Patanjali’s Path to Yoga - W B Yeats

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Some years ago I bought The Yoga-System of Patanjali, translated and edited by James Horton Woods and published by the Harvard Press. It is the standard edition, final, impeccable in scholastic eyes, even in the eyes of a famous poet and student of Samskrit, who used it as a dictionary. But then the poet was at his university, but lately out of school, had not learned to hate all scholar’s cant and classroom slang, nor was he an old man in a hurry.

Certainly before the Ajanta Caverns were painted, almost certainly before the ribbed dome and bell columns of Karli were carved, naked ascetics had put what they believed an ancient wisdom into short aphorisms for their pupils to get by heart and put in practice. I come in my turn, no grammarian, but a man engaged in that endless research into life, death, God, that is every man’s revery. I want to hear the talk of those naked men, and I am certain they never said ‘The subliminal impression produced this (super repetive balanced state)’ not talked of ‘predicate relations’. Then I found among some typed papers on various subjects a first draft of Shree Purohit Swami’s translation and was moderately content. A little later he said he was engaged on a commentary, and when we had finished The Ten Principal Upanishads he began to read it out. Now and then I would stop him to simplify or condense a phrase, or to ask him this or that. He had practiced certain meditations, had certain experiences described or implied by Patanjali, and as a Brahman monk had encircled India for nine years. He knew what he wrote about, he knew it in his bones as no European scholar could, and now after a couple of years I re-read with excitement. With his consent I lent the manuscript to the only Indian scholar in my circle, and though her excitement was not less than mine she objected to the anecdotes, the personal experiences that seemed to her to break the logical tension. If they are a fault, the fault is mine, for I begged the Swami to be as anecdotal, biographical, as he could, because we know nothing of those who study and put in practice the aphorisms of Patanjali.

© "Patanjali’s Path to Yoga" by WB Yeats, published by Rupa & Company, 7/16, Ansari Road, Daryaganj, New Delhi 110 002.

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