Vachaspati, in Rama Prasada's rendering, adds a point of grammar: the word comes "from the root Yuj, to contemplate, and not from the root Yujir, to join". The popular etymology — yoga as "union" — is the one the oldest commentators rejected for this text.

Citta — the mind-stuff. Vyasa says it "has three aspects (guṇa)": "a disposition to vividness (prakhyā), to activity (pravṛtti), and to inertia (sthiti)". Those are the three strands of Sāṃkhya — sattva, rajas, tamas — and Patanjali's whole psychology is built on them.

Vṛtti — a fluctuation, a wave. Woods: "fluctuations"; Rama Prasada: "modifications"; Vivekananda: "taking various forms".

Nirodhaḥ — restriction. Woods: "Yoga is the restriction of the fluctuations of mind-stuff." Rama Prasada: "the restraint of mental modifications." Vivekananda: "Yoga is restraining the mind-stuff (Chitta) from taking various forms (Vrittis)."

Three translators, one meaning. The next sutra says why: "tadā draṣṭuḥ svarūpe 'vasthānam" (1.3), "Then the Seer abides in himself" (Woods). When the waves stop, what was always watching is left. "At other times," says 1.4, "it takes the same form as the fluctuations." That is the whole system in three lines: you are the watcher; you mistake yourself for the waves; stop the waves and the mistake ends.

Five ways a mind moves

If yoga is stopping the waves, the first job is to count them. Sutra 1.5 says there are five, "hindered or unhindered" — Woods' words for kliṣṭa and akliṣṭa, afflicted or not. Sutra 1.6 names them:

"pramāṇaviparyayavikalpanidrāsmṛtayaḥ" — Sutra 1.6, GRETIL text

Woods: "Sources-of-valid-ideas and misconceptions and predicate-relations and sleep and memory." Vivekananda, plainer: "right knowledge, indiscrimination, verbal delusion, sleep, and memory."

Each gets its own sutra. Pramāṇa, valid knowledge, comes by "perception and inference and verbal-communication" (1.7). Viparyaya, misconception, is "an erroneous idea not based on that form" (1.8) — Vyasa's example is seeing two moons. Vikalpa, Woods' "predicate-relation", is an idea "without any corresponding perceptible object" that follows "from words" (1.9): a thought that exists because language allows it. Nidrā, sleep, is itself a fluctuation (1.10). Smṛti, memory, is "not-adding-surreptitiously to a once experienced object" (1.11).

Two things stand out. Correct knowledge is a wave too: yoga does not ask you to think true thoughts instead of false ones, but to stop the waves of both. And sleep counts. Sutra 1.12 gives the brake: "abhyāsavairāgyābhyāṃ tannirodhaḥ", "The restriction of them is by means of practice and passionlessness" (Woods). Everything after is detail on those two words.

Five reasons a mind hurts

Chapter two opens with a "yoga of action" — "Self-castigation and study and devotion to the Iśvara" (2.1, Woods) — "for the attenuation of the hindrances" (2.2). Then it names them:

"avidyāsmitārāgadveṣābhiniveśāḥ kleśāḥ" — Sutra 2.3, GRETIL text

Woods: "Undifferentiated-consciousness (avidyā) and the feeling-of-personality and passion and aversion and the will-to-live are the five hindrances." Vivekananda: "The pain-bearing obstructions are — ignorance, egoism, attachment, aversion, and clinging to life."

For a beginner, in order:

Avidyā — Woods' "undifferentiated-consciousness", everyone else's "ignorance". Not lack of information. Sutra 2.5 defines it: "The recognition of the permanent, of the pure, of pleasure, and of a self in what is impermanent, impure, pain, and not-self." Sutra 2.4 calls it "the field for the others". The other four grow in it.

Asmitā — "feeling-of-personality", egoism. Sutra 2.6: "When the power of seeing and the power by which one sees have the appearance of being a single self." Watcher and instrument are confused for one thing, and that thing says "I".

Rāga — passion, attachment. Sutra 2.7: "that which dwells upon pleasure."

