Patanjali and Ethical Life

Why the Yamas and Niyamas are Not Moral Guidance

Ahimsa-satyāsteya-brahmacaryāparigrahā yamah

The yamas are non-injury, truth, not stealing, celibacy, and non-grasping (of unnecessary possessions). (Yogasutra 2.30)

Jāti-deśa-kāla-samanyānavaccinnāh sarva-bhaumā mahā-vratam

[These yamas] are the great vow, not to be exempted by birth (caste), place, time, or circumstance [but rather] apply to all of the world. (2.31)

Śauca-santoSa-tapah-svādhyāya-praNidhāni niyamah

The observances are purity (or cleanliness), contentment, austerity, study (placing the teachings within), and surrender (to the sublime power). (2.32)

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These three verses from Patanjali’s Yogasutra initiate the process of the so-called Eight Limbs that carries on until the conclusion of the second chapter at 2.55. Just how the eightfold prescription fulfills the definition of yoga (1.2) or the practice of yoga (2.1) has consumed volumes from both traditional commentators and modern scholarship.

I’ve no intention here of going through the lists to define their individual meanings though, as we shall see, those meanings are hardly self-evident. As ideas, ethical concepts, practices, and observances the yamas/niyamas are remarkable less for what they enjoin than for how they factor into larger agenda of Patanjali’s yoga.

Some precepts, like truth telling or not stealing (shall we call that honesty?), or observances like cleanliness and contentment, should strike us as anodyne, at least in the sense that most humans would hardly disagree that such matters enjoin virtue. Others, like celibacy (note that brahmacarya is here not an effective commitment to study before householder life) and surrender to the power of the sublime (or God), can also find roles in the comparative study of ethics and spiritual practices. In short, there really is nothing particularly remarkable about either the prescriptions (yama) or their concomitant observances (niyama) until we consider more precisely how they figure into Patanjali’s grander scheme.

Ethics more often invoke the feeling “who would disagree” rather than “these are surprising ideas demand our consideration.” But some of Patanjali’s ideas do indeed invoke some incredulity. When I first encountered the yamas/niyamas I was puzzled how certain ones would be considered virtue at all. Others, dare I say, appear obvious even if their practice challenges us to manifest them. This doesn’t mean these aren’t important ideas but rather that what’s noteworthy is how they are formulated within the frameworks that imagine our human possibilities. Why should these particular ideas warrant our fealty?

When we consider the yamas/niyamas as integral to Patanjali’s yoga we can certainly take note of peculiar meanings, most of which are shared across India’s traditions, but what is at stake does not address morality as such. Morality is more often assigned in Indian systems to Dharma: the necessary and obligatory terms of living in society. However, even when we ferret out the nuances of meaning in the yamas/niyamas we might not yet appreciate fully how they factor into Patanjali’s worldview.

I find myself puzzled by repeated references (in statements made by modern yogins) that the yamas/niyamas somehow provide a guide to moral living in the everyday world. It’s not as if we couldn’t use them for these purposes---though I think most of us would find them not particularly appealing as moral guidance, at least those less than obvious. Do you really think of celibacy as moral virtue or necessity? Do you think that surrender to God is required to be a moral person? Instead let’s consider how these ideas “fit” within the project of the Yogasutra, particularly in light of Vyasa’s commentary which represents best the “standard” interpretation.

My aim here is not to disparage the value of these ideas but to represent them from within the system (such as it is) that is proposed in the primary text. Put in context, I think we can appreciate better the meaning and purpose of the yamas/niyamas and decide for ourselves what to make of their objectives. What is being said, why is Patanjali saying it, and how are we to take these ideas? As injunctions and precepts? Mandates for living an ethical life? Prerequisites to an agenda that presumes their importance?

(Before going any further I refer the reader to Edwin Bryant’s magisterial study The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (North Point Press, 2009) which will further make clear where my own readings offer some alternative understanding. Bryant’s diligence and seriousness warrant our attention and admiration. It is not that I suggest much disagreement as it is my concern to bring attention to how the yamas/niyamas feature within the larger project defined as “yoga,” cf. 1.2. and within the structure of the ashtanga in the second pada. To project a coherent system onto the Yogasutra-as-a-whole requires the commentarial tradition treating it as such: this is a complex text, not likely of single authorship, more a compilation of redacted resources than any consistent or systematic pedagogy---but that is a matter we can take up on another occasion. For purposes of argument, I’ve treated Patanjali as its author and held the text accountable for the teaching. I’ve also not brought other works of reputable contemporary scholarship into our discussion for the sake of brevity and focus.)

