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2016

Phenomenological Yoga: An Husserlian Approach to

Patañjali's Yogasūtra

Humphrey, William Townsend

Humphrey, W. T. (2016). Phenomenological Yoga: An Husserlian Approach to Patañjali's

Yogasūtra (Unpublished master's thesis). University of Calgary, Calgary, AB.

doi:10.11575/PRISM/27330

http://hdl.handle.net/11023/3486

master thesis

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UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY

Phenomenological Yoga: An Husserlian Approach to Patañjali’s Yogasūtra

by

William Townsend Humphrey

A THESIS

SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES

IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE

DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS

GRADUATE PROGRAM IN RELIGIOUS STUDIES

CALGARY, ALBERTA

DECEMBER, 2016

© William Townsend Humphrey 2016

ii

Abstract

This thesis examines Patañjali’s Yogasūtra, a Sanskrit treatise on the theory and practice

of yoga, in light of the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, a key figure in the 20th century

philosophical movement known as phenomenology. Using Husserl’s distinction between the

natural attitude and the phenomenological reduction, this thesis distinguishes between two

respective hermeneutical approaches to the Yogasūtra: the natural-cosmological and the

transcendental-phenomenological. While a case can be made for either approach, this thesis

argues that the latter proves to be more cogent and fruitful. It thereby explores the Yogasūtra’s

metaphysics as an account of the principles that structure conscious experience, and it explores

the Yogasūtra’s meditative praxis, particularly the meditative states known as samprajñāta

samādhi and samāpatti, as the clarification of pure experience, in a spirit similar to Husserl’s

phenomenological reduction.

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Acknowledgements

I wish to extend my thanks to the faculty of the Department of Religious Studies at the

University of Calgary. Dr. Katrin Froese, Dr. Tinu Ruparell, Dr. Wendi Adamek, Dr. David

Bergen, and of course my supervisor, Dr. Christopher Framarin, have all helped to guide and

inspire me in the development of this thesis.

I am also grateful for the financial support I have received in the form of grants and

awards from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the province of

Alberta, and the University of Calgary, along with paid employment as a teaching assistant in the

Department of Religious Studies at the University of Calgary. This gracious support has been a

tremendous help in facing the material challenges that writing and graduate study entail.

Finally, I also wish to express my gratitude to Bābā Hari Dāss, Dr. Śāradā Diffenbaugh,

and Dāyānand Diffenbaugh. Without the good fortune of having met them, the very idea of this

thesis would have remained an unsprouted seed.

iv

Dedication

For Rebecca

v

Table of Contents Abstract ii Acknowledgements iii Dedication iv Table of Contents v List of Figures vii Introduction: Problematizing the Hermeneutics of ‘Experience’ 1 Chapter 1: Mapping the Hermeneutics of ‘Experience’ 5

1.1  The Natural Attitude 5 1.2  The Phenomenological Reduction 8 1.3  The Natural and Phenomenologically-Reduced Attitudes as Two Hermeneutical

Possibilities Regarding ‘Experience’ 12

Chapter 2: Interpreting ‘Experience’ in the Yogasūtra 14 2.1 The Yogasūtra as an Account of Conscious Experience 14 2.2 Some Clarification of the Understanding of ‘Phenomenology’ in this Thesis 15 2.3 A Brief Overview of the Yogasūtra 17 2.3.1 An Overview of the Text’s Form and History 17 2.3.2 An Overview of the Text’s Content 20 Chapter 3: Interpreting Sāṃkhya’s Metaphysics 23 3.1 Introduction 23 3.2 Sāṃkhya’s Metaphysics 24 3.2.1 Classical Sāṃkhya 24 3.2.2 Sāṃkhya in the Yogasūtra 29 3.3. Interpreting Sāṃkhya 33 3.3.1 Sāṃkhya and Conscious Experience 33 3.3.2 Sāṃkhya’s Unusual Dualism and Its Hermeneutical Challenges 34

3.3.3 Two Hermeneutical Possibilities of Prakṛti, and Their Relation to the Natural and Phenomenological Approaches to ‘Experience’ 35 3.3.4 Sāṃkhya and the Natural Attitude 39 3.3.5 Sāṃkhya and the Transcendental Attitude 45 3.3.6 Idealism and the Yogasūtra 51

3.4 Conclusion 52 Chapter 4: Interpreting Samādhi 55 4.1 Introduction 55 4.2 Textual Definitions of Samādhi and Samāpatti 55 4.2.1 An Overview of YS I:41 57

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4.2.2 An Overview of YS III:3 60 4.2.3 A Summary of the Definitions of Samādhi and Samāpatti Thus Far 64 4.3 The Natural Attitude and Samādhi 68 4.4 The Phenomenological Reduction and Samādhi 72 4.4.1 Nirodha and Epoché 73 4.4.2 No Mind, or no World? 76 4.4.3 Grahītṛ-grahaṇa-grāhya and Ego-cogito-cogitum 82 4.5 Conclusion 85 Conclusion 87 5.1 Summary 87 5.2 Directions for Further Research 90 5.2.1 Samāpatti and Constitution 90 5.2.2 Time in Husserl and Patañjali 92 5.2.3 Samyama and Vibhūti 93 5.2.4 Soteriology 94 References 98

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List of Figures Figure 1: The 25 Tattvas of Classical Sāṃkhya and Yoga 31 Figure 2: A Schematic of Satkāryavāda 32

1

Introduction: Problematizing the Hermeneutics of the Term ‘Experience’

There is an old joke that the writer David Foster Wallace once told in a college

commencement address. As the joke goes, two young fish are swimming along one day. An old

fish comes swimming along in the opposite direction. The old fish says to the young fish, “Good

morning boys! How’s the water?” “Fine,” they reply. The old fish swims on. When he’s finally

gone, one of the young fish, perplexed, turns to the other and says, “What the hell is water?”

(Wallace 2009, 3-4).

The joke evokes something that is at the heart of the thesis at hand. This thesis is

basically about a few men’s attempts to recognize the water in which they swim, and my own

attempt to show them as so doing. Of course, the metaphoric possibilities of ‘water’ in the joke

are vast. Nevertheless, as I will attempt to show, the two main subjects of this thesis—Patañjali

and Edmund Husserl—are attempting to point to the water that is one’s own conscious

experience.

If one follows this analogy of water as conscious experience, then pointing out the latter

to a sentient being presents some of the same difficulties as pointing out the former to a fish.

That is, both are media that are always there, and in their ubiquity they become invisible. Just as

the fish are always in water, I am always experiencing. The fish, of course, have it easy, or at

least I do, as a land-dweller considering the fish. I need only consider the air beyond the surface

of the water, and the once-incomprehensible medium comes immediately into relief. With

conscious experience, the matter is not so simple. For indeed, what is the analogue of the air in

the case of conscious experience? Anything that I imagine or postulate as beyond or outside of

experience is still something that I imagine or postulate, and such imagining or postulating

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occurs as an experience. Thus, in so doing, I have, in a way, not managed to get outside of

experience at all.

Likewise, anything that I then define experience as will itself be an object of experience.

In designating experience as ‘experience,’ or consciousness as ‘consciousness,’ I am still left

with the question of the experience in which the act of that designation arises. There is, in other

words, a conscious act that remains obscured until I reflect upon it in another conscious act, and

so on ad infinitum. As long as I try to predicate it as thus and so, I am always one step behind

experience itself. There is thus a tension between experience and its predication as ‘experience’

or ‘consciousness’ or ‘presence’ and so on.

Insofar as I attempt to predicate something of experience, then, there is a constant

movement between the felt presence of my own experience and the act of naming it as such. It

requires considerable effort to continue to consider the fact that anything that I take to exist, I

take to exist through its appearance in my own experience. From a pragmatic perspective,

moreover, it makes little sense to continuously perform such a reflection while the things of the

world await study and manipulation. In this way, the very act of knowing in which the

designation ‘experience’ arises can readily slip out of consideration.

As a result, inasmuch as I consider experience, I can come to consider it as an object,

even if only a mental or conceptual one, among other objects in existence, the cognition of which

is taken for granted. Put differently, I come to consider experience in the third person rather than

the first. In this way, experience as ‘experience’ no longer provokes a reflection on the very fact

of my own present awareness, here and now, but it instead signifies some signified thing in

experience, of which I can make further predications and descriptions.

3

Two basic hermeneutical possibilities thus emerge in encountering the notion of

‘experience.’ On the one hand, I can take the term ‘experience’ to refer to a thing separate from

my own experience. I thereby do not broach the question of my own direct conscious experience

in the present, and instead I imagine experience in general, or experience as a thing or a capacity

among other things in a world whose perception by me as a cognizing subject is taken for

granted. A similar interpretive move can take place, I would argue, regarding concepts related to

cognition in general, like ‘mind,’ ‘intellect,’ ‘awareness,’ and the like. ‘Mind,’ for example,

would thus refer to some mind taken as an object of my own thought or consideration, rather

than provoke a consideration of mind as the medium of that very consideration that I presently

undertake.

On the other hand, I can understand terms like ‘experience’ or ‘consciousness’ to refer

back to my own experience. The term provokes a consideration of the means by which objects of

experience are given to me as a conscious subject, rather than referring to a thing or an event

occurring in a world whose experience in consciousness I do not bring directly into question. Of

course, as I discussed above, inasmuch as I then attempt to predicate this conscious experience as

‘conscious experience,’ or anything else, for that matter, I make yet another object of experience.

Nevertheless, these predications can still reveal or lead to an apprehension of experience in the

first person, even if they themselves remain objects for my own consciousness, to which they

point. In this way, a term like ‘conscious experience’ may provoke an encounter with that which

is beyond words, rather than remaining a conceptual object that I can further describe and define.

This second hermeneutical possibility regarding the term ‘experience’ thus calls me as

the reader or hearer of the term back to the felt presence of my own awareness, rather than to a

consideration of experience in general. In so doing, I certainly use language to posit and describe

4

existent objects in experience. However, I do not merely take the presence of these objects for

granted, but I begin to consider the process of their appearance in my own experience. I begin to

catch the present, existent world in the act of appearing in conscious experience, rather than

simply assuming and forgetting its appearance for me as a conscious subject.

5

Chapter 1: Mapping the Hermeneutics of ‘Experience’

The philosopher Edmund Husserl’s (1859-1938) phenomenology provides a helpful

rehearsal of how one might think about experience in these two different ways. Husserl provides

a useful critique of the same sort of distinction between first-person and third-person reflections

on conscious experience discussed above. In particular, his development of the ideas of the so-

called natural attitude and the phenomenological reduction can further help to clarify the two

hermeneutical possibilities I have thus far developed regarding the term ‘conscious experience.’

Husserl’s philosophical project is, in short, to understand how objective, self-existent

things, whether logical laws or sensorial percepts, are given in subjective conscious experience.

Put somewhat differently, Husserl wishes to show how in starting with one’s own, direct

experience, one can then posit things which transcend the immanent data of lived experience. In

so doing, however, Husserl faces the challenge of clarifying the precise domain of his inquiry.

Indeed, as I discuss above, the notion of ‘conscious experience’ can, on the one hand, mean

something like experience in general, as a concept or object among others in a world whose

cognition is taken for granted. Or, on the other hand, it can direct me back to my own conscious,

lived experience as the basic ground for any and all postulations about what exists, and as the

basic medium by which all objects of experience appear.

1.1 The Natural Attitude

Husserl, I would argue, is interested in this second possible meaning of ‘conscious

experience.’ In order to make his interest clear, however, he must also delineate the

interpretation of consciousness from which he wishes to distance himself. He does so with the

development of the notion of the “natural attitude” or “natural standpoint” (natürliche

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Einstellung), the definition and critique of which is a perennial theme in Husserl’s writing after

his first major work, the Logical Investigations. By ‘natural,’ Husserl does not so much mean

that such an attitude is somehow free of pretense, but rather that such an attitude, more literally,

takes the idea of nature as a guiding presumption. By ‘nature’ Husserl means a world or a

spatiotemporal universe that pre-exists, and stands independently opposed to, subjective

consciousness. Husserl characterizes the view of the natural attitude in Ideas I thus:

I find continually present and standing over against me the one spatio-temporal fact-world to which I myself belong, as do all the other men found in it and related in the same way to it. This “fact-world,” as the world already tells us, I find to be out there, and also take it to exist just as it gives itself to me as something that exists out there…“The” world is as fact-world always there; at the most it is at odd points “other” than I supposed, this or that under such names as “illusion,” “hallucination,” and the like must be struck out of it, but the “it” remains ever, in the sense of the general thesis, a world that has its being out there (1962, 96 emphasis in original).

In the natural attitude, the assumption of a world existing ‘out there’ is already in play as human

beings, particularly in the endeavours of the natural sciences, set about exploring the various

objects and entities that populate the “spatio-temporal fact-world” (ibid.). Eugen Fink, Husserl’s

student and amanuensis, offers a similar characterization of the natural attitude, although in a

somewhat different idiom:

To the facticity of the existing spirit belongs the Knowledge of itself in the world as an entity among entities. Enclosed by the cosmos, embedded in the infinite manifold of things, together with them in the one space and in the one time, delivered over to the superior powers of nature, impotent in the face of the governing destiny, the spirit understands and addresses itself as “man.” That is, the ontological self-Interpretedness of man—whether it is worked out or not—stands, always, in the cosmological horizon” (1972, 16; emphasis in original).

Again, in Fink’s characterization, the defining basis of the natural attitude is its assumption of

“one space” and “one time” (ibid.) which various subjects populate and that they assume pre-

exists them as a matter of course. While an individual, conscious subject will only perceive a

7

small portion of this universal, objective “one space”—just as now only the wall of the room, my

desk, and computer are all that are directly perceptible by me—there nonetheless remains a sense

that one’s own present, immediate experience is situated in a “cosmological horizon” (ibid.)—

just as I might matter-of-factly assume that my present perceptual view of my writing desk is a

window onto an objectively existent world that stretches beyond my immediate, sensuously

given environment, and outwards to the city, the continent, the planet, the galaxy, and beyond.

As Husserl writes, in the natural attitude, the subject understands itself and other things as

“within a world of which part is perceived, as are the individual things themselves, and of which

part is contextually supplied by memory from whence it spreads out into the indeterminate and

unknown” (1964a, 13).

To be clear, the natural attitude still allows for consideration of conscious experience or

cognition. However, inasmuch as the natural attitude considers consciousness and cognition, it

treats them as objects or activities existing in a world whose objective existence is already

assumed. As Husserl explains, in the natural attitude, “cognition is a fact of nature. It is the

experience of a cognizing organic being. It is a psychological fact…[and] cognition [in the

natural attitude] is essentially cognition of what objectively is. Through the meaning intrinsic to

[cognition]…it is related to what objectively is” (1964a, 15, emphasis in original). By this view,

consciousness occurs as a product of a brain or a psyche that is spatiotemporally in the world and

in history as a discrete entity, and consciousness perceives a world and other entities already

assumed to exist apart from experience.

However, for Husserl such an understanding fails to investigate how the notion of

consciousness as a real object or process in the world comes to be constituted in one’s own first-

person, direct experience. Along these lines, even in his final work, The Crisis of European

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Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Husserl is still keen to distinguish between the

“transcendental ego” and the “psychological ego” (1970a, 205-206). The former is responsible

for the constitution of any notion of a transcendent object from immanent experience, whereas

the latter is itself an object constituted “as the ego already made part of the world, objectified

with a particular real meaning, mundanized, so to speak—concretely speaking, the soul” (ibid.,

206). From the natural attitude, one can certainly inquire about consciousness or cognition as a

natural object, and yet one cannot quite bring into focus the very first-person mental acts that

allow for the positing of such a natural object. To do so, according to Husserl, requires a very

special change in one’s fundamental orientation toward experience.

1.2 The Phenomenological Reduction

Such a change in one’s orientation to experience comes about, according to Husserl, by

the performance of the phenomenological reduction, also referred to as the transcendental

reduction. The reduction’s goal is to bring about both the relinquishment of the natural attitude

and the concomitant recognition of all objects as objects present to, and constituted through,

conscious subjectivity. It is the setting aside of all theses regarding that which transcends

consciousness, coupled with the direct realization of that which is immanent to consciousness. In

this way, the reduction involves two moments: an abstention from one interpretation of

experience, and the realization of another, which Husserl takes to be epistemologically

fundamental.

Husserl often refers to the first part, i.e. the suspension or bracketing of the natural

attitude, as the “epoché,” a Greek term (ἐποχή) used in ancient forms of skepticism, particularly

Pyrrhonism, to mean the abstention from a final judgment on a philosophical dispute (Thorsrud

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2009, 3-7 et passim). While Husserl sometimes seems to use ‘epoché’ and ‘phenomenological

reduction’ interchangeably, later interpreters take the former term to emphasize the abstention

from the natural attitude and the latter term to emphasize the realization of the immanent mental

acts and intuitions that constitute the transcendent objects supposed in the natural attitude (Fink

1995, 41; Zahavi 2003, 46). Indeed, this bipartite sense of the reduction is evident in Husserl’s

own writing, as in his article on phenomenology in Encyclopedia Britannica:

The method of phenomenological reduction…to the pure “phenomenon”… consists (1) in the methodical and rigorously consistent epoché of every objective positing…and (2) in the methodically practised seizing and describing of the multiple “appearances” as appearances of their unitary objects and their unities as unities of components of meaning…accruing to them each time in their appearances (1971, 80).

There is thus a bracketing “of every objective positing” (ibid.) and yet therewith comes a

“seizing and describing of the multiple ‘appearances’” (ibid.) that remain.

This second part of the reduction truly opens the domain of phenomenological inquiry.

As Husserl is fond of reminding his readers, the epoché “does not leave us confronting nothing”

(1960, 20), but rather “what I, the one who is meditating…acquire by it is my pure living…the

universe of ‘phenomena’” (ibid.). With the reduction, there are still phenomena present in

consciousness, but they are no longer taken to indicate an external world of self-existent objects.

Instead, the purpose of the reduction is to lay bare these phenomena as mere appearances so that

in turn the phenomenologist can begin to understand how the sense of an external world of self-

existent objects obtains from these phenomena. As Husserl writes,

natural being is a realm whose existential status is secondary; it continually presupposes the realm of transcendental being [i.e. purely phenomenal consciousness]. The fundamental phenomenological method of transcendental epoché, because it leads back to this realm, is called transcendental-phenomenological reduction (1960, 21).

10

Again, it is this leading back to transcendental being, to that which is immanent in conscious

experience as mere phenomenon, that lends the reduction its name, from the Latin reducere, ‘to

lead back’ or ‘return.’

Nevertheless, the phenomenological reduction is no easy task. Eugen Fink is uncertain

whether many of Husserl’s contemporaries even fully grasp the phenomenological reduction, and

he strongly emphasizes the difficulty in bringing it about:

The phenomenological “epoché,” is anything but a noncommittal, “merely” theoretical, intellectual act; it is rather a spiritual movement of one’s self encompassing the entire man and, as an attack upon the “state-of-motionlessness” supporting us in our depths, the pain of a fundamental transformation down to our roots (1972, 9, emphasis in original).

Husserl, too, seems to recognize the potential inscrutability of the phenomenological reduction,

and he expends considerable effort justifying the reduction and explaining how one might arrive

at it. Scholarship on Husserl recognizes several ‘ways’ to the reduction, with Iso Kern offering

the first thematic overview (Kern 1964, 195, 196-239 passim). Kern discerns four such ways—

the Cartesian way, the way through psychology, through a critique of the positive sciences, and

through ontology (ibid., 195). Later scholars like Dan Zahavi (2003, 47) and Sebastian Luft

(2004, 200) discern just three—the Cartesian, the psychological, and the ontological. I take John

Drummond’s view that there are really basically just two ways, the Cartesian and the way

through ontology, with the psychological way being a key subset of the way through ontology

(Drummond 1975, 47).

For my purposes in this thesis, only the first and oldest among these ways to the

reduction, the so-called Cartesian way, requires explication. The Cartesian way appears in some

of Husserl’s earliest works that discuss the phenomenological reduction, like The Idea of

Phenomenology (1964a, 22-25) and Ideas I (1962, 136-141), and yet it remains a theme even in

11

one of Husserl’s final works, Cartesian Meditations (1960, 7-26). As its name suggests, the

Cartesian way involves radically doubting the existence of a world external to one’s perception

of it, in a manner similar to René Descartes’ famous undertaking in Meditations on First

Philosophy (1993, 13-16). As mentioned above, Husserl does not believe that such doubt need

result in total oblivion (1962, 136-137). There may still be experience, just not the experience of

an external world, just as in, say, a dream or an hallucination engineered by an evil demon, as

Descartes imagines. The basic fact of the ego cogito, or the fact that one thinks or cognizes, and

the cogitationes, the actual cognitions taken in and of themselves, remain in spite of all such

doubt; they are apodictic for both Descartes and Husserl. For Husserl, the fact of experience still

remains as a residuum after radically doubting the transcendent world that experience supposedly

references, and it is this residuum of immanent experience or intuition that the reduction aims to

bring into focus. At the same time, such a program of radical doubt also serves to demonstrate

the fundament of Husserl’s phenomenology—that conscious experience precedes, and remains

independent of, the positing of a transcendent object or world (1962, 137). In other words, one

can posit an ego cogito without positing a world that transcends it, but one cannot posit a

transcendent world without positing an ego cogito in which that positing takes place.