Dveṣa — aversion. Sutra 2.8: "that which dwells upon pain."

Abhiniveśa — the will-to-live, "clinging to life". Sutra 2.9 is the most human line in the book: it "sweeping on by the force of its own nature exists in this form even in the wise." Even the sage is afraid to die.

Vivekananda's summary: "the fivefold tie that binds us down, of which ignorance is the cause and the other four its effects." The method that follows is designed to thin the five; the first cannot be thinned by thinking, only by a different kind of seeing, which the text calls discrimination (viveka, 2.26).

The eight limbs, from their own sutras

Sutra 2.28 promises that by following the aids to yoga impurity dwindles and knowledge shines. Then the list:

"yamaniyamāsanaprāṇāyāmapratyāhāradhāraṇādhyānasamādhayo 'ṣṭāv aṅgāni" — Sutra 2.29, GRETIL text

Vivekananda: "Yama, Niyama, Āsana, Prānāyāma, Pratyāhāra, Dhāranā, Dhyāna, and Samādhi are the eight limbs of Yoga." Woods calls them "the eight aids". Each has a defining sutra and a comment from Vyasa.

1. Yama — the abstentions (2.30). "Abstinence from injury and from falsehood and from theft and from incontinence and from acceptance of gifts are the abstentions" (Woods). Vyasa puts non-injury first for a reason: it "means the abstinence from malice towards all living creatures in every way and at all times. And the other abstentions and observances are rooted in it." Sutra 2.31 makes them "the great vow", "unbroken by time, place, purpose, and caste-rules" (Vivekananda). Yoga begins with how you treat other people.

2. Niyama — the observances (2.32). "Cleanliness and contentment and self-castigation and study and devotion to the Iśvara are the observances" (Woods). Vyasa: "to practise contentment means not to covet more than the means at hand". Sutras 2.35–2.45 give a result for each of the ten.

3. Āsana — the seat (2.46). Two words: "sthirasukham āsanam". Woods: "Stable-and-easy posture." Rama Prasada: "Posture is steadily easy." Vivekananda: "Posture is that which is firm and pleasant." That is the whole sutra; the next section reads it with its commentary.

4. Prāṇāyāma — regulation of breath (2.49). "When there is this [stability of posture], the restraint of breath cutting off the flow of inspiration and expiration follows" (Woods). Note the first words: breath control is conditional on a stable seat. Sutra 2.50 adds that it is "regulated by place and time and number". Vivekananda warns, "Prana is not breath, though it is usually so translated."

5. Pratyāhāra — withdrawal of the senses (2.54). "The withdrawal of the senses is as it were the imitation of the mind-stuff itself on the part of the organs by disjoining themselves from their objects" (Woods). Vyasa's picture: "Just as when the king-bee flies up, the bees fly up after him; and when he settles down, they settle down after him. So when the mind-stuff is restricted, the organs are restricted."

6. Dhāraṇā — fixed attention (3.1). The third chapter opens here. "Binding the mind-stuff to a place is fixed-attention." Vyasa lists the places: "the navel or the heart-lotus or the light within the head or the tip of the nose or the tip of the tongue ... or an external object."

7. Dhyāna — contemplation (3.2). "Focusedness of the presented idea upon that place is contemplation" (Woods). Vivekananda: "An unbroken flow of knowledge in that object." Attention held in one place becomes a stream.

8. Samādhi — concentration (3.3). "This same [contemplation], shining forth as the intended object and nothing more, and, as it were, emptied of itself, is concentration" (Woods). Vivekananda: "When that, giving up all forms, reflects only the meaning, it is Samādhi." Sutra 3.4 names the last three together: "trayam ekatra saṃyamaḥ", "The three in one are constraint"; 3.7 (antaraṅga) calls them "more internal than those that precede" (Vivekananda) — Woods: "direct aids in comparison with the previous [five]".

Read as a whole, the ladder goes: how you treat others; how you treat yourself; how you sit; how you breathe; how you close the senses; where you put attention; keeping it there; losing yourself in it. One rung is bodily, and it is a seat.

