The Yoga Sutras · Pada 1: Samadhi

The very first word is ‘atha’, and do not make the mistake of taking it lightly. Almost every major work of Sanskrit philosophy begins with it, and its hidden meaning is this: something has already happened, and now this begins. So Patanjali assumes that the reader has seen a little of life’s churn, has recognized the round of pleasure and pain, and now wants an orderly path. The word ‘anushasana’, discipline, is also different from ‘shiksha’, instruction. Shiksha means receiving information; anushasana means a practice that is repeated, one that has a structure. The first day of any real skill gives exactly this feeling: all right, now the real work begins.

The next two sutras are the heart of the whole philosophy of yoga, and everything else is an expansion of them, so pause here a moment. Yoga means the stilling of the vrittis, the movements of the chitta. Do not take chitta to be the mind; it is the background awareness in which thoughts arise, like a pond. The pond is the chitta, the waves that form on it are the vrittis, and we often mistake the waves themselves for the pond. Do not read nirodha as suppression; that would be too violent a word. This is hot tea cooling on its own, left to sit rather than blown on. And when the waves come to rest, the drashta, the seer, settles into its true form. The seer means the one who sees, awareness itself. All our lives we stay sunk in the waves, so we take the seer to be just another wave. The moment the noise stops, the ‘I’ looks like something else, a quiet, watching presence that was there before too, only it could not be heard. The word ‘avasthanam’ speaks of coming back to one’s own home, a home that was always open, only the way to it was lost in the noise.

Outside of stilling, our everyday condition is that the seer looks just like the waves. We say ‘I am angry’, while the truth is that a wave of anger has risen in me. The first sentence is identification, the second is only watching, and the difference looks small yet is very large. Place something red on clear glass and the glass itself begins to look red; the seer, in the same way, gets dyed in the color of the wave. Then Patanjali enters into classification: the waves are of five kinds, and each kind either brings suffering or does not. Here is a relief, every wave is not bad. A correct memory, a clean inference, these are waves that bring no suffering. Thinking itself can continue. The yogi’s real work is to recognize which wave brings suffering and which does not.

Now he counts out the five waves, and the list surprises you, so close is it to modern cognitive science. Pramana, right knowledge. Viparyaya, wrong understanding. Vikalpa, imagination built from words. Nidra, sleep. And smriti, memory. Whatever ran through your mind all day today will fit somewhere among these five. The most delightful point: sleep too is counted as a wave, a particular state whose object is ‘there was nothing’, which is exactly why on waking we can say ‘I slept well.’ Right knowledge arrives by three routes: pratyaksha, where you see for yourself; anumana, inference, smoke seen means fire; and agama, where a trustworthy source has told you, a shastra, a guru, or properly tested research. Any ‘knowledge’ outside these three is really viparyaya.

Now comes a definition for each of the remaining four waves, and each hides a fine point. Viparyaya is the wrong understanding that takes a thing to be what it simply is not, like taking a rope for a snake in the dark. The rope is real, the snake is what appears, and as long as the illusion holds the fear feels completely true. Most of our distress is exactly this, taking a temporary state for a fixed identity. Vikalpa is the wave built from words with no real thing behind it, like ‘the horns of a rabbit’, though this is not always bad, since mathematical ideas and plans for the future are vikalpa too and very useful. Nidra is the wave that rests on the experience of ‘there was nothing’, a recorded experience rather than an empty blank. And smriti is the wave in which something experienced earlier returns intact, though note this: every time a memory comes back it is actually a fresh construction, the mind is shaping it again.

The five waves are to be stilled, so how? Patanjali’s answer is small, just two tools are needed, and both run side by side: abhyasa and vairagya. Abhyasa means doing the same thing again and again; vairagya means releasing your grip on its result. Practice alone becomes an obsession; dispassion alone becomes sitting back and giving everything up. For an aircraft to fly it needs both the thrust of the engine and the wheels leaving the ground, and if even one is missing the plane never lifts. Then comes the precise definition of practice: the effort to stay settled in that quiet state is practice itself. The target is just to be there, with nothing to ‘achieve’. In meditation people often want a peak experience, yet peaks will keep coming and going; the real work is to sit as long as you can in that plain, grounded quiet.