In making such points, Husserl certainly shows an affinity for Descartes. However,

Husserl is nevertheless eager to differentiate himself from the French philosopher, and he argues

that Descartes ultimately fails “to make the transcendental turn” (1960, 23), or in other words, to

grasp the sort of phenomenology that Husserl develops. The crux of Husserl’s disagreement with

Descartes seems to be that Descartes prematurely cuts off his attention from the immanently

given data of pure consciousness and the methodical working out of how it constitutes ostensibly

real objects. According to Husserl, Descartes instead reifies the ego cogito as “a little tag-end of

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the world…whereby the ego becomes a substantia cogitans, a separate human ‘mens sive

animus,’ and the point of departure for inferences according to the principle of causality” (1960,

24). In other words, Descartes reverts to the natural attitude, assuming that the ego cogito is a

thing in a pre-given world, the existence of which he does not adequately ground in immanent

experience.

For Husserl, however, the doubting of the world reveals the ego cogito as the

transcendental ego, which itself is not some part of the world, but the condition of its positing.

As Husserl explains, “the Objective world…derives its whole sense and its existential status,

which it has for me, from me myself, from me as the transcendental Ego, the Ego who comes to

the fore only with the transcendental-phenomenological epoché” (1960, 26). Husserl uses this

radical doubt to reveal the transcendental ego and the realm of pure phenomena that it

circumscribes as a field of inquiry, rather than immediately forsaking it for the matter-of-fact

world of the natural attitude, like Descartes.

1.3 The Natural and Phenomenologically-Reduced Attitudes as Two Hermeneutical

Possibilities Regarding ‘Experience’

Husserl’s distinction between the natural attitude and phenomenologically reduced

experience can thus better help to define the two possible ways of interpreting the concept of

conscious experience. In the natural attitude, the interpretation of ‘conscious experience’ leaves

unexplored the conscious experience in which the very consideration of ‘conscious experience’

occurs, i.e. my own or your own. From this standpoint, the various intentional objects’ presence

for consciousness is taken for granted. One considers ‘experience’ as yet another intentional

object whose presence for consciousness is, again, taken for granted. From the standpoint of the

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phenomenological reduction, however, the term ‘experience’ does not reference yet another

entity or concept in my experience, but instead it instigates an encounter with the very fact of my

own first-person experience. I become aware not only of intentional objects, but I reflect also on

the process of their appearance as such in conscious experience. In other words, I become aware

of intentional objects as just that, i.e. as present in relation to my own intentional awareness.

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Chapter 2: Interpreting ‘Experience’ in the Yogasūtra

2.1 The Yogasūtra as an Account of Conscious Experience

With these two hermeneutical possibilities—the natural and phenomenological

attitudes—in mind, the remainder of the thesis will turn to the Yogasūtra (YS) of Patañjali, and

the present chapter will provide some background on the content of the text. In the context of the

present discussion, the basic contention of this thesis is that the YS is itself a long and well-

elaborated signification of ‘conscious experience’ By this I mean that the text outlines a

metaphysical schema, largely consistent with the classical Sāṃkhya of the Sāṃkhyakārikā, that

posits both a purely witnessing sentience (puruṣa) and a number of mental faculties or categories

that seem to be integral to conscious experience, e.g. intentional awareness (buddhi), a sensorial

mind (manas), and kinaesthetic and perceptual senses (karmendriyas and jñānendriyas). Also,

the YS describes the practices of samādhi and samāpatti, which seem to involve a consideration

of the very processes through which one experiences objects and a self.

In these ways, the foregoing two possibilities of interpreting ‘consciousness’ and related

concepts regarding cognition thus come into play. In other words, when the YS discusses both

Sāṃkhyan metaphysics and samādhi, it is thereby discussing conscious experience and related

topics. Thus, the reader faces the ambiguity of responding to the idea of ‘conscious experience’

that I outline above. Using Husserl’s ideas, I will attempt to show that one can fruitfully bring

the phenomenological understanding of ‘experience,’ i.e. as a cue to the reader to return to his or

her own conscious experience, into play in the interpretation of the YS, particularly its

descriptions of Sāṃkhya’s metaphysics and the meditative states known as samāpatti and

samprajñāta samādhi. More specifically, such a reading allows modern-day interpreters of the

YS to make its metaphysics and samāpatti and samprajñāta samādhi intelligible as part of an

15

investigation of conscious experience in the first-person, in a spirit very similar to Husserl’s

phenomenological reduction, rather than treating these meditative states as simply inscrutable,

mystical, or peculiar to a specific culture and moment in history.

2.2 Some Clarification of the Understanding of Phenomenology in this Thesis

Before moving on to the content of the Yogasūtra, some further elucidation of how I

propose to employ Husserl’s phenomenology in this thesis may be useful. ‘Phenomenology’ is a

word that certainly pre-exists Husserl’s use of it, and it can signify a number of theoretical

approaches that, although consonant with Husserl’s philosophy, nevertheless differ considerably

in key ways. Particularly in the social sciences, ‘phenomenology’ often has a somewhat looser

and more general meaning than that of Husserl’s more radical and specific transcendental

phenomenology.

In one sense, ‘phenomenology’ or ‘phenomenological’ can serve as a technical term that

simply means something like ‘concerning subjective experience in general.’ For instance, an

ethnographic study of, say, performing abhiśekha on a śivaliṅga in Benares, or insufflating yopo

in the Orinoco Basin, is phenomenological when the investigator asks his or her informants what

they themselves experience—see, feel, imagine, and so on—upon performing the action in

question. While this use of ‘phenomenology’ is, in a way, in accord with Husserl’s, it does not

bespeak the radical nature of the phenomenological reduction. That is, such a phenomenological

inquiry does not necessarily bring into question the first-person experience of the ethnographer.

Instead, it takes the experience of another subject in the world, whose appearance for the

ethnographer remains largely unproblematized, as one object among many in a pre-existent

world. In this way, such a phenomenological investigation can remain squarely within the natural

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attitude, and the sorts of questions and problems which Husserl attempts to raise never come into

view.

Such an understanding of ‘phenomenology’ is not in play in this thesis. I do not interview

yogins to ask them what they see and feel while meditating. Likewise, I do not treat the YS and

its commentaries’ discussions of samādhi as narratives of some inner journey to be catalogued

and dissected. Rather, I approach the YS as itself a directive toward the realization of the

presence of one’s own experience, in the same spirit as Husserl’s phenomenological reduction.

The YS is not just about the experience of another, but rather about the employment of a noetic

techne that brings about a reckoning with one’s own conscious experience.

With this in mind, I also wish to distinguish this study from the so-called

‘phenomenology of religion,’ a theoretical approach commonly associated with such scholars as

Mircea Eliade, Ninian Smart, Gerardus van der Leeuw, and others. One can indeed discuss this

theoretical approach to the study of religion in terms that Husserl uses. As Seth Kunin explains,

for example, the phenomenological approach to religion begins with a kind of epoché of the

scholar’s belief or disbelief in the claims of a religious discourse, followed by an attempt to

discern the essential structures and patterns (eidos) that inform the general phenomenon of

religion as the scholar encounters it (2006, 109-110).

This second employment of ‘phenomenology’ is somewhat nearer to the spirit of

Husserl’s work as I approach it in this study. At the very least, there is an acknowledgment of the

consciousness of the investigator in his or her performance of a limited epoché. However, the

key difference is that I will not use phenomenology as a theoretical lens through which to view

the YS as a religious phenomenon. Rather than subjecting the YS to a limited version of the

phenomenological gaze, I wish to argue that the YS is itself an outline of how to achieve the

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phenomenological gaze, and also an outline, along with Sāṃkhya, of the various eidoi, or

essential structures of conscious experience, that one discovers upon so doing.

2.3 A Brief Overview of the Yogasūtra

2.3.1 An Overview of the Text’s Form and History

With some sense of the theoretical basis of this study in place, I will turn now to a brief

overview of the text itself, before beginning the interpretive endeavour of the study in the next

chapters. As its title suggests, the Yogasūtra is a collection of 195 Sanskrit sūtras, or aphorisms

(literally ‘threads,’ from the Sanskrit root √siv). The sūtra was the favored textual format among

the philosophical schools of ancient India, and these sūtras, in both the YS and elsewhere,

typically served as a condensation of a topic or line of argumentation, which either a flesh and

blood teacher or a written commentary was to unpack further.

The origins of a supposed foundational text of just the sūtras are hardly clear, and the

precise date of the YS’s composition is disputed. Complicating matters further, much of the

conjecture about when the YS appeared depends upon the proposed identity of its author

Patañjali, a matter which is also unresolved. In general, though, most scholars date the origin of

the YS itself to somewhere between the second century BCE and the fourth century CE. For

more extensive reviews of the debate over the authorship and date of the YS, see Larson (2008,

54-61) and Whicher (1998, 42-43).

When read on their own, the sūtras are sometimes so terse as to be indecipherable. Given

this general inscrutability, very few scholars attempt to interpret the aphorisms in complete

isolation from the larger commentarial tradition (Bryant 2009, xxxviii; White 2014, 5). While a

few modern critical scholars such as Burley (2007), Chapple (1994) and Whicher (1998) have

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offered novel accounts of various sūtras that intentionally contradict one or more of the

traditional commentaries, even these approaches at least begin by responding to the context of

the commentarial tradition, rather than treating the aphorisms as a free-floating blank slate.

When interpreting the YS directly in the fourth chapter of this thesis, I will thus consider

two of the oldest commentaries on the YS, Vyāsa’s Yogabhāṣya (“Commentary on Yoga”) and

Vācaspatimiśra’s Tattvavaiśāradī (“Expert Guide to the Ontological Principles”), along with the

sūtras themselves. The former is the oldest known commentary, and while there is some dissent

on the matter, scholarly consensus dates the Yogabhāṣya to sometime in the 4th or 5th centuries

CE (Larson 2008, 53). The Yogabhāṣya’s influence on the study of Patañjali is immense, and

most later commentaries focus just as much of their interpretive effort on it as on the sūtras

themselves. As Edwin Bryant remarks, “when we speak of the philosophy of Patañjali, what we

really mean (or should mean) is the understanding of Patañjali according to Vyāsa” (2009,

xxxix-xl). The Sanskrit of the Yogabhāṣya forms an almost seamless extension of the aphorisms,

which are woven into the argument of Vyāsa’s prose in such a way that some commentators have

even quibbled over the precise demarcation of some of the sūtras from the commentary

(Bhattacharya 1985, 43-47). Vyāsa’s elaborations on these terse aphorisms operate largely within

the framework of Sāṃkhya philosophy, a dualist system that enjoyed considerable popularity

around the time in which Vyāsa wrote, and which will receive closer attention later in this thesis.

Indeed, an alternate title of the Yogabhāṣya is the Sāṃkhyapravacana (“Pronouncement on

Sāṃkhya”) (Āraṇya 1983, 405). In recent years, some scholars have raised considerable

questions regarding the identity of Vyāsa (cf. Bronkhorst 1985, Maas 2013, and Angot 2008).

Regardless of who wrote it, however, this commentary exerts a tremendous influence on

subsequent commentarial literature and is therefore difficult to ignore in a study such as this.

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Vācaspatimiśra’s Tattvavaiśāradī (“Expert Guide to the True Principles”) is perhaps the

second most influential commentary after Vyāsa’s (Bryant, op. cit.), and is also likely the second

oldest, appearing sometime between the 9th and 10th centuries CE (Larson 2008, 54). The

Tattvavaiśāradī takes the form of a subcommentary, or ṭīkā, on the Yogabhāṣya, providing a

gloss of various terms in it and expanding into broader discourses while doing so. In cleaving so

closely to the Yogabhāṣya, Vācaspatimiśra’s commentary retains the strongly Sāṃkhyan

orientation present in Vyāsa; indeed, the term ‘tattva’ in Tattvavaiśāradī is a reference to the true

or absolute principles of existence whose enumeration is the hallmark of Sāṃkhya philosophy.

According to Gerald Larson, the Tattvavaiśāradī, taken together with the Yogabhāṣya

and the sūtrapāṭha, or the sūtras alone, constitutes the core “text-complex” of the YS that forms

the basis for most later interpretation (2008, 65). This study will take this core text complex of

the sūtrapāṭha and Vyāsa’s and Vacaspatimiśra’s commentaries as its basis. As Larson argues

(2008, 65) it is only with the addition of these two oldest known commentaries that a robust

enough text, or tripartite “text-complex” as Larson calls it (ibid.), emerges that one can

reasonably hope to interpret. The aphorisms alone are simply too laconic, and in places even

Vyāsa’s commentary is so brief as to be inscrutable without further unpacking. In addition, this

core text has provided the consistent foundation for most subsequent commentaries, many of

which have then gone off in their own idiosyncratic and even contradictory directions. A study of

the aphorisms along with the Yogabhāṣya and Tattvavaiśāradī thus allows one to draw

conclusions about the text that may have the greatest relevance to the discourse at large. Of

course, there are further commentaries that have played important roles in the history of the YS.

For further information, Burley (2007) lists a number of other notable commentaries, and Larson

(2008) also provides an extensive catalogue, including summaries of the major ones.

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2.3.2 An Overview of the Text’s Content

With some sense of the history of the YS and its key commentaries established, I will

turn now to an overview of its content. The overall rhetorical movement of the YS, as defined by

the sūtrapāṭha, will likely frustrate readers expecting an orderly, linear progression from first

principles to final conclusions. This is not to say that the progression of the sūtrapāṭha is

incoherent, but it is prone to sudden digressions and pivots in topic. Still, a guiding organization

is discernible in the topics of the text’s four pādas or chapters (literally, ‘feet’).

The first, Samādhi Pāda, or the chapter on meditative absorption, begins with a definition

of yoga as the cessation of turnings in the mind (YS I:2 yogaścittavṛtti nirodhaḥ), and further

statements as to what happens when such a cessation does or does not occur (YS I:3-4). From

there, the text moves on to catalogue the five forms of such turnings (vṛtti): right knowledge

(pramāṇa), error (viparyaya), imagination (vikalpa), sleep (nidra), and memory (smṛti) (YS I:5-

11). Then, attention turns to the process of stopping these turnings through both the regular

practice of stilling the mind (abhyāsa; YS I:12-14) and the cultivation of dispassion towards all

objects of experience (vairāgya; I:12, 15-16). After this definition of dispassion, however, the

remainder of the pāda largely takes meditative practice (abhyāsa) as its focus, with descriptions

and classifications of meditative absorption (samādhi and samāpatti; YS I:17-19, 40-51) and

practical considerations and techniques concerning its attainment (YS I:20-39).

The second chapter, Sādhana Pāda, or the chapter on practice, is to a large extent a

further elaboration on praxis. It begins with a definition of kriyāyoga, or the yoga of activity,

presented as the practice of austerity (tapas), study (svādhyāya), and surrender or dedication to

the Lord (īśvārapraṇidhāna) (YS II:1-2). Then follows a description of the afflictions (kleśa)

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that the practice of kriyāyoga is to weaken, namely ignorance (avidyā), egotism (asmitā),

attraction (rāga), aversion (dveṣa), and clinging to life (abhiniveśa) (YS II:3-9), along with their

relationship to yoga practice and to the causal mechanics of karma (YS II:10-14). Following this

is the text’s first detailed excursus on the attainment of liberation, couched in the terms of

Sāṃkhya metaphysics (II:15-28). Shifting topic, the sūtras then return their focus to more

practical matters once again with an enumeration of the aṣṭāṅgayoga, or eight-limbed yoga, the

discussion of which spills over into the third pāda. These eight limbs are behavioral restraints

(yama), observances (niyama), the cultivation of a steady, comfortable seat for meditation

(āsana), control of the breath or vital force (prāṇāyāma), withdrawal of the senses from their

objects (pratyāhāra), concentrative focus (dhāraṇā), meditation (dhyāna), and absorption

(samādhi) (YS II:29-55, YS III:1-3).

The third chapter, Vibhūti Pāda, or the chapter on supernormal powers, begins with

descriptions of the final three limbs of the aṣṭāṅga yoga, and then defines their combination as a

single practice known as saṃyama, a technical term with a literal meaning along the lines of

‘restraint’ or ‘exertion’ (YS III:1-4). Much of the remainder of the pāda concerns the application

of saṃyama to various objects of focus, and the special knowledge (jñāna) or—true to the title of

the pāda—the extraordinary powers (siddhi, vibhūti) that result therefrom. Despite its strong

focus on such powers, the pāda also contains aphorisms on the nature of samādhi (YS III:5-12),

time (YS III:12-16), and the knowledge that is said to lead to liberation (kaivalya) (YS III:49-

55).

The fourth and final chapter, Kaivalya Pāda, or the chapter on liberation, begins with an

excursus on the functioning of latent mental conditioning (saṃskāra), including speculation on

so-called “created minds” (nirmāṇacittāni) of the yogin (YS IV:2-11), and then onto what

22

appears to be an invective against what some scholars, beginning with James Haughton Woods

(2003 [1927], xvii), have understood as the idealism of Buddhist vijñānavāda (IV:14-23). From

there, the focus shifts back to a more recognizably Sāṃkhyan metaphor with a discussion of the

state of liberation (kaivalya) as the result of the discernment of the difference between the mind

and the puruṣa. This discernment ultimately brings about a cessation of the activity of the guṇas,

or fundamental constituents of experience, and the establishment of the power of consciousness

(citiśakti), i.e. puruṣa, in its own essential nature (svarūpa) (IV:23-34).

Such a brief summary of the topics of the sūtrapāṭha could give the impression that it is a

digressive, at times random, meander, albeit through interrelated ideas and practices. Indeed, a

number of scholars have concluded that the YS must be a patchwork of excerpts from other texts

for this very reason (cf. Deussen 1922, 507-578; Frauwallner 1953, 408-445; J.W. Hauer 1958,

239-258; Feuerstein 1979, 36-89). For the purposes of this study, however, two key thematic

veins require further explication: Sāṃkhya’s metaphysics, and meditative praxis.

In the next chapter, I will turn to the first of these two themes. After introducing the key

terms and schematics of Sāṃkhya, I will attempt to show how the two major hermeneutical

possibilities regarding ‘experience’ that I have outlined in this chapter—the natural attitude and

the phenomenological attitude—may be brought into play in regard to Sāṃkhyan metaphysics.

Going further, I will also argue that of these two possibilities, the latter, phenomenological

approach is ultimately more coherent. This will also help to prepare the way for a consideration

of samāpatti and samprajñāta samādhi in the subsequent chapter.

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Chapter 3: Interpreting Sāṃkhya’s Metaphysics

3.1 Introduction

In this chapter, I will turn my attention to the classical expression of the philosophical

system known as Sāṃkhya, which provides the metaphysical underpinning of the YS,

particularly as Vyāsa’s and Vācaspatimiśra’s commentaries present it (White 2014, 11). In so

doing, I will first provide an overview of some of Sāṃkhya’s key terminology and doctrines.

Then, I will argue that Sāṃkhya is, in general, signifying conscious experience. More

specifically, its various tattvas, or ontological principles, make reference to such things as pure

consciousness or sentience (puruṣa), intentional awareness or intellect (buddhi or mahat), the

sensorial mind (manas), and the five senses (buddhīndriyas or jñānendriyas), all of which relate

to cognition, perception, and conscious experience in general.

As a result, the two basic hermeneutical responses to ‘conscious experience’ outlined in

the previous chapter can come into play in regard to Sāṃkhya’s metaphysical schema. That is,

one can interpret Sāṃkhya in the spirit of the natural attitude, such that it describes either a

cosmology or a psychology whose cognition by me as a conscious subject is taken for granted.

Or, one can interpret Sāṃkhya in the spirit of the transcendental or phenomenological reduction,

whereby the system describes the principles that are at work in my own first-person conscious

experience, and that constitute a world that transcends my immediate conscious experience. I

will argue that the latter possibility not only allows for a cogent interpretation of Sāṃkhya, but

can even provide a more elegant and sensible account than an interpretation in the spirit of the

natural attitude. Securing this interpretation of the YS’s metaphysics as transcendental and

phenomenological will also prepare the way for the arguments of the next chapter that the state

of samāpatti is analogous to Husserl’s formulation of the phenomenological reduction.

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3.2 Sāṃkhya’s Metaphysics

3.2.1 Classical Sāṃkhya

The term ‘sāṃkhya’ has a long history in Indian thought, with appearances in the

Upaniṣads and portions of the epic Mahābhārata. Given the scope and length of this study, it

will be more profitable simply to turn to an explication of such concepts in the Sāṃkhya of the

time period of the YS, rather than recount the historical development of the diverse concepts at

work in that particular formulation of Sāṃkhya.

