(Routledge South Asian Religion Series) Knut A. Jacobsen - Yoga in Modern Hinduism - Hariharānanda Āra Ya and Sā Khyayoga-Routledge (2017)

Yoga in Modern Hinduism
The Sāṃkhyayoga institution of Kāpil Maṭh is a religious organization with a

small tradition of followers that emerged in the last decade of the nineteenth cen-
tury and the first decades of the twentieth century in Bengal in India around the
renunciant and yogin Hariharānanda Āraṇya. This tradition developed during the
same period in which modern yoga was born and forms a chapter in the expansion
of yoga traditions in modern Hinduism.
The book analyzes the yoga teaching of Hariharānanda Āraṇya (1869–1947)
and the Kāpil Maṭh tradition, its origin, history and contemporary manifesta-
tions, and the tradition’s connection to the expansion of yoga and the Yogasūtra
in modern Hinduism. The Sāṃkhyayoga of the Kāpil Maṭh tradition is based on
the Pātañjalayogaśāstra, on a number of texts in Sanskrit and Bengali written by
their gurus, and on the lifestyle of the renunciant yogin living isolated in a cave.
The book investigates Hariharānanda Āraṇya’s connection to premodern yoga
traditions and the impact of modern production and transmission of knowledge
on his interpretations of yoga. The book connects the Kāpil Maṭh tradition to the
nineteenth-century transformations of Bengali religious culture of the educated
upper class that led to the production of a new type of yogin. The book analyses
Sāṃkhyayoga as a living tradition, its current teachings and practices, and looks
at what Sāṃkhyayogins do and what Sāṃkhyayoga is as a yoga practice.
A valuable contribution to recent and ongoing debates, this book will be of
interest to academics in the fields of religious studies, anthropology, Asian stud-
ies, Indology, Indian philosophy, Hindu studies, and Yoga studies.
Knut A. Jacobsen is professor in the study of religions at the University of Ber-

gen, Norway. His research focuses on Yoga, Sāṃkhya, and Hindu conceptions
and rituals of space and time. He is the editor in chief of the six volumes Brill’s
Encyclopedia of Hinduism (2009–2015), and he is the editor of the Routledge
Handbook of Contemporary India (2016).
Routledge South Asian Religion
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Guru Faith in the Mata Amritanandamayi Mission
Maya Warrier
2 Parsis in India and the Diaspora

Edited by John R. Hinnells and Alan Williams
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Religious Processions in South Asia and in the Diaspora
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Edited by Esther Bloch, Marianne Keppens and Rajaram Hegde
5 Health and Religious Rituals in South Asia

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Edited by Anne Murphy
7 Cross-disciplinary Perspectives on a Contested Buddhist Site

Bodhgaya Jataka
Edited by David Geary, Matthew R. Sayers and Abhishek Singh Amar
8 Yoga in Modern Hinduism

Hariharānanda Āraṇya and Sāṃkhyayoga
Knut A. Jacobsen
Yoga in Modern Hinduism
Hariharānanda Āraṇya and Sāṃkhyayoga
Knut A. Jacobsen
First published 2018
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Contents
List of figures vi
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
1 Sāṃkhya, Yoga, and Sāṃkhyayoga 11
2 Encounters with a living Sāṃkhyayoga tradition 23
3 Kapila as the originator of Yoga 36
4 The rebirth of Yoga and the emergence of the bhadralok yogin 52
5 Gurus, book printing, and the Sāṃkhyayoga lineage 69
6 The textual tradition of the Kāpil Maṭh institution 88
7 Sāṃkhyayoga meditation instructions of

the Kāpil Maṭh tradition 124
8 Monastic life and recitation of Sanskrit stotras 155
9 The material religion of Sāṃkhyayoga 177
10 The Kāpil Maṭh tradition and modern scholarship on Yoga 189
Conclusion 202
Appendix: Some publications of the Kāpil Maṭh tradition 209

Glossary 214
Bibliography 217
Index 228
Figures
2.1 The main building at Kāpil Maṭh with the Kāpil Cave to the left
and the Kāpil Mandir to the right 30
2.2 The opening in the cave during the period in which the guru
is in solitude. Above the opening on top is a painting of
Kapila and underneath a painting of Hariharānanda Āraṇya
and Dharmamegha Āraṇya. The photo on the wall to the left
of the opening is of Hariharānanda Āraṇya and to the right of
Dharmamegha Āraṇya 31
3.1 Statue of Kapila in the garden of Kāpil Maṭh in Madhupur 38
7.1 A model of the Ṛddhi Mandir, in the garden of Kāpil Maṭh 140
7.2 Participants in Omprakāś Āraṇya’s instructed Sāṃkhyayoga
meditations in Varanasi 147
8.1 Bhāskara Āraṇya meeting devotees in the opening of the cave 158
9.1 Shrine at Kāpil Āśram in Kurseong. On the top is the symbol
Om, next is a drawing of Īśvara and below a drawing of
Kapila. Underneath are photos of Hariharānanda Āraṇya and
Dharmamegha Āraṇya and their samādhisthānas. Below on the
right side is Bhāskara Āraṇya and on the left Śaṅkarācārya 179
9.2 Samādhisthāna of Hariharānanda Āraṇya 181
9.3 Orange figure with a text written in Bengali on the front about
the inevitability of death and the immortality of the self 182
9.4 The skull with a message about suffering and death and the
unchangeable self that does not die 183
Acknowledgments
This book has been a long-term project. I want to recognize the support I have
received from a number of persons of the Kāpil Maṭh institutions for the pro-
ject over the years. The head of Kāpil Maṭh, Bhāskara Āraṇya, early on gave
his support to the project, and I am thankful for his cooperation. I have always
felt welcomed at the Maṭh. I want to express my thanks to the late Ram Shankar
Bhattacharya, who was a disciple of the Kāpil Maṭh. I am also thankful for the
assistance I have received from Adinath Chatterjee, Santanu Mukhopadhyay,
Abhijit Mukhopadhyay, Asoke Chattopadhyay, Tarapada Roy Chowdhury, Deepti
Dutta, Swati Ray, D. N. Banerjee, and all the other devotees of the Kāpil Maṭh
in Madhupur. I would also like to thank the late Omprakāś Āraṇya, Abhai Singh,
Sohmer Gautam, and the other devotees of Kāpil Sāṃkhyayogāśram in Sarnath,
as well as Banabir Bhattacharya and devotees of the Kāpil Āśram in Kurseong, for
their cooperation and assistance. I want to acknowledge the assistance of Sagar
Chowdhury in Puducherry, Ajay Pandey, and Krishna Mohan Mishra in Varanasi,
and thank Gerald James Larson, professor emeritus at the University of California
for his continuous support and encouragement, and, finally, I want to state my
gratefulness to my partner Hanne Svendsen for her assistance during many of
the visits over the years to Madhupur, Kurseong, Kolkata, Varanasi, Sarnath, and
Ganga Sagar.
Introduction
The religious institution explored in this book is a small tradition of followers of

