The Third Chapter of Yoga Sutras: A Problematic Text with a Discussion of Powers

The aim of this study is to discuss the problematic nature of the third chapter of the Yoga Sutras. An early discussion of the importance of ascetic powers in the West was offered by Charles Rockwell Lanman of Harvard University in 1917 for the American Philological Association. Because the Yoga Sūtras compiled by Patañjali devote one entire chapter to siddhas (powers) in a text of only four chapters this has caused scholars to offer various reasons for this problematic aspect of the text. After critically reviewing the opinions of scholars with respect to the imbalance in the text to understand Patañjali’s decision, this essay places the text within the historical context of asceticism in India in order to grasp developments that might have shaped the compiler’s mind. The historical development of asceticism in India was also accompanied by many narratives that stressed the importance of ascetic powers and helped to shape Patañjali’s decision to make a quarter of his text about powers, even though these powers were acknowledged to be a hindrance to an aspirant’s final goal.

Around the fourth century CE, the legendary Patañjali, compiler of the Yoga Sūtras, collected elements associated with ascetic practices in order to serve as a guidebook for others. In his attempt to bring unity to the various pre-existing yogic traditions, Patañjali gathered together various elements into aphoristic, cryptic, and esoteric statements (sūtras) that lent themselves more to remembrance and oral transmission. Because the text was incomprehensible, it invited commentaries from authorities with the intention of rendering the text comprehensible to the uninitiated. The Yoga Sūtras consisted of four parts with about three-quarters of the text focusing on technique and the third part of the text concerned with powers gained by yogis practicing the various disciplines. Hence a quarter of the text was concerned with these various supernatural powers called in the introduction to chapter three vibhūtis, but called siddhas in the remainder of the chapter.

According to the contents of the Yoga Sūtras and its third chapter, these powers include the ability to know, for example, the past and future, awareness of past rebirths, ability to read the mind of another person, awareness of the approach of one’s death, intuiting the location of hidden objects, and intuiting the presence of the puruṣa (self). These are examples of cognitive (jñāna) powers. Powers (Siddhas) that are more physical in nature include, for instance, the ability for a yogi to become invisible, have the strength of an elephant, ability to enter the body of another person, levitation, acute hearing, the ability to fly, become disembodied, and gain a perfected body. These various forms of mental and physical powers also find their way into Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain narratives that will be illustrated later in this essay.

A reader of the Yoga Sūtras is informed that these powers are a result of practicing the final three parts (samyama) of the path to liberation that begins with concentration (dhāranā) and includes meditation (dhyāna), and absorption (samādhi), and all major commentators agree that the various powers are results of practicing yoga, and are not the goal of the yogic path. In addition, practitioners are warned not to become attached to the powers gained by yogis because they are a trap that keeps a yogi attached to the world. Nonetheless, within the context of a “how to manual,” it is curious that an entire quarter of the book is devoted to powers (siddhas). Patañjali obviously considered the acquisition of powers to be an essential aspect of the yogic path. This apparent oddity of the text has puzzled scholars, and various attempts have been made by scholars of yoga to attempt to make sense of this feature of the text. This essay proposes to reconsider and attempt to understand what might have motivated Patañjali to devote an entire chapter of his four-chapter text to the subject of yogic powers. To meet this purpose of the essay, it is advisable to review interpretations of these powers by different scholars and then to place these powers into their historical context. Thirdly, examples of yogis/ascetics using powers in various narratives will be included because these stories are part of the cultural milieu in which Patañjali worked on the text. Because the yogi has been an ascetic figure traditionally in Indian culture, I have used the terms yogi and ascetic interchangeably.