But when does that practice become firm ground? Three conditions, and all three are needed. Dirghakala, meaning years, not months; in a window that small nothing will show. Nairantarya, meaning no breaks in between; once-a-week heroics do not work here, it has to be daily, same time, same place. And satkara, meaning reverence, the most overlooked and the most necessary, never taking the practice lightly. The hour for meditation arrives and you stay sitting there checking email, and you have sent a small signal that email is large and the practice small, and these small signals add up. Then comes the turn of vairagya, and it too has two layers. The first layer: no craving for either the things of this world you have seen or the things you have heard about in the scriptures. Note carefully, vairagya is toward the things of the world and toward religious rewards as well, since ‘you will get heaven’ is a kind of craving too. This is a mastery, vashikara, where the pull of things is understood and yet no tug rises within, nothing forced down. And higher even than that is a para-vairagya that comes from recognizing the purusha, where things need not be given up because the grip was never there at all. This is the heart of Samkhya philosophy, identification falling away even from the three gunas, sattva, rajas, and tamas.

Now Patanjali shows a gradient within samadhi, since samadhi is no single-piece thing. Samprajnata samadhi is built across four stages. Vitarka, awareness resting on something gross, a mantra, a form. Vichara, on something subtle, an idea, a vibration. Ananda, where the object almost drops away and only bliss remains. And asmita, where even the bliss falls and only the plain sense of ‘I am’ is left. At every stage some object still remains, which is why all of this is ‘with knowledge’. The next sutra goes past even this: there is another samadhi, asamprajnata, in which there is no object, only awareness seated with itself. But Patanjali is honest, even here the old deep imprint is still present, full liberation is not yet, this is the pause just before it.

Now the question arises, how does one reach this deep state. Patanjali separates two kinds of seeker. For some beings that samadhi-like state comes naturally, a leftover portion of practice from earlier births, though this is only a pause, not lasting freedom, and afterward they return to ordinary life again. In today’s language, some children are calm and inward-turned from birth. For the rest of the seekers, who do not have this old momentum, samadhi comes in the order of a staircase, and every rung is built from the one before. Shraddha, a working trust that this path is serious. From shraddha comes virya, energy; from energy, smriti, steady mindfulness; from mindfulness, samadhi, concentration; and in a concentrated mind, prajna, understanding, rises on its own. A lovely thing: this sequence matches the ‘pancha indriya’, the five faculties of the Buddhist tradition, exactly.

And what does the speed depend on? A straight, unhedged statement: for those whose longing is intense, the destination is near. People practice for years and nothing happens, because the longing is faint, yet this longing cannot be manufactured artificially, it comes when the true measure of one’s suffering is seen clearly. That longing too has three grades, mild, middling, and very intense, and here is a relief, do not compare. Each grade has its own speed, the path is open even to the slow-paced seeker, the clock is simply scaled differently.

Now comes Patanjali’s most talked-about turn, so pause on it a while. Up to the twenty-second sutra this was a manual of self-effort. And suddenly one small word, ‘va’, meaning ‘or’, and a completely different door opens, surrender. Note this, it is an alternative, not an addition. There are two paths, one of systematic practice, the other of Ishvara-pranidhana, and both lead to the same destination. Then comes the definition of Ishvara, and it startles: Patanjali’s Ishvara is not ‘a God who creates the world’, for in his Samkhya framework no one makes the world. This is a special purusha untouched by the four, klesha, karma, karma-phala, and samskara. All of us are tangled in these four; Ishvara is not tangled, and that is the only difference.