Sāṃkhyayoga, which emerged in the last decade of the nineteenth century and
the first decades of the twentieth century in Bengal in India around the renun-
ciant and yogin Hariharānanda Āraṇya. Hariharānanda Āraṇya was from How-
rah in Bengal, on the west bank of the river Hooghly from Kolkata, and lived
from 1869 to 1947. For most of those years, 1892 to 1947, he lived the life of a
Sāṃkhyayoga saṃnyāsin (renunciant, ascetic) and authored many texts in San-
skrit and Bengali on the theory and practice of yoga. Āraṇya is an enigmatic fig-
ure of the early history of modern yoga. He promoted the ancient Sāṃkhyayoga
teaching as a living religious tradition and attracted a small number of disciples
who themselves also became Sāṃkhyayogins, a few monks, and a small number
of laypeople. He spent many years in caves and in āśramas, which were named
after the ancient sage Kapila: Kāpilāśrama (the hermitage following the teach-
ing of Kapila) and Kāpila Maṭha/Kāpil Maṭh (the monastery following the teach-
ing of Kapila). His most important work is considered to be the Kāpilāśramīya
Pātañjal Jogdarśan (“The Yoga Philosophy of Patañjali of the Kāpilāśram”), a
Bengali translation of the Sanskrit text Pātañjalayogaśāstra (Yogasūtra and its
auto-commentary Yogabhāṣya or Vyāsabhāṣya) with a detailed commentary on
and an explanation of the text. Āraṇya became a saṃnyāsin in 1892 and studied
the Pātañjalayogaśāstra in solitude in a cave for several years during the period
1892 to 1898, and he attempted to practice and follow the Sāṃkhyayoga teach-
ing of this text. Kāpilāśramīya Pātañjal Jogdarśan was written in Kāpilāśram
in Triveni, north of Kolkata along the river Hooghly some years after that and
published in 1911 (see H. Āraṇya 1981, 1997). The word Kāpilāśramīya in the
title refers to the place where the text was written, the Kāpilāśram in Triveni. In
1924, Āraṇya settled in Kāpil Maṭh in Madhupur, where the main center of the
Kāpil Maṭh institutions remains to this day. Madhupur was at that time in the
Bengal District of Santal Parganas, but today it belongs to the Indian state of
Jharkhand. Āraṇya had an excellent grasp of the Sanskrit language. He wrote
a number of texts in Sanskrit and Bengali, not only philosophical and religious
interpretations of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra and the Sāṃkhyakārikā, but he also
wrote instructions in Sāṃkhyayoga meditation and pieces of creative writing such
2 Introduction
as an autobiographical novel, as well as an allegorical narrative, and a number of
poems written in the format of classical Sanskrit stotras.
Yoga has become a famous global phenomenon and perhaps the most important
export product of India and has from 2015 even been celebrated by the United
Nations annually in the International Day of Yoga.1 Āraṇya, however, did not
achieve fame. A general feature of many of the major gurus of modern yoga is
that they failed to attain the ultimate goal they preached, but they attained a large
transnational following that, paradoxically, became the measure of their success.2
Hariharānanda Āraṇya is not among those gurus. He is not even mentioned in
Benoy Gopal Ray’s Religious Movements in Modern Bengal, published in 1965,
which describes a large number of gurus and guru movements in Bengal of the
preceding 150 years. Nor are the institutions of Kāpilāśram or Kāpil Maṭh men-
tioned in the book. However, in J. N. Farquahar’s An Outline of the Religious
Literature of India, the author notes that he met a Sāṃkhya saṃnyāsin in Kolkata:
“Sāṅkhya sannyāsīs are now so rare that it is of interest to know that, as late as
1912, a learned Sāṅkhya yati named Svāmī Hariharānanda was alive and teaching
in Calcutta” (Farquahar 1920: 289, italics added). By using the phrase “as late as
1912,” Farquahar seems to indicate that Āraṇya came from a larger premodern
tradition of Sāṃkhya that was on the verge of dying out and that Āraṇya was one
of the few, or the last one, left. There was apparently no one left in the Yoga3 tradi-
tion, because Farquahar writes, “Yogis of this great old school have become very
rare. I have never had the good fortune to meet one” (Farquahar 1920: 289). It is
also telling that Farquahar was not able to recognize Āraṇya as a follower of the
Pātañjalayogaśāstra because he probably had certain expectations of what “yogis
of this great old school” would be like, and, apparently, Yoga would be some-
thing different from Sāṃkhya. One of Āraṇya’s realizations was that Sāṃkhya
and Yoga were both schools of Sāṃkhya philosophy and that “yogis of this great
old school” would indeed be Sāṃkhyayogins.
Āraṇya sought solitude, both in this life and as the salvific goal of Sāṃkhyayoga,
acquiring a large following was not his primary concern. In spite of the absence of
a large number of followers, Hariharānanda Āraṇya and the Sāṃkhyayoga institu-
tion he founded nevertheless constitute an important chapter in the history of yoga
as well as in the history of the Hindu religious tradition.
Āraṇya was a contemporary of the famous Bengali Vivekānanda (1863–
1902) who was from Kolkata, but Āraṇya had a much longer life. His life
span paralleled another well-known yogin from Kolkata, Sri Aurobindo (1872–
1950) and was almost exactly the same as that of Mahatma Gandhi (1869–
1948). Hariharānanda Āraṇya does not mention any of them in his writings,
and I have discovered hardly any mention of politics, politicians, or contem-
porary religious figures in his texts published by Kāpil Maṭh. There are only
very few references to contemporary Indian intellectuals, mainly to a small
number of scientists. Āraṇya did not engage in society, and he did not comment
at length in any of his writings that I have read on any political events, even
though he lived through one of the most dramatic historical periods of Bengal
and India.4 In what I have read, Āraṇya does not write about any other topics
Introduction 3
than renunciation, Sāṃkhya, and Sāṃkhyayoga. Āraṇya embodied what he and
his disciples perceived to be the ancient Hindu model of the yogin – a yogin
who was a renunciant and totally removed from society and its concerns. This
also explains to some degree his avoidance of fame. Hariharānanda Āraṇya
prohibited his disciples from writing his biography. This can be interpreted as
a sign of humility, but is also a reflection of Āraṇya’s insistence on traditional
correctness and his idealistic interpretation of the institution of saṃnyāsin. The
followers of Kāpil Maṭh have taken the prohibition to mean that, preferably,
no information about his pre-saṃnyāsin years should be communicated to oth-
ers or talked about among themselves. This is in line with the Hindu idea that
a saṃnyāsin has completely relinquished his pre-saṃnyāsin life.5 It is often
considered improper, according to the idealistic conception of the saṃnyāsa,
to speak about the pre-saṃnyāsin life of monks except to praise the person for
what he renounced in relation to wealth and so on.
After Āraṇya discovered Sāṃkhyayoga and mastered its teachings, and explored
and developed forms of Sāṃkhyayoga meditation, his main vision seems to have
been to promote Sāṃkhyayoga as a living tradition by personally following the
strict discipline of the saṃnyāsin and, in addition, undertaking long periods of
silence (restraint of speech), completing a number of writing projects, and living
for long periods in isolation in caves. He spent the last 20 years of his life enclosed
in an artificial (man-made) “cave.” The guru enclosed in a cave became one of the
unique features of the Kāpil Maṭh tradition and has continued to the present day.
It adds to the authority of the guru and also secrecy as his daily life and practices
cannot be observed. This institution of cave dwelling came perhaps as a response
to the general expectations of Hindu religion that ideally yogins should live alone
and in mountain caves. Perhaps nineteenth-century India’s search for proper
yogins, who were supposed to be found in caves, also had an influence. Possibly,
Āraṇya wished to demonstrate that proper yogins do indeed exist. However that
may be, he had a strong personal inclination for solitude, and it illustrates that the
Kāpil Maṭh tradition aspired to be a tradition of “proper” yoga – a living form
of an ancient tradition in its pure form as conceived by them. Teachers of yoga
in modern India, on the contrary, typically have favored involving themselves
actively in the society, often referring to the teachings of the Bhagavadgītā, which,
contrary to the teaching of stages of life (āśramas) in the Dharmaśāstras, taught
that renunciation did not mean renouncing action but renouncing only the fruits
of action. Āraṇya opposed such an interpretation, arguing that the Bhagavadgītā
was written in a context when many persons became monks but had no real incli-
nation for ascetic living, and thus the text encouraged them to return to society
instead and do their social duty. Hence the situation mirrored his perception that
ascetics and renunciants who had no real propensity for ascetic living dominated
contemporary India. They were either dishonest with no inclination for ascetic
living or, though honest, were more inclined to social engagement than the prac-
tice of solitude and therefore should not have been renunciants in the first place
(H. Āraṇya 2003: 34). This contrast between proper and honest and improper and
dishonest yogins constituted an important component of the discourse about yoga
4 Introduction
and yogins in Bengal in the nineteenth century. Romantic notions about India’s
past contrasted with descriptions and experiences of contemporary society.
Hariharānanda Āraṇya looked back to an ancient period in which a philosopher
called Kapila had, he believed, discovered and realized for the first time in the
current cycle of creation the possibility of salvific liberation (mokṣa, kaivalya) by
means of Yoga. He believed Kapila taught this knowledge, the Sāṃkhya system
of thought, to his disciple Āsuri and thus made salvific liberation possible for oth-
ers to attain.6 He believed Kapila was the founder of Sāṃkhya and therefore also
the founder of Yoga philosophy (Pātañjalayogadarśana) since this Yoga, Āraṇya
had realized, was not only based on Sāṃkhya philosophy, but was also an integral
part of it. Āraṇya promoted the lifestyle and teachings of this ancient sage. Read-
ers acquainted with modern yoga may be surprised by the strong focus on Kapila
and the minor role assigned to Patañjali in the Kāpil Maṭh tradition, as in modern
yoga, Patañjali has become an immensely celebrated figure. In modern yoga, it
is Patañjali who is most often thought of as the foundational figure of yoga, not
Kapila. In the Kāpil Maṭh tradition, Patañjali is indeed recognized as the author
of the Yogasūtra, but as we shall see in this book, since the Pātañjalayogaśāstra
(Yogasūtra and its auto-commentary Yogabhāṣya or Vyāsabhāṣya) is based on
Sāṃkhya philosophy, it is based on the teachings of Kapila and his yoga, accord-
ing to the Kāpil Maṭh tradition. In addition to the sage Kapila as the first to attain
salvific knowledge of the unchangeable puruṣa principle, Āraṇya promoted
īśvara as a nirguṇa (“without qualities”) divinity and Hiraṇyagarbha as a saguṇa
(“with qualities”) divinity and world creator, but no significant role is assigned to
Patañjali. Although Patañjali is considered to be the author of the Yogasūtra, he
is not thought to be the originator of yoga. Āraṇya looked at Sāṃkhya and Yoga
as one integrated tradition and both were based on the teachings of Kapila and
both taught the ultimate separateness of the two ultimate principles of puruṣa and
prakṛti, consciousness and matter. This Sāṃkhya dualism is also taught in the
Pātañjalayogaśāstra, according to Āraṇya. Modern yoga, in contrast, has often
separated the Yogasūtra from the dualism of Sāṃkhya, and from the rest of the
Pātañjalayogaśāstra as well, treating the Yogasūtra as an independent text, and
has instead interpreted the Yogasūtra as a text that preaches various forms of
union (union of body and mind, union of the self and the divine, etc.). One reason
for this insistence on union as the message of the text is probably the dominance
of the goal of oneness and union in many Indian religious traditions,7 and a simi-
lar tendency to emphasize union in modern yoga in India and in many New Age
yoga environments as well. Another reason is that even though many consider the
Yogasūtra to be the foundational text of yoga, the type of yoga they practice is in
fact not based on this text. Because of the high status the Yogasūtra attained in
modern yoga, many have often blended or identified their teachings, which have
roots in other traditions of yoga than the Sāṃkhyayoga of the Yogasūtra, with the
teachings of that text and have read their own teachings into the text.
Hariharānanda Āraṇya, Kāpil Maṭh, and its related institutions are part of the
history of yoga in India and the history of Hindu religion in Bengal, and consti-
tute a chapter in the history of modern Hinduism. This study of the Kāpil Maṭh
Introduction 5
tradition is of interest for several reasons. First, Hariharānanda Āraṇya and Kāpil
Maṭh represent one of the earliest manifestations of the “new” yoga – the advance-
ment of the yoga philosophy of the Yogasūtra in the modern world. Hariharānanda
Āraṇya’s endeavors to promote Sāṃkhyayoga occurred in Bengal where modern
yoga is supposed to have originated around the same time. The publication in
1896 of Vivekānanda’s lectures to his American audience in the book Rāja Yoga, a
translation of the Yogasūtra into English together with a non-traditional commen-
tary is considered to be the culmination of a growing interest in yoga in the second
half of the nineteenth century and is acclaimed as the origin of modern yoga (De
Michelis 2004, 2008). The Sāṃkhyayoga of Hariharānanda Āraṇya and the Kāpil
Maṭh tradition developed in the same period in which modern yoga is supposed to
have emerged: the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the
twentieth century (Alter 2004; De Michelis 2004; Singleton 2010; Sjoman 1999).
Kāpil Maṭh’s tradition is therefore of interest for understanding the origin and his-
tory of modern yoga. At the same time (the winter of 1895/1896) that Vivekānanda
was lecturing on the Yogasūtra in the United States, the founder of Kāpil Maṭh,
Hariharānanda Āraṇya, studied the Sanskrit text of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra with
Vācaspatimiśra’s commentary the Tattvavaiśāradī in solitude in a cave in the
Barabar Hills in Bihar, 24 km north of the town of Gaya. Why this interest in
Sāṃkhyayoga and the Yogasūtra in late nineteenth-century Bengal when in the
earlier decades of the century apparently hardly a single Hindu specialist ( paṇḍit)
in the Yogasūtra and its Sāṃkhyayoga philosophy could be found? Some of the
questions dealt with in this book include the following: Was the Sāṃkhyayoga of
Hariharānanda Āraṇya and the Kāpil Maṭh a direct continuation of a premodern
yoga tradition, one of the few remaining of a classical tradition that was still alive,
as Farquahar seems to have believed? Did Āraṇya encounter representatives of a
living tradition of Sāṃkhyayoga? How did Āraṇya learn the yoga of Sāṃkhya?
Who was his guru? And to what degree was his yoga impacted by or a product
of modernity? And what kind of yoga is the Sāṃkhyayoga of Kāpil Maṭh? Is it
ancient, old, traditional, purist, orthodox, or modern?
Second, Kāpil Maṭh and its related institutions represent a late nineteenth-
century, a twentieth-century, and even a contemporary Indian manifestation of
the teachings of Sāṃkhyayoga. It is a living Sāṃkhyayoga religious tradition.
Little is known about what ancient Sāṃkhyayogins did, or if there was ever a
community of Sāṃkhyayogins. No description of large Sāṃkhyayoga commu-
nities is given in the main text of Sāṃkhyayoga, Pātañjalayogaśāstra, or com-
mentaries on the text. The community of Kāpil Maṭh tells us something about
what Sāṃkhyayogins did in the late nineteenth, twentieth, and early twenty-
first centuries. This book about Āraṇya and the institutions of Kāpil Maṭh
describes Sāṃkhyayoga as a living practice and as “lived religion” – that is,
Sāṃkhyayoga at a particular time and in a particular cultural context. The book
analyzes what Sāṃkhyayoga meditation is as a contemporary practice. How
did Āraṇya perceive Sāṃkhyayoga as a yoga practice? What is Sāṃkhyayoga
meditation in practice? What do Sāṃkhyayogins do? These are some of the
questions that will be pondered in this book.
6 Introduction
A note on methodology
The approach of the book is philological and ethnographic. The textual sources
of the philological research are mostly the published texts of the Kāpil Maṭh.
The first two gurus of the Kāpil Maṭh tradition, Hariharānanda Āraṇya and Dhar-
mamegha Āraṇya, wrote the majority of the texts but some were written also
by disciples of the Kāpil Maṭh tradition. Most of the original texts of the Kāpil
Maṭh are in Sanskrit and Bengali, a few are in English, and translations of most
of them have been published in English by the Maṭh and in Hindi by the Kāpil
Sāṃkhyayogāśram in Sarnath – an institution related to Kāpil Maṭh. Since the
translations of the texts into English and Hindi have been done completely and
entirely by disciples of the Kāpil Maṭh tradition, and the translations have been
supervised and reviewed carefully by one of the gurus before publication, these
translations can be considered, in principle, as equally authentic expressions of
the teachings of the Kāpil Maṭh tradition as their Bengali and Sanskrit editions.
Any differences between the original editions and the translations, except for mis-
takes, are indications of conscious decisions of the Maṭh and could be interpreted
as revisions and manifestations of changes in the tradition, or adaptations to an
English-speaking audience. However, the translators often note in the prefaces
that they have attempted to remain faithful to the original Bengali text as far as
possible (see D. Āraṇya 2003b: x). During my field studies, I also asked several
disciples to write about their memories of the gurus, and their narratives are part
of the written material for this study as well. The ethnographic material are my
own field observations of Kāpil Maṭh in Madhupur, mostly for short periods over
many years, and related institutions in Kolkata, Sarnath, Kurseong, and Varanasi,
and interviews with gurus and disciples of the Kāpil Maṭh institutions at these
places, as well visits to the vacant Kāpil Maṭh institution Kāpilāśram in Triveni.
In addition, I have over the last two decades produced photographic documenta-
tions of the places of the Kāpil Maṭh institutions and their traditions and practices.
Chapter summaries
The book has ten chapters and a conclusion. The first chapter discusses the mean-
ing of the term Sāṃkhyayoga, gives a short introduction to the Sāṃkhya and
Yoga systems of religious thought, and discusses their similarities and differ-
ences, and their textual traditions. Sāṃkhyayoga is a textual tradition connected
to the Pātañjalayogaśāstra (Yogasūtra and the Bhāṣya) and the historical devel-
opment seems primarily to have been as a theoretical tradition. That no ancient
monastic community of Sāṃkhyayogins has been identified, in contrast to the
rich archeological remains of ancient Buddhist and Jain communities in India,
seems to confirm this. In Chapter 2, I describe some of my initial encounters
with the living Sāṃkhyayoga tradition of Kāpil Maṭh and introduce the reader to
this Sāṃkhyayoga tradition, my encounters with a paṇḍit connected to the insti-
tution of Kāpil Maṭh, and my gradual discovery of the organization, its gurus,
publications, devotees, and āśramas. Chapter 3 analyzes the role of some early
Introduction 7
Orientalists and their ideas about Sāṃkhya, and its founder Kapila in the emer-
gence of Sāṃkhyayoga in nineteenth-century Bengal, and it discusses its possible
impact on the teachings of the Kāpil Maṭh tradition. In the chapter, I further look
at a belief present in the nineteenth century that the Buddha’s teachings were
dependent on the teachings of Kapila and that Buddhism was a form of Sāṃkhya –
a view explored by the early European Orientalists as well as Indian intellectuals.
The chapter discusses the role of this belief for the rebirth of Sāṃkhyayoga in
nineteenth-century Bengal. At this time, it was Kapila and not Patañjali who was
celebrated among Orientalists and Hindu intellectuals in Bengal as the originator
of the philosophy of Yoga, which was considered part of Sāṃkhya philosophy.
The chapter suggests that Kāpil Maṭh has institutionalized this nineteenth-century
view.
Nineteenth-century Bengal was the center of the intellectual encounter between
India and the West, and the encounter triggered a remarkable amount of intellec-
tual creativity, which influenced religion and caused the emergence of new forms
of Hindu traditions as well as a revival or rebirth of some of the old traditions.
These changes took place in particular among the Bengali bhadralok population
(the educated upper class in Bengal during the colonial period). While Chapter 3
analyzes the emergence of Sāṃkhya in nineteenth-century Bengal, Chapter 4
examines the rebirth of the Yoga of the Yogasūtra in the same period and the emer-
gence of a new type of bhadralok yogin, the educated upper caste yogin. This new
bhadralok yogin emerged as a contrast to other types of yogins, whom India’s
elites often looked upon with suspicion. The ascetic puritanism of late nineteenth-
century Bengal seems to have contributed to new yoga identities, which became
important for the new phenomenon of modern yoga as a whole. The founder of
the Kāpil Maṭh tradition of Sāṃkhyayoga, Hariharānanda Āraṇya, seems to be
one of the earliest representatives of this new “bhadralok yogin.” Orientalists and
Bengali intellectuals gave renewed attention to ancient texts and teachings, and
these were also made available to new audiences. Hariharānanda Āraṇya became
a Sāṃkhyayoga saṃnyāsin in the 1890s. His unique contribution was the attempt
to make the Sāṃkhyayoga philosophy of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra a living tradi-
tion by experimenting with the role of the Sāṃkhyayoga saṃnyāsin. In the next
chapter, Chapter 5, I discuss the likelihood that Hariharānanda Āraṇya did meet
a Sāṃkhyayoga ascetic who connected him to a living tradition of Sāṃkhyayoga
teachers with ancient roots. As already mentioned, J. N. Farquahar appears to
have understood Āraṇya as the last remaining example of an ancient tradition.
Other scholars have also considered the possibility that Āraṇya’s Sāṃkhyayoga
was connected to a tradition of “isolated hermits living high in the Himalayas”
(White 2012: 12). In the Yoga volume of the Encyclopedia of Indian Philoso-
phies, Āraṇya is presented in one sentence that gives the impression he had a
teacher. He was, the text says, “a disciple of Swāmī Trilokī Āraṇya, but noth-
ing is known about this teacher” (Larson and Bhattacharya 2008: 367), implying
that he had encountered a teacher who possibly taught him Sāṃkhyayoga. David
White makes the claim that this teacher, Swāmī Trilokī Āraṇya, “belonged to a
lineage extending back to Patanjali himself” (White 2014: 224). Is it possible
8 Introduction
that Hariharānanda Āraṇya met one of these cave dwelling hermits who initiated
him into the ancient Sāṃkhyayoga tradition going back to Patañjali? Was there
a living Sāṃkhyayoga tradition in India throughout the nineteenth century and
did Hariharānanda Āraṇya come into contact with such a tradition? Or is living
Sāṃkhyayoga a form of “modern” yoga created in an environment that favored
rationality and ethics and disfavored rituals and priestly power? In other words,
is living Sāṃkhyayoga a new institutionalization of yoga that responded to the
needs of the Bengali bhadralok for a religion based on reason and free from myths
and rituals, or is it an old lineage of Sāṃkhyayoga transferred through centuries
by an oral tradition? The chapter attempts to provide answers to these questions.
With Chapter 6, I turn to the analysis of the Sāṃkhyayoga teachings of
Hariharānanda Āraṇya and the Kāpil Maṭh tradition. Hariharānanda Āraṇya was
a practitioner of the yoga of the Sāṃkhyayoga system of religious thought, but
Āraṇya also remained oriented around books and textual knowledge and this
shaped the institution of Kāpil Maṭh. The main part of the chapter gives a presen-
tation of some of his Sāṃkhyayoga teachings based on an analysis of his books
and written texts. It analyzes some of the main themes in his texts, such as the
divinities Hiraṇyagarbha and Īśvara of Yoga; the meaning of samādhi; the theory
of karma; the subject and the object; the ideal yogin; the understanding of āsana,
prāṇāyāma, saṃyama, jīvanmukti; and the extraordinary powers, and references
to Buddhist meditation. The main part of the chapter focuses on the Kāpilāśramīya
Pātañjal Jogdarśan.
In Chapter 7, I turn to texts of Kāpil Maṭh that give detailed instructions in how
to do yoga – i.e., instructions in Sāṃkhyayoga meditation. Āraṇya experimented
with Sāṃkhyayoga ascetic practices and did give meditation instructions in his
writings, which seem to be based on his own experiences. His fictional autobiog-
raphy describes a number of meditation experiences of the yogin as he advanced
on the Sāṃkhyayoga path toward salvific liberation (kaivalya). In this chapter,
I analyze these texts as well as views of Dharmamegha Āraṇya and yoga instruc-
tions of Omprakāś Āraṇya, to further answer the question: What is the yoga of
Sāṃkhyayoga?
Chapter 8 describes daily life in the Maṭh and the Sāṃkhyayoga ritual of sto-
tra (Sanskrit verses) recitation. The melodious recitation of stotras composed
by Hariharānanda Āraṇya is considered the most important daily practice of the
devotees of the Kāpil Maṭh tradition. The living guru and the samādhisthānas
of the dead gurus are honored, but there is no pūjā to statues of gods. This daily
ritual is performed twice a day: in the morning and in the evening. When the
Sāṃkhyayoga devotees gather at the āśramas, they recite the stotras together and
the chapter argues that this ritual functions to construct and maintain a form of
Sāṃkhyayoga community. The chapter analyzes the dominant themes in the sto-
tras and offers a translation of some of them.
In Chapter 9, the material religion of Sāṃkhyayoga is analyzed. The devo-
tees of Sāṃkhyayoga, and even the gurus, emphasize the complexity of the
Sāṃkhyayoga teachings and how difficult it is to understand them from read-
ing the texts. The textual tradition is looked upon as available only to the few.
Introduction 9
Hariharānanda Āraṇya is admired for his scholarship and writings, and his grasp
of Sāṃkhyayoga philosophy, but most Sāṃkhyayoga devotees do not claim to
fully understand his texts and often state that they understand very little and have
also read very little. The gurus, aware of this difficulty, have utilized the material
dimension of the āśramas to teach Sāṃkhyayoga. The Sāṃkhyayoga āśramas
are decorated with elements of the teachings for aesthetic and pedagogical pur-
poses. The visual items found in the Sāṃkhyayoga monasteries such as paintings,
statues, and inscriptions display the main doctrines and are a means of remind-
ing the followers of the main teachings as well as maintaining a common iden-
tity. Sāṃkhyayoga is mainly a nirguṇa tradition, without the worship of statues.
The monastic building with a guru inside and its surroundings become the most
important part of the material religion. The chapter examines the material dimen-
sion of Kāpil Maṭh in Madhupur and Kāpil Sāṃkhyayogāśram in Sarnath, and in
particular the art and the calligraphic (visual art related to writing) decorations.
The calligraphic decorations display the main teachings. The chapter argues that
they serve pedagogic and aesthetic purposes as well as make the monastery itself
become the embodiment of the teachings.
In the last chapter, Chapter 10, I suggest several connections of Kāpil Maṭh with
modern Indian scholarship on Sāṃkhya and Yoga. The gurus and some disciples
of the Maṭh have been intellectuals and their writings are often based on textual
studies of the Sāṃkhya and Sāṃkhyayoga traditions and have points of contact
in academic scholarship. It is telling that a British Indologist, in a review of a
book on Yoga written by a scholar who was a disciple of Kāpil Maṭh, published
in 1933 (but republished in 1977), wrote that this book must be “the first book
arguing the case for Yoga which reached an acceptable academic standard in han-
dling its sources and over-all presentation” (Werner 1980: 100). That a renowned
Indologist approved of the book and suggested that this was the correct way to
write about yoga, is probably because the Kāpil Maṭh tradition at its origin had a
connection to Indological textual material. The chapter discusses the role of the
Kāpil Maṭh tradition in the emergence and development of modern scholarship
on Sāṃkhya and Yoga in India. One problem for the study of ancient Indian phi-
losophy, noted the Bengali historian of Indian philosophy Surendranath Dasgupta,
was that those traditions had been lost almost for centuries as living traditions so
that the study of Indian philosophy was basically philological. With the Kāpil
Maṭh tradition, however, one of these old traditions of Indian philosophy, which
was thought to have disappeared long ago, could, surprisingly, be encountered as
a living tradition. This encounter meant that Sāṃkhya and Sāṃkhyayoga could
not be treated only as historical facts and dead traditions. The living tradition had
to become part of the scholarship, and the chapter suggests some ways the Kāpil
Maṭh tradition has influenced scholarship in India.
The conclusion sums up several of the main findings and discusses the relation-
ship between tradition and innovation in the case of Hariharānanda Āraṇya and
the Kāpil Maṭh tradition. It discusses possible connections of Āraṇya with modern
yoga and other yoga traditions, and suggests that Āraṇya, with access to ancient
texts and influenced by Orientalists’ glorification of India’s ancient past and
10 Introduction
renewed interest in yoga, set out to separate the Sāṃkhyayoga teachings of the
Pātañjalayogaśāstra from associations to contemporary renunciants and yogins
and from other traditions of yoga and philosophy, with which the teachings of the
Pātañjalayogaśāstra had been united for several centuries. Āraṇya’s project has a
modern dimension to it in the sense that he attempted to purify a tradition and pro-
moted its most ancient part as the one most relevant for the contemporary world.
Notes
1 The initiative came from the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and was announced
in a speech to the General Assembly of the United Nations on September 27, 2014 (see
United Nations Information Centre for India and Bhutan [2014]).
2 See Singleton and Goldberg 2014 for an analysis of many of these gurus of modern
yoga.
3 Yoga with a capitalized first letter refers to the Yoga system of religious thought, while
the lower case yoga refers to spiritual practice and any other forms of yoga.
4 One of very few instances of a sentence commenting on political events can be found
in a letter Āraṇya wrote in 1894, reprinted in H. Āraṇya 2003: 113–119, he describes
experiences of extraordinary powers of knowledge, and when he returns to his normal
state he reflects:
With it, past prejudices started coming back; e.g. I thought, do I return to earth
empty handed, without doing anything worthwhile for the people? – Why not make
India independent! The moment I thought of it, I had a sudden big drop from the
exalted state. I felt bad that such a narrow selfish thought could creep into my mind
after having seen so many universes. I realized it is difficult to get rid of narrow-
mindedness (H. Āraṇya 2003: 118).
Unlike many other forms of modern yoga in India, Āraṇya’s yoga does not seem to have
been part of a nationalist project (for yoga and nationalist projects, see Alter 2004, 2007;
De Michelis 2004; Jain 2014; Radice 1999; Rosselli 1980; Singleton 2008; Sjoman
1999; van der Veer 2001, 2014)
5 This has made it difficult to collect information about Hariharānanda Āraṇya from the
followers of Kāpil Maṭh. I respect the opinion of the Kāpil Maṭh and this book does not
give any information other than what is necessary to present the arguments. The book
is not a biography of Hariharānanda Āraṇya but a contribution to the study of the emer-
gence of yoga in modern Hinduism, Āraṇya’s teaching, and the Sāṃkhyayoga of the
Kāpil Maṭh tradition.
6 See Jacobsen 2008 for a monographic study of different traditions associated with
Kapila.
7 Āraṇya would agree with many of these traditions that the purpose of yoga is to get rid
of the “false sense of ego”; however, he disagreed with assertions of the self merging
with or being absorbed into something else. On the contrary, he wrote: “The self cannot
merge with anything . . . the self does not merge into anything. Generally, people think
the self merges in Brahman or something like that. But in reality it is not so” (H. Āraṇya
2003: 103–104). According to the teaching of Sāṃkhya and Sāṃkhyayoga, when the
experience of the object ceases for all time, the self attains isolation and does not unite
with anything.
1 Sāṃkhya, Yoga, and
Sāṃkhyayoga
Hariharānanda Āraṇya and the Kāpil Maṭh tradition refer to their teachings as
Sāṃkhyayoga, Sāṃkhya, and Yoga. The honorary title given to Āraṇya by his dis-
ciples and devotees was Sāṃkhyayogācārya. Ācārya means a specialist in the field
of one or more of the śāstras (Sanskrit textual traditions of knowledge). A learned
guru may be called ācārya to emphasize his scholarly qualities (see Hara 1980;
Jacobsen 2011b), and this was the case with Āraṇya. Sāṃkhyayogācārya denotes
a specialist in Sāṃkhyayoga. The term Sāṃkhyayoga has a double meaning and
often both meanings are implied when the term is used. First, Sāṃkhyayoga
means the “yoga tradition of Sāṃkhya” and a Sāṃkhyayogin is a follower of that
tradition. Second, Sāṃkhyayoga may refer to the unified tradition of the Sāṃkhya
and Yoga systems of religious thought, and a Sāṃkhyayogin is a follower of this
unified tradition. The Yoga system of religious thought (Yoga with a capital Y)
is now often referred to in the research literature as Pātañjalayoga, but in the
Kāpil Maṭh tradition, it is called Sāṃkhyayoga and simply Yoga. Sāṃkhya and
Yoga (i.e., Pātañjalayoga, Sāṃkhyayoga) are two of the so-called six Brāhmaṇical
systems of religious thought (darśanas). In the medieval philosophical digests
(nibandhas), the concept of six darśanas, or six Brāhmaṇical systems of philoso-
phy (Sāṃkhya, Yoga, Nyāya, Vaiśeṣika, Mīmāṃsā, and Vedānta) became wide-
spread.1 Each darśana was a philosophical system with a foundational text and
a number of commentary texts. These six systems became conceived of as three
pairs because of their similarities: Sāṃkhya-Yoga, Nyāya-Vaiśeṣika, and Pūrva
and Uttara Mīmāṃsā. It is because of the similarity between the Sāṃkhya and
Yoga systems of religious thought that they are often “simply referred to together
as the tradition of Sāṃkhyayoga” (Larson 2008: 23). For the followers of Kāpil
Maṭh, the Yoga system is the “yoga tradition of Sāṃkhya” and is therefore called
Sāṃkhyayoga. The Sāṃkhya and Yoga systems of religious thought are consid-
ered a unified tradition and are thus also covered by the term Sāṃkhyayoga. The
followers of Kāpil Maṭh regard Sāṃkhya as the theory part and Yoga as the prac-
tice part of a single tradition.
The terms sāṃkhya and yoga

