Namaste, Welcome to SAM-VAD (Together In Conversation), Last week we concluded the excerpts from ‘The Panćatantra’a monumental work, tradition ascribes this fabulous work to Vişņu Śarma (“Preserver of Bliss”), faced with the challenge of educating three unlettered princes, to awaken their intelligence, Vişņu Śarma evolved a unique pedagogy – for his aim was to teach the princes how to think, not what to think.

The Panćatantra presents two worlds, one mirroring the other. We cannot see ourselves as we really are, truly and completely, except in a mirror as a reflection, flattering or otherwise. We have to stand back to look at ourselves, our conduct and our actions. Since we get overly involved in the daily motions of living, we do not always see a pattern and meaning in events and circumstances until we view it presented before us. And what is more, we see and understand it better when they are presented as happening elsewhere to others. And this the Panćatantra does very effectively. The two worlds – human and non-human – dialogue with each other and/or comment on each other.

I hope you enjoyed listening to its various tales and I am sure you will enjoy reading the book too, so go get your copy if you have not yet purchased it.

Today I will share some excerpts from The YOGA SŪTRAS of Patañjali which is Translated from the Sanskrit by Edwin F Bryant (WITH INSIGHTS FROM TRADITIONAL COMMENTATORS)

Edwin F. Bryantreceived his Ph.D. in Indology from Columbia University. He has taught at Columbia University and Harvard University and since 2001has been professor of Hindu religion and philosophy at Rutgers University.

The Yoga Sũtras contains about 1200 words in 195 sũtras indicating that they are constructed to be a manual requiring unpacking. That the sũtras, or aphorisms, are in places cryptic, esoteric, and incomprehensible in their own terms points to the fact that they were intended to be used in conjunction with a teacher.

The term sũtra (from the Sanskrit root sũ, cognate with sew) literally means a thread and essentially refers to a terse and pithy philosophical statement in which the maximum amount of information is packed into the minimum number of words.

One of the goals of yoga meditation, as discussed repeatedly in the traditional literature, is to maximize the presence of the guņa of sattva in the mind and minimize those of rajas and tamas. According to Sānkhya metaphysics, all three guņas are inherently present in all the material by-products of prakŗiti including the citta, so rajas and tamas can never be eliminated, merely minimized or, at best, reduced to a latent and unmanifest potential. Clearly, sattva is the guņa most conducive – indeed, indispensable – to the yogic enterprise, but while rajas and tamas are universally depicted as obstacles to yoga, a certain amount of each guņa is indispensable to embodied existence. Without tamas, for example, there would be no sleep; without rajas, no digestion or even the energy to blink an eye.

The etymological meaning of sattva is the nature of being. This indicates material reality in its purest state, and is characterized by the desirable qualities of discrimination, lucidity and illumination, since it is sattva that can reveal matter for what it is before rajas and tamas cause it to transform. On the other hand, rajas and tamas are the active influences in the production of the changing states of the mind and fluctuations of thought, the vŗittis, by disrupting the cittas’s placid and lucid aspect of sattva.

Citta encapsulates buddhi, intelligence; is the aspect of citta that produces, among other things, the functions of thought connected to judgement, discrimination, knowledge,