ATT ATETRT:
A CONCORDANCE-DICTIONARY
70
THE YOGA-SUTRA-S OF PATANJALI
AND
THE BHASHYA OF VYASA
BY
BHAGAVAN DAS
(M, A., Calcutta University; D. Litt, hon. cau
Benares University; D. Litt, hon. cau.,
Allahabad University ).
THE KASHI VIDYA-PITHA
BENARES,
1938.All right reserved.
Brae Bey GSR, THATS TASH, FA |FOREWORD
Some thirty-five years ago, the wish came to me to study the
Yoga-Sutra-s of Patanjali, and the Bhashya thereon of Vyasa, in the
original Samskrt,
But I was very busy, in those years, with the work of the
Central Hindu College of Benares; which had been founded in 1898,
by Mrs, Annie Besant and Indien colleagues, to form a centre for
the rationalisation, liberalisation, and solidarisation of what is now
called ‘Hinduism’,
This ‘Hinduism’ is obviously something very degenerate now.
Formerly it was Vaidika Dharma, ‘the Religion of Knowledge, of
Spiritual and Material Science’, ‘Scientific Religion’; Arya Dharma,
‘the Noble Religion’, ‘the Religion of the Philanthropic and Noble-
mjnded’; Sanatana Dharma, ‘the Eternal Religion’, ‘the Religion of
the Eternal Spirit, the Supreme Universal Self’; Bauddha Dherma,
‘the Religion of Buddhi, Rational Intelligence’, ‘Rational Religion’;
Manava Dharma, ‘the Religion of Man, the child of Manu the
Thinker’, ‘the Human and Humane and ‘Humanist Religion’,
Tt was a spirituo-material, psycho-physical, scientific, far-sighted,
comprehensive Code of Individuo-Social and Socio-Individual Lifes
a scheme of a fourfold Educational-Political-Economic-Industrial
Organisation of the whole Human Race, calculated to seoure, for
that Race, the maximum heppiness possible, individual and social,
this-worldly and other-wordly, here and hereafter. But for some
centuries now it has been, and is today, an unsightly heap of
conflicting superstitions, a dazing turmoil of hundreds of struggling
sects, mostly senseless, some foul also (as, indeed, unhappily, are
the other great living religions too, though in a lesser degree); its
followers, an amazing jumble, a jostling welter, of between two and
three thousand mutually ‘touch-me-not’, mutually exclusive, mutually
abusive, petty castes, sub-castes, and yet further sub-divisions, to the
fifth or sixth degree, all utterly disorganised.
‘The honorary secretary-ship of the Board of Trustees and the
Managing Committee of the institution was placed upon my shoulders.
We wore all working hard, Mrs. Besant hardest of all, to build up the
college and make it a fit instrument for realising our ideal, viz.,
gradually restoring the old ‘order’ in place of this disorder, of re-
organising the disorganised.
The hundreds of branches of the Theosophical Society, dotted
all over India, in the large and small towns, became committees for
collecting funds, This was one main cause of such success as was