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Yoga Sutras

Pātañjala Yogasūtra — 196 aphorisms on yoga as the cessation of mental fluctuations

Patañjali (the historical author or compiler; possibly composite) · c. 2nd century BC – 4th century AD (composite redaction likely) · Sanskrit · 196 aphoristic sutras in four pādas (chapters)

Tradition: Hindu philosophy / one of the six classical darshanas

Yoga is the cessation of the modifications of the mind (yogaś citta-vṛtti-nirodhaḥ) — the eightfold path leads to liberating samādhi

The Yoga Sutras are the foundational text of classical Indian yoga and one of the six āstika darshanas of Hindu philosophy. Composed (or compiled) by Patañjali across 196 short aphorisms in four chapters — on samādhi, practice, extraordinary powers, and liberation — they set out the eightfold path (aṣṭāṅga yoga: yama, niyama, āsana, prāṇāyāma, pratyāhāra, dhāraṇā, dhyāna, samādhi) by which the practitioner stills the modifications (vṛtti) of consciousness and realises the radical distinction of puruṣa (pure consciousness) from prakṛti (the mental and material flux). The text shaped every later Indian meditative tradition (Hindu, Buddhist, Jain) and is the historical foundation of the global modern yoga movement.

Author

Editions cited

  • The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (Edwin F. Bryant, North Point Press, 2009 — with commentary)
  • How to Know God: The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali (Swami Prabhavananda & Christopher Isherwood, 1953)
  • Yoga Sutras (Georg Feuerstein, Inner Traditions, 1979)
Compare this work

School Embodiments

Samkhya · 35%
Advaita Vedanta · 15%
Buddhism · 15%
Jainism / Anekantavada · 5%
Yogacara · 10%
Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism · 5%
Energetic Wellness Worldview · 15%
Samkhya 35%

The Yoga Sutras presuppose the dualist metaphysics of Sāṃkhya — puruṣa (consciousness) and prakṛti (nature) as distinct fundamental categories. Yoga is Sāṃkhya's soteriological practice.

"Then the seer abides in his own true nature." (Yoga Sutras 1.3)
Advaita Vedanta 15%

The Yoga Sutras are not Advaitic in metaphysics (they are dualist), but their methodology has been thoroughly absorbed by the broader Vedānta tradition as the practical preparation for the realisation of Brahman.

"Yoga is the cessation of the modifications of the mind." (Yoga Sutras 1.2)
Buddhism 15%

Patañjali's eightfold path, the analysis of the kleshas (afflictions), and the doctrine of liberation through cessation of mental modifications are in continuous dialogue with Buddhist meditative tradition. Yogācāra Buddhism in particular shares much technical vocabulary.

"Practice and dispassion are the means to its restraint." (Yoga Sutras 1.12)
Jainism / Anekantavada 5%

Jain ascetic and meditative practice runs parallel to the Patañjala path; the ethical observances (yama: non-violence, truthfulness, non-stealing, continence, non-possession) are shared with the Jain mahāvratas.

"Non-violence, truthfulness, non-stealing, continence, and non-possessiveness are the yamas." (Yoga Sutras 2.30)
Yogacara 10%

Yogācāra Buddhism shares substantial vocabulary and analytical framework with the Yoga Sutras — meditation as the analysis of mental events, liberation through transformation of consciousness, the role of the storehouse consciousness.

"Knowledge arises through the steady, continuous, and properly attended practice." (Yoga Sutras 1.14)
Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism 5%

Vajrayāna engages many of the same psychophysical technologies — breath, mantra, visualisation, subtle-body channels — that the Yoga Sutras and their commentarial tradition develop.

"Through stabilisation of breath, the cover that obscures the light is dissolved." (Yoga Sutras 2.52, paraphrasing)
Energetic Wellness Worldview 15%

The modern global yoga movement reads the Sutras as one of its founding documents; the doctrine of prāṇa (vital breath/energy) flows through contemporary Western "energetic wellness" practices that descend from this textual tradition.

