Eminent world scientists
Author- Cicily Kodiyan
Publisher- Dwarka Parichay, Rs250
It is his literary works on different branches of learning that reveal in him the profoundest scholar, the ascetic, the moralist as well as the physician of the highest repute. An excerpt:
Patanjali is one whose life and death are still embedded in obscure strata of the past. It is his literary works on different branches of learning that reveal in him the profoundest scholar, the ascetic, the moralist as well as the physician of the highest repute. Mythologically, he is regarded as an incarnation of the serpent king, Sesha, who is said to support and surround the universe.
He is the expounder of Yoga Sutras. He probably lived and composed Yoga Sutra in the second century BC. Patanjali systematised the existing yoga practices and likened them with tenets of Samkhya school of philosophy. This, he enunciated in his Yoga Sutras. He corrected the doctrinal and technical tradition of yoga and published it in his Yoga Sutra.
Yoga means joining or yoking of the individual soul with the universal soul, the union of personal spirit with God; the Sanskrit word ‘yuj’ from which the word Yoga seems to have been derived, means to join or to yoke. The Yoga discipline is nothing more than the purification of the body, mind, and soul. The aim of yoga is to keep mind and body in perfect health. It is to control the mind from external and internal disturbances.
Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra advocates certain physical and mental disciplines to achieve this aim. Yoga is meant to stop all spontaneous activities of the mind, which by nature are in constant agitation to achieve this end. The Yoga doctrine recommended certain physical and mental disciplines which can be taken in stages — Ashtanga Yoga (yama, niyama, vairagya, asana, pratyahara, pranayam, dhyana, and samadhi). Different stages in this process are regulated and adjusted by the preceptor according to the fitness of the disciple. The last stage is achieved by very few adepts.
The theory of Yoga is made according to the relevant structure of the human body. It states that from their base in the perineal region (muladhara), there run upwards towards the nose two channels (nadis) along left and right side of the backbone. There are a series of six centres (chakras) situated along the backbone. Its locations are at the rectum (muladhara), a little above it urinal place (swadhishtan chakra), at the naval (manipurva chakra), heart region (snahata chakra), in the throat (vishudhi chakra), in between the eyebrows (gyana chakra). A very fine channel extends in the centre of the backbone to the head through a hole in the brahmachakra.
During the stage of regulated breathing (pranayam), the spontaneous activity of breathing becomes more and more frequent and the wind withdraws itself from the mouth to inside the body and is stored in the two channels of the backbone. By the pressure of its presence at the base of these channels, it awakens the pent-up and coiled energy, through the central fine channel and the various centres through the backbone and goes up to the centre in the head.
Yoga Sutras of Patanjali consist of 194 aphorisms which are organised into four books. The first, Samadhi Pada treats in the course of 51 aphorisms the nature of samadhi (meditation). The second Sadhana Pada has 55 aphorisms and deals with the means of attaining samadhi. The third, Vibhuti Pada, consisting of 55 aphorisms, dwell upon the super-normal powers to be acquired for the Yoga practices, and the fourth, Kaivalya Pada, consisting of 33 aphorisms, sets forth the nature of liberation.
In the first part of the Yoga Sutra, Patanjali states that ordinarily a man is lost in his own confused thoughts and feelings. When Yoga is attained, his personal consciousness becomes stilled “like a lamp in a windless place”, and then it is possible for the embodied soul to know itself as apart from the manifestation to which it is accustomed. At first, it is achieved periodically, but in time and with steady effort, it becomes a habit.