Let’s begin with Patanjali’s one-way ticket agenda. Patanjali’s agenda is liberation from and nowhere does he suggest liberation to. In other words, he’s writing a ticket to free us from the terms of our mortal experience rather than prescribing a way to live within it, much less free from within our experience as material beings. Patanjali is not interesting in bringing us back into the world once his ultimate aim is accomplished. Why in the world would return to a world that is defined by suffering and limited experiences?

Ideas like yamas/niyamas are not devised for living in the world as free beings but rather as means of providing the conditions that will permit us to experience freedom. Once these conditions for freedom are met---by achieving nirodha (cessation) from the vicissitudes (vrtti) of psychophysical consciousness (citta), the final stages of samadhi (mental equanimity), and the other practices (kriya, cf. 2.1) of yoga and the eight limbs as an entirety (cf. 2.20ff.), there is little need for the further employment of these means, one is simply no longer subject to the outrageous fortunes of a material identity.

None of these teachings, including the yamas/niyamas, are ends unto themselves: they are means for creating a the circumstance for liberation from the world, which would necessarily include these practices.

The goal is not to somehow live in the world with these teachings, under their terms, and expressive of their values. The goal is to use these methods to arrive at the state of liberation from all limitations associated with living in the world at all. Once that state of exemption from conditionality is realized there is no ticket back to living as a human being with individual or social conscience. Patanjali isn’t talking to every person as if these were moral charges; he is talking to yogins in pursuit of liberation.

Let’s put this agenda clearly in Patanjali’s terms: the purpose of his yoga is to isolate the immortal reality of Purusa which suffuses every human as the self (atman) from its putative entanglements with material reality (prakrti). However, it is not Purusa that needs wrangling since it is by nature immaculate, thus unaffected by its relationship to our experience with material identification. Yoga is to address our material conditionality, not to make us better at living with it but to free us from it. (We can also note that yoga doesn’t address the Purusa, which needs no help, but only the limited consciousness as it is materially constructed and defined through the process of the categories (tattva).)

Purusa does nothing, it simply is while the complex features of the prakritic self tarry through the malaise caused by its limited, conditioned, and transient characteristics. Our material identity is made of a permanent feature of reality (prakrti) whose distinctive feature is that it cycles, thus creating the experiences of change, impermanence, and all the associated problematics that cause us to misidentify ourselves as merely mortal beings.

The prakrtic features that describe embodied experience are facts (tattva), not mere mental constructs (as our pals the Buddhists would have it), and so materiality is real (sat) but it is, as it were, half of what we are. But Patanjali’s ontology (his theory of existence) is dualist: our better half is Purusa (which may warrant a capital letter given the peculiar relationship it has to God (Iśvara). Our Purusa-existence is our true self (atman) which never suffers nor needs any care, guidance, much less ethical direction; the Purusa doesn’t have values, doesn’t make decisions, isn’t involved in any choices, is posed with no dilemmas or circumstances, it simply is.

The Self is not involved doing anything at all any more than it is moral by nature; the Self is not good or evil, it has no feelings, thoughts, values, or mutable experiences. Patanjali’s goal is to disentangle and dissociate from our prakrtic experiences without any mention or prospect of returning to the world. He’s not proposing a bodhisattva-like Teflon experience of samsara whereby the liberated being is capable of empathy (karuna) but is also somehow not subject to the suffering that attends all changeable experiences----and all experiences that can change are by definition suffering in these systems of thought.

So, what’s the deal with yamas/niyamas? What are they about and for what purpose? We must begin with Patanjali’s clearly stated purpose: these are neither methods for living in the world nor are the positive results, the proper conclusions that demonstrate the experience of yogins living exemplary lives. In other words, the yamas/niyamas are not ethical guidelines for living nor are they what ethical persons exemplify: they are means to an end in which they are themselves no longer applicable or necessary to the yogin who is ultimately free.

Human beings have a potential unavailable to other embodied life---this assumption pervades yoga traditions. We can take hold of our peculiar experience, engage and discipline ourselves: all this contained in the word “yoga.”

When Patanjali introduces the yamas/niyamas (2.30ff.), he’s applying the basic meaning of the Sanskrit verb /yam. In the Rg Veda and the Brahmanas, /yam can mean to sustain, to support, as if one were holding up or holding on to something of worth. But in Patanjali the sense is one of restraint, curbs, governance, and control. One is not so much being held in a condition but being held back from conditions that would otherwise take hold.

To realize our freedom we must begin, he says, by placing restraints upon ourselves or to put it more precisely, we must curb and control in certain ways so as to create the conditions for the freedom that ultimately relinquishes every material identification. In other words, these are the provisions and terms we must meet in order not to allow other even more problematic experiences to disrupt the equanimity we will need to recognize the original state of liberation that is the Self.