The terms “sāṃkhya” and “yoga” are ancient Sanskrit words. The Sanskrit word
sāṃkhya relates to numbers and enumeration but its technical meaning also refers
12 Sāṃkhya, Yoga, and Sāṃkhyayoga
to “reasoning,” “reasoning method,” and “the method of salvific knowledge”
(Edgerton 1924). As the name of a philosophical system, the term sāṃkhya refers
to the method of enumerating the contents of experience and the world (Jacobsen
2011b: 685; Larson 2008: 3).
The term “yoga” has a number of meanings and references in addition to being
a name of one of the systems of religious thought, the Yoga darśana. The basic
meaning of yoga is as a disciplined method for attaining a goal and refers to
techniques of controlling the body and the mind, spiritual discipline. Yoga is
used in combination with other words, for example hatḥayoga, mantrayoga, and
layayoga, as well as sāṃkhyayoga, which refer to traditions specializing in par-
ticular techniques of yoga. Yoga can also be the name of the goal of yoga prac-
tice, such as in the statements “yoga means union” or “yoga means concentration
(samādhi)” or “yoga means the cessation of the transformation of awareness.” In
Indian history, yoga has been one of the main forms of spiritual practice,2 and it
has been linked with a great variety of theologies and philosophies.
The terms sāṃkhya and yoga were found in ancient Indian texts long before
they became names of the systems. In the most ancient texts, there was neither a
Sāṃkhya nor a Yoga system of religious thought (Edgerton 1924: 1–46). In the
Mahābhārata, which is the most important text for understanding the early use
of the terms, the words sāṃkhya and yoga mostly refer to methods of salvation
rather than systems of religious thought, and even as late as in the Bhagavadgītā
chapters of the text, sāṃkhya and yoga most probably do not yet refer to systems
but to ways of acquiring salvation. Sāṃkhya referred to “salvation by knowing,”
which implies renunciation of action, whereas one of the meanings of yoga was
salvation by performing disciplined unselfish activities (Edgerton 1924: 4). While
this is the view of Indological scholarship, the Kāpil Maṭh tradition takes the
terms sāṃkhya and yoga in the Mahābhārata and the Bhagavadgītā to sometimes
refer to the Sāṃkhya and Yoga systems of religious thought.
The Sāṃkhya system of religious thought