Read the actual document: what "asana" meant

The sutra, Vyasa's comment, and Vachaspati's gloss, as Woods printed them:

"46. Stable-and-easy posture. For example, the lotus-posture and the hero-posture and the decent-posture and the mystic diagram and the staff-posture and [the posture] with the rest and the bedstead, the seated curlew and the seated elephant and the seated camel, the even arrangement, the stable-and-easy — also called, as-is-easiest — and others of the same kind." — Sutra 2.46 with Vyasa's comment, trans. J. H. Woods, The Yoga-System of Patañjali (1914), ii. 46

"Stable means motionless. That posture which is easy, which brings ease is the one intended by the sūtra. The word āsana means either that whereon a man sits [that is, a seat] or the manner in which he sits [that is, a posture]. The lotus-posture is well known." — Vachaspati Mishra on 2.46, trans. Woods

In plain words: the sutra says a posture should be steady and comfortable, and the commentary gives examples, every one a way of sitting or lying. Rama Prasada's 1912 rendering of Vachaspati's gloss is the clearest: the hero-posture is "that in which a sitting man has one foot in contact with the ground, and places the other over the partially inclined other knee"; the staff-posture is "practised by sitting with thighs, shanks and feet stretched straight along the ground"; and "the Sopasraya is that in which the tiger's skin or the deer skin or some cloth is used to sit upon." That last one — "the posture with the rest" in Woods — is not a posture at all. It is a mat. The curlew, elephant and camel "are to be imitated from the sitting postures" of those animals. And the list ends with "the stable-and-easy", which Vachaspati says is "whatever posture may secure steadiness and ease", also called "as-is-easiest", meaning "any position that may secure ease."

Two more sutras finish the subject. Sutra 2.47: the seat is achieved "by relaxation of effort or by a mental state-of-balance with reference to Ananta" — the cosmic serpent, an image of effortless steadiness. Sutra 2.48: "Thereafter he is unassailed by extremes" — "by cold and heat and by the other [extremes]", says Vyasa. That is the entire treatment of the body: sit steadily, stop straining, and the opposites will no longer disturb you. Vivekananda gives the purpose: "Until you can get a firm seat you cannot practise the breathing and other exercises."

A word of honesty about the word. Vachaspati gives both meanings, seat and manner of sitting, and "posture" is a fair translation. What the text does not contain is any standing pose, any sequence, any instruction to move.

The chapter about powers, and the sutra that cancels them

The third chapter is the one a sceptic reaches for. After the three inner limbs are defined, Patanjali says that "constraint" — saṃyama, the three practised together on one object — produces knowledge, and lists what it produces when applied to different objects. The list runs from sutra 3.16 to about 3.49, some thirty-four sutras, and it is startling. Constraint upon the three kinds of change gives "knowledge of the past and future" (3.16); upon another's ideas, "knowledge of the mind-stuff of another" (3.19); upon the form of the body, "indiscernibility [of the yogin's body]" (3.21); upon the sun, "knowledge of the cosmic-spaces" (3.26); on body and space, "passing through space" (3.42); on the elements, "atomization and the other [perfections]" (3.45).

Vyasa does not soften this. His comment on 3.1 says the chapter describes "the supernormal powers" which are "reasons for propagation of belief" — they exist to persuade. Then, in the middle of the list, comes the sutra most summaries skip:

"te samādhāv upasargā vyutthāne siddhayaḥ" — Sutra 3.37, GRETIL text

Woods: "In concentration these [supernal activities] are obstacles; in the emergent state they are perfections (siddhi)." Vivekananda: "These are obstacles to Samadhi; but they are powers in the worldly state." Vyasa's comment: they "are obstacles, in that they go counter to the sight which belongs to this concentrated mind-stuff."

Vivekananda's gloss is blunt: "if the Yogi rejects them, he attains the highest. If he is tempted to acquire these, his further progress is barred." The fourth chapter then demotes the powers altogether: "Perfections proceed from birth or from drugs or from spells or from self-castigation or from concentration" (4.1, Woods) — four other ways to get them, none of which is yoga.

