Sutras in the Indian tradition were a response to the practical considerations of an oral tradition. The Indian tradition, for much of its history, distrusted writing and preferred to conserve and pass down texts orally. The Vedas are an example of a mammoth corpus, committed to memory. Epics too, large in size, were committed to memory until a late date. While Indians seemed to be willing to commit large texts to memory, many sought more economical means of memorizing texts. The answer was the sutra. The Sanskrit word sutra stands minimally for a single aphorism, or an entire text of aphorisms. The sutra, as a text, is composed of single lines, each dense conjunctions of words, often not even combined in any obviously grammatical fashion, often missing explicit markers of a subject-predicate structure. Each line of a sutra, or the individual sutra verse, is comprised of words chosen for their multiple significances. The more significances a word can conjure, the greater work each verbal component of a sutra can play in compressing a large text within short, dense lines. Originally, they were meant to be expanded upon in the context of discourses given by teachers, Sutras are no longer passed down in this fashion, and since they have been committed to writing, commentaries now take place of the living guru. The challenge however is how to translate a sutra text.

From Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra, translated and commented by Shyam Ranganathan, London: Penguin, 2008, pp. 31-32.