The Sāṃkhya system of religious thought is a Sanskrit textual tradition, which
has the Sāṃkhyakārikā (“Verses on Sāṃkhya”) of Īśvarakṛṣṇa (c. 350–400) as
its authoritative foundational text and a tradition of commentaries on that text.
Two other important Sāṃkhya texts are the Tattvasāmasa and the Sāṃkhyasūtra,
and commentaries on them.3 Most likely one or more Sāṃkhya texts preceded
the Sāṃkhyakārikā, but none have survived. The Sāṃkhya system of religious
thought is associated with a series of key concepts in the Hindu tradition, such as
puruṣa, prakṛti, guṇa, sattva, rajas, tamas, buddhi, tattva, pariṇāma, tanmātra,
and kaivalya. The Sāṃkhya system of religious thought is based on a fundamental
dualism between matter ( prakṛti) and contentless consciousness ( puruṣa). Prakṛti
and puruṣa are, in reality, independent principles. Puruṣa is the observer (draṣṭṛ),
the witness consciousness and prakṛti the observed content (dṛśya). Because of an
imbalance in prakṛti, the observer and the content, subject and object appear as if
interdependent, as if one. We therefore identify with the content (the mind, body,
Sāṃkhya, Yoga, and Sāṃkhyayoga 13
and external world) displayed to puruṣa as if it were part of us, when in reality it
is not, but part of prakṛti and not our self. The Sāṃkhya system provides a method
for analyzing the world, and this analysis leads ultimately to the realization of the
separateness of prakṛti and puruṣa. The realization of their separateness leads
to kaivalya, salvific liberation and the end of suffering (duḥkha), according to
the doctrines of Sāṃkhya. The world is analyzed in terms of 25 tattvas ( princi-
ples). These are the five gross elements (mahābhūtas), the five subtle elements
(tanmātras), the five action capacities (karmendriyas), the five sense capacities
( jñānendriyas), the mind (manas), the ego (ahaṃkāra), the intellect (buddhi), the
material principle ( prakṛti), and the consciousness principle ( puruṣa). The main
purpose of the enumeration in Sāṃkhya seems to be to provide guidance for the
attainment of salvific knowledge. In the enumeration of the principles, prakṛti
and puruṣa are not the first principles but the last. They are sometimes referred to
as caturviṃśati tattva (twenty-fourth principle) and pañcaviṃśati tattva (twenty-
fifth principle). This seems to indicate that it is their realization for the purpose of
kaivalya that is central and not a mapping of a cosmogony. Sāṃkhya is a teach-
ing that deals with salvific liberation (mokṣa), and the purpose is a practical one:
the realization of ultimate reality – that is, the realization of the principle that is
beyond change. Matter is made up of three constituents, sattva, rajas, and tamas,4
but they are in imbalance, and it is this imbalance that causes perpetual change and
suffering. Because of the similarity of consciousness and the purest part of matter
called intellect (buddhi), which is the part made up mostly of sattva, we mistak-
enly identify ourselves with matter – i.e., with body and mind – which undergoes
change. This incorrect identification is the ultimate cause of the experience of suf-
fering (duḥkha), according to Sāṃkhya. Sāṃkhya tells us that the mind and body
are objects for the witness consciousness. This witness consciousness (sākṣin) is
unchanging and contentless, and the absolute subject which can never become
an object. By means of the correct knowledge of the tattvas, the separation of
consciousness from the objects of consciousness is attained and the unchange-
able contentless puruṣa principle is realized, and the manifestations of prakṛti are
dissolved. Prakṛti is singular, as it is the material foundation of the objects of the
puruṣas, and it is consciousness that is plural according to Sāṃkhya.
The Yoga system of religious thought

Yoga is the name of the system that has the Pātañjalayogaśāstra (“the authori-
tative text on yoga authored by Patañjali”) as its foundational text. Its author,
Patañjali, is thought to have lived around 325–425 CE. The Pātañjalayogaśāstra
consists of the Yogasūtra and an auto-commentary called the Yogabhāṣya or the
Vyāsabhāṣya. The Yoga system is mostly in agreement with the dualist teach-
ing of Sāṃkhya, but provides a meditation vocabulary that describes methods
for purifying the mind so that it becomes more and more sāttvika (dominance
by sattva guṇa [lightness]), which ultimately leads to vivekakhyāti, discernment
between puruṣa and prakṛti. In the Yogasūtra, Patañjali describes this state as
“the cessation of the transformation of awareness” (yogaś cittavṛttinirodhaḥ;
Yogasūtra 1.2), which is a state in which “the seer abides in itself” (tadā dṛṣṭuḥ
svarūpe ’vasthānam; Yogasūtra 1.3). Attainment of this state is the goal of Yoga.
Pātañjalayogaśāstra – that is, Vyāsabhāṣya – on Yogasūtra 1.1 seems to define
yoga as samādhi (yogaḥ samādhiḥ). Pātañjalayogaśāstra distinguishes between
saṃprajñātasamādhi (concentration with content) and asaṃprajñātasamādhi
(concentration without content), but both are considered yoga. The goal of medi-
tation practice is the realization of the puruṣa principle as separate from prakṛti –
that is, separating the non-self from the self and dissolving the manifestations of
prakṛti into prakṛti, which is attained in asaṃprajñātasamādhi, a state when all
changes of awareness have ceased (cittavṛttinirodhaḥ). Once attained, the period
of cessation can gradually be prolonged. According to the Pātañjalayogaśāstra
traditions, when the transformation of awareness ceases, the real identity of the
human being is realized. The goal is, similar to Sāṃkhya, the realization of the
contentlessness of the principle of consciousness, puruṣa, and its total separate-
ness from the material principle, prakṛti. As in Sāṃkhya, prakṛti is singular and is
the object of the experiences of all non-liberated puruṣas. It is consciousness that
is plural. In spite of the similarities between Sāṃkhya and Yoga, one major dif-
ference between the Sāṃkhya system and the Yoga system is the difference in the
vocabulary of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra and the Sāṃkhyakārikā. The Yoga system
of religious thought is associated with a series of key concepts of the South Asian
meditation traditions, primarily from the Buddhist traditions, which are absent in
the Sāṃkhya texts.
Fundamental concepts of Yoga include the five activities of normal awareness
(cittavṛttis) and the five stages of awareness (bhūmi). The five vṛttis are knowl-
edge ( pramāṇa), error (viparyaya), verbal construction (vikalpa), sleep (nidrā),
and memory (smṛti), and the cessation of all these needs to be attained through
practice (abhyāsa) and dispassion (vairāgya). The stages of awareness are dis-
tracted (kṣipta), sluggish (mūḍha), partially distracted (vikṣipta), one-pointed
(ekāgra), and suppressed (niruddha). One-pointed awareness (ekāgra) is called
concentration with content (saṃprajñātasamādhi). Suppressed awareness (nir-
uddha) is concentration without content (asaṃprajñātasamādhi). It destroys
afflictions (kleśas), provides release from karma, and is the goal of yoga. The
Yoga system of religious thought for the first time merged Buddhist meditation
terminology, such as dhāraṇā (fixation), dhyāna (meditation), samādhi (con-
centration), nirodha (cessation), samāpatti (engrossment), āśaya (trace), smṛti
(memory), vāsanā (imprint), avasthā (condition), dharmamegha (a final stage
of samādhi), ṛtambharā (“truth bearing,” a stage in samādhi), bhūmi (stage of
awareness), samāpatti (engrossment of the mind on the object of meditation),
and so on, with the Brāhmaṇical tradition (see Larson 1999; Poussin 1936–37).
The author of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra created a synthesis of Buddhist medita-
tion terminology with the Sāṃkhya teaching of the tattvas and the discernment
of the distinction between puruṣa and prakṛti (Larson 1999; Larson 2008).
This vocabulary might have been common to several philosophies of medita-
tion in ancient India and entered the Brāhmaṇical tradition in that way, but the
Pātañjalayogaśāstra probably points more directly to a Buddhist influence.
The author of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra seems to have had a favorable view of
some aspects of Buddhist meditation. Mallinson and Singleton, pondering the
influence of Buddhism on the Pātañjalayogaśāstra, assert directly that, “the
Pātañjalayogaśāstra represents a Brāhmaṇical attempt to appropriate yoga from
the Śramaṇa tradition” (Mallinson and Singleton 2017: xvii). That the author bor-
rows from Buddhism without referring to it in the first parts of the text, and does
not acknowledge the influence of Buddhism in the Pātañjalayogaśāstra itself,
probably supports the idea of appropriation. However, this may have happened,
either as religious appropriation or perhaps as the result of someone switching his
religious interests from Buddhism to Sāṃkhya, Patañjali produced a theory of
meditation that explained how to realize the Sāṃkhya tattvas by using Buddhist
meditation vocabulary. The Yoga system blended the Sāṃkhya philosophy, with
its belief in an eternal unchangeable and contentless self, with theories of medita-
tion preserved and promoted in the Buddhist traditions. The relationship between
Sāṃkhyayoga and Buddhism was of great importance to Hariharānanda Āraṇya
and the Kāpil Maṭh tradition, which will be discussed in Chapter 3.
Sāṃkhya and Yoga have a common core. Knowledge is of fundamental impor-
tance for attaining the goal, and they both accept three means of valid knowl-
edge ( pramāṇas): perception ( pratyakṣa), inference (anumāṇa), and reliable
testimony (āgama). They accept the tattvas and the guṇas as the basic elements
for analyzing reality, the ultimate separateness of prakṛti and puruṣa, the idea of
puruṣa as the passive witness, the fundamental character of everything as suf-
fering (duḥkham eva sarvam, Pātañjalayogaśāstra 2.15; duḥkhatrayābhighātāt,
Sāṃkhyakārikā 1), and the idea of mokṣa (kaivalya) as the realization of the sepa-
rateness of puruṣa. Pātañjalayogaśāstra differs in many of its descriptions from
Sāṃkhyakārikā because Pātañjalayogaśāstra is a philosophy of meditation for
the attainment of nirodha, cessation, while Sāṃkhyakārikā’s focus is on inferen-
tial reasoning (anumāna) and discernment ( jñāna) by the intellect (buddhi) of the
separateness of puruṣa and prakṛti. The most important differences between the
Sāṃkhya and Yoga systems are the following. First, in the Sāṃkhyakārikā 53, the
divine world is stated to be eightfold, but the kārikā mentions only Brahmā and
does not specify which other divine beings are included. The commentaries usu-
ally take this divine world to refer to a number of divinities of ancient Brāhmaṇical
cosmology. Pātañjalayogaśāstra 3.26 refers to a cosmology of divinities, which is
comparable to Buddhist teachings about correspondences between cosmic divini-
ties and degrees of mastery of meditation. However, in addition to these cosmo-
logical gods, there is mention in the Pātañjalayogaśāstra of a god īśvara, which
is a particular puruṣa ( puruṣaviśeṣa), but is not an additional principle (tattva).
Devotion to this īśvara (īśvarapraṇidhāna) is one of the methods of concentration
that leads to salvific liberation.
A second difference is that in the Pātañjalayogaśāstra, the mind as a unity
is called citta, and this concept is not used in the Sāṃkhyakārikā, which speaks
about intellect (buddhi), ego (ahaṃkāra), and mind (manas). Third, in Sāṃkhya
there is a subtle body (liṅgaśarīra) that transmigrates at death, while in Yoga citta
is all-pervasive and immediately takes a new body at the moment of death (Larson
2008: 47). Fourth, in Sāṃkhya, the phenomenology of experience is analyzed into
50 components of the intellectual creation ( pratyayasarga), whereas Yoga simpli-
fies it into the five cittavṛttis (Larson 2008: 47). Fifth, Yoga offers a sophisticated
theory of time in terms of moments (kṣaṇas) and three perspectives of change
(dharma, lakṣaṇa, and avasthā), which it then analyzes in terms of dharmin (sub-
stratum) – the transformations of prakṛti. Sixth, and finally, while the soteriology
of Sāṃkhya is based on the reflective discernment of the separateness of puruṣa
and prakṛti (vijñāna), “Yoga’s principal concern is with the purposeful strategies,
both physical and psychological, to be employed in order to achieve the requi-
site reflective discernment” (Larson 2008: 50). Yoga seems mostly to accept the
Sāṃkhya doctrines, but it elaborates on some aspects of the Sāṃkhya system and
especially on a more “sophisticated and detailed theory of awareness based upon
‘altered states of awareness’ ” (Larson 2008: 51).
At what point in time the terms Sāṃkhya and Yoga came to refer to sys-
tems of religious thought is not entirely clear. The Sāṃkhyakārikā (350–400
CE) became the foundational text of the system of religious thought called
Sāṃkhya,5 and in the following centuries, several commentary texts were writ-
ten on it, but it is noteworthy that the idea of a Yoga system of religious thought
separate from Sāṃkhya probably arose very many centuries later. It is indicative
that in the eighth-century CE Haribhadra Sūri did not name Yoga as a separate
system in his Ṣaḍdarśanasamuccaya (Compendium of Six Philosophies). The
six systems included were Buddhism, Nyāya, Sāṃkhya, Jainism, Vaiśeṣika,
and Mīmāṃsā, enumerated in śloka 3 of the text: bauddhaṃ naiyāyikaṃ
sāṃkhyaṃ jainaṃ vaiśeṣikaṃ, jaiminīyaṃ ca nāmāni darśanānāṃ amūnyāho
(Ṣaḍdarśanasamuccaya 3, p. 4). Other compendiums that also do not mention
Yoga as a separate system of philosophy include Bhavya’s Madhyamakahṛdaya,
the Prapañcahṛdaya, and Śāntarakṣita’s Tattvasaṃgraha (Bronkhorst 1985).
Johannes Bronkhorst has argued that Śaṅkara’s Brahmasūtrabhāṣya 2.1.3 pos-
sibly contained the first recorded use of the term “Yoga” as a name of a philo-
sophical system to refer to Pātañjalayoga (Bronkhorst 1981). Previously, the
word yoga was perhaps sometimes used to refer to Nyāya. The word yoga
was used in the Arthaśāstra 1.2.10 to mean “logic – the science of reason-
ing (yukti)” (Matilal 1977: 77). Arthaśāstra 1.2.10 reads, sāṃkyaṃ yogo
lokāyatam ceti ānvīkṣikī. The terms sāṃkhya, yoga and lokāyata6 here prob-
ably do not refer to systems of philosophy, but to methods. A possible trans-
lation of the statement is “enumeration, reasoning and disputation constitute
philosophy.”7 It was apparently only around the twelfth century CE that Yoga –
i.e., Sāṃkhyayoga – was for the first time listed as one of the darśanas (Mal-
linson and Singleton 2017: xxxvi). Before that, Sāṃkhyayoga was most likely
so closely identified with Sāṃkhya that it was not considered to constitute a
separate system. Both Sāṃkhyakārikā and Pātañjalayogaśāstra were probably
thought to be texts of Sāṃkhya philosophy. In other words, what we today
call Pātañjalayoga (or Sāṃkhyayoga or Yoga) seems, for many hundreds of
years after the composition of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra, to have been known
as a cohesive part of Sāṃkhya. We shall see that, according to the Kāpil Maṭh
tradition, this identity is important, as it makes the Pātañjalayogaśāstra an
integrated part of Sāṃkhya and Sāṃkhya an integrated part of Yoga.
What is generally known as Pātañjalayoga or the Yoga system of religious
thought in the twenty-first century was a century ago referred to by one of the
foremost Bengali scholars on Indian philosophy, Surendranath Dasgupta, as
Pātañjala Sāṃkhya and the philosophy of Kapila. In the first decades of the twen-
tieth century, Surendranath Dasgupta wrote several books on the Yoga system of
philosophy and made reference in the first volume of his renowned five-volume
History of Indian Philosophy (Dasgupta 1922) to both systems as Sāṃkhya. Das-
gupta referred to the Sāṃkhya and Yoga systems as Kāpila Sāṃkhya and Pātañjala
Sāṃkhya (Dasgupta 1922: 208), the “Sāṃkhya of Kapila” and the “Sāṃkhya of
Patañjali.” Jibananda Vidyasagara’s Sanskrit publication of Pātañjalayogaśāstra
with the Tattvavaiśāradī (second edition published in 1895 and third edition pub-
lished in 1940) make reference in the title to the book of Pātañjala Darśana as
representing the philosophy of Kapila: Patanjala Darshana of The System of Yoga
Philosophy by Maharshi Kapila (Vidyasagara 1940).8 Nandalal Sinha published
in 1915 a compilation of a large number of Sāṃkhya texts as a volume (volume
11) in the Sacred Books of the Hindus. In the preface he notes,
The present volume of the Sacred Books of the Hindus which bears the mod-
est title of the Sāṃkhya-Pravachana-Sūtram is, in reality, a collection of all
the available original documents of the School of the Sāṃkhyas, with the
single exception of the commentary composed by Vyāsa on the Sāṃkhya-
Pravachana-Yoga-Sūtram of Patañjali.
(Sinha 1915)
The Pātañjalayogaśāstra was not included in Sinha’s volume. Not because

