Patanjali yoga sutras and adoption patterns

AbstractIn many ways, the Yoga Sutras complement the Samkhya-notions of purusha and prakriti that underlie them. It shares certain vocabulary with Buddhism, with which it has a strong relationship. When compared to the Bhakti ritualism and Bhakti traditions that predominated at the time in India, Samkhya and Yoga may be considered distinct expressions of the same wide lineage of ascetic traditions. This is in contrast to the popular Vedic ritualism that predominated at the time. Most people know the Yoga Sutras as the text that introduced the concept of ashtanga, an eight-part practise culminating in samadhi, or the concentration of the mind on a meditational object. These practises include abstaining from certain foods, observing certain rules, practising yoga postures, controlling one's breath, and withdrawing one's senses (absorption). Purusha, the witness-conscious, is to be discerned as distinct from the cognitive apparatus (prakriti), and the defilements of prakriti are to be untangled. This collection of Patajali's Yoga Sutras is made up of 195 (according to Vedas and Krishnamacharya) and 196 (according to Patajali) aphorisms on yoga's theory and practise (according to other scholars including BKS Iyengar). Patanjali, an Indian sage who integrated and structured yoga knowledge from far earlier traditions, wrote the Yoga Sutras in the first century CE.