Chip Hartranft's Articles on Lion's Roar

As in Buddhism, the true goal of yoga is liberation from ego and suffering. Yoga becomes a complete spiritual path, says Chip Hartranft, translator of the Yoga Sutra, when we join the familiar postures of hatha yoga with the meditative practices of rajah yoga. Tranquil and motionless, the ascetic sits in a simple posture. As each breath flows in, he experiences its sensations, relaxing any effort to control or improve anything. With each exhalation, he observes a new stream, each ripple of feeling a fresh occasion for surrender. Even so, thoughts, feelings, and identifying concepts repeatedly erupt, centered around the same dualistic notions: self/other, past/future, like/dislike, success/failure. Once noticed, though, they recede. The meditative path, samadhi, begins to emerge as the ascetic continues to sit. Sustained at first by intention, it sharpens until the need to train it gives way to effortless mindfulness and equanimity. Abruptly, in a timeless instant of cessation, nothing remains to obscure the unconditioned. An unshakeable realization arises: all things—mind, body, nature—may be known, but are empty of a knower. There is an ennobling security in this understanding that no experience nor experiencer is ultimate, but is only a dewdrop perched on a web of contingencies—dharmas—glistening for a moment before evaporating. Does this sound to you like the wandering ascetic Gotama awakening under the Bodhi tree? In fact, this account depicts the ancient Indian sage Patanjali, and describes how he and his followers practiced yoga. This might be a little surprising, not only to Buddhists but to most yoga students today, who may be wondering where their own yoga, with its stretching, deep breathing, and perhaps a little perspiration, fits in. Setting aside the clichés familiar from movies and advertising, we must acknowledge that even for many of its most devoted and accomplished adherents, “doing yoga” primarily means pouring the energies of body and breath into a series of postures that range from soft to strenuous. Few are aware, though, that this dynamic approach was developed mostly in the last millennium and is the still-evolving baby in the yoga family. Its tenth-century creators called it hatha yoga, meaning “forceful” or “energy” yoga, to distinguish it from the “royal” or “highest” path, raja yoga—the cultivation of samadhi laid out by Patanjali nearly a thousand years earlier in the Yoga Sutra. The oldest surviving hatha text, dating from the fifteenth century, insists that raja and hatha are related and meant to be practiced side by side. This becomes clear not only at the deep end of the yoga pool, but also in the shallows where most of us first dip a toe or two. Yoga does promise—and can quickly deliver—a smorgasbord of enhancements to flexibility, strength, health, and beauty, as well as the possibility of meeting new people in a relaxed environment with few pressures and even fewer clothes. However, it is the peaceful glow that a yoga practitioner is sure to feel even after the first class that usually brings people back. This ineffable sense of contentment, clarity, and presence can awaken us to the possibility of something far greater. What may spring originally from the desire to enhance oneself can be transmuted over time into a quest for what lies beyond the self and its desires. It is then that yogis begin to tap the ancient, meditative roots—more accessible in Buddhist practice than yoga at present in the West—and seek to draw on their enormous stores of knowledge. Trunk, Roots, Branches. Although tradition that claims Patanjali was an important grammarian of the second century BCE, more recent scholarly investigations have revealed several illustrious Patanjalis. The author of the Yoga Sutra lived hundreds of years later, it would appear. This seminal text was probably composed between 100 BCE and 300 BCE, but it is now clear that most of its teachings are even more ancient, based on oral traditions from at least a millennium earlier. They concern contemplative practices prevalent both before and after the time of the Buddha. In fact, if we look back to a time before the Buddha, there is evidence that an inwardly focused meditative tradition existed among some indigenous peoples of the Indian subcontinent a millennium or more earlier. This practice tradition was quite different from the externally directed spirituality of the Aryan tribes that infiltrated from the northwest. This more external form of spirituality came to dominate the area and its cultures during the first several centuries of the second millennium BCE. Although initially overwhelmed during the Aryan influx, the inward-focused meditation tradition was more than hardy enough to survive the cross-cultural assimilation that unfolded over the next millennium. By the seventh or eighth centuries BCE, this introspective sensibility is everywhere evident in the widespread phenomenon of wandering ascetics, or sramana. Rejecting Vedic authority, with its