Yoga Sūtras

Patañjali

3 ideas

1. Five kleśas as cascading afflictions

   Suffering has five roots: avidyā (ignorance), asmitā (I-am-ness, identifying the self with the mind's instruments), rāga (attraction), dveṣa (aversion), and abhiniveśa (clinging to life, fear of ending). Ignorance is the field in which the other four grow, since mistaking the impermanent, impure, painful, and non-self for the permanent, pure, pleasant, and self produces the false identification that then generates attachment, repulsion, and dread. The kleśas can be dormant, weakened, interrupted, or fully active, so practice aims to thin them before they fire rather than fight them at full strength.

2. Yoga is stilling the mind's fluctuations

   Yoga is defined as citta-vṛtti-nirodha, the cessation of the mind-stuff's turnings. The five vṛttis are valid knowledge, error, conceptualization, sleep, and memory. When the turnings stop, the seer rests in its own nature; when they run, the seer takes on the form of whatever fluctuation is present. Stilling them comes through two paired forces: abhyāsa, sustained practice kept up long and without interruption, and vairāgya, non-attachment to what is seen or heard of.

3. Eight limbs from ethics to absorption

   The path runs in eight stages. It starts with outer restraints (yama: non-harm, truth, non-stealing, continence, non-grasping) and observances (niyama), then moves to posture (āsana), breath regulation (prāṇāyāma), and withdrawal of the senses (pratyāhāra). It ends in three inner stages practiced together as saṃyama: concentration (dhāraṇā), meditation (dhyāna), and absorption (samādhi). The order matters because behavioral and bodily agitation must settle before attention can hold one object, and sustained attention on one object is what dissolves the observer-object split.

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