he did not consider it part of Sāṃkhya, but because it had already been pub-
lished as volume four of the Sacred Books of the Hindus. Sinha considered the
Pātañjalayogaśāstra part of Sāṃkhya and used the title “Sāṃkhya-Pravachana-
Yoga-Sūtram of Patañjali.” These examples indicate that the tradition that under-
stood Sāṃkhya and Yoga as two schools of Sāṃkhya was current among scholars
in Bengal in the first half of the twentieth century.
Pātañjalayogaśāstra and Yoga as a textual tradition

As mentioned earlier, the Pātañjalayogaśāstra is made up of two integrated texts,
the Yogasūtra and its auto-commentary, the so-called Vyāsabhāṣya or Yogabhāṣya.
The Yogasūtra is a short text, only a few pages in length, and consists of very brief
statements called sūtras, which introduce topics in the Sanskrit sūtra style.9 Its
195 sūtras were by later commentators, and editors divided them into four sec-
tions ( pādas): samādhipāda, sādhanāpāda, vibhūtipāda, and kaivalyapāda. The
sūtra text might possibly contain some older sūtras on yoga, but it seems reason-
able to believe that most of the sūtras were composed by the author Patañjali
himself.10 Philipp Maas has documented that in old manuscripts, the two texts
(sūtras and bhāṣya) are always found together, and he argues that they should
be thought of as a unified work (Maas 2013). In other words, the sūtra text was
not an independent work from the commentary, but the author himself wrote a
commentary on the sūtra text and called the whole text Pātañjalayogaśāstra
sāṃkhyapravacana, which is the full title of the work written in the colophon
in the manuscripts of the text. Pātañjalayogaśāstra sāṃkhyapravacana can be
translated as “the exposition of yoga of Patañjali, the doctrine of Sāṃkhya.” This
title indicates that the author also understood his text to represent the doctrine of
Sāṃkhya philosophy. Johannes Bronkhorst has suggested that the use of the term
yoga in the title Pātañjalayogaśāstra refers to “spiritual discipline, which is free
from, or at least adjustable to, philosophical views” and not to Yoga philosophy
(Bronkhorst 1981: 309), which would also support Dasgupta calling the system
Pātañjala Sāṃkhya. The title Pātañjalayogaśāstra sāṃkhyapravacana would
then mean “the exposition of the spiritual discipline of Patañjali, the doctrine of
Sāṃkhya.” In the later history of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra, the sūtrapāṭha came
to be treated as an independent text, and the Yogasūtra, without reference to the
Sāṃkhyapravacana, became the common title of the text.
Sāṃkhyayoga seems to have been primarily a textual tradition and was probably
not associated with a large monastic community of yogins and laypeople compara-
ble to, for instance, the Buddhist or Jain communities. Even the Pātañjalayogaśāstra
is a highly theoretical work, a text in philosophy, and it is not a practical manual,
a “how to” book. The most important commentaries on the Pātañjalayogaśāstra
from a philosophical point of view are probably Vācaspatimiśra’s Tattvavaiśāradī
(c. 950), Śaṅkara’s Pātañjalayogaśāstravivaraṇa (written somewhere between
800 and 1350, some claim by the first Śaṅkarācārya [788–820]), and Bho-
ja’s Rājamārtaṇḍa (c. 1050).11 Bronkhorst has suggested that the author of the
Pātañjalayogaśāstra himself had no experience of yogic states since the text
was mainly theoretical (Bronkhorst 1981: 203).12 The tradition of philosophical
commentaries on the Pātañjalayogaśāstra is also quite limited, and none of the
authors of the old commentaries were probably themselves part of any community
of Sāṃkhyayogins. If this is correct, it would make the Pātañjalayogaśāstra and
Sāṃkhyayoga mainly a textual and theoretical tradition. It is even possible that
Sāṃkhyayoga never constituted a monastic community. Names of Sāṃkhyayoga
persons are known, but hardly anything is known about many of them. It is also
symptomatic of the lack of knowledge of ancient Sāṃkhyayogins that nothing is
known about the author of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra except the name Patañjali. If
there had been communities of Sāṃkhyayoga ascetics and laypeople supporting
them, more information would probably have been available. Likewise, hardly
anything is known about the life of Īśvarakṛṣṇa, the author of the Sāṃkhyakārikā.
The only figure in the early history of Sāṃkhya who is associated with a large
number of narratives is Kapila, the mythical founder of Sāṃkhya, but these narra-
tives mostly portray a divine figure and not a human being.13 Kapila as a possible
human person is primarily known through the teachings, which he is supposed to
have discovered by himself without a teacher, but any historical information about
this person has become hidden behind mythology about divinities.
In the sixteenth century, the philosopher Vijñānabhikṣu (1550) gave
Pātañjalayoga a vedāntic interpretation, and it seems the tradition of Sāṃkhyayoga
was after that, even as a textual tradition, of peripheral interest to Sanskrit paṇḍits
and yogins. The Yogasūtra/Pātañjalayogaśāstra was still read by some but
mainly in vedāntic environments, especially in South India (see White 2014).
However, throughout the second millennium CE, and in the early modern period,
the Pātañjalayogaśāstra apparently remained the most important text on yoga
for Indian scholars (Mallinson and Singleton 2017: xxxvi). Nevertheless, the
Yogasūtra had a revival in the nineteenth century, caused to a large degree by
Orientalists, Theosophists, Vivekānanda’s book Rāja Yoga and his American
audience, and others, and the text has since had a remarkable history. In the last
decades, it has become one of the most popular Hindu texts globally, perhaps
surpassed only by the Bhagavadgītā in the number of translations into foreign
languages. However, the popularity of the Yogasūtra has, for various reasons, not
led to a substantial revival of the Sāṃkhya philosophy. It is a paradox that the
foundational text of Sāṃkhyayoga has attracted millions of readers worldwide,
many of whom study the Yogasūtra as part of their yoga practice, and some of
whom even learn to recite the Yogasūtra in Sanskrit as part of their yoga training,
while the Sāṃkhya philosophy of the text seems not to have gained a large num-
ber of followers. This is perhaps due to the great variety of yoga traditions that
have contributed to the revival of yoga in modern Hinduism and globally, many
of which were not based on the Yogasūtra, the dominance of monism and theism
in modern Hindu yoga, and a dislike of the dualist philosophy of Sāṃkhya. In
addition, the Pātañjalayogaśāstra is a text on philosophy and the theory of yoga
practices. The practices of modern yoga, which focus on health and body pos-
tures, in fact have little in common with the Pātañjalayogaśāstra tradition. The
Pātañjalayogaśāstra, as argued earlier, was originally a text about Sāṃkhyayoga
meditation philosophy. The Pātañjalayogaśāstra differs both from the tapas tra-
dition of Indian ascetics as well as the Haṭhayoga tradition. The tapas tradition of
contorting the body into strenuous positions, mostly standing postures, and hold-
ing them for a long time, was found in both the Vedic tradition and in Jainism,
and perhaps also other ascetic movements. Standing still for an extended period
of time, on one foot or holding one arm upraised in the air, even many years,
are examples of the tradition of tapas still found today among Hindu sādhus in
South Asia. Such ascetics are encountered in the Mahābhārata. The Haṭhayoga
tradition, which is present in the texts from the eleventh century CE14 originally
contained only sitting postures, but in the Haṭhayogapradīpikā,15 the Haṭhayoga
tradition seems to have blended with tapas traditions. As Mallinson and Singleton
have noted, tapas and yoga are synonymous in early texts such as Mahābhārata,
and these practices center both on yoga powers and liberation from rebirth in
saṃsāra (Mallinson and Singleton 2017: xiv). But in the Pātañjalayogaśāstra,
āsana, posture, meant mostly sitting in a comfortable position and did not refer to
the austerity of the tapas tradition and certainly not to physical exercise. As was
noted earlier, teachers of modern body yoga have often linked their practices to
the Yogasūtra, even those who teach primarily āsanas, promoting a view of the
body not supported directly by the text. Health and physical exercise are not the
main concerns of the Yogasūtra. This attempt to link practices to the Yogasūtra is
perhaps a result of the prominence and prestige the text received in the nineteenth
century (see Chapter 4). Orientalists, Theosophists, Vivekānanda, and the Indian
elite often looked down on Haṭhayoga and tapas traditions of yoga and favored the
Brāhmaṇical Yogasūtra textual tradition. Traditions described in the Haṭhayoga
texts have more in common with modern postural yoga than the Sāṃkhyayoga of
the Pātañjalayogaśāstra has.
Hariharānanda Āraṇya’s Sāṃkhyayoga

