Sutras 1.27 - 1.28. Sanskrit and mantra-yoga

The following two lines of Yoga Sutras are dedicated to mantras and power of the sound.

तस्य वाचकः प्रणवः ॥२७॥

1.27. tasya vācakaḥ praṇavaḥ

तज्जपस्तदर्थभावनम् ॥२८॥

1.28. tajjapastadarthabhāvanam 

Sutras 27 and 28 tell that “the expression of that (Isvara) is OM (pranava)” and “the repetition of it (Om) in one mind’s eye allows one to experience it (the Isvara)”. Without getting into specifics of what the Om-sound means let us raise a more important question: why do mantras generally exist and how do they work?

Sutra 1.25. Ishvara and the world tree. The metaphysics of plato

The line 25 of Yoga Sutras compares Ishvara with a seed that contains omniscience (sarva-jnana-bidja):

तत्र निरतिशयं सार्वज्ञबीजम् ॥ २५॥

1. 25. tatra niratiśayaṃ sārva-jña-bījam 

1. 25. In Him [Ishvara] is the complete manifestation of the seed of omniscience. [Engl. transl. by Swami Satchidananda – translator’s note].

This happens to be in a remarkable manner aligned with an amazing line from Katha Upanishad:

An aesthetically-linguistic note on Yoga and samadhi

I cannot stop marveling at the way how deeply, almost at the archetypic level those various aspects of ancient Indian views – yoga, philosophy, grammar and medicine – happen to be intertwined. Here is the recent fact that has astonished me.

As I have already written in one of my previous articles http://yoga-sutra-comment-eng.blogspot.com/2015/02/blog-post.html almost all words in Sanskrit (except the borrowed ones) have derived from the so called verbal roots which complete list and classification have been drawn in “Dhatupatha” directory that was compiled more than two thousand years ago. 

Sutra 1.26. Learning from the universe. The problem of yoga schools classicality

The next line of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras that we shall today consider continues the theme of Ishvara.

स पूर्वेषामपि गुरुः कालेनानवच्छेदात् ॥ २६॥

1.26. sa pūrveṣāmapi guruḥ kālenānavacchedāt ॥ 

sa (m.Nom.sg.) - he;

pūrveṣām (m.Gen. pl) – previous, prior, senior; with Genitive case and plural form considered – “of the previous”, “of the senior”;

The Fundamentals of sanskrit grammar

Whenever someone suggests that you translate Yoga Sutras using only a dictionary and without knowing enough about Sanskrit grammar – don’t fall for it! This person is either not aware of what he is talking about and has never been doing it himself, or it is no further than the third or fourth line of the original text that he himself has managed to “advance”. Sanskrit is a fairly sophisticated language which grammar is intricate enough. Words that have been “distorted” in the course of morphologic transformations, including the rules of guna and sandhi, may bear little resemblance to their dictionary forms, while the logic of cases is somewhat different from what we are used to in our languages [Russian and Ukrainian – translator’s note].

Sutra 1.26. Ishvara, prakriti and sanskrit grammar

In the previous article I have mentioned the Tantric concept of Purusha (Ishvara) and Prakriti in which Ishvara comes as a static “male”, passive-ordering principle that is opposed to Prakriti – the active and chaotic, “female” one. This correlation of principles is symbolized in many different ways, for instance, by the therein given figure of Kali dancing on the sleeping Shiva (who despite being asleep still has his phallus erect). As we can see, this concept differs from the traditional European idea about relations between male and female principles that is borrowed from popular versions of Taoism where Yan is both male as well as ordering and active principle, while Ying is female, chaotic and passive.

Sutra 1.24.Ishvarapranidhana (continued). Ishvarapranidhana and purusha

In my two previous posts I have without further ado explicated to the reader my understanding of the “ishvarapranidhana” category introduced by Patanjali. Yet an attentive reader might remember that the author of Yoga Sutras tends to give the definition of the new concepts in the lines that follow their introduction. Now, does the understanding of ishavara proposed by me meet the definition that was given by Patanjali?