Book Review: Prashant Iyengar’s Ashtanga Yoga Of Patanjali – Siegfried Bleher

ASHTANGA YOGA OF PATANJALI (PHILOSOPHY, RELIGION CULTURE, ETHOS AND PRACTICES) BY PRASHANT IYENGAR

BY SIEGFRIED BLEHER, PH.D.

This 888-page work by Prashant Iyengar achieves many aims. Among them, a scholar’s clear analysis of a portion of an ancient text enjoying a modern resurgence, a teacher’s instructional manual to help bring the light of knowledge to a range of sadhakas, from beginner to accomplished, and an insightful practical guide for practitioners who inevitably encounter numerous questions along the yogic path. This work may also be considered a science manual for the science of yoga that maps out the procedure required to attain the aim of yoga, Samadhi. In 24 chapters, Prashant translates and expands upon the portion of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras that is Ashtanga Yoga (Eight Limbs of Yoga), or Sutras II.28 to III.3.

Prashant analyzes each sutra into its component parts and brings the parts together to give a deeper understanding than is possible in a cursory reading. Each analysis is enhanced by examples to make the principles he elucidates accessible to beginners. Those who wish to go further are provided with progressive refinements.

Prashant begins with a sober assessment that in the present day we are collectively not suited to the original intention of Patanjali’s Ashtanga Yoga— we are more inclined toward materialistic pursuits than to spiritual practice or depth. Even so, he encourages us to begin. Prashant exhorts us to develop gratitude (Yajna), generosity and gifting (Daana), and austerity and restraint (Tapas) before taking up yogic practices proper. The careful teasing apart of each sutra and the elaboration of its meaning through comparative study with other texts makes this an important complement to widely read works in the field, such as Guruji’s Light on the Yoga Sutras of Patanajali, and Edwin Bryant’s The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. The pace and rhythm and spiraling nature of the presentation progressively unfolds the subject for student-practitioners, from simple interpretations they can easily access to subtler meanings that are not commonly recognized. Prashant holds a conversation with the reader over the course of several sittings, reminding them where they had arrived in the last sitting before continuing on. It is possible to read this work in two ways. One is to become informed about Ashtanga Yoga, to clarify one’s understanding before beginning and throughout one’s practice, to glean insights about this path that are not found elsewhere. The other is to read this work as a spiritual practice of discernment. For example, Prashant describes seven channels of pursuit, all of them with the prefix “Yog,” the first four of which I mention here: “Viyog,” the channel of disjunction, in which we experience bliss when we mitigate and disassociate ourselves from the causes of the sorrows of life; “Samyog,” the channel of inclusions and associations in which we cultivate conjunctions with noble qualities such as mental restraint, sensory restraint, wisdom, peace, and contentment; “Yog,” in which our efforts are to maintain and augment one’s existing noble qualities and attributes; and “Viniyog,” which, in Prashant’s words, means “using— applying the yogic components that we possess innately, intrinsically, inherently, and indigenously.” Now why did Prashant not stop with only one of these terms, say “intrinsically”? Some reflection shows that each of these terms points to a slightly different meaning. And, according to Prashant, we possess yogic components that are all of these things and that must be applied and developed through Viniyog. Consider the capacity for absence of greed— Aparigraha, which is treated in Chapter 9.

All who are familiar with Ashtanga yoga and Sutra II.30 recognize the meaning of Aparigraha as absence of greed. And the fruit of Aparigraha, as stated in Sutra II.39, is knowledge of one’s past and future births. Prashant helps the reader understand how this fruit can arise. He begins by pointing out that Aparigraha is not merely nonacceptance of instruments of pleasure for one can reject pleasure out of frustration and dejection. Instead, Aparigraha is “nonacceptance by discerning certain defects or drawbacks to indulgence.” Being aware of these defects helps lead us to Aparigraha.

By appreciating the wide-ranging implications of Parigraha, we may also see that “Aparigraha is not only noncoveting or nonhoarding. It is a great qualifier of spiritual wisdom. It is deep inwardliness, which reveals roots of our psyche and consciousness.” Prashant explains that our intellectual resources, which he calls Janashakti, are externalized and depleted by the mental effort required when seeking objects of

pleasure. Through Aparigraha “the pleasurewardliness diminishes, the outwardliness ebbs, and he gets the soulwardliness… he gets the scanning visions of all the manifestations that the soul has gone [through] so far.”

Prashant also offers reinterpretations of certain sutras he feels have been misinterpreted in other texts. For example, the four kinds of samprajnata listed in Sutra I.17 as vitarka, vicara, ananda, and asmita are often associated with the common meanings of these terms. However, Prashant explains that vitarka does not refer to the apprehension of sensory objects in Samadhi, nor even of supersensory apprehension of common sensory objects as, for instance, might take place in clairvoyance. Rather the term “vitarka” in Sutra I.17 refers to apprehension of one of the panchamahbhutas, the five great elemental principles, which are not objects of sensory perception but principles that form the supports (alambana) for consciousness. Consciousness comes to be “one with” and completely absorbed in one of these principles or supports in vitarka Samadhi.

An example of “ethos” in the subtitle of this work is the case Prashant makes for the relevance and importance of yoga, of the science of yoga for our times: “Evil is never overcome by evil, but it ceases only through goodness, self-purity. Selfpurification comes through observing vows and forgetting wrongs” (55). Yoga provides such a path toward self-purification: “Yoga not only describes the practice of truth, it tries to teach us how to practice the truth by developing the infrastructure for its practice. The unique feature of the Ashtanga-yoga is that it helps one to develop the psychodynamics for practicing cherished qualities such as satya.”

In this work of Prashant’s, we are invited to bring the same discernment into our study of the Sutras and our daily lives that we bring to our practice of asana. Whereas other works on Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras may share the fruit of the authors’ sadhana, Prashant also offers us in the reading of his work a sadhana in its own right to complement and fulfill one’s practice of asana and pranayama.

Siegfried Bleher, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in physics at Fairmont State University and a Certified Iyengar Yoga Teacher (Intermediate Junior III). He and his wife Kimberly Williams run Inner Life Yoga Studio in Morgantown, WV.