Silence Unheard: Deathly Otherness in Pātañjala-Yoga

1 Eight Characters in Search of the Yogasūtra: The Lively Banalization of Yogic Deathly Silence

13 1 Eight Characters in Search of the Yogas¥tra: The Lively Banalization of Yogic Deathly Silence Sages and scholars, no less than others, desire to live on and on. Not only continuity of living is desired, but also the indefinite extension of a certain essence of life and identity. Scholars are people; they are what they are. They seek to live on and remain the same. Sometimes they come forward to grope for the unfamiliar and foreign, projecting themselves onto the dark of the unknown. The encounter with the overwhelming otherness of yoga, a tradition particularly inimical to “normal life,” has the mirror potency of stark otherness. Such otherness reflects and refracts the scholar’s identity— nature, concepts, affiliation, education, fears, hopes, incompetence—in the light of day. How does one fill the gap between strikingly unfamiliar otherness and oneself? Many indeed are the voices speaking for and instead of Patañjali, desperately closing and reclosing the gap between normal consciousness and the dying yogin’s terribly dense innerness. But can it be done? If so, under what conditions? Perhaps Patañjali knows; most probably he too does not. He himself tried to close the gap between his normal consciousness (that of a highly verbal Så£khya philosopher) and the dying yogin’s testimony of the interior. Here they are, then, approaching the Yogas¥tra: the Complacent Outsider , the Ultimate Insider, the Romantic Seeker, the Universal Philosopher, the Bodily Practitioner, the Mere Philologist, the Classical Scholar, the Observers ’ Observer. These, of course, are archetypes, not found in reality. None of the Spiritual and Romantic Seekers would readily relinquish the scholarly voice and tacit access to objective truth. Though himself a Romantic Seeker, W. B. Yeats advances a general theory on the impact of Buddhism on Indian history.1 M. Eliade is a great scholar, but also—essentially—a Romantic Seeker. He seeks deconditioning, freedom, and immortality. B. K. S. Iyengar is primarily a Bodily Practitioner, but is also a Spiritual Seeker who moves from the body to the innermost core of the soul. G. Feuerstein is a Seeker offering scholarly speculations on the history of yoga, the structure of 14 Silence Unheard consciousness, and many other scholarly subjects. R. Mehta, a sage and seeker affiliated with Krishnamurti, interprets the Yogas¥tra as an Existential Seeker, though with much attention to detail such as correct Sanskrit wordings and diacritical signs. He thus understands his mission not only as an expression of his own personal and spiritual values and experience, but also as an exegesis of the Yogas¥tra.2 S. Radhakrishnan—a Universal Philosopher—thinks highly of merging in the Absolute, but he also seems to have a special esteem for family life and brotherly cooperation, which—he admits—are not found in yoga. Thus he is concomitantly a Universal Philosopher and a Hostile Outsider. M. Müller is also a great scholar partially hostile to yoga, which he claims contains—among other things—“all these postures and tortures” as well as materials which are solely “of interest for the pathologist.” Swami Vivekanada is definitely a Seeker, but also precise about diacritics and translation. Paramahansa Yogananda and J. H. Woods are an Ultimate Insider and a Mere Philologist, respectively. The above is a kind of a commentary on one of Patañjali’s sutras, YS 2.9. Patañjali asserts here that sages as well as fools are activated by a common and forceful current underlying normal life, the desire to preserve one’s essence on and on.3 This is one of the kleßas, omnipresent roots of misery.4 Vyåsa conceives of abhiniveßa as “fear of death” (maraªa-tråsa). Such a fear, he observes, is perceived even in worms which have just been born (k®mer api jåta-måtrasya). Vyåsa seems to wonder whence this fear, for—he suggests—such a desire (to live on) could not possibly have arisen if the quality of death had not been experienced before (na cånanubh¥tamara ªa-dharmakasyai™å bhavaty åtmåߤ‡). Vyåsa concludes that the pain of death experienced in previous lives (p¥rva-janmånubh¥ta¢ maraªa-du‡kham) has been inscribed into each creature’s being, and is activated and remembered anew time and again in each life cycle. Thence the consciousness of all creatures: “May I never cease to live; may we live on and on.” Patañjali’s Yogas¥tra is a collection...