The YS largely reflects Sāṃkhya in its so-called classical phase, which Gerald Larson,

who is perhaps the authority among English-speaking scholars on the subject, places between the

first and tenth centuries CE (1969, 143). During this time, various teachers and scribes seem to

have consolidated the wide-ranging speculations of texts such as the Mahābhārata into a

normative set of doctrines (Larson 1987, 10-11). Also during this time, the Sanskrit

Sāṃkhyakārikā (SK) of Īśvarakṛṣṇa, a collection of aphorisms written in Āryā meter, appeared

between 350-450 CE. Today, most scholars take the SK as the paradigmatic surviving text of the

tradition’s classical expression (Larson 1987, 15). While there likely was at least one important

text, the Ṣaṣṭitantra (‘Seventy Topics’), that preceded the SK and that receives mention in it and

several other texts, no known manuscript now exists (Larson 1969, 145-147). Since its writing,

the root text of the SK has also inspired a number of commentaries, perhaps the most notable of

which are the sixth century CE Gauḍapādabhāṣya, the recently discovered seventh century

Yuktidīpikā, and Vācaspatimiśra’s ninth or tenth century Tattvakaumudi (Burley 2007, 25-26). In

addition to these commentaries, a considerable number of works on Sāṃkhya have continued to

appear up through the twentieth century, with the Sāṃkhyasūtra, which appeared during a

revival of Sāṃkhya during the 15th century, being perhaps the most influential among them

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(Larson 1987, 15-17).

One finds a well-elaborated system of thought in classical “Kārikā-Sāṃkhya,” which

Larson takes as roughly the same as the “Pātañjala Sāṃkhya” in evidence in the YS (ibid., 18).

The term ‘sāṃkhya’ literally means “relating to number, enumeration, or calculation” (Larson

1987, 3). True to this original meaning, Sāṃkhya, in its classical expression, provides an

enumeration of twenty-five tattvas, or fundamental ontological principles (literally ‘that-nesses’),

the correct knowledge of which results in liberation (kaivalya) from the suffering and

dissatisfaction (duḥkha) of human existence (Larson 1987, 23-24).

The most fundamental of these tattvas are puruṣa and prakṛti, also ‘mūlaprakṛti’ or

‘pradhāna’ when taken in isolation. ‘Puruṣa,’ literally ‘person’ (Monier-Williams 1974, 637),

refers to a pure, witnessing consciousness. Perhaps most crucial to understand about the classical

Sāṃkhyan conception of puruṣa is that it is, in Gerald Larson’s words, “individual but not

personal” (1969, 185). Larson offers a description that gets to the crux of the matter:

The personal ego or self-consciousness in classical Sāṃkhya is included in the notions of buddhi, ahaṃkāra, and manas, which are the first evolutes of mulaprakṛti when the latter has come into the presence of puruṣa. Thus, what commonly is considered to be self-consciousness or ego is understood in classical Sāṃkhya to be other than the puruṣa…the puruṣa in itself, then, is apart from all knowledge, emotion or self-awareness. It is likewise apart from all action and willing…it is simply a witness, a spectator (ibid).

Some caution is thus required in defining puruṣa as consciousness. If ‘consciousness’ is to

denote all of the various processes of discursive thought, self-reflection, feeling, sensation, and

so forth, then the term varies considerably from the meaning of puruṣa in classical Sāṃkhya.

Only insofar as ‘consciousness’ denotes a kind of pure witnessing or sentience is its equation

with the term puruṣa justified.

Prakṛti, then, as the other half of Sāṃkhya’s dualism, is a general term for that of which

26

puruṣa is aware. Interpreters have translated ‘prakṛti’ as “the primordial material matrix of the

universe” (Bryant 2009, xlviii), “the fundamental substance out of which the world evolves”

(Radhakrishnan 1929, II: 266), “Nature or Matter” (White 2014, 26), “ultimate first principle”

(Larson 1969, 174) and “plenitude of being” (ibid, 175). As I will attempt to show later in this

study, many of these translations are problematic. However, all of them are helpful inasmuch as

they suggest a fundamental objectivity in contrast to puruṣa’s witnessing subjectivity. Indeed,

the terminology of the sūtrapāṭha refers to puruṣa and prakṛti as draṣṭṛ and dṛśya, or that which

sees and that which is seen, respectively (Āraṇya 1983, 150; YS II:17).

Saying more about what puruṣa and prakṛti are in and of themselves presents

considerable difficulty. Puruṣa, as the subject of all awareness, cannot take itself directly as its

own object. That is, the act of supposedly cognizing puruṣa as an object would still imply a

subject of that very act of cognizing, which would still remain unknown. On the other hand,

prakṛti, although “seen,” in a sense, does not present itself to puruṣa as some sort of static,

unified entity. According to SK 8-9, prakṛti itself remains imperceptible, although its existence

can be inferred. However, prakṛti’s conjunction (saṃyoga) with puruṣa, or, put differently, the

cognizing of prakṛti by puruṣa, results in the stimulation or disturbance of the former’s three

constituent qualities, called the guṇas (Larson 1987, 23). With this arise the remaining manifest

tattvas and the entire multiplicity of the known world.

Before listing these additional manifest tattvas, the guṇas themselves require review.

The term ‘guṇa’ does not lend itself to a clear and concise definition, at least in English. A literal

translation might be ‘virtue’ or ‘quality’ (Monier-Williams 1974, 357), suggesting that these are

the basic qualities of prakṛti. Another translation is the braided strands of a rope (ibid.),

suggesting that the three are somehow intertwined in the totality of experience. The SK offers no

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real explanation of what a guṇa is in and of itself. One only learns that there are three: sattva,

rajas, and tamas (SK 12-14). A great deal of scholarly effort has gone into both defining these

terms and concomitantly searching out their origins in Indian thought, including work by van

Buitenen (1988) and Larson (1969, 1987), but a lengthy review is not necessary here. For its

part, the SK describes sattva, which literally translates as something like ‘being-ness’ or

‘goodness’ (van Buitenen 1988, 76), as buoyant (laghu) and shining (prakāśaka), and

characterized by pleasure (prīti) and—somewhat redundantly—illumination (prakāśa) (SK 12-

13; Larson 1969, 175). Rajas (literally ‘impurity’, ‘dust’, or ‘vapor’) is said to be stimulating

(upaṣṭambhaka) and moving (cala), and characterized by pain (aprīti) and actuation (pravṛtti)

(ibid.). Finally, tamas (literally ‘darkness’ or ‘obscuration’) is heavy (guru) and enveloping

(varaṇaka), and characterized by indifference (viṣāda) and restraint (niyama) (ibid.).

Despite the ambiguity regarding the precise meaning of these terms, the SK is clear that

the guṇas are in an ongoing, dynamic relationship with one another, and that variations in their

predominance over each other result in the manifestation of the various remaining tattvas (SK

12, 15; Burley 2007, 166-167). Classical Sāṃkhya refers to this causal unfolding or evolution of

the tattvas as satkāryavāda, the doctrine (-vāda) of the existent (sat-) effect (-kārya-), which

holds that effects in some way preexist in their causes (Larson 1969, 178). Thus, all of the

remaining tattvas arise as effects from mūlaprakṛti after its being cognized by puruṣa. From

prakṛti comes the intellect (mahat or buddhi), and from the intellect comes egoity (ahaṃkāra).

Egoity, in turn gives rise to the sensorial mind (manas); to the five sensorial capacities

(buddhīndrīya): hearing (śrotra), touching (tvac), seeing (cakṣus), tasting (rasana), and smelling

(ghrāṇa); to the five kinaesthetic or action capacities (karmendrīya): speaking (vāc), grasping

(pāṇi), locomotion (pāda), procreating (upastha), and excreting (pāyu); and to the five subtle

28

elements (tanmātra): sound (śabda), contact (sparśa), form (rūpa), taste (rāsa), and smell

(gandha). Finally, the subtle elements give rise to five gross elements (mahābhūta): ether

(ākāśa), air (vāyu), fire (tejas), water (ap), and earth (pṛthvi) (SK 22-26, 38; Larson 1987, 48-50;

Burley 2007, 168-169). Again, the SK, true to its name, delights in enumeration. Among these

twenty-five tattvas, the text goes on to provide a variety of sub-groupings, and in addition, the

text also lists a variety of other properties and mental states at work in manifest experience.

Much of this listing and sub-listing seems to result from a need to create a well-

elaborated and self-consistent ontological schema, but a knowledge of such intricacies is not

needed in order to understand the basic thrust of the SK’s soteriology. Indeed, the metaphysics of

the SK, and classical Sāṃkhya in general, ultimately serves to frame a pathway to liberation

from the inherent suffering and dissatisfaction (duḥkha) of mundane existence (SK 1; Burley

2007, 164). The main problem to overcome is that the puruṣa, which is in fact separate from

prakṛti (SK 3; ibid.) and untouched by any suffering or bondage (SK 62; ibid., 177), nevertheless

becomes mixed up with the activities and processes of manifest prakṛti due to the intellect’s lack

of discrimination. According to SK 20, “because of the proximity (or association) (of the two—

i.e. puruṣa and prakṛti), the unconscious one appears as if characterized by consciousness.

Similarly, the indifferent one appears as if characterized by activity because of the activities of

the three guṇas” (Larson 1969, 188). The various caused or created tattvas outlined above

present the ongoing experience of being an individual body-mind complex to the puruṣa. As a

result, the puruṣa becomes misidentified with these tattvas, particularly the so-called inner

instrument (antaḥkāraṇa) of the intellect (buddhi), egoity (ahaṃkāra), and sensorial mind

(manas) (ibid., 204). The intellect then mistakenly attributes the suffering inherent in the

experiences arising from prakṛti to puruṣa, which consequently seems to suffer. The solution is

29

thus to learn to discriminate the various tattvas from one another correctly, particularly puruṣa

from prakṛti (SK 64; Burley 2007, 177). This discriminative knowledge ultimately results in

puruṣa’s isolation (kaivalya) from prakṛti and the eventual end of the cycle of death and rebirth

(SK 68; ibid.).

3.2.2 Sāṃkhya in the Yogasūtra

In the YS, the principles of Sāṃkhya appear throughout the sūtrapāṭha and the

commentaries of Vyāsa and Vācaspatimiśra, but Sāṃkhya’s clearest influence on the YS is in a

series of sūtras in the second pāda. As mentioned in the overview of the sūtrapāṭha above, YS

II:15-26 act as a condensed summary of Sāṃkhya and its route to liberation. In YS II:15-16 there

is an assertion that suffering is inherent in existence, much like SK 1 (Āraṇya 1983, 144, 149).

YS II:17 then goes on to declare that the union (saṃyoga) of the seer (draṣṭṛ, i.e. puruṣa) with

the seen (dṛśya, i.e. prakṛti) is the cause of the suffering that one can still avoid (ibid., 150).

From there, a description of the various tattvas follows in YS II:18-22 (ibid., 157-188). Then in

YS II:22-26, the standard classical Sāṃkhyan account of liberation appears, according to which

discriminative wisdom (vivekakhyāti) as to the difference between seer and seen brings about the

end of their alliance (saṃyoga) and its concomitant suffering (ibid., 187-199). This connection

between liberation and the discrimination between the seer and seen continues elsewhere in the

YS. For instance, YS IV:26 claims that the mind (citta) inclined toward discrimination of the

seer from the seen (viveka) naturally gravitates toward liberation (kaivalya) (ibid., 394-395). In

turn, YS IV:34, the final aphorism of the text, defines liberation as when the seer (here referred

to as citiśakti) is established in its own nature (svarūpa-pratiṣṭhā) (ibid., 405). The basic

soteriological project of the YS appears in largely the same terms as in the SK and the classical

30

Sāṃkhya it typifies.

However, the YS is not an exact restatement of the tenets and methodology of Sāṃkhya.

In terms of ontology, there are two main differences between classical Sāṃkhya and Pātañjala

Yoga. First, the YS makes reference to a single, pervasive cognitive faculty called citta, often

translated as ‘awareness’ or, somewhat confusingly, ‘mind,’ that seems to be either intentional

awareness (buddhi) alone, or its combination with egoity (ahaṃkāra), and the sensorial mind

(manas) (Larson 1987, 27). Second, the YS also admits the existence of Īśvāra (literally ‘Lord’),

a deity or god that does not comprise an additional tattva, but is instead a special puruṣa

unaffected by affliction or the fructification of karma (YS I:24; Larson op. cit.). Also, such

enumerative schemas in the YS as the five afflictions (kleśa) (YS II:3-9) and the five types of

turnings of the mind (cittavṛtti) (YS I:6) do not appear in the SK’s various formulations. By far

the greatest difference between the YS and the texts of classical Sāṃkhya, however, is the

former’s emphasis on meditative praxis as essential to achieving liberation, a topic which the

next chapter will review and interpret.

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Figure 1: The 25 Tattvas of Classical Sāṃkhya and Yoga

1) Puruṣa: pure, witnessing sentience, the subject of consciousness

2) Prakṛti: the creative source of the manifestation witnessed by puruṣa

3) Buddhi: intentional awareness, intellect

4) Ahaṃkāra: egoity

5)   Manas: the sensorial mind, which synthesizes sensations into a coherent whole

6)—10) Buddhīndriyas or Jñānendriyas: five sensory capacities, being 6) hearing (śrotra), 7) touching (tvac), 8) seeing (cakṣus), 9) tasting (rasana), and 10) smelling (ghrāṇa)

11—15) Karmendriyas: five action or kinaesthetic capacities, being

11) speaking (vacana) 12) clasping (ādāna) 13) moving (viharaṇa) 14) procreating (ānanda) 15) excreting (utsarga)

16—20) Tanmātras: five modes of sensory content, being

16) sound (śabda) 17) touch (sparśa) 18) visual form (rūpa) 19) taste (rasa) 20) odour (gandha)

21—25) Bhūtas: five constituents of perceptual objects, being

21) space (ākāśa) 22) air (vāyu) 23) fire (tejas) 24) water (ap) 25) earth (pṛthivī)

The antaḥkāraṇa, or ‘internal instrument,’ consists of manas, ahaṃkāra, and buddhi in Classical Sāṃkhya. The bāhyakāraṇa, or ‘external instrument,’ consists of the five buddhīndriyas and the five karmendriyas together. The kāraṇa, or ‘instrument,’ consists of both the internal and external instruments together. Citta is a name for the mind in general, referenced in Pātañjala Yoga. It is sometimes understood as a cognitive capacity comprising buddhi, ahaṃkāra, and manas, and sometimes as solely synonymous with buddhi, especially its purely sattvic aspect.

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Figure 2: A Schematic of Satkāryavāda

cognizes

puruṣa (subject of consciousness)

prakṛti (object of consciousness, source of phenomenality)

buddhi (intentional awareness)

ahaṃkāra (egoity, sense of ‘I’)

tanmātras (modes of sensation)

śabda (sound) sparśa (tactility) rūpa (visual form) rasa (taste) gandha (odour)

bhūtas (constituents of percepts) ākāśa (space) vāyu (air) tejas (fire) ap (liquidity) pṛthvi (solidity)

manas (synthesizing, sensorial

mind)

buddhīndriyas (sense capacities)

śrotra (hearing) tvac (touching) cakṣus (seeing) rasana (tasting) ghrāṇa (smelling)

karmendriyas (action capacities)

vacana (speaking) ādāna (grasping) viharaṇa (walking) ānanda (procreating) utsarga (excreting)

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3.3 Interpreting Sāṃkhya

3.3.1 Sāṃkhya and Conscious Experience

Having outlined some of the key themes of Sāṃkhya’s philosophy, I will now turn to an

interpretation of Sāṃkhya’s metaphysical schema. More specifically, I wish to explore how

Sāṃkhya is subject to the same hermeneutical ambiguity that the term ‘conscious experience’ is,

as I discuss in the introduction to this thesis. Sāṃkhya’s tattvas, or ontological principles, make

reference to such things as pure consciousness or sentience (puruṣa), intentional awareness or

intellect (buddhi, also mahat), the sensorial mind (manas), and the five senses (buddhīndriyas or

jñānendriyas), all of which relate to cognition, perception, and conscious experience in general.

When faced with such a reference to conscious experience, the two basic hermeneutical

responses to the concept of ‘experience,’ as outlined in the previous chapter, may come into play.

That is, one can interpret Sāṃkhya in the spirit of the natural attitude, such that it describes either

a cosmology or a psychology whose cognition by me as a conscious subject is taken for granted.

Or, one can interpret Sāṃkhya in the spirit of the transcendental or phenomenological reduction,

whereby the system describes the principles and processes that are at work in my own first-

person conscious experience, and that constitute a world that transcends my immanent conscious

experience. I will argue that the latter possibility not only allows for a cogent interpretation of

Sāṃkhya, but can even provide a more elegant and sensible account than an interpretation in the

spirit of the natural attitude. By doing so, I will be following in the footsteps of Mikel Burley’s

2007 study Classical Sāṃkhya: An Indian Metaphysics of Experience, and I will both clarify and

augment the critiques and arguments Burley makes there.

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3.3.2 Sāṃkhya’s Unusual Dualism and Its Hermeneutical Challenges

The interpretive ambiguity regarding Sāṃkhya’s description of conscious experience

correlates with, and is compounded by, a further ambiguity in Sāṃkhya’s tattvas, or ontological

principles. As the brief summary above has shown, Sāṃkhya is a dualism comprised of puruṣa,

or a purely sentient, witnessing subject, and prakṛti, the object for that sentient subject. The basic

difficulty results from Sāṃkhya’s peculiar division between puruṣa and prakṛti, which sets a

pure, witnessing sentience on the side of the former, and the mind and senses as well as the

objects of the mind and senses on the side of the latter. Mikel Burley describes this same feature

of Sāṃkhya’s metaphysics in somewhat different terms:

The concept of puruṣa seems to require, then, that we distinguish between, on the one hand, experiential contents and the acts that intend them…both of which fall under the category of prakṛti, and on the other hand, the fundamentally non-empirical pure subject [puruṣa]—the “subject that is never the object” as J. Ghosh puts it ([Āraṇya] 1977, 21) (Burley 2007, 78-79, emphasis added).

The result is a dualism within a dualism, whereby prakṛti, although the object of puruṣa,

nevertheless consists of its own subjective or sattvika aspect (buddhi, ahaṃkāra, manas, and the

indriyas) and objective or tamasika aspect (the tanmātras and the bhutas). That is, intentional

awareness (buddhi), the sense of being an individual self (ahaṃkāra), the organizing sensorial

mind (manas), and even the various capacities for sensation and kinaesthesia (indriyas) are

themselves still objects for puruṣa, along with those tattvas that may more naturally lend

themselves to objectification, namely the modes of sensorial presentation (tanmātra), viz. sound,

tactile sensation, visual form, taste, and smell, and the basic properties or constituents of the

experienced world (bhūtas), viz. ether, air, fire, water, and earth. How, then, should one

characterize this principle called prakṛti that seems at once to consist both of faculties capable of

mental acts and of the objects of those acts?

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The difficulty in answering this question may have its roots, per Burley, in the modern

collision of Sāṃkhya with the sort of dualism found in the philosophy of René Descartes (1596-

1650) (ibid., 75). Descartes famously distinguishes between res cogitans (‘thinking things’ or

‘thinking substances’) and res extensae (‘extended things’ or ‘extended substances’) (1993, 17-

23 et passim). Even today such a distinction is basic to most modern people’s understanding of

their experience, as is evident in the taken-for-granted sense that there is an internal realm of

thought that includes postulations, fantasies, memories, emotions, and so forth, and that stands in

opposition to an external realm of extended space that includes the sort of physical objects one

encounters out in the world, e.g. tables, stones, cats, human bodies, and so on.

When overlaid with Sāṃkhya, however, this sort of mind-matter dualism does not find a

neat match. As already suggested above, the conceptual dividing line of Cartesian dualism runs

through prakṛti, not along the dividing line between puruṣa and prakṛti. Though puruṣa, as mere

sentience or consciousness, may seem to fall on the side of res cogitans, so, too, do prakritic

tattvas like buddhi, ahaṃkāra, and manas. Interpreting Sāṃkhya forces one beyond such a

common-sense divide between mind and matter, and yet this move beyond must still take place,

at least at the outset, in terms of the familiar Cartesian dualism. How might this shape

hermeneutical responses to Sāṃkhya?