Now three colors of that Ishvara open up. First: in it lies that seed of omniscience beyond which there is nothing further. All of us have knowledge, but only a little at a time; in Ishvara that same knowledge is without any limit, and every person’s capacity for knowledge is really a small version of that same seed. Second: it is the guru even of the oldest gurus, because it is not bound by time. Human gurus carry knowledge forward up to a point, yet the source of that knowledge is Ishvara itself, and it has never once been absent. And third, the most practical: its signifying word is ॐ. This is no arbitrary name; ‘vachaka’ means precisely to point through an inner relationship, a natural resonance between ॐ and Ishvara.

So what is to be done with ॐ? Its japa, its repetition, done along with contemplation of its meaning, never a mechanical drone. While saying ॐ, let the meaning of Ishvara stay settled in the mind; only then does attention drop anchor and sit, otherwise the repeating stays mere background noise. And what does this do? Two things at once. One, the attention that always stayed outward turns inward. Two, the obstacles listed ahead begin to weaken. This sutra is good precisely because it can be tested: practice, and watch, is attention turning inward, are the obstacles lessening.

Now the obstacles themselves are counted, and look at Patanjali’s precision, nine obstacles, each in its own compartment, a working checklist. Illness at the level of the body; lethargy and sloth at the level of mental energy; doubt and delusion at the level of understanding; carelessness and craving at the level of habit; and failing to reach a stage and failing to hold it there at the level of progress. When the practice stalls, check among these nine which one is active right now. And these obstacles do not stay in the mind alone, they come down into the body very quickly, and four marks come with them, pain, restlessness of mind, trembling of the body, and disturbed breath. The reverse is true too, if the breath is disturbed the mind is disturbed, which is why asana and pranayama come in Pada 2.

So how are these obstacles to be stopped? Patanjali’s first prescription is straightforward: practice on a single thing. Binding to one thing cuts the obstacles, and today, when every app is fighting to pull your attention, this advice has only sharpened. Then comes the loveliest sutra, a fourfold template that gathers up almost the whole of social life: maitri, friendliness, toward the happy; karuna, compassion, toward the suffering; mudita, gladness, toward the virtuous; and upeksha, equanimity, toward the wrongdoer. The interesting thing, the hardest of these is friendliness toward the happy, greeting someone’s joy with friendship while something inside pricks. Do not turn compassion for the suffering into pity; it is the kind that reaches out a hand. Gladness for the virtuous has grown harder in an age of comparison. And upeksha does not mean getting entangled; if someone is doing wrong, do not keep burning in anger, set it right if you can, otherwise step back, because anger itself is a wave. The ‘brahmavihara’ of the Buddhist tradition match this exactly.

Now Patanjali opens several doors for holding the mind; enter through whichever is open for you. The first is the body’s: the mind quiets by exhaling and holding the breath, and specifically exhaling and holding, not inhaling, because pulling the breath in revs the nervous system up and letting it out brings it down; in any tense moment let out two long breaths, and the difference arrives within thirty seconds. Second, the rising of a subtle sense-experience also steadies the mind; in deep meditation some seekers experience a particular scent, light, or sound that becomes an anchor, though this is a middling method, most people do not get it and often it is only imagination. And third, an experience of an inner light beyond sorrow, which the yoga traditions call chitta-jyoti; if it comes, an anchor, if it does not, no problem, the practice does not hang on this.

There are still more doors. One is deeply lovely: make a vitaraga person, someone free of passion, the support of your mind; settle into your mind someone who has become calm and unattached, your guru, the Buddha, whoever you truly revere, and their mental presence itself holds the mind. Today’s science calls this ‘co-regulation’, a calm presence by its very presence creating a resonance in others, and Patanjali is saying this works even when you recall them in imagination. Second, by making the experience of dream and sleep a support, because even while sleeping awareness was present, which is exactly why we can say ‘I slept well’; the whole tradition of yoga-nidra grew from this one sutra. And at the end, Patanjali’s generosity: or from whatever object of meditation you please. This settles that the method comes second and the stilling comes first, so do not get caught in the tangle of which app, which teacher; whatever supports your daily practice is enough.

