Day by day, I am copying by hand different translations of Patanjali’s masterpiece in my library (“Copying by Hand,” April 2, 2014). As I go along, I am also coming up with my own translation. Tentative as it is, it is based on all the translations I have already mastered over the years. I am doing my best to be true to them all while paving my own way through the ancient text. The first draft may take a few weeks only, but the final one will surely take years. In the meanwhile, I already feel a clear benefit from the exercise: I am looking at the news hardly at all. Even if I visit the online editions of so many leading newspapers I have bookmarked on my laptop, I skim through them without any passion. Or any serious concern. Could I come up with better words in praise of Patanjali? I surely hope so, but ridding me of the news is an achievement worth bragging about at present. I am wasting my precious time, though. I must return to my translation. The translation of all translations, that is.

Addendum (December 5, 2014)

In the end, I abandoned this project, which preoccupied me for quite a while. The translation of Patanjali’s masterpiece turned out to be too annoying on account of all the funny stuff concerning accomplishments or powers at the disposal of a yogi (“Screw Accomplishments or Powers,” April 5, 2014). Try as I might, I could not get around the childish arts toward which much of yoga is geared (“On Childish Arts,” October 14, 2014). In the end, my own yoga sutras are way ahead of his (“Ten Principles of Bon Yoga,” November 11, 2012). No mumbo-jumbo anywhere. And no false promises of levitation, entering the body of others, or becoming invisible. Pace Patanjali, but you should have learned a few things from the Buddha before you. By way of a tip, you should start with my sutras on Buddhism minus mumbo-jumbo (“Ten Principles of Bon Buddhism,” April 10, 1992).