3.3.3 Two Hermeneutical Possibilities of Prakṛti, and Their Relation to the Natural and

Phenomenological Approaches to ‘Experience’

In trying to understand, then, how prakṛti can at once consist both of faculties capable of

mental acts and of the objects of those acts, two main options seem to have arisen for recent

commentators. The first is to subsume manifest prakṛti’s seemingly mental aspects to its

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seemingly objective aspects. In Cartesian terms, that which is suggestive of res extensae—e.g.

the bhūtas—subsumes that which is suggestive of res cogitans—e.g. buddhi—among the

manifest tattvas of prakṛti. By this view, one conceives of prakṛti as having the same ontological

status as the world one sees “out there,” apart from, and independent of, oneself as a perceiving,

mental subject. In this vein, Burley notes the widespread tendency of a diverse array of scholars,

including such luminaries as Jhā (1896), Garbe (1899), Macdonell (1900), Eliade (1969),

Radhakrishnan (1971), and Larson (1980), to translate prakṛti with words like ‘matter,’ ‘world,’

or ‘nature’ (2007, 75), as already mentioned above. Such terms reflect the notion that prakṛti is

some sort of res extensa, or stuff that exists apart from a perceiving or cognizing subject.

In taking this view, one thus tends to conceive of the subjective or mental tattvas, like

buddhi, ahaṃkāra, and manas, nevertheless as somehow objective entities, or even as something

material, occupying a mind-independent space ‘out there.’ Take, for instance, James Woods’

translation of citta as “mind-stuff” (2003, 8 et passim), whereby the mind is characterized as a

kind of substance. Gerald Larson also provides a typical example of the tendency to materialize

or substantialize, as it were, the seemingly mental manifest tattvas:

Citta or ‘mind stuff’ encompasses or is co-extensive with the entire realm of materiality from the subtlest level, pure cittasattva or buddhisattva, down through the subtle forms (tanmātras) (‘objective universals’) of ordinary everyday experience that eventually become the concrete, gross object world of everyday life (mahābhūtas) (2008, 104).

For Larson, the underlying metaphor is one of materiality; manifest prakṛti is material in some

way. Thus, there is the implication that prakṛti is like the stuff that composes the physical, mind-

independent world that one perceives as “out there” in everyday experience. In this way, the

subjective, mental tattvas like buddhi, ahaṃkāra, and manas can come to be considered as also

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“out there,” perhaps even as material entities of some sort, existing independently of the

hermeneut’s (i.e. your and my) own experience.

In contrast to this first interpretive option, whereby the objective subsumes the subjective,

a second option exists, namely that the subjective, mental character of manifest prakṛti subsumes

the objective, ostensibly material character. The first explicit proponent of this view seems to be

Mikel Burley, as mentioned above. For Burley, “none of the manifest categories contains items

that are external to the field of experience” (2007, 157), i.e. none of the manifest tattvas are

meant to reference some substance, matter, or world that exists independently of cognition. By

Burley’s view, one could therefore say that when Larson declares that “citta or ‘mind stuff’

encompasses…the entire realm of materiality from the subtlest level…down through…the

concrete, gross object world of everyday life” (op. cit.), he is indeed correct that citta

“encompasses” the entire realm of the manifest tattvas down to the bhūtas. And yet, this is not

because citta, like the bhūtas, is material, but rather because the bhūtas, like citta, are, in a sense,

mental. The bhūtas and tanmātras are categories or modalities of cognition, rather than some sort

of special stuff outside of cognition. The bhūtas and tanmātras can thus come to be considered

as “in here,” as cognitive structures of a kind, existing inseparably from the hermeneut’s (i.e.

your and my) experience of any external, real world.

Going further, these two possibilities regarding the interpretation of prakṛti correspond,

in many ways, to the natural and phenomenological approaches to imagining and interpreting

‘experience.’ The objectifying tendency toward manifest prakṛti seems to operate largely from

the natural attitude, as the fact of my own conscious experience as the interpreter never really

comes into consideration. Rather, I instead understand the manifest tattvas as things whose

existence for consciousness is already assumed and taken for granted. They are entities out there,

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as it were, which reference conscious experience in the third person, as it occurs in a

consciousness-transcendent cosmos. In this spirit, the various tattvas provide, in Burley’s words,

“an account of how the universe is—that is, what it comprises and how it is constructed—

independent of anyone’s experience of it” (2007, 5). By this view, the tattvas could represent

some kind of matter, as some commentators have proposed, or discrete psyches that populate the

space of a mind-independent universe. Thus, Sāṃkhya can seem to be either a cosmology or a

psychology of some sort, or perhaps an odd mixture of both, as some commentators point out (cf.

Burley 2007, 108-110; Whicher 1998, 71; Radhakrishnan 1971, 268). In any case, however, one

still imagines the manifest tattvas in such a way that they do not provoke a consideration of

one’s own, first person experience.

However, the subjectifying interpretive tendency, whereby the seemingly objective

manifest tattvas are subsumed by the subjective ones, does allow for such a consideration of

one’s own, first person experience. In this way, the subjectifying approach to Sāṃkhya allows

for the phenomenological interpretive possibility. Sāṃkhya’s manifest tattvas do not reference a

world of which the cognition has already occurred and is now assumed to be unproblematic.

Instead, they attempt to describe the very dynamics and principles whereby such a world arises

in my own conscious experience. Sāṃkhya, thus understood, turns me as the interpreter back

upon myself.

With an idea of the two major interpretive possibilities regarding prakṛti now outlined, an

understanding begins to come into focus of the philosophical tasks that await either direction. In

short, it remains for those one might call ‘objectifiers,’ or the “external realists,” as Burley might

characterize the position (2007, 73-75), to give an account of how the subjective, seemingly

mental tattvas can be conceived of as objective, mind-independent entities “out there.”

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Conversely, it remains for those one might call ‘subjectifiers,’ or the “idealists” or even

“phenomenologists,” as Burley might also characterize the position (ibid. 13), to give an account

of how the objective, seemingly material tattvas can be conceived of as subjective, mind-

dependent categories “in here.” My contention is that in so doing, the latter position proves to be

more plausible.

3.3.4 Sāṃkhya and the Natural Attitude

In turning now to the philosophical tasks of either casting the internal tattvas as external,

or vice versa, it is important to note that Sāṃkhya provides a key stipulation as to how the

various manifest tattvas are related. This stipulation comes in the form of satkāryavāda, or the

doctrine of the existent effect, as mentioned above. Kārikā 22 of the Sāṃkhyakārikā is typically

considered the locus classicus of satkāryavāda, although YS II:19 echoes some of its import.

The kārikā presents the prakritic tattvas in a terse string of ablatives: “prakṛter-mahāṃs-

tato’haṃkāras- tasmād-gaṇaś-ca ṣodaśakaḥ tasmād-api ṣodaśakāt pañcabhyaḥ pañca bhūtāni”

(Burley 2007, 168), or ‘mahat (mahān) [i.e. buddhi] from prakṛti (prakṛteḥ); thence (tataḥ),

ahaṃkāra (ahaṃkāraḥ); from that (tasmād), the group (gaṇaḥ) of sixteen (ṣodaśakaḥ) [i.e.

manas, the five buddhīndriyas, the five karmendriyas, and the five tanmātras]. And (api) from

those sixteen (ṣodaśakāt), from five (pañcabhyaḥ) [i.e. the tanmātras] [come] the five bhūtas

(pañca bhūtāni).’

Thus, for the external realist in the natural attitude, not only are the seemingly mental

tattvas (buddhi, etc.) to be conceived of as objective and mind-independent, the seemingly

objective tattvas (bhūtas, tanmātras) are also somehow ‘from’ or ‘out of’ the mental ones, as the

ablative case designates. There is some ambiguity as to how one should understand the ablative

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case here, as I will discuss below. However, in interpreting Sāṃkhya in the natural attitude, such

that the manifest tattvas are imagined apart from my own experience, I would take the ablative

of SK 22 in a spatial, almost physical sense, as literally ‘coming out of’ or ‘emerging from’. As

Burley points out, by this interpretation satkāryavāda outlines a cosmogony; it explains the

origin of the cosmos as a diachronic development of the manifest tattvas, from buddhi or mahat

all the way to the bhūtas (2007, 91). It is, in other words, the story of an evolution unfolding “out

there” in time and space, such that satkāryavāda thus becomes a process whereby prakṛti, as

some sort of real, primordial existent, sequentially metamorphoses into the various manifest

tattvas.

Though perhaps not entirely unfounded, such an understanding of satkāryavāda is rather

obscure, and it sounds more like a cosmogonic just-so-story than a compelling philosophical

account. The idea of a mind emitting the physical world may not be entirely unheard of—

perhaps elements of Neoplatonism come to mind—yet there seems to be no clear reason why or

how this should be so, aside from an appeal to tradition or mythology. Indeed, Radhakrishnan,

as Burley points out, remains bemused as to the real rhyme and reason for the inclusion of such

an evolutionary narrative at all (2007, 108; cf. Radhakrishnan 1971, 274).

Instead, the idea that an intellect (buddhi) ultimately emits supposedly real, physical

matter actually eliminates one of the more plausible ways to regard the mental tattvas from the

natural attitude, namely materialist reductionism. By this, I mean the idea that the mental tattvas

arise from material processes in a similar way that consciousness does from material,

neurological states, as in the theories of Daniel Dennett (1991), for example. While such a

reductionist might agree that the mind can be conceived of as a real, materially-derived entity of

some sort, he or she would certainly balk at the idea that the mind somehow gives rise to the sort

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of matter that comprises the natural world, i.e. the bhūtas. Such a materialist would likely insist

that precisely the opposite is the case: the matter that comprises the natural world gives rise to

the mind as a result of complex physical processes.

In that vein, satkāryavāda also raises the question for the external realist as to what,

precisely, these supposedly extra-mental, yet mental tattvas are composed. Clearly, it is not the

sort of gross, physical matter that the external realist might take the bhūtas to indicate, for

buddhi, ahaṃkāra, and manas pre-exist and give rise to the bhūtas. Going further, it is difficult

even to imagine some sort of extra-mental space in which buddhi and the rest could arise,

considering that space (ākāśa) is itself among the bhūtas, which, again, appear at the very end of

this supposed cosmogonic sequence. Indeed, the same question arises regarding the three guṇas,

as Burley points out (2007, 104-106). Thus, those holding a materialist view of prakṛti are left

making the rather problematic assertion that there is a mind-independent substance, i.e. prakṛti,

that then somehow gives rise to one of the very conditions for there to be mind-independent

substances at all, i.e. space or extension.

Aside from the composition of the explicitly cognitive tattvas, the composition of the

ostensibly objective tanmātras also poses a challenging question for an externally realist view. In

the case of the tanmātras, it is difficult to understand how sound (śabda), tactility (sparśa),

visual form (rūpa), taste (rāsa), and smell (gandha), which seem inextricable from a perceiving

mind, can somehow be mind-independent, external entities that compose the bhūtas, which in

turn compose physical objects. Nevertheless, the external-realist understanding of satkārayavāda

would have the tanmātras somehow metamorphosing, or even “condensing,” according to

Mircea Eliade (1969, 21), into the bhūtas—or space (ākāśa), air (vāyu), fire (tejas), water (ap),

and earth (pṛthvī)—a prospect that seems rather inscrutable (Burley 2007, 123). For, to say that

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real, transcendent objects are made of sensorial data, not as phenomena, but in rebus, seems like

a hopelessly naïve form of realism. Indeed, Frauwallner, in this way, seems bewildered by the

tanmātras inclusion among the tattvas at all (1973, 122). Such naïveté on the part of Sāṃkhya is,

perhaps, not to be ruled out, and yet it makes for a rather uncharitable interpretation of the

system, and also a rather unlikely one if other, more coherent readings are possible.

Nevertheless, as Burley shows, most modern interpreters have insisted that even the

tattvas other than the bhūtas are comprised of some sort of matter, albeit qualified as in some

way ‘subtle’ or ‘non-physical,’ without really clarifying what such things as ‘subtle matter’ or, in

Radhakrishnan’s terminology, a ‘non-material substance’ (1971, 266) really are (Burley 2007,

97-98, 119-120). In fairness, the Sanskrit term ‘sukṣma,’ which translators frequently render as

‘subtle,’ does appear throughout the SK (cf. 7, 8, 37, and 39) and the YS (cf. 1:44-45), and yet its

use in both texts suggests that, in Burley’s words, “‘subtle’ should be taken primarily to indicate

an object’s degree of accessibility to a knower, and not its material constitution” (2007, 122). I

might soften Burley’s “should” to “could,” but at the very least, an ambiguity remains about

what, precisely, the two texts are describing as subtle—whether some mind-independent real or

some intra-mental phenomenon. When one takes ‘sukṣma’ in the latter sense, as many scholars

have done, however, the implication seems to be that tattvas such as buddhi, ahaṃkāra, manas,

the indriyas, and the tanmātras are made of some sort of rarefied matter (ibid., 119-122).

What such rarefied matter might be in any clearly demonstrable sense typically remains

unexplained, a point of confusion about which Burley rightfully and repeatedly complains. One

possible answer that neither Burley nor his opponents seem explicitly to consider is that the three

guṇas (sattva, rajas, and tamas) could compose the supposed subtle matter in question. Indeed,

YS II:18 makes it clear that the ‘seeable’ (dṛśya), i.e. prakṛti, is of the nature (śīla) of

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illumination (prakāśa), activity (krīyā), and stability (sthiti), or sattva, rajas, and tamas (Āraṇya

1983, 157-158). Kārikā 16 makes a similar point, that unmanifest prakṛti (avyakta) produces

(pravartate) due to the combination (samudayāt) of the three guṇas (triguṇataḥ) (Burley 2007,

167). And, as one might expect, proponents of the external-realist view do tend to take the guṇas

as substances external to the mind. Georg Feuerstein, for instance, declares that the guṇas are

“the ultimate building blocks of the material and mental phenomena… [and are] actual entities or

‘reals’…They are the indivisible atoms of everything there is…The guṇas underlie every

appearance, and are the world-ground in its noumenal character…the very material of prakṛti”

(1980, 34). To be fair to Feuerstein, the guṇas are “real” in relation to puruṣa, i.e. independently

existent of puruṣa. However, such characterizations of the guṇas as “atoms,” “the world-ground

in its noumenal character,” and “the very material of prakṛti,” can easily give the impression that

the guṇas are not only puruṣa-independent, but mind- or experience-independent, as well, since

such terms as ‘atoms,’ ‘noumenal,’ and ‘material’ at least connote, if not denote, mind-

independence. In this way, it may be tempting to see in the guṇas the sort of mind-independent

substance to which terms like ‘subtle matter’ point.

However, it is far from clear that this is necessarily the case. To be sure, the guṇas do in

some sense pre-exist and give rise to the manifest tattvas, including the ostensibly mental ones,

and yet there is no reason to interpret them according to the natural attitude and thereby assume

that they represent extra-mental, material “building blocks” akin to the atoms of modern physics.

Instead, the very same ambiguity—between subject and object, mind and matter—that haunts

prakṛti in general is also discernable in the notion of the guṇas. Indeed, one can understand the

guṇas as a distillation of this very ambiguity, with sattva, as ‘illumination,’ pointing to prakṛti’s

subjective, noetic aspect, with tamas, as ‘stability,’ pointing to prakṛti’s objective, noematic

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aspect, and with rajas, as ‘activity,’ serving as that which changes and animates the other two. In

support of this is the widespread tendency in commentarial literature to refer to manas and the

indriyas as ‘sattvika ahaṃkāra’ and the tanmātras as ‘tamasika ahaṃkāra’ (ahaṃkāra being

‘ego’ or the sense of being an individual). The sattvika aspect of ahaṃkāra seems to correspond

to that which senses, and the tamasika aspect to that which is sensed. So in short, saying that the

guṇas make up the manifest tattvas is really just begging the ontological question, rather than

proving a mind-independent substrate of the manifest tattvas. In the end, it is little different than

saying that prakṛti makes up the manifest tattvas. In this way, invoking the guṇas does not

provide a decisive answer to the question of what a mind-independent substratum of the manifest

tattvas might be.

In general, then, the objectifying interpretive approach to prakṛti, operating in the natural

attitude, struggles to show how one can plausibly conceive of the seemingly mental manifest

tattvas as mind-independent entities ‘out there,’ which in turn give rise to the objective,

seemingly physical world comprised of the bhūtas. It may indeed be that the founders of

Sāṃkhya believed the mental, subjective tattvas to be made of ‘subtle matter’ or even to be an

immaterial real along the lines of spirit or God. However, just like claiming that satkāryavāda is

some form of cosmic evolution, such a claim tends to force one into an interpretation of

Sāṃkhya’s ontological schema as an incomprehensible article of doxa, or a tortured form of

post-Vedic scholasticism. Admittedly, it may be that Sāṃkhya is in fact just that, and yet such a

hermeneutical position is hardly satisfying. Concluding that Sāṃkhya’s metaphysics are simply

an oddity of a foreign historical horizon is a failure to allow Sāṃkhya to provoke and evoke the

terms of one’s own horizon in a meaningful way. At times, such a situation may be unavoidable.

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I contend, however, that one should not be satisfied with such a circumstance, especially if other

equally or more plausible possibilities are available.

3.3.5 Sāṃkhya and the Transcendental Attitude

As is likely clear by this point, the other possibility available is the subjectifying

interpretation of the manifest tattvas, such that the seemingly objective, extra-mental tattvas (the

bhūtas and the tanmātras) are subsumed, so to speak, by the seemingly subjective, intra-mental

tattvas. As mentioned above, Mikel Burley is the foremost exponent of this view. The crux of

Burley’s argument rests on the subjective nature of prakṛti’s manifest tattvas. For Burley, the

very perceiving instrument—consisting of such principles as buddhi, manas, and ahaṃkāra—

that the external realist in the natural attitude consciously or unconsciously imagines prakṛti as

external to, and independently existent of, is instead prakṛti itself. As Burley summarizes the

issue, “none of the manifest categories contain items that are external to the field of experience;

and hence, contrary to the received view of Sāṃkhya exegesis, the schema harbours no

implications of external realism” (2007, 157). In this way, related notions that prakṛti is

equivalent to matter, however ambiguously defined, or that the schema of satkāryavāda is a

cosmogony also become problematic. For, they imagine prakṛti as a finished product of

conscious experience, when it is instead meant to model the very processes at work in conscious

experience itself.

Thus, rather than prakṛti representing an outer world or a material substance that exists

independently of an experiencing subject, Burley proposes that Sāṃkhya’s metaphysical schema

is instead a model of how experience is possible. In this way, rather than looking to Descartes,

Burley looks largely to Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Kant’s philosophical project centers on this

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very question of what the necessary conditions are for experience as we know it. Indeed, Kant’s

self-proclaimed Copernican revolution was to turn attention away from the nature of the world in

and of itself and turn attention instead toward the principles that must structure our knowledge of

it (Kant 1998, 110 [BXVI]). Or, as Robert Solomon summarizes: “rather than speak of the

conformity of our knowledge to objects, [Kant] insists that we speak instead of the necessary

conformity of objects to our knowledge” (2001, 19).

In so doing, Kant’s guiding method is the transcendental deduction, also known as

transcendental reflection or analysis. Burley explains Kant’s approach as following this basic

line of argumentation:

1.   Experience is possible. 2.   It is a necessary condition of experience’s possibility that p. 3.   Therefore, p (2007, 57).

A thorough review of the results of such an analysis is beyond the scope of this study, but in

short, Kant comes to distinguish between sensibility, which receives the basic material of

representations from beyond the mind, and understanding, which actively synthesizes

experiences or conscious episodes as we know them (Burley 2007, 58-59; Kant 1998, 193 [A51,

B75]. While sensibility only attributes space and time to this received material, thereby creating

what Kant terms ‘intuitions,’ the understanding subsumes these intuitions under a priori

categories, thereby making the basic predicative judgments that allow intuitions to be coherent

experiences. These categories include such concepts as unity, plurality, totality, negation, and

causality. They are not directly, empirically observable, but can only be deduced from

experience, as they operate in the very judgments that serve to synthesize experience as we know

it (Kant 1998, 201-266 et passim). In other words, these categories are not ‘out there,’ as objects

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that a perceiving, cognizing subject might see, but are instead the conditions for acts of

perceiving and cognizing in general; in Kantian terminology, they are transcendental.

This is a somewhat prosaic point to make about Kant’s philosophy, but when applied to

Sāṃkhya’s metaphysics it offers a novel and, as Burley contends, much more elegant way of

understanding what prakṛti and its manifest tattvas are supposed to represent. To be clear, Burley

does not propose that Kant’s various categories all have a direct Sanskrit equivalent in the YS or

the SK, nor does he argue that prakṛti and puruṣa are the equivalent of the Kantian distinction

between noumenon and phenomenon (2007, 113). Rather, what Burley takes from Kant and

applies to Sāṃkhya is simply the notion of the transcendental, of a priori categories that must be

in place in order for there to be experience. In this way, the tattvas are not some sort of res or

matter external to the experiencing subject, but are, again, the conditions and structures

necessary for experience in general.

In this way, one can begin to understand how the subjectifying interpretive tendency

could go about plausibly showing the ostensibly extra-mental manifest tattvas to be, in actuality,

intra-mental, or more precisely, intra-experiential. Burley proposes, in his words, “recasting the

tanmātras and the bhūtas as, no longer ‘subtle’ and ‘gross’ material items, but modes of sensory

content and forms of ostensibly external objects respectively” (2007, 122 emphasis author’s).