relentless sacrifices and rigid hierarchies of race, class, and gender, untold numbers of men and women dropped out of conventional society and went forth into homeless spiritual seeking. Their “inner sacrifices,” ranging from harsh austerity to blissful meditation, also began to inform post-Vedic brahmanical teachings such as the Upanisads. The thread that united most of these early yogas was their intense focus on self-liberation from suffering. Whether meditative trance, philosophical inquiry, naturalistic observation, extreme morality, or self-mortification, almost all the various approaches operated from a belief that it must be possible for individuals to shake the bonds of misperception that shackled them to an unending cycle of birth and death. Since one’s salvation lay not in a relationship to external gods but in overcoming ignorance, one had to transform oneself and one’s own perceptions. Even as ascetics clustered around charismatic and compelling seekers like the Buddha and the Jain Mahavira, the prevailing ethos was self-empowering. Regardless of background, liberation was within one’s grasp. Ironically, the spreading tent of Hinduism eventually came to enclose the unorthodox praxis of yoga, linking Patanjali to Visnu and installing his teaching as one of Hinduism’s six orthodox philosophical perspectives, or darsanas. Yoga, however, is primarily a path rather than a philosophy, and the Yoga Sutra is more road map than treatise. It is often forgotten that Patanjala-yoga shares not only the same basic meditative approach but also the spirit of independence of the Buddha’s path, rejecting spiritual authority based on revealed texts like the Vedas or residing in any one class or gender. Even as the Hindu traditions—eventually including hatha yoga—came to regard the Yoga Sutra as the essential expression of yogic truth, the radical nature of its meditative roots has largely been buried by the intervening centuries and layers of tradition. What Is Yoga? Patanjali begins the Yoga Sutra by defining yoga and the universal misperception it resolves: Yoga is to still the patterning of consciousness. Then pure awareness can abide in its very nature. Otherwise awareness takes itself to be the patterns of consciousness. Stilling reveals something generally not seen (avidya) by human beings: that what actually knows nature in all its manifestations is a timeless, subjectless, unconditioned awareness. Although the mind can imagine and express this awareness as having both a divine universal (isvara) and individual (purusa) perspective, knowing is not an entity or point of view at all. It lies beyond the reach of the mind and its insistence on location, orientation, temporality, and attributes. What is important for a suffering being to realize is that it is this imperturbable witnessing that knows—and not one’s perceptions, feelings, or thoughts. Every one of these conscious experiences issues from body-mind phenomena that are in constant flux. When the pure, unchanging awareness of purusa is mistaken for these shifting contents of body or mind, we do not see things as they are. This is the great discovery of the ancient Indian yogis: though our bodies and their surroundings may be real, all we can actually know of them are representations appearing as consciousness, citta. Each distinct display, also called citta, is a fleeting shadow play involving one of the six types of phenomena: sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile feelings, or thoughts. Even though separate and sequential, these cittas unfold so rapidly that we usually misperceive them as an unbroken, simultaneous flow we call “reality,” “self,” and “other.” This makes it almost impossible to distinguish between mind and matter, or between events and our reactions to them. So, our patterns of perception and volition are largely determined, automatic, and nearly inescapable. How to Do, How to Be. Under ordinary circumstances, this illusion of a me navigating myself through a seamless life is virtually impenetrable. But when attention is focused on the processes of body and breath, which orient the yogi in what Patanjali calls yoga, or “yoking,” consciousness begins to settle spontaneously and become transparent and reflective, like the ocean growing calm. The meditative intentions that move yogis down this natural path to tranquility are twofold. First, yogis train themselves to keep returning to the point of focus and sit with it. This intention, called abhyasa (“sit facing”), is the basis for sustained practice and begins with witnessing the current stream of bodily sensations. As yogis keeps noticing and returning from distraction, they quickly come face-to-face with conditioned habits of thought and reaction. No matter how numerous or overwhelming these distractions, though, they always dissolve. As they continue to practice, yogis may soon begin to sense a developing aptitude for remembering the focus, a...

Hatha Raja: Yoga’s Path to Liberation

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