"Prāṇāyāma is the cessation of inhalation and exhalation." (Yoga Sutras 2.49)

Internal Tensions

The Yoga Sutras are dualist (puruṣa and prakṛti are genuinely two), but the practical instructions overlap almost completely with the meditative manuals of metaphysically incompatible traditions — Advaita non-dualism, Buddhist no-self, Jain pluralism. Whether this is because the metaphysical claims are secondary to the transformative practice, or because the metaphysics is genuinely separable from the technique, has been disputed since Vyāsa's sixth-century commentary.

⧖

I. Time

Time is the medium of mental modifications (vṛtti) and of karmic accumulation. The yogi works to still the flux of mind and to burn the seeds of future karma; liberation is precisely the cessation of further temporal becoming. Saṃsāra is the cyclic field; kaivalya is the stepping out of it.

Attributes
Extent: Infinite Ontological Status: Emergent Grain: Continuous Freedom: Deterministic Traversability: Cyclical Direction: Uni-directional Dimensionality: One
✦

II. Space

Not theorised geometrically; the meditative space of the practitioner is the inner field of consciousness, analysed in great detail. The siddhis (extraordinary powers) of Chapter 3 include various forms of non-local awareness (clairvoyance, knowledge at a distance) that imply a non-Newtonian conception of spatial relation.

Attributes
Extent: Infinite Ontological Status: Emergent Curvature: Undefined Dimensionality: Three Locality: Non-local
◉

III. Matter

Prakṛti — the material-mental flux — is substantival in the Sāṃkhya sense. Real, conserved across transformations, three-dimensional. The yogi does not deny matter's reality; he disidentifies from it.

Attributes
Extent: Finite Ontological Status: Substantival Conservation: Conserved Dimensionality: Three Locality: Local
◎

IV. Observer

The Patañjalic observer is the puruṣa — pure consciousness, witness, distinct from all the modifications of prakṛti. Observer Number is Plural (each puruṣa is distinct, against Advaita's singular Self); the practitioner is embodied in this life but realises his identity with disembodied consciousness in liberating samādhi. Knowledge is total in principle at samādhi. Moral authority is tradition — the line of ṛṣis whose practical knowledge is transmitted.

Attributes
Time Instance: Multiple Space Instance: Single Knowledge Extent: Total Knowledge Retainment: Total Physicality: Both Agency: Active Number: Plural Metaphysical Agency: Cosmic-ordering
⚡

V. Energy

Prāṇa is the central energetic principle — the vital breath whose regulation is one of the eight limbs. Variable in distribution within the practitioner's subtle body, reversible across the in-breath and out-breath, substantival in its own right.

Attributes
Extent: Infinite Ontological Status: Substantival Conservation: Variable Dispersibility: Reversible
⧉

VI. Information

Karmic-saṃskāric impressions are the relational informational structure carried across lives. Personal information is conserved: the karma carries forward until the seeds are burned by samādhi. Information is discrete in the sense that distinct samskaras are distinct deposits.

Attributes
Ontological Status: Relational Cosmic Conservation: Conserved Personal Conservation: Conserved Granularity: Discrete

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Historical figures whose own classification on the same six-dimensional grid lands closest to this work's. Computed by attribute-agreement on coordinates both address.

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Computed school proximity

The work's attribute fingerprint scored against all schools using the same quiz scorer. Useful as a sanity check on the hand-curated embodiments above.

76%
Perennial Philosophy
18/26
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Mysticism
18/26
73%
Vedanta
19/26
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Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism
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Hinduism (Generic)
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Psychedelic / Entheogenic Worldview
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Hermeticism
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How Yoga Sutras resolves each dilemma

51 resolved positions across 4 dimensions, including 27 distinctive where the majority of schools go the other way · 6 unaligned.

Each dimension is sorted so minority positions come first. Mainstream positions are folded into an expandable list.

