ABSTRACT
The increasing popularity of yoga classes, videos, books,1 and gurus in the popular culture of the West today accentuates an interesting contrast between the classical Såm. khya-Yoga system of Indian philosophy known from the ancient texts of the Yoga S≠tra (YS) of Patañjali and the Såm. khya Kårikå (SK) of Û¬varakr.‚n.a and more modern appropriations of yoga. Indeed the first usage of the term yoga in Vedic literature goes back to the Taittir⁄ya Upani‚ad (2.4) from which time the word gains, as Eliade famously noted, a protean range of application, becoming one of the most salient characteristics of pan-Indic spirituality.2 A wide range of yogas develop: the ascetic disciplines of the Upani‚adic gurus, the many yogas of the Jains and Buddhists, the yogadar¬ana of the Yoga S≠tra, the karma, jñåna, and bhakti yogas of the Bhagavadg⁄tå, and a host of theistic ¡aiva and Vai‚n. ava yogas, Purånic yogas, and Vedåntic yogas of the various yoga Upani‚ads, and the Yogavåsi‚†ha. To this we must also add the medieval tantric yogas, ha†hayoga and its modern descendants listed in the yellow pages such as the Power yoga, Kripalu yoga, Iyengar yoga, Viniyoga, Ananda yoga, Vikram yoga, Transcendental Meditation etc. From the earliest time forward we have a constant revisioning of yoga. Patañjali himself seems, in his day, to have led the revisioning process: the disjointed nature of the Yoga S≠tra looks to many scholars like an effort to amalgamate early traditions of yogic practice from disparate sources with an underlying Såm. khya theory.3 This aphoristic, enigmatic compilation, which works to collect, explain and unite techniques of spiritual practice has somehow gathered to itself over the centuries a great deal of prestige. Known as one of six orthodox Vedic viewpoints (dar¬ana) and as the sister to the oldest school Såm. khya, the Yoga S≠tra, its practices and theories, seem to hang forever in the background of all future discussions of yoga, though its exact soteriology and metaphysics are honored more in the breach. Why should this be so?