Rather than the tanmātras being subtle matter, they are instead the ways in which

perceptions appear to consciousness. In this light, the tanmātras are the fundamental media of

perception. The schema of the tanmātras is thus concerned purely with phenomena; they are not

a real substance or material of any sort. There is no claim being made about the existence of a

substance or an item considered apart from the process of perception, but rather, a claim about

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how any perceived object presents itself in the process of perception. And, quite simply, such a

presentation occurs via modifications in sound, tactility, visual image, taste, and smell.

Likewise, rather than the bhūtas being gross matter itself, they are instead the

fundamental qualities that ostensibly material percepts take in experience. Burley proposes that

rather than signifying a particular material, earth (pṛthvī) might signify solidity, water (ap)

liquidity, fire (tejas) illumination or heat, air (vāyu) gaseousness, and ākāśa simply space (2007,

123-124). To stay true to Burley’s argument that Sāṃkhya’s metaphysics is transcendental, not

external-realist, one must point out that the bhūtas may be conceived of as the basic qualities

expressed in objects as phenomena, not as substances independent of the mind. In other words,

the bhūtas are the basic predications in play in the judgment of something as an ostensibly

external object, rather than external substances apprehended by the process of perception.

Such an understanding of the tanmātras and bhūtas also shows how a transcendental

reading of satkārayavāda is possible. From the perspective of the natural attitude, satkāryavada

seems to be a description of some sort of substance morphing from buddhi into ahaṃkāra, and

then from ahaṃkāra into manas, the ten indriyas, and the tanmātras, and then the tanmātras

morphing into the bhūtas. As noted above, such an account seems rather like a cosmogonic just-

so-story that invokes a magical matter that congeals from buddhi into the various other manifest

tattvas. If one recalls Burley’s transcendental interpretation of the tanmātras and the bhūtas,

however, a different understanding of satkāryavāda begins to become apparent. Rather than the

tanmātras generating or emitting the bhūtas, the tanmātras provide the necessary conditions for

the bhūtas as qualities of an ostensibly existent object. That is, it is only through variations in

sound, tactility, and the rest that the predication can be made of a percept as an external, physical

object with the qualities represented by the bhūtas. The perceived quality of hardness or solidity

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(pṛthvī), for instance, only obtains from particular variations in the modes of sensory content, i.e.

the tanmātras as Burley understands them.

Indeed, as noted above, a close reading of SK 22, which lays out the order of

satkāryavāda, reveals no finite verb suggesting a process of some primordial substance emerging

or evolving, only the tattvas listed in a string of ablatives: ‘mahat from prakṛti; thence,

ahaṃkāra; and from that, the group of sixteen (i.e. manas, the five buddhīndriyas, the five

karmendriyas, and the five tanmātras). And from those sixteen, from five (i.e. the tanmātras)

[come] the five bhūtas.’ The ablative case usually carries the meaning of ‘from’ or ‘out of,’ and

yet this need not be understood spatially; quite often the ablative indicates a causal relation, as in

the English phrase, ‘he died from pneumonia.’ Given the phrasing of SK 22, the external-realist

understanding of satkāryavāda—as a process whereby prakṛti, as some sort of real, primordial

matter, metamorphoses into various subtle or gross substances—is far from certain.

As an alternative, SK 22’s string of ablatives could signify various synchronic

relationships of dependence and subordination among the other manifest tattvas, rather than a

diachronic cosmogony. The bhūtas are ‘from’ the tanmātras, not in the sense of a substantial

emergence or evolution, but in the sense of ‘because of’ or ‘resulting from.’ Only because there

are modalities of sense, i.e. the tanmātras, can there be the constitution in conscious experience

of the fundamental qualities, i.e. the bhūtas, of an external, physical world as we perceive it.

Without going into the extensive detail that Burley does, one can likewise see how ahaṃkāra, as

the positing of an ‘I,’ could be the necessary precondition for the ten indriyas, manas, and the

tanmātras. That is, the sense of an ‘I’ is at the heart of the basic divide between, on the one hand,

senses (buddhīndriyas), kinaesthetic capacities (karmendriyas), and a synthesizing sensorial

mind (manas), and on the other hand, the content of those senses (tanmātras). Put differently,

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only with the positing of an ‘I’ can there be senses (indriyas) and an organizing mind (manas)

that belong to that ‘I’ and modes of sense content (tanmātras) that are a priori deemed other than

the ‘I.’ In turn, that sense of egoity is itself dependent on the presence of intentional awareness,

or a mere capacity to be conscious of or think about, which is how Burley argues one should

interpret buddhi (2007, 115). Additionally, for there to be intentional awareness (buddhi), there

must be some fundamental intentional counterpart (prakṛti) to the pure, or in itself objectless,

awareness of puruṣa.

What, then, does all of this mean in terms of what sort of thing manifest prakṛti is? In

short, rather than puruṣa cognizing a cosmos in which an intellect arises and in turn, gives rise to

various other mental and physical entities, puruṣa cognizes an intellect through which the

experience arises of a cosmos and of being an individual subject therein. Put somewhat

differently, manifest prakṛti does not present puruṣa with a world, but with a mind experiencing

a world. In Sāṃkhya, just as in Kant and, as I have begun to explain, in Husserl, even an

apparently mind-independent world is still only ever apprehended through conscious acts. Thus,

to reiterate Burley’s view once again, “none of the manifest categories contain items that are

external to the field of experience; and hence, contrary to the received view of Sāṃkhya

exegesis, the schema harbours no implications of external realism” (2007, 157).

Treating the manifest tattvas as intra-mental is, I contend, a far more elegant way to

understand how the noetic and noematic aspects of manifest prakṛti can cohere. To be fair,

however, the transcendental understanding of Sāṃkhya’s metaphysics that Burley puts forward

is certainly not without its own obscurities. If one can relinquish the tendency to imagine prakṛti

and the manifest tattvas as some sort of experience-independent substance, one is left imagining

them as sheer phenomenality or experience, synthesized through categories or structures that one

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cannot quite directly behold as empirical objects, but only deduce in some way. Indeed, such

notions are hardly straightforward and commonsensical. Those without transcendental idealist

sympathies might well be perplexed as to what, for example, an experience or intuition (in the

Kantian sense of Anschauung) really is, in and of itself. However, such obscurity, I contend, is

not due to the incoherence of the interpretation of Sāṃkhya. Rather, it simply belongs to the

mystery of conscious experience in general. No one can really say what the experience of

hearing a sound, seeing a color, or being an individual self is made of in the same way that one

can about a physical object. This does not mean that one cannot grant reality to sensations or

mental categories, only that they have a different ontological status.

3.3.6 Idealism and the Yogasūtra

Aside from the counterintuitive nature of the transcendental idealist position, it faces

another, more considerable difficulty from the text of the YS and the commentaries of Vyāsa and

Vācaspatimiśra. In particular, there are a few sūtras in the fourth pāda of the YS that many

scholars, most notably James Woods (2003, xvii-xix), consider to be attacks on Buddhist forms

of idealism, specifically vijñānavāda. To be precise, though, there is no specific mention of

vijñānavāda in the sūtras in question, as Burley points out (2007, 82), and one might also fairly

ask whether vijñānavāda is best described as a form of idealism, as Dan Lusthaus (2003) does.

Nevertheless, the received view seems to be that the sūtras in question are refutations of the

position that perceptual objects depend on the mind for their existence in some way. Despite this

potential challenge to a transcendental reading of the YS, Burley provides a fairly convincing

interpretation of some of the sūtras in question (YS IV:14-15) that shows such anti-idealism

need not be the case. Limits on the length of this thesis preclude a thorough review of his

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arguments, but in general, the sūtras themselves can be read less as a thoroughgoing dismissal of

idealism, and more as a qualification of the sort of transcendental or epistemological idealism

that Burley and, in turn, Kant and Husserl, champion.

3.4 Conclusion

In general, there is considerable ambiguity about just what sort of thing prakṛti is, in

large part due to its own inner duality of seemingly material tattvas, on the one hand, and

seemingly mental ones, on the other. The result has been an interpretive tradition that often

struggles to reconcile the two sides of this duality. Many interpreters seem to have emphasized

prakṛti’s ostensibly material, objective aspect, characterizing prakṛti as not only independent of

puruṣa, but also of conscious experience in general. As a result, these interpretations, in a spirit

similar to the natural attitude, overlook the schema of the tattvas’ possible reference to the

structures and processes involved in first person, subjective experience itself. However, as I

believe both Burley and I have shown, such an interpretation of prakṛti as an account of the

cosmos or the psyche irrespective of the acts and principles that bring it into cognizance, i.e. as

‘world,’ ‘matter,’ or some other thing in itself, can easily lead to an understanding of Sāṃkhya’s

metaphysics as an obscure or even incoherent cosmogony, with little relevance to the

soteriological enterprise that Sāṃkhya and Yoga undertake.

Such an interpretation from the natural attitude may be tenable to some degree.

Nevertheless, I have attempted to show that an interpretation of prakṛti that emphasizes its

mental, subjective aspect and likewise operates from a transcendental, phenomenological

standpoint is far more elegant and coherent. Following Burley’s lead, I have argued that the

tattvas of manifest prakṛti outline a map of transcendental principles, or those things which are

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necessary for experience and cognition to obtain, in a spirit similar to Immanuel Kant’s

philosophy. In this way, though Sāṃkhya’s metaphysics posit prakṛti as real in relation to

puruṣa, it does not follow that the objective manifest tattvas, specifically the tanmātras and the

bhūtas, are real in relation to sattvika ahaṃkāra (the indriyas and manas) and buddhi. Instead, all

of manifest prakṛti is intra-experiential. In this way, Sāṃkhya and Pātañjala Yoga’s metaphysics

are transcendental rather than cosmological. In understanding the tattvas this way, one is relieved

of having to explain the mechanics of an obscure creation story. In addition, the metaphysical

schema, particularly satkāryavāda, rather than being a seemingly non sequitur cosmogony, takes

on a clear relevance to the soteriological aims of Sāṃkhya and Pātañjala Yoga, namely the

isolation of pure sentience (puruṣa) from the various objects, however subtle, that present

themselves to it in one’s own experience.

For the remainder of this thesis, I will turn my attention to samādhi, the meditative state

described in considerable depth in the YS. While Burley gives little attention to samādhi in his

own work, the transcendental interpretation of Sāṃkhya and Pātañjala Yoga’s metaphysics

meshes well with the general enterprise of samādhi. For, such praxis does not involve some

consideration of an abstractly conceived cosmos, but a deep and direct exploration of one’s own

conscious experience. Indeed, the prominent place of samādhi in the YS serves as an additional

argument that the metaphysical schema is best understood as a map of experience, not an

impersonal cosmos. In addition, the transcendental reading sets up a reading of samprajñāta

samādhi, not as contact with an object as it exists independently of the mind, but instead as an

excavation of that which is necessary for conscious experience as we know it to obtain. In other

words, samādhi does not reveal objects in their noumenality, but instead reveals the processes of

their constitution as objects through immanent conscious acts.

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However, unlike the Sāṃkhyakārikā and the more speculative portions of the Yogasūtra,

the states of samādhi bring about such a revelation via close attention to one’s own direct

experience, not an abstract deduction in the third person. While Burley leans heavily on Kant as

a European analogue for Sāṃkhya, I will argue that some of the various states of samādhi

described in the YS may most fruitfully come into comparison with the work of Edmund

Husserl, whose phenomenology also seeks to discover transcendental principles from close

attention to one’s direct experience. The task of the next chapter will be to analogize Husserl’s

phenomenological reduction with the YS’s presentation of samāpatti, the state of meditative

absorption that is the main focus of this thesis’s interpretive efforts.

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Chapter 4: Interpreting Samādhi

4.1 Introduction

In the present chapter I will turn to an interpretation of samprajñāta samādhi, also

referred to as samāpatti, as it appears in the Yogasūtra (YS). My focus in this chapter will

largely be on the nature of samprajñāta samādhi itself. I will first review the relevant textual

presentations of samādhi in the YS and the commentaries of Vyāsa and Vācaspatimiśra, and I

will provide an overall summary and interpretation of them. Then, I will argue that the YS’s

descriptions of samādhi further militate against the interpretation of Sāṃkhya and Pātañjala

Yoga from the natural attitude as external realism, as I consider how the external-realist view can

confound modern attempts to explain and interpret samādhi. I will then propose the

phenomenological philosophy of Edmund Husserl as a helpful corrective to the interpretation of

samādhi along external-realist lines. More specifically, I will attempt to analogize the

achievement of samprajñāta samādhi with the achievement of the phenomenological reduction,

thereby making a case that one can best understand samprajñāta samādhi as the apprehension of

an object as it is purely given in consciousness, to use an Husserlian turn of phrase. My hope is

that such a comparison with Husserl’s formulation of the reduction can offer a more coherent

and straightforward understanding of what samprajñāta samādhi achieves than do many modern

interpretations.

4.2 Textual Definitions of Samādhi

The Yogasūtra’s presentation of samādhi revels in the same sort of effusive classification

and enumeration that characterize much of traditional Indian thought. Samādhi consists of two

subtypes in the YS: 1) samprajñāta, or with (sam-) that which is known or discerned (pra-jñāta),

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i.e. with an intentional object, and 2) asamprajñāta, or not (a-) with (sam-) that which is known

or discerned (pra-jñāta), i.e. without an intentional object (YS I:17-18; Āraṇya 1983, 41-45).

While the asamprajñāta variety seems to admit of no further subdivisions, YS I:17 divides

samprajñāta into four types based upon the its intentional object: reasoning (vitarka), reflection

(vicāra), bliss (ānanda), and self-existence or egoity (asmitā), with YS I:42-44 providing further

detail regarding the first two of these four (ibid., 41, 91-98). YS IV:29 also mentions an

additional variety, dharma-megha samādhi, or the samādhi of the cloud (-megha) of things

(dharma-), which seems to be a kind of transitional state between the samprajñāta and

asamprajñāta states (ibid., 397).

Given the limitations on the length of this thesis, the nature of some of these subtypes

must remain a topic for further research, although from my own study, I believe that an

Husserlian reading of them is both possible and compelling. This chapter, however, will attempt

to answer a more pressing and straightforward question that arises upon first considering

samādhi in general; namely, ‘what is it?’ What is the basic quiddity or essence of this state that is

somehow common to all of these different variations, and that sets samādhi apart from ordinary

states of consciousness? To some extent, an examination of its various subtypes and their

noematic contents can help to answer such a question, and attention to them certainly merits

further research. However, the YS does offer a general definition of at least samāpatti and

samprajñāta samādhi in both YS I:41 and YS III:3. It is to these two aphorisms and their

commentarial elaboration that I will turn in this chapter.

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4.2.1 An Overview of YS I:41

YS I:41 is more precisely about samāpatti, which, again, is roughly synonymous with

samādhi. As Gerald Larson explains, samādhi derives from the Sanskrit prefixes ‘sam,’ meaning

‘together,’ and ‘ā,’ meaning ‘toward’ or ‘near,’ along with the verbal root ‘dhā,’ most commonly

meaning ‘to place,’ ‘to fix,’ ‘to set,’ or simply ‘to perform,’ such that the entire word has the

literal meaning of ‘to put, place, or hold together’ (2008, 107-108). Samāpatti, on the other hand,

has the same prefixes as samādhi, but it derives from the verbal root ‘pad,’ which can mean ‘to

move’ or ‘to fall.’ Taken together with the prefixes, Larson renders the literal meaning of

samāpatti as “to come together, to meet, or to encounter” (ibid., 108). The two words are indeed

very similar, and YS I:46 even seems to equate samāpatti with sabīja samādhi, or samādhi with

seed, which is itself a synonym for samprajñāta samādhi (Bryant 2009, 156-157).

Nevertheless, Larson insists that samādhi—taken alone—and samāpatti are not quite

identical: “It is the difference between ‘concentration’ [as the meaning of samādhi] and that upon

which the concentration is directed or focused [as the meaning of samāpatti]” (op. cit.). In a

similar vein, Edwin Bryant explains that “the former [samādhi] is the more general or overall

state of the stilled mind, the latter [samāpatti] the more specific content or object upon which the

mind has settled itself in order to become still” (2009, 144). To use a pair of classically

Husserlian terms, samādhi seems to be noetic, or related to conscious acts, whereas samāpatti

seems to be noematic, or related to the objects or contents of those acts (cf. Husserl 1962, 235-

259 passim). Larson’s and Bryant’s distinctions do seem to align with the two terms’ usage in

the YS and its commentaries, at least inasmuch as there is no mention of a ‘samprajñāta

samāpatti.’ That is, if samāpatti by definition concerns an intentional object, rather than an

intentional act of some sort, to distinguish samāpatti as samprajñāta is redundant, i.e. samāpatti

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is always samprajñāta. Nevertheless, under most circumstances, the two terms seem to be

basically interchangeable.

Despite whatever subtle differences exist between the two, the descriptions of samāpatti

and samādhi in YS I:41and YS III:3 complement one another well. In YS I:41, Patañjali declares

that when the activity of the mind is lessened (kṣina-vṛtteḥ), it becomes like a fine, transparent

jewel (abhijātasya iva maṇeḥ) that takes on the color of whatever it is situated near (tat-stha-

tad-añjanatā) (Āraṇya 1983, 88). That is, rather than being adulterated and distracted by various

unrelated thoughts, the mind (citta) presents the object of meditation alone, such that the mind is

completely filled, as it were, by that perception. In this way, the mind is like a transparent gem

that, due to the absence of any scratch or flaw that points out the substance of the stone itself, is

completely filled by the color of the object upon which it rests. Additionally, the sūtra stipulates

that the absorption can be in or on the grasper, instrument of grasping, or the object to be grasped

(grahītṛ-grahaṇa-grāhyeṣu), with ‘grasping’ being an analogy for perceiving or cognizing

(ibid.).

As is often the case, Vyāsa’s and Vācaspatimiśra’s commentaries on this sūtra serve

largely as more elaborative restatements of the aphorism and, in Vācaspatimiśra’s case, of

Vyāsa’s commentary. However, a few matters merit attention. One key point is Vyāsa’s repeated

insistence that regardless of the focus of the meditation, in samāpatti the mind (citta) becomes

(bhavati) the resemblance (ābhāsaṃ) of the object of focus’ own form or very form (svarūpa)

(ibid.). Or, put slightly differently, the mind appears (nirbhāsate) with the image (ākareṇa) of the

very form (svarūpa) of the object (ibid.). That is, the mind becomes indistinguishable from its

object of focus in samāpatti. From the special status that samāpatti holds in the text, it seems

safe to assume that the mind ‘becoming’ its object does not just mean that the mind takes the

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object’s shape or form, as in, say, some sort of Lockean notion of impressions. Rather, in

samāpatti there seems to be a complete erasure of any underlying sense of a distinction between

the object of meditation and the perceiving mind. Vyāsa makes this point somewhat more

forcefully at the end of his commentary on I:41, where he describes samāpatti (in what may be a

bit of word-play) as “āpatti,” or transformation, of the mind into that (tad) image (ākāra) of the

various objects upon which it rests, be it grasper, instrument of grasping, or object to be grasped

(ibid.). Like the gem that is so clear that it becomes undetectable as something separate from the

object that it covers and reflects, the mind’s activity has diminished to such an extent that it

likewise becomes undetectable as something separate from the object that it presents to puruṣa.

Vācaspatimiśra also offers some helpful insights about the distinguishing characteristics

of samāpatti that go beyond Vyāsa’s explanations. Of particular interest is Vācaspatimiśra’s

claim that citta, having covered over (apidhāya) its own (ātmīyam) form as internal instrument

(antaḥkāraṇa-rūpam), is united or balanced (samāpannam) with the object (grāhya), that is to

say (iti yāvat) citta is positioned (prāptam) as though (iva) it were an objectification (grāhyatām)

(Sārvabhauma and Nyāyaratna 1970, 107-108). James Woods translates all of this in a somewhat

smoother and more embellished manner that helps drive the point home: citta “covers over its

own peculiar form as inner organ and comes into a state of balance [i.e. samāpatti] with the

object to be known; or it might be said that it seems to change into an objective state of being

known” (2003, 79). Key to note here are Vācaspatimiśra’s claims that the mind covers over its

subjective nature and becomes as though it were an objective state of being known. The term

translated by Woods as ‘objective state of being known’ is ‘grāhyatā.’ Though similar,

‘grāhyatā’ is not precisely the same term as ‘grāhya,’ which is used in YS I:41 itself and means

‘that which is to be grasped,’ i.e. the object of cognition. One can understand the addition of the

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‘-tā’ as making an abstract noun out of ‘grāhya,’ which is itself actually a gerundive. The result

might literally be something like ‘that which is to be grasped-ness,’ or more succinctly, ‘object-

ness,’ ‘objectification,’ or Woods’ “objective state of being known” (ibid.)