Time · 9 dilemmas · 5 distinctive

Persistence, the future, and the direction of becoming.

Distinctive · only 9% of schools agree (18/202)
Do you really choose?
If the brain is a physical system and physical systems are governed by laws, then every choice is also a chain of causes — which raises the question of what was really left to choose.
Choice is real within a determined order — agency and determinism aren’t opposites.
On this view, the future is determined and you are genuinely choosing. Those aren't contradictory because the determination runs through you rather than around you: your reasoning, deliberation, and assent are the way the determined outcome gets settled. Choice is what it feels like from …
Roads not taken The future is open and you are a genuine origin of it. (69%) · Choice is structural illusion — every event is fixed by the prior state. (10%) · Even if the universe is undetermined, you are not the chooser. (6%)
Distinctive · only 9% of schools agree (18/202)
Are addicts responsible for their addiction?
Addiction looks from one angle like the textbook case of agency failing — a person doing what they don't, in any meaningful sense, want to do. From another angle it looks like agency at work in hard conditions. Which it is depends on what agency is.
The addict is genuinely responsible within a determined order.
On this view, the addict is acting within a determined order but is genuinely acting — making decisions, endorsing or resisting urges, seeking or refusing help. Responsibility attaches not because some uncaused choice happened, but because the addict is the kind of agent through which …
Roads not taken The addict could have chosen otherwise — that's why recovery is real. (69%) · The addict's behaviour is the outcome of causes; 'responsibility' is a useful fiction, not a metaphysical fact. (10%) · Even if the universe is undetermined, the addict isn't the chooser. (6%)
Distinctive · only 9% of schools agree (18/202)
Should we hold AI systems responsible for what they do?
When an autonomous AI takes an action that harms someone, the question of who or what is responsible — the developer, the operator, the model itself — turns on whether the model is the kind of thing that can be a responsible agent.
The AI can be a genuine agent within determined conditions — and therefore genuinely responsible.
On this view, what makes a being responsible is not indeterminism but the kind of process the being is. An AI that deliberates, considers consequences, can be given reasons, and modifies its behaviour on reflection is doing what responsible agency is, even if its underlying …
Roads not taken An AI without a free will is not the kind of thing that can be responsible. (69%) · An AI's behaviour is fully determined by training and input; 'responsibility' applies if at all to its makers. (10%) · Neither AIs nor anyone else are the locus of free agency; the question is the wrong one. (6%)
Distinctive · only 17% of schools agree (35/202)
How much weight do future people deserve?
If a billion people will exist in the 25th century, do their interests count for as much as the interests of a billion people alive now? The answer turns on what kind of reality the future has.
Past, present, and future are bound in cycles — duties span generations as a matter of course.
On these views, time is not a one-way arrow but a structure of return: cosmic cycles, karmic cycles, the seasons, the succession of generations. To act now is always also to act for the ancestors who shaped your inheritance and for the descendants who will …
Roads not taken Future people are as real as you are — and their interests count for as much. (47%) · Time arises from events or from a deeper substrate — the future is not yet. (32%) · The future branches — what we owe depends on which branch we create. (2%)
Distinctive · only 17% of schools agree (35/202)
Is regret rational?
If the past is fixed and unchangeable, what kind of mental act is regret? An error, a duty, a lesson, a perspective on a moment that is still in some sense present?
The past is part of a cycle one keeps returning to; regret is one of the gates of the cycle.
On cyclical views, the past is not a fixed thing behind you — it is part of the ongoing structure of return: karmic cycles, cosmic cycles, the cycle of seasons and generations. Regret, on these views, is less about an unchangeable past and more about …
Roads not taken The past is as real as the present; regret is a real attitude toward a real thing. (47%) · The past is not a thing now; regret is the present holding what is no longer. (32%) · Other branches exist; regret tracks roads not taken that are nonetheless real. (2%)
4 mainstream positions
Do we owe extinct species something we cannot give them? Past beings are part of the cycle; we owe them what we owe ancestors. 17% Is the universe running out of usable energy? Time is unbounded but matter is finite; usable energy can fail without time failing. 47% Are natural resources fundamentally finite, or only practically so? Time goes on but matter is bounded; we are eventually constrained even with infinite time. 47% Could we owe future generations more than is materially possible to provide? Time is unbounded but matter is not; we can owe more across long time than the matter can provide. 47%
Matter · 7 dilemmas, all mainstream
Is the world created from nothing? Yes — matter was created and is conserved as a real substance. 55% Is the physical world fully real? Yes — the physical world is fully real, mind-independent, persisting. 55% Does matter have intrinsic moral standing? Matter is morally considerable insofar as it is created or conserved good. 55% What is money? Money is a real institution with intrinsic features. 54% What is a nation? A nation is a real moral community with intrinsic character. 54% What makes someone male or female? Sex is a real biological kind with given content. 54% Should we edit the human germline? Human nature is a real biological kind given by reproductive biology or by creation; editing the germline transgresses what is given. 54%