The yamas/niyamas don’t lead to this ultimate recognition so much as they provide a stage (that must not be sublated) in a process that creates the context for liberation. We aren’t liberated when we express, exemplify, or represent these values and behaviors. Rather, we are creating the situation and making the commitment (what the calls the “great vow”, 2.31) that is necessary to prepare us for our deliverance from all conditionalities. He states that these yamas are universal insofar as they do not pertain to birth (caste, jāti), place, time, or other circumstances. This effectively places them outside of the terms of conventional law and estates, the varna-āśrama-dharma, which define our worldly and ethical obligations. Patanjali’s aim is to make particular yamas an irrefragable feature of the path to liberation. Is that your agenda?

Once again, the yamas aren’t described as prescriptions for living a worldly life in society (that would fall under the customs and legalities of dharma that pertain to birth) but rather as requirements, made as a vow of such magnitude (hence maha-vrata) that they can address the problematic defined at the outset of the text in the definition of yoga (1.2), viz., to help create the nirodha (the cessation) that effectively eliminates the changes and consequences (vrtti) of being a psychophysical person (citta). This project terms doesn’t make the yamas not ethical constraints (or values) but rather places them in the very particular context of providing what yogins need to do if they wish to realize the immortal Self (which itself has nothing to do with them because the Self is not moral anymore than it bears any other characteristics.).

That ahimsa, non-injury, comes first in the yama-list is significant: the first element of any compound in Sanskrit is regarded as having a special importance, sometimes a kind of umbrella effect over the rest. Certainly, many traditions have regarded ahimsa as a requirement for living an ethical life. It’s not a little ironic that just living will thwart its fulfillment. When we see ahimsa as a constraint defined in degrees of non-injury it comes to make more sense: make as little impact as possible in terms of inflicting or creating injury to the world (especially living things). That would surely suffice as a moral injunction but is that what Patanjali is about?

How much ahimsa is enough to provide the conditions for the Self to shine through and stand apart from our material machinations? If ahimsa is an absolute---no harm can be countenanced---then we’re in real trouble, doomed to repeat the cycles of death and rebirth. Clearly, this can’t be what Patanjali means though neither he nor the commentators tell us how much ahimsa will provide the opening we need to disentangle and thereby effortlessly recognize Self.

Notice that while he tells us that the yamas (and presumably niyamas) are not optional but constant, great commitments, the idea is at once attitudinal and behavioral, we should be in a certain state of mind consistently and act commensurately. This would translate in practical terms to a certain ethical commitment to living, that is, if one regards non-injury as having this degree of significance to moral life.

While the Bhagavadgita for example mentions ahimsa it plainly does not mean a passivist or even vegetarian way of life: Arjuna is enjoined to fight and not to grieve those who do not warrant his grief. There are values and principles deemed worth the injury though in good Patanjali-form Krishna tells Arjuna that it is not the Self that is slain nor is the slayer (2.20) because that immortal and immaculate feature of being is permanently exempt from death and re-death.

The point is that non-injury is valued for intentions and actions that create the opportunity for liberation, even in the Bhagavadgita. However, it is less about living a certain way for the world than it is a provision for the greater purpose of a liberation-yoga. In Arjuna’s case, his duty (dharma) must not be forsaken (he exhorts him to stand in yoga, fight!) precisely because Krishna entreats a more just, more livable world than the tyranny he foresees in Arjuna’s villainous cousins. Ahimsa does not constrain Arjuna from committing acts of violence.

Self can’t be injured (how very Patanjali of Krishna) but violence is sadly enjoined and there are no two ways about it. How you decide what is worth fighting for may include an aversion to violence but that does not mean non-violence is itself virtue. Dharma demands more, though to be fair Patanjali isn’t interested in creating a life of dharma so much as he is in creating the circumstances for liberation. A life of dharma means doing what is needful to “hold the world together” (loka-samgraha, Bhagavadgita, 3.20).

In sum, Patanjali’s yamas/niyamas aren’t about being an ethical person for the sake of living in the world and can’t be equated to moral guidance. Rather, they are the particular conditions for the yogin in pursuit of the liberation that is Self recognition. If these particular ideas are your moral imperatives, I can find no objection---I think you’re unlikely to be picking my pocket, breaking my leg, or imposing your religion on me. That said, I’m not particularly interested in contentment unless it provides the opportunity to ask the harder, more discomforting questions about life and as for celibacy, can we just agree upon consent? What’s clear is that Patanjali advances these particular injunctions because he’s got a certain notion of liberation in mind and I gotta’ say, that too doesn’t appeal much to me once we understand what he thinks our ultimate achievement really needs to be.