To say that citta is as though (iva) ‘grāhyatā,’ and not just ‘grāhya’ adds an important

layer of emphasis to Vyāsa’s and Patañjali’s statements. Not only does the mind become the

particular object of meditation, but in so doing it itself becomes generally object-like. In

samāpatti, citta is thus no longer understood as subject, but rather as something objective. In a

way, it is no longer internal, but external. Put differently, the dividing line between subject and

object ceases to be that between citta and a perceptual object. With the achievement of

samāpatti, both lie on the side of the object, such that the subject, it would seem, becomes

puruṣa, or pure sentience, alone.

Understanding the matter in this way, one can also see how YS I:41 could claim that

samāpatti can have as its focus the grasper (grahītṛ) and the instrument of grasping (grahaṇa),

not just the object to be grasped (grāhya). That is, in taking the perspective of pure witnessing or

sentience in samāpatti, even the tinging (uparaktaṃ) of the mind with the instrument of

cognition, the cognizer, or even the liberated witness (mukta-puruṣa), as Vyāsa suggests in his

commentary, is still seen to occur in consciousness as an appearance or image (ākāra), i.e. as an

object for the pure, witnessing sentience of puruṣa.

4.2.2 An Overview of YS III:3

Leaving the import of YS I:41 to the side for the moment, an additional sūtra, YS III:3,

also offers a definition of samādhi in general. This definition bears a strong resemblance to the

description of nirvitarkā samāpatti in YS I:43, but a full explication of the nirvitarka state must

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remain a topic for further research. For now, it will be enough to consider what YS III:3 has to

add to the overall definition of samādhi. The sūtra itself states that samādhi is that same (tad

eva) meditation or dhyānam mentioned in the previous sūtra (YS III:2), as if (iva) it is shining

forth as the object alone (artha-mātra-nirbhāsam) and is empty of its own nature (svarūpa-

śūnyam) (Āraṇya 1983, 251-252). There is some uncertainty here as to whether what shines forth

as the object alone (artha-mātra-nirbhāsam) and is empty of its own nature (svarūpa-śūnyam) is

the mind (citta) or the meditation (dhyāna), for both ‘citta’ and ‘dhyāna’ are neuter and could

thus construe with the two descriptive compounds (cf. Bryant 2009, 306 and Feuerstein 1980, 88

for examples of interjecting ‘mind,’ and Larson 2008, 166 for a translation wherein the act of

dhyāna is taken as the reference of svarūpaśūnyā). However, I would contend that either

possibility makes, in large part, the same basic point, which is also consistent with the discussion

of I:41 above. That is, in either case there ceases to be any interpretation of experience as

occurring to a mind that stands as a subject for a separate, in some cases even external, object. In

the case of the meditation being empty of its own nature, the emphasis is on the act of a

supposedly separate mind, whereas in the case of the mind being empty of its own nature, the

emphasis is on the supposedly separate mind itself. In both cases, though, I would contend that

there is a collapse of the distinction between the object of meditation and the individual mind

having the experience thereof.

YS III:3’s second claim, that the object of the meditation alone shines forth (artha-mātra-

nirbhāsa), complements its qualification of the mind in samādhi as empty of its own nature

(svarūpa-śūnya), as well as the claim of YS I:41that any self-reflective awareness of the mind

ceases to adulterate the experience of the object of focus. For, absent this self-awareness, the

object alone remains, as it is made present to puruṣa. Likewise, the sūtra’s employment of the

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term ‘nirbhāsa’ — ‘appearing’ or ‘shining forth’—further reinforces the breakdown of the usual

mind-object distinction. ‘Nirbhāsa’ casts the object of the meditation as itself seemingly active—

it literally ‘shines forth’—rather than being passively seen or registered by the mind (citta) or the

act of meditation (dhyāna). For such a sense of the object to obtain, there is at least the

suggestion that the commonplace interpretation of the object as something seen through a mind

that is separate from it has somehow ceased.

Turning to the commentaries, Vyāsa has very little to say about YS III:3, and for the most

part he just rephrases the sūtra. However, Vācaspatimiśra, true to his title as master (-pati) of

speech (vācas-), has a fair bit to add that can be of use in better defining samādhi. Of particular

note is Vācaspatimiśra’s inclusion of two quotations from the Viṣṇu Purāṇa. In the first, samādhi

is described as being “kalpanā-hīna” or devoid (-hīna) of kalpanā (Sārvabhauma and

Nyāyaratna 1970, 284). Monier-Williams translates ‘kalpanā’ as “feigning,” “creating in the

mind” or “assuming anything to be real” (1974, 263). Indeed, ‘kalpanā’ derives from the verbal

root √klṛp, as does ‘vikalpa,’ one of the five basic types of vṛtti, or mental activity, outlined in

YS I:6, and further defined in I:9 as something like ‘imagination,’ ‘metaphor,’ or ‘abstract

predication.’ However, Vācaspatimiśra clarifies that here kalpanā means the separation (bhedaḥ)

of the act of meditation (dhyānasya) from that which is to be meditated upon (dhyeyāt) (op. cit.,

284). Samādhi, as the absence of this separation, thus entails some sort of unification or

integration of the act of the mind and its object, a view which resonates with the discussion thus

far.

In addition, Vācaspatimiśra provides another quote from the Viṣṇu Purāṇa, in which the

sage Keśidhvaja is said to summarize yoga thus: the knower of the field (kṣetrajña, i.e. puruṣa)

is the possessor of the instrument (karaṇī); knowledge or thought (jñānaṃ) is the instrument

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(karaṇaṃ); it (tad, i.e. the instrument) is not sentient (acetanaṃ). Having completed (niṣpādya)

the task of liberation (mukti-kāryaṃ), verily (vai) the instrument has done what is to be done

(kṛta-kṛtyaṃ) and ceases (nivartate) (Sārvabhauma and Nyāyaratna 1970, 284). This is indeed, I

would say, an extremely concise encapsulation of both Sāṃkhya metaphysics and yogic

meditative praxis. The first sentence is largely concerned with the instrument (karaṇa), which

typically indicates the mind and senses as a single complex. This is the case in the

Sāṃkhyakārikā, which delineates the instrument (karaṇa) as consisting of manas, or the

sensorial mind, ahaṃkāra, or the sense of individuality, buddhi, or the intentional intellect, along

with the ten indriyas, or perceptual and kinaesthetic senses (cf. SK 32-35; Burley 2007, 170-

171). With the quotation from the Viṣṇu Purāṇa, Vācaspatimiśra is reminding the reader that

puruṣa, referred to here (as in the Bhagavadgītā) as the ‘knower of the field’ (kṣetrajñaḥ) (cf.

Bhagavadgītā XIII:1-3; van Buitenen 1981, 122-123), is the possessor of the instrument

(kṣetrajñaḥ karaṇī). And yet, that instrument is, in itself, not sentient (acetana); it is other than

the pure witness puruṣa. Instead, the instrument must be that which is cognized or witnessed. It

must, in some way, be a part of the field (kṣetra) known by the knower of the field (kṣetrajña).

Going further, the quotation from the Viṣṇu Purāṇa also defines the instrument as

‘knowledge’ (jñānaṃ karaṇaṃ), or even ‘thinking,’ according to Woods’ translation (cf. Woods

2003, 205). On the one hand, such a statement reiterates the standard Sāṃkhyan claim that the

mind or instrument is something known, i.e. it is ultimately an object for the subject of puruṣa.

On the other hand, the equation of the instrument with knowledge or thinking could also indicate

that the instrument itself ultimately appears to puruṣa as an idea, a mental construct, or a

cognitive habit of some sort. In this light, one could understand the second sentence’s claim that

the instrument ceases (navartate) upon completion of the task of liberation (niṣpādya mukti-

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kāryaṃ) also to mean that the idea that constitutes or instantiates the instrument also ceases as a

matter of course. In other words, the idea or fundamental attitude that the mind or instrument is

ultimately ontologically distinct from its experiential contents falls away in samādhi. As a result,

both the instrument and its contents come to be apprehended as acetana, or insentient, and

therefore as objects for sentience, i.e. for puruṣa. Such an understanding of meditative praxis

also complements Vācaspatimiśra’s earlier quotation from the Viṣṇu Purāṇa that describes

samādhi as kalpanā-hīna, or devoid of any conception that splits the act of meditation from its

object. The use of both the terms ‘kalpanā’ and ‘jñāna’ strongly suggests that what is overcome

in samādhi, at least in its samprajñāta form, is a fundamental orientation toward experience, or

an underlying mental act or attitude that continually interprets experience as occurring to a

separate mind, or mind-body complex of some sort.

Of course, whether or not the cessation of this idea is alone sufficient for total liberation

(kaivalya), or if liberation requires a further, more fundamental cessation of all experience, is not

entirely clear at this juncture. Nevertheless, it seems safe to say that the cessation of the idea of

the mind as ultimately ontologically distinct from its contents is at least necessary for liberation,

and likely sufficient for samprajñāta samādhi to occur. In this way, one can understand the

meditative praxis of the YS not just as a forceful cessation of any and all thought. At the level of

samprajñāta samādhi at least, this praxis involves the cessation of the fundamental interpretation

(kalpanā, jñāna) of the mind or the karaṇa as truly and finally distinct from its contents.

4.2.3 A Summary of the Descriptions of Samādhi and Samāpatti Thus Far

Having reviewed some of the relevant textual sources on the nature of samādhi and

samāpatti, it is worth summarizing some of the salient points that can help to guide further

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interpretation of what samādhi and samāpatti involve in and of themselves. Viewed in its more

noetic aspect, samādhi seems to involve a radical change, not just in perception, but in the basic

interpretation of perception as occurring through a mind (citta) or instrument (karaṇa) that is

separate from the object of that perception. Vācaspatimiśra’s quotations from the Viṣṇu Purāṇa

make this point especially well, I think, in their emphasis on samādhi as the elimination of a

particular kind of kalpanā or jñāna, both of which suggest some sort of way of thinking or

knowing. This way of thinking is, again, the kind of background understanding of experience as

occurring in a mind separate from its objects. And, the elimination or cessation of this

background understanding comes about, of course, by way of the meditative praxis proposed

throughout the YS, and summarized in YS I:2 as yogaś-citta-vṛtti-nirodhaḥ, or ‘yoga is the

cessation (nirodhaḥ) of the turnings (vṛtti) of the mind (citta)’ (Āraṇya 1983, 6). Indeed, there is

an echo of YS I:2 in YS I:41’s claim that samāpatti occurs when these very turnings have been

reduced (kṣina-vṛtteḥ).

When this has been accomplished, what, then, is the occurrence of samādhi like? How

does experience appear upon ceasing to interpret experience as being through a separate mind?

In turning to the noematic correlate of samādhi, the YS and the two commentaries give three

interrelated answers: the noematic object alone seems to appear, the mind seems empty of its

own nature, and the mind seems as though transformed into the object of perception.

First, in samāpatti the object of the meditation alone is present to awareness, as YS III:3

states. On the one hand, the object alone appears or shines forth because the single-pointed focus

of attention upon it allows no other perception or cognition of other objects to appear. On the

other hand, however, the aloneness of the object in samādhi also seems to be the result of the

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apparent absence from experience of a separate mind that perceives that object, not just the

absence of other objects.

Indeed, this seeming absence of a mind from experience is the second major aspect of the

YS’s presentation of what the experience of samādhi is like. YS III:3 claims that the mind is as

though empty of its own nature in samādhi. Likewise, YS I:41 claims that the mind becomes like

a precious gem that is fully and completely colored or filled by the object over or against which

it is placed, such that the intervening medium of the gem is no longer discernible.

The third, interrelated description of samāpatti is Vyāsa’s insistence in his commentary

on YS I:41 that the mind seems to transform into the object of focus in samāpatti. Such a view is

consistent with the second point. That is, if the mind has completely transformed into its object

of focus, then it would certainly seem to be devoid of its own nature, and conversely, if the mind

is devoid of its own nature, then to the extent that one could speak of it at all, one could only say

that it has transformed into the object present to awareness.

This third point—the definition of samādhi as the mind’s unification with, or

transformation into, the object of meditation—is a standard feature of modern interpretations of

samādhi (cf. Whicher 1998, 224; Eliade 1969, 86; Feuerstein 1980, 87; Dasgupta 1970, 147-

148). It can also be among the most inscrutable characterizations of samādhi, and so it deserves

some further attention. Vācaspatimiśra’s commentary on YS I:41 in particular provides some

helpful explanation as to how such a transformation of the mind into its object might be possible.

There, he explains that in samāpatti, the mind covers over its inner or subjective nature and

becomes as though it were an objective state (Sārvabhauma and Nyāyaratna 1970, 205). The first

part of this claim helps to clarify further what the ‘own nature’ of the mind is that one

relinquishes or sets aside in samāpatti. That is, the emptying of the ‘own nature’ of the mind is

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not necessarily its absolute annihilation, but rather the covering over or cessation of the

understanding of the mind as something internal or subjective that stands in opposition to an

external or objective focus of meditation.

More to the point of how the transformation of the mind into its object might be possible,

however, is the second part of Vācaspatimiśra’s claim—that in samāpatti the mind becomes as

though it were an objective state (grāhyatā). That is, samādhi brings with it the apperception that

the citta, or even the karaṇa as a whole, though a subject in everyday experience, is an object

from the perspective of pure, witnessing sentience (puruṣa). For, even ostensibly internal or

mental contents and acts appear to some sort of cognizer, at least according to Sāṃkhya’s

dualistic ontology. The mind, then, just like the focus of the meditation, is itself ultimately an

object for puruṣa, and the willful suspension of the activity of the mind, along with its

concomitant interpretation of experience, allows the yogin to see the mind as object by taking, as

it were, the perspective of puruṣa. When viewed from this perspective, both ostensibly mental

and physical experience comprise a kind of experiential or phenomenal totality that presents

itself to awareness. It is in this way, I contend, that one can most plausibly understand how the

mind in the state of samāpatti unites with, transforms into, or, in the literal sense of ‘samāpatti,’

falls together with the object of meditation.

Samāpatti and samādhi thus seem to involve the collapse of the dualism within a dualism

found in Sāṃkhya’s schematic of the tattvas. As described in the previous chapter, while

Sāṃkhya proposes a primary duality between puruṣa and prakṛti, it also proposes a secondary,

intra-prakṛtic duality between, on the one hand, an objective aspect comprised of the tanmātras

and bhūtas, and on the other hand, a subjective aspect comprised of the karaṇa, viz. the ten

senses, manas, ahaṃkāra, buddhi, and, in the YS, citta. The collapse of this secondary dualism,

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or at least its willful suspension by way of meditative praxis, results in the realization of a kind

of Ganzfeld, a total field or kṣetram, out of which both an ostensibly external world and an

empirical ego emerge or constitute themselves, to borrow a term from Husserl.

Going further, the clarification of this field allows samāpatti (as per YS I:41) to

thematize not just that which is grasped or apprehended in perception (grāhya), but also the

means of that grasping (grahaṇa) and the supposed subject or owner of that grasping (grahitṛ).

That is, in order for all three of these elements to be themes of meditation, there must be a shift

in the sense of the standpoint of the cognizer away from an identification with any empirically

given mind (citta), ego (ahaṃkāra), or means of perception (manas and indriyas), and into an

identification with the mere sentience to which mind, body, and objects of thought and

perception present themselves. From this standpoint, not just percepts, but also the notions of a

perceiver and an act of perceiving are part of the totality that presents itself to a pure sentience or

awareness that cannot itself be formally objectified (puruṣa). Put still differently, the act of

perceiving and the notion of a perceiver become percepts themselves. In this way, again, the

mind and its subjective acts fall together with their objects in a totality or a unity, becoming

objects themselves vis-à-vis puruṣa.

4.3 The Natural Attitude and Samādhi

Thus far, then, the YS and its two oldest commentaries define samprajñāta samādhi and

samāpatti as an experience devoid of any sense of a separate perceiving mind, such that the

object alone appears in consciousness. Or, expressing the matter somewhat differently, they

define it as an experience in which the mind is as though transformed into, or unified with, the

object of contemplation. Both aspects of this definition cohere with one another if one considers

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samādhi as the interpretation of experience as though from the standpoint of puruṣa. From that

perspective, the mind becomes empty of its usual nature as subject. Instead, one recognizes the

empirical mind as itself an object along with the original object of meditation, both of which

arise as a part of the totality that presents itself to puruṣa. This totality, I would contend, is

manifest prakṛti.

In this way, one can begin to see how the problem, considered in the previous chapter, of

interpreting Sāṃkhya’s ontological schema is relevant to the interpretation of samāpatti. To

review, this interpretive problem concerns how best to characterize manifest prakṛti when it

contains both an ostensibly subjective or noetic component (i.e. the karaṇā) and an ostensibly

objective or noematic component (i.e. the tanmātras and the bhūtas), while still being itself an

object for the subject of puruṣa. So, if samāpatti involves the unification or fusion of this noetic

component (citta) with the noematic component (pratyaya, or the content of the meditation),

then characterizing how the two could conceivably unite presents much the same problem as

characterizing how the two form the whole that is manifest prakṛti.

Regarding this latter problem, that of the nature of manifest prakṛti as a whole, two basic

answers emerge, as reviewed in the previous chapter. On one hand, one can subsume the

objective aspect of manifest prakṛti to its subjective aspect, such that prakṛti as a whole is

understood as a phenomenal totality within the field of experience. Such an understanding opens

the way for a transcendental, phenomenological interpretation of prakṛti, whereby it points back

to the processes and principles that inform the hermeneut’s own experience as a conscious

subject. Or, one can subsume the subjective aspect of manifest prakṛti to its objective aspect,

such that one understands prakṛti as a collection of various entities that are the denizens of a self-

existent world, without making reference to the hermeneut’s own experience as a conscious

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subject. Following Mikel Burley’s work, I have argued that the former answer is more plausible

than the latter, even if the latter seems to be the more commonplace interpretation among modern

commentators on the YS.

In light of the descriptions of samāpatti outlined thus far, the interpretation of prakṛti

from the natural attitude—as some primordial substance that gives rise to a mind-independent

world—continues to seem the less likely of the two possibilities. So long as one understands

Sāṃkhya and Pātañjala Yoga, via the idea of manifest prakṛti, as positing a mind-independent,

external world of objects, in which the citta is one object among many, then the prospect of the

unification of citta with its object can be difficult to parse. That is, if ‘citta’ only references some

sort of natural object, however subtle, to the exclusion of referencing a transcendental principle

at work in one’s own cognition of such natural objects, if both citta and its pratyaya are

conceptualized as things out there, as it were, irrespective of one’s own experience thereof, then

their unification or transformation into one another arouses the same sort of incredulity, or at

least bemusement, as might the prospect of a flower uniting or merging with a rubber boot or,

perhaps more analogously, with a human brain. So long as the mind is understood from without,

as a thing among things in the world or nature, rather than from within, as the basis of intentional

experience, there seems to be no cogent way to come to grips with the union that supposedly

occurs in samāpatti. In this way, one can easily come to imagine samādhi as some sort of

magical or ineffable state, and the prospect of “becoming one with” an object of contemplation

remains an unintelligible mystical platitude.

To be fair, one can rightly object that citta is no mere physical object in the sense that a

flower or a boot is. Rather, citta, one might say, is a special object that in some way reflects or

cognizes the objects around it. It is with this reflection, this phenomenal appearance, that the

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yogin’s citta unites, rather than with the object itself as a material, transcendent entity. This may

be the case, and yet as soon as one considers citta in this manner, one has begun to abandon the

natural attitude for the transcendental. For, the reflection with which citta unites has no direct,

formal being in the ‘world’ or ‘nature’ posited in the natural attitude. One can only fully

postulate it through considering his or her own conscious experience as a reflection of an

ostensibly external world, and then ascribing the capacity for such a lived experience to the citta

in consideration. One must therefore make the transcendental-phenomenological turn, if only

half-consciously, even in considering the possibility of another conscious subject in an ostensibly

mind-independent world. Certainly, I can consider this conscious subject as signified by the form

of the organic being with a material existence, a position in space, and so on. However, in order

to consider the nature of the object with which such a being unites in samāpatti, I must

ultimately turn to my own conscious experience and the phenomenality of its reflection of a

supposed external, transcendent world. In this way, the object of samāpatti is not one of the

denizens of a natural world in-itself, but the phenomenal presentation or intuition which I may,

in turn, predicate as a reflection or signification of such a world.

