The Yoga Sutras of Patañjali: A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary

only the kleśas other than ignorance can be found in a dormant state. Ignorance is never dormant, since it is the cause and support of the others and thus is always manifest.

jīvanmukta: someone who is still embodied and thus functioning with a citta, but a citta that generates vṛttis that are not subject to ignorance, ego, attachment, etc. Recent scholarship (Whicher, 1998, Chapple 2008) has consistently and persuasively argued that it is a misconception to consider Yoga to be a radical withdrawal from the world; rathe

the ascetic tradition tends to view the body as a rather unpleasant bag of obnoxious substances.

there is a vicious cycle: kleśas provokes karma, and karma fuels the kleśas.

In other words, even if surface-level error, viparyaya, has been dispelled by surface-level pramāṇa, right knowledge, both these vṛttis are still underpinned by a deep-structure level of ultimate ignorance.

When, according to Vyāsa, one consciously cultivates a state of mind that is the opposite of the kleśas, they become weak, tanu, the second state noted by Patañjali.

just as the previous sūtras indicated that attachment or aversion to something is caused by positive or negative memories of that thing, aversion to death likewise indicates that one’s memory retains unpleasant recollections of past deaths, although these are latent or subconscious in the present life.

ego is the root of attachment, just as ignorance is the root of ego; consequently, ego precedes attachment in the list of kleśas as ignorance precedes ego.

ignorance, says Vyāsa, is not just the absence of right knowledge but is an actual type of perception in its own right, a perception of reality that is the opposite of true knowledge.