In the introduction of the Kāpilāśramīya Pātañjal Jogdarśan (English translation
Yoga Philosophy of Patañjali),16 Hariharānanda Āraṇya sums up his teaching of
Sāṃkhyayoga in 12 points (for Bengali see Āraṇya 1988a: 12–13; for English see
Āraṇya 1981: xxxiv–xxv):
(1) Mokṣa consists in the complete and permanent cessation of all suffering.
(2) On attainment of mokṣa one abides in one’s unchangeable and contentless
self called puruṣa.
(3) In the state of mokṣa, the citta (mind) returns to its original state prakṛti.
(4) Cessation of the citta can be brought about by renunciation and supreme
knowledge acquired through samādhi (concentration).
(5) Samādhi is attained by observance of the rules of conduct and practice of
meditation, concentration, etc.
(6) Mokṣa brings about the cessation of rebirth.
(7) This cycle is without a beginning and is a result of latent impressions
(vāsanā) left by karma performed in countless previous births.
(8) Prakṛti and puruṣas (countless in number) are, respectively, the material
and efficient cause of creation.
(9) Prakṛti and puruşa are non-created realities without a beginning or end.
(10) Īśvara is the eternal free puruṣa.
(11) He has nothing to do with the creation of the universe or life.
(12) Prajāpati or Hiraṇyagarbha or the creator is the Lord of the universe and the
whole universe is being held and sustained by him.
The Sāṃkhyayoga teaching is here summed up in the concepts, mokṣa, citta,

samādhi, duḥkha, karma, vāsanā, īśvara, Hiraṇyagarbha, prakṛti, and puruṣa.
It is typical of Āraṇya’s understanding of Sāṃkhyayoga practice that many of
these 12 points deal with mokṣa and that he starts with its definition. Pointing
out the goal of mokṣa was for Āraṇya not only an intellectual exercise but also as
a Sāṃkhyayoga saṃnyāsin; this was the prescribed goal of the institution and a
goal he seems to have hoped to realize himself. The method of yoga is renuncia-
tion, observance of the rules of conduct, and the practice of meditation to attain
samādhi, and through samādhi realize the supreme knowledge. This brings about
the cessation of the citta (mind) and the citta then returns to its original state
prakṛti. This is the state of mokṣa, and one abides in one’s unchangeable and
contentless self called puruṣa. In his texts, Āraṇya mostly emphasizes the rules of
conduct (yama and niyama) and samādhi, and the knowledge attained in samādhi.
This is the essence of yoga for Āraṇya: ethics, meditation, and knowledge. The
knowledge to be realized are the 25 tattvas and especially the difference between
citta and puruṣa.
Hariharānanda Āraṇya’s Sāṃkhyayoga preceded the birth of modern pos-
tural yoga and the new forms of yoga with a focus on body and health (see Sin-
gleton 2010), and it had apparently no connection to this form of yoga. Living
Sāṃkhyayoga contrasts sharply with modern yoga institutions that emphasize
yoga as primarily, although not solely, a bodily practice having significance
mainly for mental and physical health. Yoga was a philosophical teaching, and
renunciation was a prerequisite for the serious practitioner of yoga. The yogin was
a saṃnyāsin, and yoga practice meant meditation, in padmāsana preferably, on
the principles (tattvas) of Sāṃkhya philosophy, primarily performed in solitude.
One unique feature of Hariharānanda Āraṇya and the Kāpil Maṭh tradi-
tion is that they promote the Pātañjalayogaśāstra as Sāṃkhyayoga – that is,
their practices are based on the text interpreted according to the Sāṃkhya and
Sāṃkhyayoga doctrines, and they consider Kapila, the founder of Sāṃkhya, also
as the founder of Yoga. The Kāpil Maṭh tradition has developed practices based on
the Sāṃkhyayoga philosophy of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra as interpreted by their
gurus. In the next chapter, I will describe some of my first encounters with this
living Sāṃkhyayoga tradition. It was quite surprising to find that a Sāṃkhyayoga
monastic institution with a more than 100-year-long history existed in contem-
porary India. It has also been as surprising to read some Western scholars on
yoga who mention briefly Hariharānanda Āraṇya in their books and state that they
believe that Āraṇya and his tradition represent a living tradition of a lineage going
back to Vācaspatimiśra (c. 950) (Sjoman 1996: 38 quoted in Singleton 2008: 92n)
or even to Patañjali himself (White 2014: 224), or that Hariharānanda Āraṇya was
the last remnant of a long line of Sāṃkhyayogins (Farquahar 1920: 289). Could
this be the case? Had I really encountered such an ancient lineage?
Notes
1 On the concept of six darśanas, see Halbfass 1988: 349–368.
2 In addition, the word “yoga” is a common word in the Sanskrit texts with many other
meanings such as instrument or practice.
3 For an analysis of the Sāṃkhya system of religious thought, see Larson 1979. For
detailed summaries of the philosophical arguments of the most important Sāṃkhya
texts, see Larson and Bhattacharya 1987.
4 Rajas and tamas together with sattva (lightness) are the three constituents (guṇas) of
matter. Rajas (energy) and tamas (darkness) represent suffering and ignorance, while
sattva represents knowledge.
5 Sāṃkhya texts older than the Sāṃkhyakārikā have not survived. According to Albrecht
Wezler, the original title of the work was not Sāṃkhyakārikā but Sāṃkhyasaptati (2001: 360,
n. 45). Philipp Maas has suggested that the title Sāṃkhyakārikā became predominant possibly
due to Colebrooke’s 1827 essay “On the Philosophy of the Hindus” (Maas 2017: 30n4).
6 For the meaning of lokāyatam, see Bhattacharya 1998.
7 Patrick Olivelle in his recent publication of the Arthaśāstra leaves Sāṃkhya, Yoga,
Lokāyata untranslated and renders the sentences as “Sāṃkhya, Yoga, Lokāyatam –
these constitute critical inquiry” (Olivelle 2016: 67). However, the words probably do
not refer to the Sāṃkhya, Yoga, Lokāyata systems. Wilhelm Halbfass when discussing
the term yoga in Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra reminds us, “The word yoga is by no means
exclusively associated with the Yoga system of Patañjali, or with other doctrines and
techniques of meditation and inner discipline. Its root yuj- also accounts for the word
yukti, ‘reasoning’; and likewise, the word yoga itself is occasionally used to refer to
disciplines of ‘reasoning’ and ‘argumentation,’ such as Nyāya and Vaiśeṣika” (Halb-
fass 1988: 278). Similarly, the words sāṃkhya and lokāyata are by no means exclu-
sively associated with the systems Sāṃkhya and Lokāyata.
8 The editor Jibananda Vidyasagara was superintendent of the Free Sanskrit College.
The first edition of the book was published in 1874, but apparently without Maharshi
Kapila in the title. This edition carried the title Patanjala Darshana, or The Aphorism
of Theistic Philosophy.
9 A well-known Indian proverb states that a sūtrakāra, a composer of a sūtra text, is
more thrilled when he is able to get rid of one syllable in a sūtra than when he becomes
a father for the first time.
10 None of the sūtras, as I am aware, has been identified in texts older than the Yogasūtra.
Such identification would be helpful to support the argument that older yoga texts
made their way into the Yogasūtra.
11 For summaries of the philosophical content of the Sanskrit texts of the Sāṃkhyayoga
tradition, see Larson and Bhattacharya 2008.
12 Johannes Bronkhorst writes, “The skills of the author of the Yogabhāṣya were primar-
ily, or even exclusively, theoretical” (Bronkhorst 1981: 203).
13 To give an example, the most famous narrative about the sage Kapila is that he killed
60,000 sons of King Sagara by making a sound or by looking at them (the story is narrated
in the two main Hindu mythological narratives the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata). The
narrative may be consistent with various belief systems, such as the Vaiṣṇava identifica-
tion of Kapila with Viṣṇu, but provides limited information of historical value for the
understanding of a human person called Kapila. The main mythological topic of the narra-
tive is how river Gaṅgā came to earth and how a hole in the earth was created that became
the ocean and how the ocean was filled with the water of Gaṅgā. The sons of Sagara dug
this hole while searching for Kapila, and this was how they found him being seated deep
inside the earth. After bringing river Gaṅgā to earth, the enormous hole was then filled
with water by the river Gaṅgā, and thus the ocean was created.
14 The oldest texts of the Haṭhayoga tradition are from the eleventh to fourteenth centuries. The
early texts of Haṭhayoga (i.e., texts preceding the fifteenth-century Haṭhayogapradīpikā) are
Amṛtasiddhi (eleventh century); Dattātreyayogaśāstra, Vivekamārtaṇḍa, Gorakṣaśataka
(thirteenth century); Khecarīvidyā, Śārṅgadharapaddhati (1363 CE); Śivasaṃhitā,
Yogabīja, Amaraughaprabodha; (all probably fourteenth century) (see Mallinson 2011a:
771–772).
15 Mallinson writes, “Complicated physical postures are first included among the tech-
niques of Hatḥa Yoga in the Haṭhapradīpikā. The earliest textual reference to non-
seated āsanas is in the circa 10th-century Vimānārcanakalpa, a Pāñcarātra work, and
it seems likely that the practice of nonseated āsanas developed within a Pāñcarātrika
milieu” (Mallinson 2011a: 775).
16 Both texts have come in many different editions. The Bengali Kāpilāśramīya Pātañjal
Jogdarśan refers to the 1988 edition published by Praścimabai Rājya Puṣtak Parṣad.
Yoga Philosophy of Patañjali refers to the third edition, published by the University
of Calcutta in 1981, or the fourth enlarged edition called Yoga Philosophy of Patañjali
With Bhāsvatī published by the University of Calcutta in 2000 and which includes also
the Sanskrit commentary Bhāsvatī.
2 Encounters with a living
Sāṃkhyayoga tradition
Almost three decades ago, in January 1991 in North India, I met for the first time
an Indian disciple of Kāpil Maṭh, the living tradition of Sāṃkhyayoga founded by
Hariharānanda Āraṇya. However, when I met him, my knowledge of him was only
as a paṇḍit and scholar of Sāṃkhya and not as a disciple of the Kāpil Maṭh. I had
come to the city of Varanasi (Benares) to meet the paṇḍit Ram Shankar Bhattacha-
rya. At that time, I had studied Sanskrit and the texts of Classical Sāṃkhya and
Yoga with the Indologist Gerald James Larson at the University of California, and
started the work of my dissertation on the concept of “prakṛti” (material principle)
in Indian religion, especially in Sāṃkhya and Sāṃkhyayoga.1 I came to Varanasi to
read Sanskrit texts with Indian paṇḍits in order to learn about their way of dealing
with the texts. I had learned that when working with historical religious texts that
are also part of the living Hindu traditions of India, one should research both what
the text meant when it was written and what it means to Hindus now. Hindu texts
written long ago should not be treated as if they belonged only to a dead tradition, as
had previously been the case it seems in some academic traditions, but proper atten-
tion should be given also to possible contemporary Hindu interpretations, as well as
to ritual uses of texts. Working on Sāṃkhya and Sāṃkhyayoga texts and traditions,
I was eager to learn about the contemporary Indian interpretations of these systems.
I met with Ram Shankar Bhattacharya in his home in Godolia in the center of Vara-
nasi soon after my arrival and informed him of my purpose. Bhattacharya said he
was willing to meet for one hour and a half twice a week on the precondition that
I came to him with a set of questions about Sāṃkhya and Sāṃkhyayoga for each
meeting. I had suggested reading the Pātañjalayogaśāstra, since it was the most
important text of Sāṃkhyayoga, but Bhattacharya thought it was more appropriate
if I brought questions to him. In this way, I started learning about Sāṃkhyayoga as
a living tradition from a disciple of that tradition. However, it was only a year later
that Bhattacharya informed me about Kāpil Maṭh. Bhattacharya was both a paṇḍit
and an academic scholar with a PhD in Sanskrit, and had published a number of
books and articles on Sāṃkhya and Sāṃkhyayoga, as well as on the Purāṇas. He
was a paṇḍit who had been taught Sanskrit as a child and had had to memorize entire
Sanskrit books such as the Amarakośa (a Sanskrit text that lists words that have
been grouped together according to their similarity of meaning) from childhood
24 Encounters with living Sāṃkhyayoga
and seemed to know the Sāṃkhyakārikā and the Pātañjalayogaśāstra by heart.
His father had been a Sanskrit teacher. Bhattacharya’s memory and knowledge of
Sāṃkhyayoga texts impressed me. I prepared questions and Bhattacharya answered
me most often by referring not only to the Pātañjalayogaśāstra and its commentar-
ies but also to the Sāṃkhyakārikā, the Tattvasamāsasūtra and the Kramadīpikā, the
Sāṃkhyasūtra and its commentaries, and the Mahābhārata and other texts. This
lasted for three months, and we agreed that I would return to Varanasi the follow-
ing year. After I returned around one year later, in October 1992, we continued to
meet for an hour and a half twice a week for the next nine months. I had written
him and expressed the wish to read Sanskrit texts of the Sāṃkhyayoga tradition
with him, which we then did. This time, after a few months, Bhattacharya decided
that he wanted to show me a book by Dharmamegha Āraṇya with title Epistles
of a Sāṃkhyayogin, published by Kāpil Maṭh in 1989, of which he wanted me to
make my own photocopy. He ordered me to read it very carefully. I had not heard
of the author of Epistles of a Sāṃkhyayogin, Dharmamegha Āraṇya, but I learned
that he lived between 1892 and 1985, and was a disciple of Hariharānanda Āraṇya,
the founder of Kāpil Maṭh, and that he was the second guru of the tradition. “Read
this,” Bhattacharya said when he handed me the book, “Dharmamegha Āraṇya
was an extraordinary person.” And he added, to indicate the content of the book,
“Society punishes a person only for wrong acts, but in Yoga also wrong thoughts
need to be stopped. They are as dangerous for the yogin.”2 After that, he quoted
from Pātañjalayogaśāstra 2.15. The text asks, “How is it possible that the Yogin
does not find satisfaction even in the pleasant, enjoyable objects of the world?”
The Pātañjalayogaśāstra 2.15 then states that for the discriminating person all is
suffering (duḥkham eva sarvaṃ vivekinaḥ). This seemed to be one of the favorite
passages of Bhattacharya of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra. Several reasons are given for
this in the Pātañjalayogaśāstra. One of the reasons is the painfulness of saṃskāras
(subconscious impressions), and Bhattacharya quoted from that part of the explana-
tion. The Pātañjalayogaśāstra reads,
Experiences of pleasure and pain give rise to corresponding latencies. Thus