And when the mind truly stills, a particular mastery of its own opens: it can hold attention at any scale, from the tiniest particle to the largest expanse, the mind is no longer a slave to scale. This claim can be tested; after stilling, hold attention on some tiny detail, then widen it, the whole room, the whole city, the whole sky, both are within reach. Then comes the most luscious sutra of Pada 1, which tells how a stilled mind works. When the waves fall quiet the mind becomes like a clear crystal, taking on the color of whatever it is near, the one who sees, the act of seeing, or the thing seen, each time becoming completely one with it, and still without sticking. This is samapatti, and what modern psychology calls ‘flow’ is really this ‘tatstha-tadanjanata’.

Now the rungs within samapatti open, starting from the gross. The first rung is savitarka, where you are steady on the object but a stream still runs along behind it, ‘this is that thing, this is its name, this is its meaning’, name, meaning, and cognition all mixed together; this is the easiest rung and the place to begin. The next rung is nirvitarka, where even the sense of ‘I am seeing this thing’ falls away, only the pure essence of the thing remains and the mind is one with it. This is the first time the wall between the one who sees and the thing seen vanishes; many seekers turn back right here out of fear of the ‘I’ melting, yet this fear is a part of the path itself, nothing to panic about.

The same pattern now repeats on subtle things. In place of a pillar, fix attention on an idea, then only the essence of that idea remains; this is the sequence from savichara to nirvichara, samadhi resting on subtle things. But this growing-subtler will stop somewhere, and Samkhya says it comes to rest at alinga, the unmanifest root prakriti, beyond which prakriti has no form at all. Things grow subtler and subtler, and finally they come to rest at the subtlest ‘thing’, prakriti itself, and beyond that only the seeing purusha remains.

Now Patanjali gives a name: these four, savitarka, nirvitarka, savichara, and nirvichara, are called sabija samadhi, meaning ‘with seed’. At every rung some object still remains, a ‘seed’ is present from which something further can sprout, so the real emptiness is still ahead. And the moment mastery arrives in nirvichara samadhi, an inner refinement comes. The key word is ‘vaisharadya’, mastery, meaning this is now something that can be repeated, no longer an occasional occurrence, and there is a very large difference between something happening once and its being possible every time. Then an inner clarity settles in that used to come and go; Patanjali calls this adhyatma-prasada, a steady inner peace that rests on no condition.

The understanding that wakes in that state has a name, ritambhara prajna, understanding filled with truth. Rita means the natural order of the cosmos, things as they really are, and ritambhara prajna is the understanding that grasps reality without twisting it. Our everyday ‘knowing’ is filtered, old assumptions, biases, the mood of the moment all mixing into it; on this one no filter is laid. And this prajna is distinct from scriptural knowledge and from inferential knowledge, both, because it reaches particular details. Scripture gives the general rule, reasoning draws the conclusion, but ritambhara gives a direct cognition of one particular situation, what this specific occasion really is. Experienced people sometimes have a direct feel for a situation that the data cannot justify yet which turns out right; this is a ripened ability, no fluke.

And now Pada 1 reaches its final two steps. Ritambhara prajna leaves an imprint too, but its imprint is special, it does not let the other imprints rise at all. There is no war to wage against old habits and conditioning; you simply lay down a new, strong pattern, and it suppresses the old ones on its own, the mind changes by addition, not by subtraction. But that last imprint is, in the end, an imprint too, and when it too comes to rest, everything comes to rest, no seed remains for any further movement; this is nirbija samadhi. Here Pada 1 ends, this is the destination. And notice one last thing, Patanjali is telling the destination first and the path afterward, and this is done deliberately, because once you know where you are going, the very meaning of the road changes. Carry the destination in your pocket, and we will meet in Pada 2.