One may, in turn, protest further that even if samāpatti concerns such a phenomenal,

experiential intuition, this intuition is somehow other than the manifest tattvas that Sāṃkhya

metaphysics outlines. However, sūtras I:42-45 and their commentaries by both Vyāsa and

Vācaspatimiśra make it clear that the yogin can take all of the various manifest tattvas as the

object of samāpatti. In fact, it seems as though one of the overarching goals of samāpatti is to

recognize these various principles through one’s own experience. If these tattvas are the objects

of samāpatti, and if in turn one is able, in such a state, to become one with them, then these

tattvas must indicate something intra-experiential, rather than various things-in-themselves. It

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may well be that Sāṃkhya and Pātañjala Yoga allow for, or do not explicitly discount, the

existence of a noumenal world-in-itself. However, I contend that in regard to the metaphysical

schema of Sāṃkhya and the practical investigation of samādhi, the description and apperception

of intra-experiential principles are at stake.

4.4 The Phenomenological Reduction and Samādhi

An understanding of prakṛti in the natural attitude is thus difficult to square with the YS’s

accounts of samādhi and samāpatti. However, when one understands manifest prakṛti as the

totality of phenomenal experience, I contend that the unification of the mind with its object that

supposedly occurs in samāpatti becomes quite coherent. Both the mind (citta) and the object of

meditation (pratyaya), or respectively the grasper (grahitṛ) and the object to be grasped

(grāhya), arise from or within this totality of phenomenal experience and are thus, from the

perspective thereof, unified within it. The difficulty, however, seems to be in clarifying or

demarcating (or de-demarcating, as the case may be) this totality of phenomenal experience, for

it does seem to be obscured in ordinary experience.

My aim for the remainder of this chapter will be to show that Husserl’s critique of the

natural attitude and his definition of the phenomenological reduction provides a helpful analogue

to the attempts to define samādhi and samāpatti in the YS and its two oldest commentaries. My

contention is that both Husserl and Patañjali are pointing out a very similar experiential state,

albeit in rather different idioms and in response to rather different historical pressures.

Nevertheless, considering the two side by side can help one to triangulate, as it were, the sort of

experience to which both may be referring, and it can help to fill out one’s conception of this

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state, much in the same way that multiple immanent moments or adumbrations fill out and

elaborate the unified transcendent object in Husserl’s account of constitution.

4.4.1 Nirodha and Epoché

A logical place to begin such a comparative exploration is with the process of achieving

samādhi and the phenomenological reduction. Upon first glance, the two may seem

irreconcilable. To expect to discover a Cartesian way to samādhi in the YS, for example, seems

absurdly anachronistic. And, while Fink, for his part, does refer to the reduction as ‘Besinnung,’

a word commonly translated as ‘meditation’ (Cogan, 5.b.i.), it seems far from clear that he or

Husserl thereby mean to ally themselves with the practice as it appears in Indian religious and

philosophical literature. At any rate, the sort of psycho-physical exercises on offer in the YS are

nowhere to be found in Husserl’s corpus. Nevertheless, I think there is some considerable

overlap between the two, inasmuch as both the reduction and samādhi revolve around a

suspension or cessation of at least some form of thinking. In Husserl, this cessation takes the

form of the epoché, and in the YS, nirodha.

Husserl’s epoché, as discussed in the introduction, involves the bracketing, or setting out

of play, of the notion of a world apart from one’s experience of it. One sets aside any theses

about a world, nature, or thing in itself, as it exists independently of conscious experience. The

epoché is perhaps at its most forceful in the so-called Cartesian way to the phenomenological

reduction, in which one suspends any belief that the transcendent world that experience seems to

mean or signify exists. As a result, all that remains is phenomenality itself, as that which is

simply present as an appearance in or for awareness. The epoché occurs in a less abrupt fashion

in the so-called way through ontology, or through the life-world, wherein the phenomenological

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investigator examines anything considered to exist strictly in terms of how it appears in

experience. In both ways, however, there is still a willful blocking or suspension of a

fundamental interpretation of experience as the representation of a self-existent world, or of what

Husserl calls the natural attitude or standpoint (natürliche Einstellung).

In the YS, the practice of nirodha, or cessation, parallels the blocking or suspension that

occurs in Husserl’s epoché. The term ‘nirodha’ derives from the prefix ni- and the verbal root

√rudh, which together mean “to hold back, stop, hinder…supress, [or] destroy” (Monier-

Williams 1974, 553), and the word itself is a nominal form, such that it means “restraint, check,

control, suppression, [or] destruction” (ibid., 554). ‘Nirodha’ first appears in YS I:2’s

preliminary definition of yoga as citta-vṛtti-nirodhaḥ, or the cessation (nirodha) of activity (vṛtti,

literally ‘turnings’) in the mind (citta) (Āraṇya 1983, 6). From this terse definition, one can

understand much of the remainder of the YS as an elaboration upon the sorts of methods and

technical knowledge that can bring about nirodha.

To some extent, it is unclear how far this cessation of the mind’s activity is meant to go.

Considering that YS IV:34, the final aphorism, defines liberation (kaivalya) as the dissolution

(pratiprasavaḥ) of the guṇas (guṇānāṃ), the basic components of prakṛti, one could understand

the process of nirodha to extend all the way to the total cessation of any and all experience (ibid.,

405). Ian Whicher (1998, passim), on the other hand, goes to great lengths to show that liberation

does not mean a total cessation of conscious experience, but rather a dissolution of the nescience

that causes an individual mind to identify itself with puruṣa. For the present discussion of

samprajñāta samādhi, however, one need not take a position on the nature of liberation itself, as

the two are not necessarily equivalent. In regard to samprajñāta samādhi alone, however, it is

fairly self-evident that nirodha does not mean a complete cessation of all activity or vṛtti. In fact,

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Vyāsa makes this very point in his commentary on YS I:2, where he notes that the sūtra does not

stipulate that all activity of the mind is to cease, such that samprajñāta samādhi can be included

under the definition of yoga (ibid., 6).

Nevertheless, it seems clear that some of the activity of the mind must cease in order for

samprajñāta samādhi to occur. After all, YS I:41 makes it clear that samāpatti occurs when

mental activity is lessened (kṣina-vṛtteḥ), as reviewed above. What, specifically, must cease

then? One might propose that the activity in question is simply any distraction from the chosen

object of focus, as the yogin attempts, as YS I:32 instructs, to practice fixing the mind on one

principle (eka-tattva-abhyāsa) (ibid., 73). While this seems to be necessary for the achievement

of samprajñāta samādhi, it does not seem to be sufficient. As YS III:2 explains, the

uninterrupted focus of the mind on a single object already occurs in dhyāna, a meditative state

that precedes samādhi (ibid., 251). Thus, there seems to be a further cessation necessary in order

for samprajñāta samādhi to obtain.

The YS’s discussion of samāpatti and samprajñāta samādhi reviewed earlier in this

chapter already goes a long way toward clarifying what this cessation involves. Of particular

interest is the YS’s definition of samāpatti and samprajñāta samādhi as involving the emptying

of the mind’s own nature (svarūpa-śunyam) such that the object alone appears (artha-mātra-

nirbhāsam) or such that the mind is as though transformed into the form of its object. As I have

already attempted to show, in order for this sort of re-orientation toward experience to obtain,

there must ultimately be, not just a stilling of distractions, but a stilling of a fundamental

interpretation of experience itself. Samāpatti thus involves the cessation of interpreting

experience as belonging to an individual mind that looks out upon a world that transcends its

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experience thereof. It is the cessation of this ground interpretation that allows the unification of

mind and object.

4.4.2 No mind, or no world?

I thus propose that what the yogin blocks or ceases in the practice of nirodha that results in

samprajñāta samādhi is the same basic interpretive stance toward experience that the epoché

blocks or sets out of play. Husserl calls this stance the natural attitude, and its suspension yields

an orientation toward experience that is very similar to the one that Patañjali and his interpreters

attempt to elucidate in their descriptions of samāpatti and samprajñāta samādhi. It will be my

task to flesh this claim out further in the pages to come.

A potential point of dissonance between the achievement of the epoché and the achievement

of samprajñāta samādhi presents itself at the outset. The epoché, according to Husserl, is the

bracketing of the existence of any external world, whereas samprajñāta samādhi, at least

according to YS III:3, involves the seeming non-existence of the mind (citta), or perhaps the

mental act of meditation (dhyāna). To put it somewhat more simply, the epoché, especially in the

Cartesian way to the reduction, seems to get rid of the objective world, whereas samprajñāta

samādhi seems to get rid of the subjective mind. How can these two be reconciled?

To answer this question requires some qualification of both the epoché and samāpatti. On the

side of the epoché, it is important to remember that the suspension of the interpretation of

conscious experience as being of a transcendent world, i.e. the natural attitude, does not, as

Husserl emphasizes in Cartesian Meditations, result in a void. In Husserl’s own words,

this “phenomenological epoché” and “parenthesizing” of the Objective world therefore does not leave us confronting nothing. On the contrary we gain possession of something by it…[namely] my pure living, with all the pure subjective processes making this up, and everything meant in them, purely as

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meant in them: the universe as “phenomena” in the (particular and also the wider) phenomenological sense (1960, 20, emphasis in original).

The epoché thus results in a reinterpretation of experience as being merely the appearance of

phenomena tout court, rather than the appearance of phenomena that in some way signify a

world of things in themselves. Of course, included among these phenomena are those that would

represent an ostensibly external world in the natural attitude, e.g. perceptual data that constitute

the body and the objects and forces around it. However, such perceptions simply no longer carry

the significance of a world that exists apart from one’s cognizance of it.

Still, one may be tempted to call such phenomenologically reduced experience ‘internal’

‘mental,’ or ‘intra-mental’—a term I, too, have used in earlier remarks on Sāṃkhya—in that it no

longer makes reference to an external, self-existent world of objects. To a certain extent, such a

characterization of phenomenologically reduced experience is not incorrect, for it does arise as

though ‘within’ the mind, if one defines the mind as the general domain of conscious experience

itself. However, in order to characterize such an experience as ‘within’ or ‘internal,’ one

necessarily supposes that there is something ‘without’ or ‘external,’ i.e. beyond the domain of

conscious experience. Such a supposition violates the terms of the epoché, for one would thereby

still posit, however vaguely, some external realm beyond or outside of conscious experience. In

other words, ‘internal,’ and ‘intra-mental,’ along with their corollaries ‘external,’ and ‘extra-

mental,’ still base themselves, albeit subtly, in the natural attitude. To carry out the epoché fully

is to realize that there is no ‘outside’ relative to phenomenal presence.

Indeed, this seems to be why Husserl adopts some of the idiosyncratic terminology that

appears in his work. In Ideas I, for instance, Husserl proposes the terms ‘immanent’ and

‘transcendent’ as ways to reconceptualise the distinction between the designations of acts and

their objects as ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ (1962, 112). For Husserl, immanent intentional acts are those

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whose intentional objects “belong to the same stream of experience as themselves,” whereas

transcendent acts constitute objects that are not limited to this same stream of experience (ibid.).

As an example, the perception of the book on my desk limited to its appearance at the position

and perspective in which I find it in the present moment, e.g. with its cover and two sides visible,

at some two feet of distance from my eyes, in the early evening light augmented by the lamp,

with a pen resting on it, etc., would be immanent. The book considered beyond the present

stream of experience, as the general idea or essence of the book, of which the immanent

perception described above is but an adumbration or aspect, would be transcendent.

Of course, Husserl insists that this transcendent object is only ever constituted, or only

ever obtains from, the systematic connection of immanent acts and their objects. As Husserl

explains, “the genuine concept of thing-transcendence, which is the standard whereby all rational

statements about transcendence are measured, cannot be extracted from any source other than the

perception’s own essential content, or the definitely articulated connexions which we call

evidential experience” (1962, 134). In other words, even the notion of something beyond or

transcendent of conscious experience arises from and through conscious experience. Even if I

imagine the book as it must look when I am out of the room, or imagine it as it must look to a

friend who has borrowed it, the book thus imagined and deemed to exist is still the object of an

intentional act that arises as a conscious experience. Husserl puts the matter somewhat more

clearly and forcefully in the Cartesian Meditations: “every imaginable sense, every imaginable

being, whether the latter is called immanent or transcendent, falls within the domain of

transcendental subjectivity, as the subjectivity that constitutes sense and being” (1960, 84).

In a similar way, Husserl proposes ‘noesis’ and ‘noema’ as ways of talking about various

intentional acts (e.g. perceiving, remembering, fantasizing, hallucinating) and the objects of

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those acts (e.g. particular perceptions, memories, fantasies, hallucinations), respectively (237-

240). These terminological innovations, like Husserl’s use of ‘immanent’ and ‘transcendent,’

reflect an indifference to the reality of an intentional act and its object. That is, the use of ‘noesis’

and ‘noema’ involves no claim as to whether a given act and its object are ultimately deemed

real, nor any distinction as to whether they reference something private, like a memory, or

something in the inter-subjective domain, like a perceptual object. From the phenomenological

perspective, both ostensibly external objects, like percepts, and ostensibly internal objects, like

fantasies, still constitute themselves from the appearances that arise in conscious experience.

Again, it is this whole domain of conscious experience that the phenomenological reduction

clarifies as a field of inquiry.

Husserl’s use of these various terms thus helps to clarify that the epoché does not

precisely get rid of the external world. Rather, it helps to show that the positing of any supposed

external world, and likewise any supposed internal world, occurs through conscious acts and

conscious experience. It is this general domain of conscious experience, whether it presents the

most precise scientific observations or the wildest hallucinations and fantasies, that the

bracketing of the natural world serves to bring into focus. In supposing the absence of an

external world that transcends conscious experience, one comes to realize there are nonetheless

still intuitions or impressions thereof, along with the intuitions and impressions of internal,

psychic life, both of which are given in the total domain of conscious experience. Thus, the

epoché reveals a totality that encompasses the split of inner and outer, or res cogitans and res

extensae, in everyday experience, by first bracketing the latter term.

Turning now to samāpatti and samprajñāta samādhi, I contend that they involve the

revelation of that same totality by first bracketing the former term, the notion of an inner mind

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that stands in opposition to an external world. As discussed at length above, the YS’s

descriptions of the mind becoming like a clear, precious gem (YS I:41) and becoming as though

empty of its own nature, so that the form of the contemplated object alone appears (YS III:3),

define samāpatti and samprajñāta samādhi largely as the seeming disappearance of the mind

from experience.

However, some qualification of these states is necessary in order to understand its

parallels with phenomenologically reduced experience. In particular, the emptying of the mind’s

or the meditation’s own nature (svarūpa-śūnyam) does not amount to a total repudiation of

Sāṃkhya’s metaphysics, such that samādhi might paradoxically be some form of cognition in

which there actually is no citta or karaṇā. To wit, both YS I:41 and III:3 qualify their

descriptions of samāpatti and samādhi with ‘iva,’ meaning ‘like’ or ‘as though’ (Āraṇya 1983,

88, 251). Vācaspatimiśra is particularly keen to point out the crucial significance of YS III:3’s

use of the term. He imagines an objector to the sūtra as asking how (kathaṃ) that which is to be

meditated upon (dhyeyaṃ) could appear (prakāśeta) if (cet) the mind or the meditation is empty

(śūnyaṃ) of its own nature, and in reply, he points to the use of the word ‘iva,’ or ‘as though,’

thus emphasizing that the description is a simile (Sārvabhauma and Nyāyaratna 1970, 284). This

seems to mean that neither the mind or the act of meditation cease to exist in any ultimate sense

in samādhi.

Rather, such a qualification of YS III:3, which one can readily extrapolate to YS I:41,

helps to remind the reader that these states do not result in some sort of blotting out or erasure of

what might normally be called ‘internal’ or ‘mental’ acts and objects. Indeed, just as there exists

the danger of misreading the epoché as the utter denial of the supposedly external world, such

that only, say, fantasies or one’s internal monologue were to remain while all perceptions that

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indicate an extended space around one were to be blotted out, so, too, there exists the danger of

misreading samādhi as the utter denial of the supposedly internal world, such that the yogin is

somehow catapulted into the noumenal, or more modestly, that only perceptions that indicate an

extended space around him would remain, while all thoughts normally taken to belong to an

internal world were to be blotted out. If this were the case, samāpatti could not take the

instrument of cognition (grahaṇa) and the cognizer (grahītṛ) as objects of focus, as YS I:41

declares to be possible (Āraṇya 1983, 88). Likewise, if all intuitions that seem to reference an

external object were to disappear with the reduction, then many of the phenomenological

analyses that Husserl carries out could not occur.

Instead, the emptying of the own-nature of the mind or of the act of meditation is, again,

a way to characterize the re-interpretation of experience that defines samāpatti. No final,

ontological negation of the mind and mental acts need occur in samāpatti. Rather, there ceases to

be an interpretation of experience as in the mind and through mental acts that exist apart from an

ostensibly external object. As I have already discussed above in regard to the epoché, the notion

that there is an external world independent of the mind implies the notion that one is therefore

having a separate, phenomenal experience thereof inside the mind. To understand samāpatti one

can look to the converse of this statement: the notion that one is having a phenomenal experience

inside the mind implies the notion that there is an external world independent thereof, which

phenomenal experience references. To suspend the former notion of either of these statements is

thus to suspend the latter. In other words, if there is no outer, there can be no inner, and if there is

no inner, there can be no outer. There remains only the totality or wholeness of experience or

presence simpliciter. Both the phenomenological reduction and samprajñāta samādhi bring

about this realization.

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To remain true to the YS’s Sāṃkhyan roots, of course, one can still say that this

experience is, as it were, in citta, just as one can say that phenomenologically reduced experience

is in consciousness or in the mind. Nevertheless, such a statement is problematic and requires

some careful explication of what citta is. Indeed, claiming that experience occurs in citta really

only coheres if one defines citta as the total field of experience. Even in so doing, one must

clarify that the notion ‘inside of citta’ is at most a manner of speaking, since there can be no

formally given ‘outside of citta.’ (Of course, one may imagine puruṣa as outside of citta, but

puruṣa is not formally given in and of itself.) So long as one conceives of citta as a thing among

other things, i.e. as a spatially discrete entity contained in a cosmological horizon, however, then

to say that samprajñāta samādhi occurs in citta or reveals all intentional objects to be within

citta is to miss the point entirely.

4.4.3 Grahītṛ-grahaṇa-grāhya and Ego-cogito-cogitum

For further evidence that the reduction and samāpatti point toward the same fundamental

interpretation of experience, one can look to descriptions of the specific content of both. For

indeed, the reduction and samāpatti are not precisely ends in themselves, but instead provide

openings for examining the structures and patterns that inform experience. While Patañjali

mostly describes these sorts of structures and patterns in sūtras other than I:41 and III:3, he does

give some indications of the general scope of samāpatti’s content in I:41. Again, he notes that

samāpatti can be of or on the grasper or cognizer (grahītṛ), the instrument of grasping or

cognizing (grahaṇa), or the object to be grasped or cognized (grahya) (Āraṇya 1983, 88). As I

will argue, this claim offers some additional evidence that both samāpatti and the reduction point

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out an experiential totality that is epistemologically prior to any positing of an individual,

empirical ego who exists as a discrete entity in the world.

As stated above, the fact that samāpatti can, according to Vyāsa, take the image (ākāra)

of the cognizer or the process of cognition as an object underscores the peculiar noetic move that

samāpatti involves. That is, samāpatti allows for the foregrounding of the very idea of the

perceiver or the instrument of perceiving, such that the constitution of the subject becomes itself

an object of investigation. In order for this to happen fully, one must somehow step back, as it

were, from the usual grounding interpretation of experience as occurring to or within a discrete

mind in the world. There is a kind of fourth wall break, to borrow a term from drama and film

theory, in which the very identity of the yogin, as a human personality or a psyche supposedly

experiencing the world, comes into view as itself constituted through experience. That is, any

and all predications regarding a cognizer or means of cognition are themselves objects of

cognition that arise in experience. Samāpatti, then, is the clarification of the total experiential

field from which the experience of an ostensibly internal, perceiving psyche can be seen to arise,

as well those objects that are ostensibly external to it.

Turning to Husserl, one can also see the phenomenological reduction as clarifying the

total experiential field from which arise the intuitions or experiences that serve to constitute the

notion of a cognizing subject, the means or instrument of cognition, and the cognized object. In

his article on phenomenology for the 1927 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, Husserl

brings this into relief as he distinguishes between phenomenology and psychology. He writes,

My actual current mental processes of pure perception, fantasy, and so forth are, in the attitude of positivity [as in the “positive” sciences], psychological givens of psychological inner experience. They are transmuted into my transcendental mental processes if through a radical epoché I posit as mere phenomena the world, including my own human existence, and now follow up the intentional life-process wherein the entire apperception “of” the world, and in particular the

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apperception of my mind, my psychologically real perception-processes, and so forth, are formed (1971, 86).

In other words, the epoché brings about the discernment that both the world and the mundanized

(verweltlichte) psyche taken to exist within it arise and constitute themselves within experience.

This discernment requires the abandonment of one’s usual sense of identity with that

psychological or empirically given subject, for, as Husserl writes, “the present (apperceived) I

and we presuppose an (apperceiving) I and we for which they are present, which, however, is not

itself present again in the same sense” (ibid., 85). One must occupy the position of this latter ‘I’

in order to thematize the former as a psyche, personality, mind-body complex, etc. The parallel

with Sāṃkhya is hard to ignore here. That is, Husserl posits both a subject in the field of

apperception and a subject that apperceives that field while necessarily not being present therein,

along lines that seem very similar to the distinction between buddhi or citta, on the one hand, and

puruṣa, on the other.

