ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the likelihood that Hariharananda Aranya did indeed meet a Samkhyayogin ascetic who belonged to an ancient surviving lineage of a Samkhyayoga tradition. David White in his biography on the Yogasutra has argued that the Yogasutra tradition in the centuries preceding the nineteenth century had primarily become a dead tradition. Aranya wrote a poem in Sanskrit, printed in Bengali letters, in the dedication to his text Samkhya Pranatattva published in 1902 in which a parampara of a living Samkhyayoga tradition is presented. Adinath Chatterjee met his Guru only briefly and after his initiation as a Samnyasin he chanced upon an old text of Samkhya-yoga in a library. The akhand path of this text marks the anniversaries of the samadh is of the gurus. Book printing made knowledge available to a larger number of people with education who did not need access to an oral tradition in order to read the texts.
