Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtra is the heart of yoga.

The Yogasutra is found in The Heart of Yoga: Developing a Personal Practice by TKV Desikachar

The heart, hṛdaya, is that which does not change and Patañjali gave a permanent definition and form to yoga in his Sūtra. The heart without prāṇa, however, is not alive and is without relevance for us. Desikachar explains that the teaching relationship is the prāṇa or life of the Yoga Sūtra; it is the teacher who brings the heart into life. The Yoga Sūtra is a potent tool for the teacher who is able to make it relevant to the student and thus transmit the transformative power of the heart.”

“Patañjali presented his work in the style known as sūtra, that which has very few words, yet is free from ambiguity, full of essence, universal in context, and affirmative. The sūtra (from which we get suture) links the teacher, the teaching, and the student. As yoga study and practice develop, the message of the Sūtra takes on a deeper resonance and becomes more relevant, more revealing. There can be no haste or exaggerated effort to gain its understanding; it must be a natural process.

There is uncertainty as to who Patañjali was. There are some who think of him as the divine incarnation of the serpent Ananta who supports the whole universe. He is the Adhiśeṣa, “the first servant of God,” who “being so close to God, knows the teaching of God best.” We can assume that Patañjali did not originate the yoga teaching but inherited it from the vastness of the Vedas. On the instruction of a great teacher, he identified all the teachings in the Vedas about the mind and presented them in this precise, organized form. Yoga concepts such as Īśvara, kleśa, karma, guṇas, puruṣa, samādhi, siddhi, and kaivalya are all contained in the ancient Upaniṣads “in different forms. The Vedas, however, are presented in no particular order, making it difficult to study anything in a coherent fashion. It is a great gift therefore that Patañjali systematized the yoga teachings from the Vedas into an accessible system of development.

The short, pithy words and meanings of the Sūtra enabled oral transmission of the yoga understanding from teacher to student through the centuries. In our time, it was Krishnamacharya who had the privilege of learning the intricacies of these words at a very practical level from his teacher, Ramamohan Brahmachari. Likewise, Desikachar’s study and practice with Krishnama-charya has resulted in clarity and the present-day relevance of every sūtra. Krishnamacharya and Desikachar are not interested in spiritual or philosophical speculation. Rather, they have brought to yoga an intellectual rigor, technical definition, and practice to determine the means by which each person may reduce duḥkha (suffering).

Mark Whitwell