from experience of pleasure and pain resulting from Karma, fresh Karmāśaya
is accumulated (through corresponding Vāsanā). In this way the eternal
stream of misery causes distress only to the Yogin, because the mind of a
wise man is as sensitive as the surface of an eye-ball. As the touch of a fall-
ing cobweb hurts only the eye-ball, but no other part of the body, so these
miseries (due to the mutative nature of things) affects only a Yogin who is as
sensitive as an eye-ball and not others.
(H. Āraṇya 1981: 145–146)
He advised me that thinking about ahiṃsā for several minutes every day would
be a good way to start doing Sāṃkhyayoga. Epistles of a Sāṃkhyayogin contains
a number of essays and letters written by Dharmamegha Āraṇya to lay disci-
ples of Kāpil Maṭh. A couple of months later, Bhattacharya showed me a copy of
another publication of Kāpil Maṭh, published in 1935, with the title The Sāṃkhya
Encounters with living Sāṃkhyayoga 25
Catechism (Brahmacārī 1935; Āraṇya 2014a). I was even more surprised than
being shown the book of Dharmamegha Āraṇya. The book is in the form of ques-
tions and answers, and seems perhaps to have been modeled on similar texts.
The Buddhist Catechism, especially, comes to mind. The Buddhist Catechism
was compiled by the Theosophist Colonel Henry Steel Olcott and was published
in 1881 and was an important factor in the revival of Buddhism in Sri Lanka
(Olcott 1881). The Buddhist Catechism appears to have been based on the model
of Christian Catechisms. Perhaps the author of The Sāṃkhya Catechism also
knew A Hindu Catechism of Śriśa Chandra Vasu, published first in 1899 (see Vasu
1919). The Sāṃkhya Catechism was edited by Vivekaprakāśa Brahmacārī, the
first brahmacārī disciple of Hariharānanda Āraṇya, and declares that it represents
the teaching of Sāṃkhya “as it is understood by those to whom it is a living sys-
tem” (Brahmacārī 1935: iii). The text starts with the following questions: “What is
Sāṃkhya?,” “Who is the founder of Sāṃkhya?,” and “What is the distinguishing
character of Sāṃkhya?” (Brahmacārī 1935: 1–2). The answers in The Sāṃkhya
Catechism are based on excerpts from passages in the texts of Hariharānanda
Āraṇya in Bengali and Sanskrit, and translated into English by the disciple. I later
learned from relatives of Vivekaprakāśa Brahmacārī during one of my many visits
to Kāpil Maṭh in Madhupur that Hariharānanda Āraṇya had been almost totally in
charge of the process of composing the questions as well as selecting the passages
and formulations that make up the answers in the book. I found it quite interesting
that an English-language version of The Sāṃkhya Catechism had been produced,
as catechisms were a traditional Christian way of presenting religion, which had
been copied by the Theosophical movement in The Buddhist Catechism. One pur-
pose of The Buddhist Catechism was to encourage the Buddhists in Sri Lanka to
value their own religious heritage. The purpose of The Sāṃkhya Catechism seems
similarly to encourage the readers to pay more attention to the Sāṃkhya heritage.
The text is primarily theoretical (as is The Buddhist Catechism), and the vocabu-
lary is technical with the use of a very large number of Sanskrit terms. In the text,
distinctions are made between apara (lower) and para (higher) dharma. Yoga is
defined as cittavṛttinirodha, “quiescence of the cognitive modifications of mind”
(Brahmacārī 1935: 115). Especially important for realizing yoga is the “practice
of Viveka or constant meditation upon the contrary natures of Puruṣa and Bud-
dhisattva” (Brahmacārī 1935: 115), according to The Sāṃkhya Catechism.
That Kāpil Maṭh published The Sāṃkhya Catechism did say something about
the ambitions of the institution and the wishes of the Sāṃkhyayoga group to find
support for their interpretations of Indian religion and philosophy, and to spread
their message and attract interest also beyond the Bengali-speaking world and
perhaps beyond the borders of India. It shows that the institution of Kāpil Maṭh,
whether it represented a premodern linage or not, did respond to discourses of the
colonial and missionary powers about Indian culture. On the question “What is
the distinguishing character of Sāṃkhya?,” the Catechism answers,
It is that no blind faith is necessary for the determination of the main under-
lying principles of Sāṃkhya. They are not mere abstract concepts but are
entities that really exist and can be realized. As Kapila, the First Enlightened,
and the Greatest of all sages, taught the doctrine after realizing its Principles
by Samādhi (absolute concentration of mind), its truth is fully established.
(Brahmacārī 1935: 2)
The mention of that “blind faith” is not necessary for understanding that the main
underlying principles of Sāṃkhya are probably a reference to discourses about
Christianity in colonial India and points also to an approach to presenting yoga
that had become common at that time. Vivekānanda, the most influential of the
early modern promoters of the Yogasūtra, used the introductory chapter of his
book Rāja Yoga to argue that yoga is a science and that its epistemology is similar
to science. Vivekānanda stated in the “introduction” of Rāja Yoga, “The science of
Rāja Yoga proposes to put before humanity a practical and scientifically worked
out method of researching this truth” (Vivekānanda 2012b, vol. I: 131) and that
“in the study of this Rāja Yoga no faith or belief is necessary” (Vivekānanda
2012b, vol. I: 131). That yoga was perceived and promoted as one of India’s
rational traditions comparable to science and superior to religious traditions based
on faith points to the search for Indian traditions capable of counteracting the
nexus of British colonialism and Christianity’s claims of superiority, and the high
status of science in India during that time. Identification and promotion of rational
traditions of spirituality in Indian culture was for some probably a way to realize
dignity and countering the ideology that functioned to legitimize colonial rule.
The most important work of Hariharānanda Āraṇya, his Bengali book
Kāpilāśramīya Pātañjal Jogdarśan (Pātanjala Yoga Philosophy of the Kāpil
Āśram) originally published in 1911, was translated into English only after his
death. Hariharānanda Āraṇya had searched for someone who was willing to trans-
late the book, but he had not succeeded. Before he died in 1947, Āraṇya had asked
several persons, both Indian and non-Indian, to translate Kāpilāśramīya Pātañjal
Jogdarśan into English, but his wish remained unfulfilled (Mukerji 1981: xiv). It
shows that Āraṇya, in spite of living in isolation in a cave, still wanted his teach-
ing to be spread to the wider world. The Kāpilāśramīya Pātañjal Jogdarśan was
translated into English by P. N. Mukerji and published in 1963 by the University
of Calcutta with the title Yoga Philosophy of Patañjali 16 years after Āraṇya’s
death. The State University of New York Press in the United States published the
same book in 1983.
Ram Shankar Bhattacharya told me that he had seen Hariharānanda Āraṇya for
the first time in December 1946 or January 1947 when he was around 19 years
old, just a few months before Hariharānanda Āraṇya died, when he was ill and
very visibly suffering from the final stage of diabetes. At that time, Bhattacharya
also met for the first time Dharmamegha Āraṇya, the second guru in Kāpil Maṭh’s
paramparā, who also became Bhattacharya’s guru. However, Bhattacharya had
apparently been familiar with the philosophical literature of the Maṭh since child-
hood because his father supposedly had started to teach him the Kāpilāśramīya
Pātañjal Jogdarśan when Bhattacharya was still in school. Bhattacharya had
corresponded with Hariharānanda Āraṇya for several years, first in Sanskrit and
later in Bengali (Bhattacharya 2003: 140). He was initiated as a disciple of Kāpil
Maṭh in 1962 by Dharmamegha Āraṇya, who from then on formally became his
guru (Bhattacharya 2003: 144). He visited several times during the Kapila festival
(Kāpil utsav), but after the death of Dharmamegha Āraṇya in 1987, he probably
never again visited the Maṭh.
The interpretations of Sāṃkhyayoga that I learned from Ram Shankar Bhat-
tacharya were, in other words, not only a paṇḍit’s textual interpretation, not only
a historical study of an ancient tradition but also a lived religion.3 Bhattacharya
was committed, he had written, to fulfilling “the special responsibility entrusted”
to him by Dharmamegha Āraṇya of “explaining the rationality and profundity of
the Sāṃkhya-yoga system to people” (Bhattacharya 2003: 153). After the death
of Dharmamegha Āraṇya in 1985, Bhattacharya addressed the members of Kāpil
Maṭh:
It is our responsibility to make people, both within and outside the monastery
aware of the new landmark established by Ācārya Swāmijī [Hariharānanda
Āraṇya] in the study of Sāṃkhya-yoga system, and we should not spare
any effort to work in this direction, according to our individual disposition.
Whether it is through study, meditation or practice, we should keep alive the
tradition of Sāṃkhya-yoga initiated by Ācārya Swāmījī.
(Bhattacharya 2003: 152–153)
And Bhattacharya concluded the essay by stating,
Together we can work to re-establish the Sāṃkhya doctrine in the mod-

ern world, which is in search of a philosophy, fully comprehensible in all
respects, empirically valid, free from blind superstition and emotionalism
and unclouded by an excess of rajas and tamas elements.
(Bhattacharya 2003: 153)
Many of the books and writings of Hariharānanda Āraṇya have, in the last two
decades, been translated into English and published by the Maṭh (H. Āraṇya 2000,
2001, 2003, 2005a, 2006b, 2007, 2008a, 2008b, 2014b). The letters, speeches,
instructions, and writings of Dharmamegha Āraṇya have also been translated (D.
Āraṇya 1989, 2003b). This has been encouraged and organized by the current guru,
Bhāskara Āraṇya. It is in accordance with the missionary disposition voiced by
Bhattacharya “to work to re-establish the Sāṃkhya doctrine in the modern world,”
but can perhaps also be understood as simply an effort to make Sāṃkhyayoga bet-
ter known without very high aspirations for the establishment of Sāṃkhyayoga on
a large scale. Ram Shankar Bhattacharya died unexpectedly in June 1996.
Encountering the Sāṃkhyayoga institutions

After the death of Ram Shankar Bhattacharya, I visited Kāpil Maṭh in Mad-
hupur for the first time in 1999. I have since paid many visits to the Maṭh in
Madhupur and visited its related institutions in Kolkata, Triveni, Kurseong, and
Kāpil Sāṃkhyayogāśram in Sarnath outside Varanasi.
Kāpil Maṭh is situated on the outskirts of the small town of Madhupur. In 1999,
Madhupur was part of the state of Bihar, but since 2000, Madhupur has been part
of the new Indian state of Jharkhand. The town is now relatively poor with little
development and few employment opportunities. This was, however, not always
the case. Early in the twentieth century, and up until the 1970s, Madhupur was a
place where many bhadralok families from Kolkata, who had adopted the British
idea of vacation time, had second homes. The Bengal bhadralok, at the beginning
of the twentieth century, was
a socially privileged and consciously superior group, economically depend-