So the honest reading is this. Patanjali and his commentator believed concentration produced extraordinary abilities, and said so at length. They also said the abilities were a trap, and that drugs could produce them too. A reader who wants the text to be a modern psychology has to skip 3.16–3.49; a reader who wants it to be a book of magic has to skip 3.37. The text contains both, and tells you which to prefer.

The Sankhya underneath, in one paragraph

Vyasa's colophon on the last sutra calls the work "the Exposition of the Sāṃkhya, the Book on Isolation, the Fourth." The whole system is Sāṃkhya with a method attached. Sāṃkhya says two kinds of thing have always existed: puruṣa, pure consciousness, which only watches; and prakṛti, everything else, including the mind, made of three strands — sattva (clarity), rajas (activity), tamas (inertia). The mind is matter, the finest there is, but not the watcher. Suffering comes from the watcher mistaking the mind's waves for itself (2.17). Liberation, kaivalya, "isolation", is the watcher standing alone again — 4.34, in Woods' words: "Isolation is the inverse generation of the aspects, no longer provided with a purpose by the Self, or it is the Energy of Intellect grounded in itself." Vivekananda's preface notes the one large difference: Patanjali "admits a Personal God in the form of a first teacher" (the Iśvara of 1.23–27). The Sutras assume a reader who already has this.

Who wrote it, and when

The tradition says Patanjali, and from about the tenth century identified him with the Patanjali who wrote the great grammatical commentary on Panini — the author the Chidambaram temple honours. Woods found that unproven: the identification "has not been traced definitely any farther back than to the tenth century", and Vyasa's commentary "makes no statement as to the authorship of the Yoga-sutras".

For the date, Woods argued from what the text attacks. Sutras 4.14–21 argue against a Buddhist idealism he thought was Vasubandhu's, which makes the earliest limit the fourth century; the seventh-century poet Magha and Gaudapada (about A.D. 700, in Woods' estimate) already quote the Sutras. "The conclusion would be then that Patañjali's sutras were written at some time in the fourth or fifth century of our era" — "between A.D. 300 and 500" in his table of contents. For the commentary he found a later window, "between A.D. 650 and 850".

The range sometimes quoted, second century BCE to fourth century CE, is the spread between the grammarian's date and Woods'. Scholarship since has narrowed it. Philipp Maas, who also prepared the GRETIL text used here, has argued that the Sutras and the commentary are a single work, the Pātañjalayogaśāstra, composed around 400 CE — which would make "Vyasa" a later name for Patanjali's own explanation. This Investigation did not open Maas's papers and reports his argument as summarised by others. One number depends on the edition: the GRETIL text has 195 sutras, 55 in chapter three; some later editions, including B. K. S. Iyengar's, count 56 there and 196 in all.

The strongest case for the other side: where the yoga of the mat came from

If Patanjali's yoga is a seated discipline of the mind, where did the yoga of standing poses, sequences and sweat come from? The best-argued answer is Mark Singleton's Yoga Body (Oxford University Press, 2010), which this Investigation did not open. As the published summary of it puts it, modern postural yoga is "a radical break from hatha yoga tradition, with different goals, and an unprecedented emphasis on asanas"; by the nineteenth century "asanas and their ascetic practitioners were despised" and the yoga Vivekananda carried to America was "asana-free"; and "from the 1920s, an asana-based yoga emerged, with an emphasis on its health benefits", its flowing sequences "adapted from the gymnastics of the physical culture movement" under an Indian nationalism that wanted "an image of health and strength". The quoted words are the summary's, not Singleton's.

The documents support the dates. Vivekananda's Raja Yoga, published in 1896 (July, by the standard biography) from his New York class lectures, warns that "Yoga can only be safely learnt by direct contact with a teacher". In 1928 the Raja of Aundh, Pant Pratinidhi, published The Ten-Point Way to Health: Surya Namaskars, a sun-salutation drill presented as exercise. On 11 August 1933 a yoga school opened in the Jaganmohan Palace at Mysore under Tirumalai Krishnamacharya (1888–1989), with the Maharaja's patronage; his Yoga Makaranda appeared in 1934; and his students there — B. K. S. Iyengar, K. Pattabhi Jois, Indra Devi — carried the flowing, posture-led method across India and to America. Krishnamacharya said he had learned a text called the Yoga Korunta from a teacher near Mount Kailash; no copy has ever been found.

