On my round of one of Zagreb’s bookstores with foreign books, I was surprised today by David Gordon White’s The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali: A Biography.[1] A biography? What could this possibly mean? I took the book from its shelf and walked toward the cashiers without looking. On my way home, I could not stop leafing through the book, and so I bumped into many a passerby. It is a part of a long series of such biographies by the same publisher, all of which go by the grand title of “Lives of Great Religious Books.” Eleven of them are already in print while thirteen are forthcoming.

According to the dust jacket, Patanjali’s masterpiece is extoled nowadays by the yoga establishment as a perennial classic and guide to yoga practice, but White shows that it was virtually forgotten in India for centuries, as well as maligned when it was first discovered in the west. In fact, the sutras have been elevated to the present iconic status only in the last forty years or so. The dust jacket also introduces the author as a professor of comparative religion at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Although I was hardly pleased by the connection between yoga and religion, I was delighted to discover in the book itself that Hegel had dealt with Patanjali’s masterpiece.

To my chagrin, I was not yet home when I read that Hegel actually rejected the Indian worldview as superficial, derivative, and utterly alien to the European mind.[2] Luckily, White argues on the very next page that Hegel had changed his mind close to his death. At last he recognized yoga as the “midpoint between Indian religion and philosophy,” and he singled out the final chapter of Patanjali’s sutras, which deals with samadhi or enlightenment, as “philosophy proper.”[3] There was no end to my merriment at this point on account of my new book. Hegel and I are on the same page, no doubt. I could hardly wait to sit down and start reading the book in peace.

Footnotes

1. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014.

2. Op. cit., p. 89.

3. Op. cit., p. 90.