Patanjaliपतंजलि

Patanjali (पतंजलि) is the name attached to the Yoga Sutras, the terse Sanskrit aphorisms — fewer than two hundred — that organised the practices and psychology of yoga into a coherent system and became the foundational text of one of the six classical schools of Hindu philosophy. Of the man himself history knows almost nothing; scholarly estimates of the text's date range across several centuries around the turn of the common era. Tradition, untroubled by the gap, supplied a biography of its own: Patanjali is an incarnation of Adishesha, the thousand-headed serpent on whom Vishnu rests, fallen (pata) into the joined hands (anjali) of a woman praying for a son.

The Yoga Sutras

The sutras open with a definition that the whole tradition has turned upon: yoga is the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind. What follows is less a manual of postures than a map of consciousness — the obstacles that disturb it, the disciplines that steady it, and the states that lie beyond it. The celebrated eight limbs, ashtanga, ascend from ethical restraints and observances through posture, breath-regulation and withdrawal of the senses to concentration, meditation and samadhi. Nearly every later yoga lineage, whatever its actual methods, has claimed descent from this scheme, and commentaries on the sutras, beginning with the one attributed to Vyasa, form a literature of their own.

One Patanjali or three

Indian tradition came to credit a single Patanjali with three sciences: yoga for the mind, grammar for speech, and medicine for the body — a triad honoured in a well-known invocatory verse. The grammarian Patanjali, author of the Mahabhashya, the great commentary on Panini, is a securely dated figure of about the second century BCE; whether he and the yoga compiler were the same man is a question scholars generally answer in the negative, though the identification is ancient and cherished. The medical attribution is looser still. The composite Patanjali, however, became the figure the tradition reveres.

The serpent sage

Iconography renders the legend directly: Patanjali is shown as a sage from the waist up, coiled serpent below, hands folded in anjali. Shaiva tradition places him at Chidambaram, where he is counted among the sages granted the vision of Shiva's cosmic dance, and images of the serpent-bodied devotee attend Nataraja in southern temples. With the worldwide spread of yoga in the modern era, invocations to Patanjali are now chanted in studios on every continent — an afterlife no other ancient Indian systematiser has enjoyed.