Observer · 37 dilemmas · 5 distinctive

Mind, agency, and the knower's relation to the known.

Distinctive · only 6% of schools agree (12/202)
Is reality fundamentally digital?
Pancomputationalism, Planck-scale quanta, simulation theory and Kabbalistic letter-mysticism all say yes — but for very different reasons. The rest of the atlas says no.
Yes — but divinely-discrete: divine letters, momentary cognitions, atomistic theism.
On this view, the world is at bottom discrete, but the units are not bare bits. They are divine names, momentary cognitions, karmic atoms, sacred letters — the elementary acts of a creating or ordering agency. Discreteness is real and fundamental, and so is the …
Roads not taken No — continuous divine sustaining act, the Tao that knows no joints, the One's self-disclosure. (44%) · No — continuous fields, classical limits, analog deep structure. (37%) · Yes — bits, quanta, computational substrate. (13%)
Distinctive · only 6% of schools agree (12/202)
Are there indivisible units of experience?
Whiteheadian actual occasions, Buddhist moments of mind, Kabbalistic letter-cognitions, IIT phi-units — or the unbroken Jamesian stream? The atomism of experience cuts across naturalism and theism alike.
Yes, theistic atomism — actual occasions, divine letters, momentary cognitions.
On this view, the atoms of experience are not bare quanta but agent-laden moments: Whiteheadian actual occasions in which subjectivity and the divine lure meet, Kabbalistic letter-cognitions in which divine names act, Buddhist Abhidharma moments of mind, tantric ksana. The discreteness is real and so …
Roads not taken No — continuous divine presence; consciousness is the unbroken witness. (44%) · No — continuous Jamesian stream, phenomenological lived time. (37%) · Yes — naturalist quanta of experience. (13%)
Distinctive · only 6% of schools agree (12/202)
Is memory stored or reconstructed?
Engrams and traces — or continuous re-narration each time you remember? The cognitive-science debate has a theological cousin: divine memory holding each hair, or the ancestors' continuous remembering.
Stored — in divine memory's discrete particulars, or in karmic-record units.
On this view, memory is held in discrete particulars by an agency: the Lord who knows each hair, the karmic ledger that records each act, the angelic scribe who writes each deed, the Kabbalistic letters that spell each soul. Storage is real; the storer is …
Roads not taken Held in continuous divine or ancestral remembering — neither stored discretely nor purely reconstructed. (44%) · Reconstructed — continuous re-narrating, no fixed engrams. (37%) · Stored — discrete engrams, traces, weights. (13%)
Distinctive · only 9% of schools agree (18/202)
What makes someone the same person over time?
When dementia hollows out memory, when a coma resolves with no recall, when you imagine being uploaded — the question of whether the surviving person is still you turns on what kind of thing the 'you' was to begin with.
You span moments — identity is a pattern that need not be located at a single now.
On this view, the observer is not bound to a single present. Identity is something that exists across moments — as a pattern, an ancestral line, a trans-temporal structure. Uploading, in this picture, is not a metaphysical impossibility but an engineering question; ancestors are real …
Roads not taken You are your body — continuity is bodily continuity. (36%) · You are a soul — what persists through change is the non-bodily aspect. (29%) · There was never a fixed self to either preserve or lose. (14%)
Distinctive · only 9% of schools agree (18/202)
Is the late-stage dementia patient still the person their spouse married?
Loss of memory, of recognition, of the cognitive patterns that made the person — does this end the person, or merely the person you knew? The answer turns on what makes someone who they are.
The person is the pattern across moments — diminished pattern, diminished person.
On this view, the person is constituted by a pattern extending across moments — memory, narrative, characteristic ways of being. As dementia erodes the pattern, the person is correspondingly diminished. What remains is real but is less than what was; the marriage to the person …
