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

the mind is merely a physical substance that selects, organizes, analyzes, and molds itself into the physical forms of the sense data presented to it;

Yoga philosophy is Patañjali’s philosophy as understood and articulated by Vyāsa.

These two categories are prakṛti, or the primordial material matrix of the physical universe, “the undifferentiated plenitude of being,”13 and puruṣa, the innumerable conscious souls or selves embedded within

If citta is the sea, the vṛttis are its waves,

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.

very goal of yoga and of human existence in the Yoga school is the very cause of bondage and ignorance in Buddhism.

Ahaṅkāra is thus not only pivotal in all experience but also is the critical midpoint in the choice between material identification or spiritual pursuit, the external material world or the pure puruṣa.

there was a cluster of interconnected and cross-fertilizing variants of meditational yoga—Buddhist and Jain as well as Hindu—prior to Patañjali, all drawn from a common but variegated pool of terminologies, practices, and concepts (and many strains continue to the present day).

Real detachment is indifference to sense objects whether in their absence or presence.