Much like samāpatti, which, by taking the viewpoint of puruṣa, clarifies the total field of

experience in which the constitution of the cognizer and means of cognition can occur, so too

does the phenomenological reduction clarify the same sort of field, such that the manners of

appearing of “the apperception of my mind [and] psychologically real perception processes”

(ibid., 86), i.e. the cognizer and means of cognition, can come into focus as objects of

investigation. And, indeed, they are objects of investigation for Husserl’s phenomenology. In the

Crisis he states that the “first ordering of all working problems [is] under the heading ego-cogito-

cogitatum” (1970a, 170), or ‘I-think-thought.’ As Husserl writes, “we have, in the Cartesian

manner of speaking, the three headings, ego-cogitatio-cogitata: the ego-pole (and what is

peculiar to its identity), the subjective, as appearance tied together synthetically, and the object

poles. These are [the] different directions our analyses can take” (ibid., 171). Indeed, Husserl’s

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body of work bears this out. One can look, in particular, at Ideas II (1989), in which Husserl

offers some of his most in-depth analyses of the process of constitution. In that study, Husserl is

not only concerned with the external objects of perception, but also with the constitution of

“animal nature,” including “psychic reality” and the body as parts thereof (1989, 96-180 passim),

as well as the constitution of the person as an individual ego in the world (ibid., 183-222), and

even of the constitution of the “pure ego,” at least as an abstraction in experience (ibid., 103-

127). In this way, one can discern an echo of the grahītṛ-grahaṇa-grāhya schema of samāpatti in

Husserl’s phenomenological analyses. The fact that this schema appears as a defining feature of

the landscapes revealed by both the phenomenological reduction and the epoché lends further

support to the argument that they are both pointing out similar terrain.

4.5 Conclusion

Thus far, I have attempted to show that both the phenomenological reduction and

samprajñāta samādhi ultimately point to the same basic interpretation of experience. Both

involve the clarification of experience simpliciter as epistemologically prior to the interpretation

of experience as belonging to a discrete psyche enclosed by, and looking out into, an

independently existent world.

More specifically, I have shown that the YS’s descriptions of samprajñāta samādhi and

samāpatti result from the willful suspension of the interpretation of experience as occurring to a

mind that stands apart from an externally real, outer world. As a result of this suspension, there

arises the apperception of the total field of experience or phenomenality, no longer understood as

occurring in a discrete, worldly psyche. In this way, the form of the object alone seems to appear,

and the mind and the act of meditation seem as though empty of their own nature, or entirely

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transparent, or as though transformed into the object. At the same time, the very positing of a

cognizing subject and an instrument of cognition is seen to arise in this total field of experience,

such that not only the everyday objects of cognition can be examined, but also the supposed

everyday subject of, and instrument of, cognition may, too.

Understood in this way, samprajñāta samādhi and samāpatti present further difficulties

for the externally realist view of Sāṃkhya’s and Pātañjala Yoga’s metaphysics outlined in the

previous chapter of this study. As I have argued, it is difficult to understand how a system of

thought that holds that there is an external world existing independently of conscious experience

could then offer a coherent account of how the mind transforms into such a real object.

Moreover, it is also difficult to understand why such a system would value such a transformation

as a source of correct knowledge about experience.

Finally, I have attempted to show that rather than taking an externally realist approach to

samādhi, one can instead understand it as the clarification of pure experience, whereby the

question of the real world’s existence is suspended. In this way, samādhi, and Sāṃkhya and

Pātañjala Yoga as a whole, are concerned with phenomenality or experience itself. A useful

interpretive analogue for samādhi is thus the phenomenological reduction of Edmund Husserl.

Despite their different starting points, I have argued that both samprajñāta samādhi and the

reduction yield the same basic orientation toward experience. This reorientation clarifies

experience as a totality in which objects of cognition, instruments of cognition, and subjects of

cognition are all formally constituted from the synthesis of the contents of pure experience.

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Conclusion

5.1 Summary

In this thesis, I have attempted to clarify the possible interpretive approaches to two

major elements of the Yogasūtra—Sāṃkhya’s metaphysics and the meditative states of

samāpatti and samprajñāta samādhi. In particular, I have engaged the YS as a text that is saying

something about conscious experience, and I have attempted to reveal a basic ambiguity that

emerges as result. That is, I can consider consciousness from without, or in the third person, as a

process or an event in a world or universe whose consideration by me as a conscious subject is

taken for granted. Or, I can consider consciousness from within, or in the first person, as the

process whereby I as a conscious subject am aware of the world.

To clarify this subtle difference further, I have drawn on Edmund Husserl’s distinction

between the natural attitude, in which one considers the world independently of one’s cognition

of it, and the phenomenological reduction, by which one reflects on the world transcendentally,

as an appearance for, and an achievement of, one’s own consciousness. In the former attitude,

consciousness is the result of natural processes, a capacity borne by entities in a real world, and a

reflection of the features of a world that is matter-of-factly taken to exist. In the latter,

consciousness is the very ground for any experience of a world and entities therein, and therefore

also for any postulations about that which exists apart from conscious acts.

When one understands Sāṃkhya’s schema of various tattvas, or ontological principles, as

operating in the mode of the natural attitude, they thus seem to outline a cosmology or physics of

some sort. That is, the tattvas, or at least those of manifest prakṛti, refer to objects or entities out

there, whose appearance for consciousness remains unconsidered. In approaching Sāṃkhya’s

metaphysical schema as operating in the phenomenological attitude, however, the tattvas

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describe that which is necessary for the cognition of any world to obtain. In this way, Sāṃkhya

engages the fact of one’s own, first person experience, rather than consciousness in general, as a

fact in the world.

While one can conceivably understand Sāṃkhya through either theoretical lens, I have

argued, following the lead of Mikel Burley’s work, that the transcendental-phenomenological

approach is ultimately more cogent. In particular, Sāṃkhya’s doctrine of the existent effect, or

satkāryavāda, whereby the subjective, cognitive tattvas somehow give rise to the objective ones,

presents problems for an interpretation of the manifest tattvas in the natural attitude.

Satkāryavāda would seem to outline a cosmogony that has things such as intentional awareness

(buddhi), ego (ahaṃkāra), and the sensorial mind (manas) as real objects emitting subtle and

gross elements (tanmātra and mahābhūta) as themselves mind-independent, physical entities. In

taking this view, inconsistency and contradiction arise. Chiefly, the mental tattvas such as

buddhi, taken as themselves mind-independent, even material reals, would seem to give rise to

the very conditions needed for there to be such reals, namely the bhūtas, especially space, or

ākāśa.

According to an understanding of Sāṃkhya as transcendental, however, the manifest

tattvas are not the denizens of a material, mind-independent universe of some sort, but the very

conditions and structures that allow for cognition to obtain. In this way, satkāryavāda is not a

diachronic creation story, but an account of the manner in which the tattvas condition and

necessitate one another. The schema of the tattvas thus describes conscious experience in the

first person, such that prakṛti presents puruṣa with a mind cognizing a cosmos, rather than just a

cosmos populated by minds.

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Having established the possibility of Sāṃkhya, and in turn, Pātañjala Yoga, as working

from a phenomenological standpoint, I then turned to examine the YS’s description of samāpatti

and samprajñāta samādhi. My main contention has been that the achievement of samāpatti

amounts to the realization of conscious experience as the total field in which both the idea of an

internal psyche and a mind-independent world arise. In this way, samāpatti can fruitfully come

into comparison with Husserl’s phenomenological reduction, which also seeks to set aside the

postulation of a world apart from one’s experience of it in order to examine the mental acts

through which any such ontological claims may occur.

Ultimately, I contend that the presentation of samāpatti in the YS complements and

supports an interpretation of its metaphysics as transcendental. If samāpatti serves to bring the

fact of the total field of conscious experience of the yogin radically into relief, then it would

make sense that the accompanying ontological schema acts as a model of the structures of

experience, rather than a mind-independent cosmos. At the same time, the interpretation of

Sāṃkhya’s metaphysics as transcendental helps to clarify what purpose samāpatti essentially

serves. Rather than being an obscure mystical state of some sort, samāpatti, not unlike Husserl’s

phenomenological reduction, is a first-person apperception of the way in which conscious

experience provides the medium and basis for any postulation of an objective reality.

In establishing an interpretation of both Sāṃkhya’s metaphysics and the meditative

praxis of samāpatti—two of the main themes of the YS—as both participating in a larger

transcendental-phenomenological framework, additional fields of inquiry and application

emerge. Before concluding this thesis, it may be of interest to consider how other aspects of the

YS might come into harmony with the phenomenological standpoint.

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5.2 Directions for Further Research

5.2.1 Samāpatti and Constitution

Perhaps the most immediate topic for further research involves the interpretation of the

particular subtypes of samāpatti. These subtypes—samāpatti with (sa-) and without (nir-)

vitarka, or reasoning, and with (sa-) and without (nir-) vicāra, or reflection—involve different

ways of cognitively dismantling an object of meditation. In savitarkā samāpatti, for instance, the

yogin sees the everyday percept as a unity of three distinct elements: the object’s name (śabda),

sensorial form (artha), and associated knowledge (jñāna) (Āraṇya 1983, 91-93; YS I:42). In

nirvitarkā samāpatti, the focus shifts to the sensorial form (artha) alone, such that associated

knowledge and verbal predication fall away (ibid., 93-95; YS I:43). Going further, savicārā

samāpatti takes the artha as object, revealing how it, too, is a unity of manifest tanmātras

(sound, tactile sensation, visual form, taste, and smell) conditioned by a sense of time (kāla),

space (deśa), and causation (nimitta). In nirvicārā samāpatti, all that remains are the tanmātras

themselves, unconditioned by any sense that they signify or cohere as a single object or figure

(ibid., 98-99).

The limits placed upon the length of this thesis by my department preclude an exploration

of the full import of these states. Generally, though, all of these types of samāpatti involve a

recognition of a mental act whereby a whole arises from parts—an act which both Vyāsa and

Vācaspatimiśra refer to as vikalpa (ibid., 91-95 passim; Sārvabhauma and Nyāyaratna 1970, 108-

121 passim). While one could perhaps interpret the progression of these samāpattis as the

revelation of some kind of pure, mind-independent thing-in-itself, Husserl’s phenomenology

could help to clarify how a transcendental understanding of samāpatti and vikalpa is possible.

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More specifically, Husserl’s general idea of constitution, the way in which a manifold of

immanent mental acts meaningfully combines to synthesize a transcendent object as a whole, can

provide a fruitful analogy for vikalpa. The perception of physical objects provides perhaps the

most straightforward example in Husserl’s writing of how he analyzes such a process of

constitution. Husserl’s analyses of the constitution of perceptual objects as transcendent, material

objects tend to revolve around the simple, yet easily overlooked fact that one never sees an

object all at once, in all dimensions. Rather, objects of perception are revealed in adumbrations

(Abschattungen) that together constitute a whole. Husserl gives a rather succinct summary of this

sort of process in Cartesian Meditations:

For example, if I take the perceiving of this die as the theme for my description, I see in pure reflection that “this” die is given continuously as an objective unity in a multiform and changeable multiplicity of manners of appearing, which belong determinately to it. These, in their temporal flow, are not an incoherent sequence of subjective processes. Rather they flow away in the unity of a synthesis, such that in them “one and the same” is intended as appearing (1960, 39).

Such an observation is at once prosaic and profound. Claiming that one never sees, say, a die in

all of its aspects at once is hardly surprising. However, from the standpoint of the epoché, i.e.

having set aside the presumption of the die’s existence as a material, three-dimensional object,

these adumbrations or “manners of appearing” (ibid.) become epistemologically primary. They

are not just the same object from different perspectives, but are the very elements from which the

perception of an existent object is constituted or synthesized as such. What Husserl here points to

is both the fact that, and the way in which, an existent object is always only given through

conscious mental acts.

I would argue that the yogin’s grasp of the processes of vitarka and vicāra while in

samāpatti results in a similar realization of the ways in which an existent object is always only

given through conscious mental acts. Going further, both Husserl’s constitution and Patañjali’s

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vikalpa involve the ordered synthesis of momentary experiential parts into wholes. They are both

attempts to catch the structures and processes of consciousness in the act of allowing for the

postulation of existent objects out of the momentary raw material, as it were, of immanent

conscious experience. Viewed in this way, an analysis of the various forms of samāpatti could

add considerable evidence for Pātañjala Yoga as a transcendental phenomenological enterprise.

5.2.2 Time in Husserl and Patañjali

Related to these considerations of constitution and vikalpa is the general theme of time.

Indeed, such syntheses of parts into wholes is essentially temporal, for the systematic accretion

of adumbrations into the coherent structure of the fully constituted noema can only take place

over time. In Patañjalian terms, the conditioning of the tanmātras by time (kāla) in savicāra

samāpatti could reflect a similar insight.

Aside from its direct relationship to constitution in Husserl and vikalpa in the YS, the

general question of time as a phenomenological problem can be seen in both philosophies. For

his part, Husserl devotes an entire text, The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness

(1964b), to the topic, in which he focuses on how the flow of time is constituted from a first

person nunc stans, as an achievement of transcendental subjectivity, rather than the natural

attitude toward time as some sort of real, linear duration apart from one’s own experience of it.

On the Patañjalian side, the YS is far more laconic than Husserl. Nevertheless, several sūtras of

the third pāda (YS III:13-16, 52) could provide interesting material for a phenomenological

study of time in that they propose an examination of time in samādhi, implying that the yogin

can reflect upon time from a radically first-person perspective. Indeed, in his commentary on YS

III:52, which proposes the moment (kṣaṇa) and its sequence (krama) as a focus for samādhi,

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Vyāsa asserts that time is not real, but a mental construct of sorts (Āraṇya 1983, 335), a

statement which invites further comparison with Husserl’s discussion of time.

5.2.3 Samyama and Vibhūti

In addition to these problems of constitution, further attention could also be given to the

YS’s discussion of siddhi and vibhūti, or supernormal attainments of power and knowledge, and

how they might fit into an understanding of the text as phenomenological. These powers and

forms of knowledge are extensive and diverse, and they occupy the larger part of the third pāda.

They include knowledge of previous births (YS III:18), invisibility (YS III:21), knowledge of the

arrangement and movement of the stars (YS III:27-28), supernormal powers of sense (YS III:36,

41), and levitation (YS III:42), among many others. Pertinent to the inquiries of this thesis,

however, is the text’s insistence that such supernormal power and knowledge obtain through the

achievement of samyama, or restraint, a technical term introduced in YS III:4 as combination of

dhāraṇā, dhyāna, and samādhi. More specifically, it is through performing samyama on

particular empirical objects that these various accomplishments come about. Thus, an

understanding of samprajñāta samādhi and samāpatti are crucial to an understanding of how

Patañjali and his commentators conceive of these powers as possible.

Of particular interest for the interpretation of Pātañjala Yoga’s philosophical position,

especially in regard to its use of Sāṃkhya’s metaphysics, is the text’s basic contention regarding

these supernormal powers that samādhi, as a particular state of mind or perception, can somehow

bring about a change in the material world. This claim could invite further examination of how

Sāṃkhya and Yoga imagine the relationship between the seemingly subjective, mental tattvas,

e.g. citta, buddhi, ahaṃkāra, and manas, and the seemingly objective, material tattvas, e.g. the

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tanmātras and bhūtas. As both Bryant (2009, 332-339) and Koelman (1970, 242-243) discuss,

the former tattvas’ status as causes, conditions, or substrata for the latter suggests that somehow

such manipulation might be possible in such a worldview. Of course, this leaves unanswered the

question as to whether the bhūtas manipulated in the exercise of some of these powers are extra-

mental reals created by the mind via some quasi-physical force, or whether they are structures of

intra-mental phenomena whose manipulation results in the constitution of a world in which

flight, invisibility, and so forth take place. Both a natural and a transcendental-phenomenological

account would seem to require further fleshing out and elaboration. Either account would likely

be plagued by Sāṃkhya’s general vagueness regarding the source and mechanism of conation,

and especially how an act of will would be possible in samyama, when any usual sense of subject

and object has vanished.

5.2.4 Soteriology

One final area for further exploration is the rather stark difference between Pātañjala

Yoga and Husserlian Phenomenology on the matter of soteriology. The YS, like so much of

traditional Indian religious and philosophical thought, is clearly preoccupied with the

achievement of some form of liberation from the inherently painful cycle of death and rebirth. In

classical Sāṃkhya and Yoga, such liberation is typically referred to as ‘kaivalya,’ or ‘isolation,’

and it is conceived of as the isolation or separation of puruṣa from prakṛti. In Husserl, however,

there seems to be no trace of such a soteriological interest.

The question thus arises as to how an understanding of the YS as taking a transcendental-

phenomenological orientation could account for such a soteriological aim. In other words, what

might phenomenology have to do with liberation? Interestingly, Husserl’s own little-known

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encounter with Buddhism may provide the beginnings of an answer. In 1925 Husserl wrote a

review, or what might be better described as a very long blurb, for a collection of excerpts from

the Buddhist Suttapiṭaka, edited and translated by the Viennese Schopenhauerian Karl Eugen

Neumann (Schuhmann 1992, 25-26). According to the Husserl scholar Karl Schuhmann, Husserl

asserts that Buddhism “is not transcendent—not directed toward some deity who would dwell

behind the world…but transcendental, i.e. it looks inward and assigns to subjectivity the

constitutive principles of reality” (ibid., 26). As Schuhmann goes on to point out,

‘transcendental’ is a term that Husserl applies to his own phenomenology, thus strongly

suggesting that Husserl saw at least something of value in Buddhism, and that it resonated with

his own phenomenological inquiries.

However, Schuhmann also notes that in later lectures on the topic, Husserl characterizes

the overall project of Buddhism as seeking “a way out in transcendentalism” (ibid., 30). Husserl

makes this statement in the context of a pro-European polemic that can seem, for various

reasons, rather problematic in our own post-colonial age. Still, the idea of the transcendental—

here understood in the more strictly Kantian and Husserlian senses of the word—as an escape or

a way out could help to clarify how Sāṃkhya and Yoga could be at once transcendental-

phenomenological and soteriological. That is, the achievement of the transcendental-

phenomenological attitude, and its concomitant dismantlement of the usual sense of the natural

world, result also in the dismantlement or suspension of one’s everyday human identity. This is

evident in Husserl’s general interest in psyche and spirit as constitutive achievements of

transcendental subjectivity, and likewise in the YS as the possibility of taking the so-called

grasper (grahitṛ) as the object of samāpatti while occupying the viewpoint of a pure witness,

unaffected by the changing phenomena presented to it. In the YS, and perhaps other related

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systems of Indian thought, this dismantlement could thus result in the suspension of any

identification with the human, empirical ego, if not experience altogether, whereby the

vicissitudes of karma could cease to have an effect.

Such an understanding of the overall import of Sāṃkhya and Pātañjala Yoga, especially

the meditative praxis of the latter, helps to add considerable nuance and richness to them. If the

attainment of their soteriological aims results, at least in part, from such transcendental and

phenomenological reflection and exploration, then these systems should not simply be

summarized as the mere cessation of experience or the cauterization of desire. Certainly, such

cessative intentions have a significant place in Pātañjala Yoga, and yet they are intertwined with

a re-orientation toward experience that requires a new interpretation of the world, rather than a

simple abnegation of it. Indeed, one could thus understand the various forms and foci of

samāpatti and samyama as steps or markers of progress on the way to the mastery of a

transcendental viewpoint that ultimately allows one to renounce one’s identity as an isolated ego.

All of these avenues of inquiry would certainly require further research and consideration

to be adequately integrated with a transcendental-phenomenological reading of the YS. Still, I

am optimistic that such integration is possible. At the very least, though, the distinction I have

attempted to draw between the natural and phenomenological attitudes, and their implications for

an interpretation of the YS, can further help to clarify the interpretive possibilities of Pātañjala

Yoga specifically, and even Indian philosophy more generally. Indeed, since many systems of

traditional Indian thought devote considerable effort to accounts of conscious experience and

meditative praxis, the ambiguity of how one understands consciousness—whether in the natural

or phenomenological attitude—can confuse the larger hermeneutic enterprise. In engaging these

themes, then, it may be helpful for future interpreters to clarify whether they understand a given

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system as working in the natural or phenomenological mode. To the extent that they choose the

latter, a considerable reorientation of our engagement with such systems becomes possible. Such

a re-engagement can approach these systems of thought as something more than obscure artifacts

of a wholly foreign historical horizon. While a critical historical awareness must still accompany

the study of these traditions, an understanding of them as phenomenological models of reality

can also be an invitation to enter into conversation with them as we return to the felt presence of

our own experience.

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