Roads not taken Same body, same person — even when the cognitive pattern has changed. (36%) · The soul persists; the cognitive change is the body's, not the person's. (29%) · There was no fixed person to lose; care is owed to whoever is here. (14%)
26 mainstream positions
If a teleporter copied and destroyed you, would you have survived? You are the pattern; the pattern survives the substrate change. You arrive. 9% Does environmental harm in another country bind me morally? Distance doesn't dilute obligation; what is real is the connection, not its length. 12% Are the dead morally present to the living? Observers span moments; the dead are present in a real (not merely metaphorical) way. 13% Is divine omniscience compatible with human freedom? An observer can occupy multiple times at once; foreknowledge is not foreordering. 13% Does meditation reveal something genuinely timeless? Meditation accesses a trans-temporal level the ordinary observer doesn't ordinarily reach. 13% Does prayer change God's mind? Prayer participates in a trans-temporal liturgy or communion; the question of 'changing the mind' misses the trans-temporal mode. 13% Is environmental damage ever truly permanent? Loss is part of cycles; what disappears returns in another form. 17% Can a civilization recover from collapse? Civilization rises and falls in cycles; recovery is structural to history. 17% Does the second law of thermodynamics mean something morally? Local entropy increase is part of a cycle; the moral category is participation in the cycle. 17% Could causation work backwards? Time is structured as return; 'forward' and 'backward' are local features of the cycle. 17% Is the asymmetry between memory and anticipation a real feature of time, or just of us? Memory and anticipation are phases of a cycle that visits both directions. 17% Is the arrow of time a real feature of the cosmos, or only of how we describe it? Within a cycle there is a direction; across the cycle there isn't. 17% When does a person begin? A person exists from conception — when a new being comes into existence. 54% What is marriage? Marriage has a given form — it’s a kind of thing we recognize, not make. 54% What is our place in nature? Active in a real nature — we cultivate, steward, transform. 48% Should we colonize space? Cultivating worlds beyond Earth is the next form of stewardship. 48% Is genetic engineering of food stewardship or domination? Genetic modification is cultivation by other means. 48% What happens to "you" when you die? A soul continues into another mode of being. 37% Can prayer for someone far away affect them? Prayer reaches because God or a cosmic ordering acts on the prayed-for. 37% Are coincidences ever more than coincidence? What looks like coincidence is providence — there is no such thing as a real coincidence. 37% Could an AI have a mind that matters? No — minds are not the kind of thing we engineer. 30% Do animals have moral standing comparable to humans? Moral standing comparable to humans requires what only humans have. 29% Could a fetal brain organoid in a petri dish be conscious? Without ensoulment, an organoid is tissue, not a person. 29% Should we trust expert testimony when we can't verify it? Defer to credentialed traditions; experts are the modern analog. 28% Is religious revelation a real source of knowledge? Revelation is the paradigm case of authoritative knowledge. 28% Does an LLM 'know' the things it correctly produces? An LLM has no soul to whom revelation could be addressed; the question doesn't apply. 28%
6 unaligned
Does history have a direction or meaning? Schools split: 37% / 23% / 19% — How is knowledge of reality produced? Schools split: 25% / 17% / 13% — Is salvation, liberation, or fulfillment individual or communal? Schools split: 15% / 14% / 4% — Is truth universal, tradition-bound, situated, or constructed? Schools split: 65% / 16% / 10% — What kind of religious-theological authority does the tradition recognize? Schools split: 44% / 16% / 14% — Who is the moral primary — the individual, the community, the cosmos, the class, or the species? Schools split: 40% / 28% / 14% —