Two cautions against overstating him. "Modern postural yoga is a twentieth-century construction" is not the same as "postures are un-Indian": seated postures are in Vyasa, the medieval hatha texts (not opened here) describe non-seated ones, and the Mysore synthesis was made by an Indian Sanskrit scholar in an Indian palace. And Krishnamacharya based his teaching on Patanjali's Sutras (and the Yoga Yajnavalkya). The dispute is not whether he knew the Sutras but whether the Sutras authorise what he built. On their own words, they authorise a steady seat and are silent about everything else.

What we could not prove

• The date and single authorship of the Sutras and the commentary. Woods' argument (A.D. 300–500 for the Sutras; 650–850 for Vyasa) was read in full. Philipp Maas's argument for a single work of about 400 CE was not opened at source and is reported as summarised by others.
• Mark Singleton's book in full. Yoga Body is in copyright and was not opened; its argument is quoted from published summaries. The Mysore dates were checked against reference sources, not Singleton's pages.
• A public-domain photograph of Krishnamacharya. None was found on Wikimedia Commons. The Mysore school is described in words only.
• The medieval hatha texts. The Hathapradipika and Gheranda Samhita, the bridge between Vyasa's seats and the Mysore sequences, were not opened; the statement that they describe non-seated postures rests on general knowledge.
• The 196-sutra count. We confirmed 195 in the GRETIL/Agashe text; we did not open a 196 edition to see which sutra is divided.
• Woods' 1914 printing. The archive.org scan of the first printing failed to serve its text; the 1927 second printing was used. References are by sutra number, not page.
• A pre-1920 photograph of a non-seated yoga posture. None found on Commons with a clear licence; both historical photographs used show seated figures.

Why it still matters today

Yoga is now a word that means a class, a mat and a set of poses, and the eight limbs are printed on studio walls as a staircase that starts with the body. The text that gave the world the eight limbs starts with how you treat other people and spends three of 195 lines on the body. That is not an argument against stretching. It is an argument about reading. When a claim is made in Patanjali's name — that yoga is union, that it is exercise, that it is religion, that it is not — the check is the same as for any document: find the sutra, read Vyasa, see what is there. The translations used here are free, and the Sanskrit is 195 lines.

And the history is Indian on both sides. The seated, mind-first yoga of Patanjali was Indian. The posture-led yoga of Mysore in 1933 was also Indian, built by a Sanskrit scholar who revered Patanjali. The honest story is not "ancient versus fake". It is a text about stilling the mind, and a twentieth-century school that borrowed its name for a discipline of the body — which the text treats as the place you sit down before the real work begins.

Verdict

The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, read with Vyasa's commentary, are a treatise on the mind. Their definition of yoga is the stopping of mental waves (1.2); their anatomy of the mind is five kinds of wave (1.6) and five afflictions (2.3); their method is eight limbs (2.29), of which the first two are ethical, the last three mental, and one — āsana — bodily. That limb is defined as "stable and easy" (2.46), the commentary's examples are ways of sitting and a cloth to sit on, and its purpose is to make breath control possible (2.49). The powers of chapter three are real to the author and called obstacles by him in the same chapter (3.37).

What the documents do not prove is a second-century-BCE Patanjali, a grammarian-yogi, or a single author for the Sutras and their commentary; Woods' fourth-or-fifth-century date is the one the text supports. Nor do they prove that posture-practice is foreign to India: they prove that it is foreign to this text. The yoga of standing poses and flowing sequences has its own history, with a date — 11 August 1933 — and an address — the Jaganmohan Palace, Mysore. Patanjali asked you to sit still. Everything that happens on a mat after that is somebody else's book.