History of Dharmashastra (Ancient and Mediaeval Religious and Civil Law in India) v7.c94.162

v7.c94.162

The author of the Yogasūtra is, according to the tradition embodied in such comparatively early commentaries as that of Vācaspatimiśra, said to be Patañjali. Important questions arise as to his age and his identity with Patañjali, the author of the famous Mahābhāṣya on Pāṇini's grammar and the Vārtikas thereon. The grammarian Patañjali is generally held to have flourished about 150 B. C. Therefore, the question of identity becomes important for the date of the Yogasūtra. Some scholars like Prof. B. Liebich, Dr. Haüer (p. 98 of the work of 1932) and Prof. Das Gupta favour the identity of the two, but several others such as Jacobi, Keith, Woods, Renou are against it. Prof. Renou (in I. H. Q. vol. XVI. pp. 586-591) examines the question from the grammatical point of view, points out that certain words like Pratyāhāra, Upasarga, Pratyaya are used in the Yogasūtra in senses entirely different from the senses of these words in the Mahābhāṣya. But as the subjects of the two works are entirely different, the same words may have acquired different senses. Similarly, Prof. Renou relies on breaches of grammatical rules (in the Yogasūtra I. 34), while he says that Patañjali in the Mahābhāṣya is very strict in following Pāṇini's rules though Pāṇini himself is rarely not strict in observing his own rules as in 'tat-prayojako hetuśca' (I. 4 55) which is against his own sūtra 'trjakābhyāṁ kartari' (II. 2. 15); but Patañjali also employs such an expressions as ‘aviravikanyāya’²²⁹⁴ (which should be avyavikanyāyena) for which Patañjali is criticized in the long Pūrvapakṣa on Vyākaraṇa contained in the Tantravārtika and which is not explained away in the reply to the Pūrvapakṣa. It cannot be supposed that the Yogasūtra for the first time settled the technical terms of Yoga. Yoga terms had been evolving from Upaniṣad times and Patañjali only used them in the sense which they had acquired in the course of centuries. Prof. Renou arrives at the conclusion that the Yogasūtra is later by several centuries than the Mahābhāṣya. Jacobi in his paper on ‘the dates of the philosophical sūtras of the Brāhmaṇas’ (in JAOS. vol. 31 pp. 1-29) holds (p. 29) that the Yogasūtra must be later that the 5th century A. D. and, following Garbe, thinks that it is not improbable that the Vyāsabhāṣya was composed in the 7th century A. D. The views of Jacobi are strongly criticized by Jwala Prasad in J. R. A. S. for 1930 pp. 365-375. The present author disagrees with Jacobi and Prof. Renou.