Information · 4 dilemmas · 4 distinctive

Pattern, memory, and what is preserved or lost.

Distinctive · only 9% of schools agree (18/202)
Is anything truly lost when someone forgets?
The memory you don't retrieve, the conversation you can't remember, the face you no longer recognise — is the forgetting a loss of something real, or just the routine operation of a finite mind?
Information persists or doesn't depending on whether the holder is sustained.
On these views, conservation is not a flat cosmic law but a function of the conditions that hold. Memory persists where it is sustained — by divine attention, by community, by ritual, by practice — and is genuinely lost where it isn't. The asymmetry between …
Roads not taken Information is lost when a mind forgets; matter and energy continue, but the pattern is gone. (51%) · Information is conserved — the personal pattern is held even when an individual mind loses it. (39%) · Forgetting is the cosmic case, not the exception; nothing is conserved. (1%)
Distinctive · only 9% of schools agree (18/202)
Does deleting your data online destroy something real?
Account deletion, the right to be forgotten, the obsolescence of file formats, the slow decay of digital archives — whether any of this destroys something that was real depends on whether information is the kind of thing that can be destroyed.
Information persists where it is held; deletion releases what isn't held elsewhere.
On these views, information persists or doesn't depending on whether something is sustaining it. What is held in divine memory or in active communal practice continues; what is held only by the deleted artifact is genuinely released. The variable conservation maps onto a variable moral …
Roads not taken Information is genuinely lost when the substrate that hosted it goes; deletion really destroys. (51%) · Information at the cosmic level isn't destroyed; deletion only obscures access. (39%) · Nothing is fundamentally conserved; deletion is just routine impermanence. (1%)
Distinctive · only 9% of schools agree (18/202)
Could the dead, in principle, be brought back?
If we had perfect information about who someone was — their connectome, their behavioral patterns, their history — could we, in principle, restore them? The question is partly engineering, but the ceiling on the engineering is metaphysical.
What is held by God or sustaining practice can be restored; what isn't can't.
On these views, the conservation of personal information depends on what is sustaining it. The Eastern Orthodox doctrine of resurrection holds that the person is preserved in God's memory and restored in the resurrection by divine action operating on what God has held. What is …
Roads not taken The information dissipates with the substrate; restoration is in principle impossible. (51%) · The information that constitutes a person is conserved; restoration is in principle possible. (39%) · Nothing of what was can be restored; restoration is wishful framing. (1%)
Distinctive · only 9% of schools agree (18/202)
Is forgiveness ontologically possible?
When someone forgives, does the offense actually go away — erased, undone, no longer a fact — or does forgiveness reframe a wrong that persists exactly as it always was?
The offense persists where sustained and releases where conditionally absolved; forgiveness is real ontological work.
On these views, conservation is not a flat cosmic law but a function of what sustains. An offense persists where it is held — by holding-on, by ritual continuation, by divine attention to a particular debt — and is genuinely released where it is conditionally …
Roads not taken The offense is locally constituted by its substrate; when the substrate dissolves, the offense genuinely passes away. (51%) · The offense persists ontologically; forgiveness is real moral work, but it doesn't erase what was. (39%) · Nothing is preserved; the offense is impermanent, and holding it is the suffering. (1%)
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