ent upon landed rents and professional and clerical employment; keeping its
distance from the masses by its acceptance of high-caste proscriptions and
its command of education; sharing a pride in its language, its literate culture,
and its history; and maintaining its communal integration through a fairly
complex institutional structure that it had proved remarkably ready to adapt
and augment to extend its social power and political opportunities.
(Broomfield 1968: 12–13)
Broomfield stresses that the bhadralok was a status group and not an economic
or occupational class. A person did not become a bhadralok simply by attaining
a certain employment of wealth, nor did he loose his status as bhadralok by los-
ing wealth or employment, as long as he maintained certain bhadralok values
(Broomfield 1968: 14). Broomfield suggests that in 1900, bhadralok may have
been 3 or 4 percent of Bengal’s population (Broomfield 1968: 13n10). Bhadralok
families from Kolkata who had second homes in Madhupur visited for their sum-
mer, Durgāpūjā, and Christmas vacations. L. S. S. O’Malley in his Bengal District
Gazetteers, Santal Parganas, published in 1910, noted that the town had “a grow-
ing reputation as a health resort among the Bengali community. A number of new
houses have consequently been built in recent years by residents of Calcutta and
other places.” He further noted that the town had “an increasing population of
Bengali gentlemen who have country residents here” (O’Malley 1910: 268–269).
The term “Bengali gentlemen” refers to bhadralok. O’Malley reported that the
town in 1901 had 6,840 inhabitants (O’Malley 1910: 268). Health was an impor-
tant part of the British concept of vacation and upper-class Bengalis also adopted
this way of thinking. Health resorts were developed both for the British and the
Bengalis (Borthwick 1984: 238). Madhupur was thought to have special healthy
drinking water, in addition to the fresh air. In addition to those owning houses,
many of the elite in Kolkata came for visits. Today, many of the holiday bunga-
lows built for the bhadralok from Kolkata have been in decay for several decades,
since the 1970s, or have been renovated by new and different owners.
The first thing that met me when I arrived at Kāpil Maṭh in a bicycle rickshaw
from the Madhupur railway station early one morning in January 1999, was a
large brown and reddish-colored gate, like a piece of art shaped as a person sitting
in padmāsana in meditation. This image seemed to indicate that the buildings
on the other side of the gate were not ordinary houses but places of religion and
yoga. Confirming this assumption, the name Kāpil Maṭh together with a man-
tra stating nāsti sāṃkhyasamaṃ jñānam, nāsti yogasamaṃ balam, “there is no
knowledge comparable to Sāṃkhya, there is no power comparable to Yoga,” was
written in Sanskrit with devanāgarī letters above the gate. This is a quotation
from the Mahābhārata (12.304.2). What sāṃkhya and yoga originally referred
to in this verse is another matter, but for Kāpil Maṭh, they refer to the Sāṃkhya
and Yoga systems of religious thought and Hariharānanda Āraṇya’s teaching of
Sāṃkhyayoga. Open fields surround the walls of the monastery on three sides.
Buildings of Kāpil Maṭh have been constructed on both sides of the road, and
there is a gate on both walls, facing each other. The gate with the mantra that pays
homage to Kapila, the ancient sage who is considered the founder of the Sāmkhya
system of religious thought, is on the left-hand side and leads to the kuṭi (hut)
where one monk stayed at that time, to the Kāpil mandir (“temple of the followers
of Kapila”), and to an artificial cave called the Kāpil guhā (“cave of the followers
of Kapila”). The Kāpil guhā is a building similar to a house, but with no entrance
and exit door, and joined to a small temple. One of the remarkable features of Kāpil
Maṭh is this artificial cave in which the three gurus, one after another, have been
voluntarily permanently enclosed. The Kāpil cave was built for Hariharānanda
Āraṇya by a disciple who wanted to construct a suitable house as Āraṇya’s per-
manent home in Madhupur where his sister (remembered as Sādhu Mā in the
Kāpil Maṭh tradition) had a vacation house. Hariharānanda Āraṇya spent the last
21 years of his life (from 1926 to 1947) in the cave. The guru never goes outside
of his structure, but he is able to use the roof of the building (see Figure 2.1).
It has a small window into the Kāpil mandir through which he meets devotees
for five days at the start of each Bengali month except for the cāturmāsa, the four
months from July to October that are traditionally reserved for austerities, during
which he remains mostly in complete silence and solitude (see Figure 2.2).
The other gate, on the right-hand side of the road, leads to a building called the
Kāpilāyan, where lay followers of Sāmkhyayoga and other visitors stay. Visitors
come, usually, mainly for the festivals, especially during durgāpūjā and during
the Christmas holidays for Kāpil utsav, and for the fifth day of the Bengali month
that is observed as Ācārya Divas and on the four consecutive days before Ācārya
Divas during which the guru is also available. Both Hariharānanda Āraṇya and
Dharmamegha Āraṇya died on the fifth day of a Bengali month (Hariharānanda
on the fifth of Baiśākh and Dharmamegha on the fifth of Kārtik), and these dates
are also memorial days with a special ritual program in which disciples of the
Maṭh participate. During the five days of the eight months in which the guru is
available at the window of the cave that opens up into the Kāpil mandir, there
are usually a few disciples present who have arrived from cities in West Bengal,
especially Kolkata, Durgapur, and Kurseong.
When I first arrived in 1999, I noticed that around the Kāpil mandir and the
Kāpil guhā there was a picturesque garden. The aesthetic beauty of colorful
flowers and shade-giving trees characterized the area already in 1999, but the
Figure 2.1 The main building at Kāpil Maṭh with the Kāpil Cave to the left and the Kāpil
Mandir to the right
Photo: Knut A. Jacobsen
biggest change in the last two decades has been the increased beautification.
In the garden, the mantra ādividuṣe kapilāya namah, “homage to Kapila who
was the first knower,” had been written in devanāgarī letters with dark flowers
in a bed of white flowers. Some years later, this was replaced with the same
mantra written in concrete. A notable change after my first visit has been the
increase of statues, monuments, and buildings in the garden. The visual and
material dimension of Kāpil Maṭh has been favored. In the garden surrounding
the temple and the cave, several statues, monuments, and pieces of religious
art have been set up. These pieces of art have been inspired by the writings
and ideas of Hariharānanda Āraṇya. The largest statue in the garden is of the
person honored as the founder of Sāṃkhya and Sāṃkhyayoga, the sage Kapila.
It is a statue of art of a person to be remembered but not a mūrti intended for
pūjā. A new office building has been erected, financed by a gift from a disciple
of the Maṭh, the Sāṃkhya scholar Anima Sen Gupta, who published several
books on Sāṃkhya (Sen Gupta 1959, 1964, 1973, 1982; see also Chapter 10).
The Kāpil cave was the first building and was built for Hariharānanda Āraṇya.
A devotee, who had at that time a vacation home in Madhupur, gifted it. The
second guru, Dharmamegha Āraṇya, was the son of Hariharānanda’s sister.
Dharmamegha spent summer and autumn vacations at Kāpil Āśram in Triveni
in Hooghly when Hariharānanda Āraṇya stayed there in the first decade of the
Figure 2.2 The opening in the cave during the period in which the guru is in solitude.
Above the opening on top is a painting of Kapila and underneath a painting of
Hariharānanda Āraṇya and Dharmamegha Āraṇya. The photo on the wall to
the left of the opening is of Hariharānanda Āraṇya and to the right of Dharma-
megha Āraṇya
twentieth century. When Harhiharānanda settled in Kāpil Maṭh in Madhupur,
Dharmamegha lived in Kāpil Āśram in Kurseong, and he moved into the Kapil
cave in Madhupur after Hariharānanda died in 1947. He became a renunciant
at a young age in 1911 as a disciple of his uncle.
The statues, monuments, and pieces of religious art have been based on
the drawings of the current guru of Kāpil Maṭh, Bhāskara Āraṇya. Bhāskara
Āraṇya is a relative of the person who had gifted the property and money to
build Kāpil Maṭh in the early 1920s when Hariharānanda Āraṇya had to leave
his āśram in Triveni because of the outbreak of a plague. Before Bhāskara
Āraṇya became a saṃnyāsin, he was a student at Santiniketan, Rabindranath
Tagore’s famous institution for the study of arts. He is a humble person whose
main contribution has been the organization of translations into English of
most of the writings of Hariharānanda Āraṇya and Dharmamegha Āraṇya, and
the transformation of Kāpil Maṭh into a place of aesthetic beauty. He consid-
ered the writings of Hariharānanda and Dharmamegha too difficult for many
laypeople to understand and thought that teaching Sāṃkhyayoga through art
would be beneficial. This has produced a noteworthy material dimension of
the Sāṃkhyayoga teaching (see Chapter 9). Bhāskara Āraṇya once told me,
when I asked him to explain a certain topic of Sāṃkhyayoga, that he, like the
other disciples of the Maṭh, was a śiṣya (student) of the two earlier gurus. He
was also trying to understand their teaching. Another saṃnyāsin with a leader-
ship role was Omprakāś Āraṇya, a Hindi-speaking monk who, after leaving
Madhupur, established his own Maṭh in Sarnath, Kāpil Sāṃkhyayogāśram, in
a similar style to Kāpil Maṭh and which follows many of the same practices.
Omprakāś Āraṇya’s father was a disciple of the Kāpil Maṭh. Omprakāś Āraṇya
claimed when he visited the Maṭh the first time to have already been initiated
by Hariharānanda Āraṇya in a dream, I was told.4 Omprakāś Āraṇya translated
and published into Hindi large parts of the writings of Hariharānanda Āraṇya
and Dharmamegha Āraṇya. A wealthy devotee of him had bought the property
in Sarnath and funded the building of Kāpil Sāṃkhyayogāśram as well as the
publication of the books in Hindi. Omprakāś Āraṇya instructed devotees in
meditation and established himself as a teacher (see Chapter 7). He died in
2012. The Kāpil Sāṃkhyayogāśram in Sarnath afterward has had a caretaker,
but no guru. However, this āśrama has also used art to teach Sāṃkhyayoga
doctrines and has a significant material dimension (see Chapter 9).
The Sāṃkhyayoga institution founded by Hariharānanda Āraṇya promotes the
texts that were considered the basis of the classical philosophy of Sāṃkhyayoga:
the Pātañjalayogaśāstra and the Sāṃkhyakārikā, and a few other Sāṃkhya and
Yoga texts, as interpreted by Hariharānanda Āraṇya. For Kāpil Maṭh, Yoga is a
school of Sāṃkhya. Yoga is Sāṃkhyayoga and the teaching of Kapila is at the
foundation of both Sāṃkhya and Yoga (see Chapter 3). Interestingly, Patañjali,
who has become central in modern yoga, plays no role in the material religion
of Kāpil Maṭh. This is probably because Patañjali was re-actualized only in the
second half of the twentieth century by schools of modern postural yoga (Sar-
backer 2016). Dharmamegha Āraṇya describes the view of Kāpil Maṭh on the
relationship between Sāṃkhya and Yoga with Kapila as the founder of both as
follows:
Sāṃkhya and Yoga are not mutually exclusive systems of philosophy inas-
much as both the systems accept the twenty-five principles or Tattvas. While
Sāṃkhya represents the theoretical basis of the psychology of liberation,
Yoga concerns itself with the practices of attaining that objective. There is,
therefore, no fundamental difference between the two. . . . This is why study
or practice of Yoga invariably attracts the Sāṃkhya and one has to conclude
that the original exponent of both the systems was one and the same person,
viz. the great seer, Kapila.
(D. Āraṇya 1989: 1)
Kapila did not write any of the texts of Sāṃkhya and Yoga, but the teaching of
Kāpil Maṭh is that Kapila was the first to attain salvific liberation in the present
creation cycle of the universe. He discovered this on his own, based on “intense
spiritual practices performed by him in his previous lives” (D. Āraṇya 1989: 2).
That the guru of Kāpil Maṭh lives permanently locked up in an artificial cave
correlates with the spiritual goal of Sāṃkhyayoga. The goal of Sāṃkhyayoga is
isolation of the self, the puruṣa, from materiality, prakṛti, and its products. Isola-
tion of the guru in the cave symbolizes this isolation of the self from material-
ity. It is a method to realize the isolation of the self and seems at the same time
to be a statement of faith in the doctrine. The self is absolutely passive and is
separated from everything else. It is a pure witness, a sheer presence, independ-
ent, and uninvolved. Realization of the self means therefore to realize the self
as something it already is, independent and separate from materiality. When all
the changes in the mental organ (citta) cease, the self is established in itself and
all connection with the world is severed. Even the god of Yoga, īśvara, is an
eternally isolated self, a special self that has never been bound or involved in
materiality, but is pure, full of bliss, and established in calm isolation, like the
guru in the cave. However, there is no mention in any ancient Sāṃkhyayoga text
about a Sāṃkhyayoga guru living permanently enclosed in a cave or about such
doctrine. It might be an example of how Hariharānanda Āraṇya wanted to estab-
lish a purified tradition of yoga, an imagined Sāṃkhyayoga orthodoxy, that true
yogins live in caves. This isolation was perhaps intended as a contrast to those
wandering yogins he had observed, whom he mostly considered have dishonored
the institution of renunciation, and to the new organizations of ascetics such as
Rāmakṛṣṇa Mission and Bhārat Sevāśram Saṅgha, which held that monks should
participate in social work for the benefit of laypeople and society at large. Solitude
is a major theme in Sāṃkhyayoga, as kaivalya, the spiritual goal, means isolation,
both from the transformations characteristic of matter, prakṛti, but also of other
puruṣas. The confinement of the guru in the cave consequently signifies a par-
ticular form of asceticism. Hariharānanda Āraṇya, in his autobiographical novel
Apūrba bhramaṇbṛttānta (A Unique Travelogue) (H. Āraṇya 2001, 2006a), makes
a case for the value of solitude and describes various experiences produced from
Sāmkhyayoga forms of meditation as the narrator of the book progresses toward
samādhi and salvific liberation (mokṣa). In this book, Hariharānanda Āraṇya
describes some ideas about solitude that can partly explain the Maṭh’s tradition of
permanently enclosing the ācārya in a cave dwelling. One figure encountered in
the book, an ascetic who dwells in a cave, is quoted saying,
For those who are engaged in spiritual practices and have not yet reached the
goal, solitude is absolutely necessary. . . . In fact, only those who are pure in
mind can stay in solitude. Ordinary people lose their balance of mind under
such circumstances. Ignorant people believe that greed disappears in soli-
tude. But it is not that. In solitude only those with power of introspection can
successfully fight to eradicate the roots of all desire.
(H. Āraṇya 2001: 16)
Swami Dharmamegha Āraṇya continued the practice of cave dwelling and chose
to be locked in the cave some time after the death of Hariharānanda. Dharma-
megha Āraṇya did not himself write scholarly commentaries in Sanskrit and Ben-
gali on the Sāṃkhyayoga Sanskrit texts as Hariharānanda Āraṇya had done, but
he was especially engaged with the laypeople and advised them in letters and
talks (in Bengali). He was the spiritual advisor of the disciples that Hariharānanda
Āraṇya had initiated, and he himself also initiated new disciples. For him and for
the disciples, Sāṃkhyayoga was a living philosophy, founded by Kapila, with a
paramparā from Kapila, Āsuri, and Pañcaśikha, but with no record of a continu-
ing tradition after Pañcaśikha although names of several other teachers are given
in Hindu texts.
The current ācārya Bhāskara Āraṇya (born in 1942) took up his permanent
abode in the Kāpil cave in 1986, and he has maintained the same lifestyle of seclu-
sion and solitude as the two previous ācāryas. Bhāskara Āraṇya has continued to
spread the teaching of Sāṃkhyayoga by supporting publications and translations
of the work of the two previous gurus. The ācāryas have been quite detached
about the propagation of Sāṃkhyayoga, a necessity since they have been locked
into a cave, except for the books and pamphlets. Dharmamegha Āraṇya argued
that the demands of the administrative functions of a monastery are detrimental
to spiritual practice. The ācāryas have also showed little concern for the material
prosperity of the monastery. Material prosperity is often seen as a source of spir-
itual decline, and the establishment of monasteries is not considered necessary for
the practice of spirituality.
Kāpil Maṭh is a contemporary institutionalization of many features of the teach-
ing of the ancient texts of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra – the foundation texts of the
Hindu Yoga system of religious thought (darśana). Since this Yoga system origi-
nated as a school of Sāṃkhya philosophy, a main significance of Kāpil Maṭh is that
it claims to preserve the tradition of the “original Yoga.” That there is no reliable
description of a continuous Sāṃkhyayoga tradition as a spiritual practice in Indian
history indicates that the practitioners of Sāṃkhyayoga probably were always
quite few in number, and this might be the reason Sāṃkhya traditions had to be
revived several times in Indian history. The Sāṃkhyayoga of Kāpil Maṭh might
not be the first revival of Sāṃkhya. Perhaps the writing of the Sāṃkhyasūtra in
the fifteenth century represented one such revival and that the next revival was
in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Bengal by Hariharānanda Āraṇya
and the tradition of Kāpil Maṭh. The Kāpil Maṭh tradition is probably the only
institutionalized living Sāṃkhyayoga tradition that follows the Sāṃkhyayoga of
Pātañjalayogaśāstra as well as the Sāṃkhya of the Sāṃkhyakārikā.
The encounter with a living Sāṃkhyayoga tradition led me to ask a number
of questions about its relationship to tradition and modernity in Bengal. What
were the sources for Āraṇya’s Sāṃkhyayoga? Was there an oral tradition of Yoga
that Āraṇya encountered as a saṃnyāsin? Who was his guru? Āraṇya’s com-
mentary texts appear quite traditional, so what were his sources? How did this
Sāṃkhyayoga tradition come about? In the next chapters, we will look at how
it happened that this ancient philosophy of Sāṃkhyayoga re-emerged in late
nineteenth-century Bengal and look at its teaching and practices. In the search
for the sources of this Sāṃkhyayoga tradition, we will look at some of Āraṇya’s
views and look at some who shared them to try to identify some of the background
of this tradition of Sāṃkhyayoga. In the next chapter, I try to understand the influ-
ence of some nineteenth-century views on Kapila and Sāṃkhya, and their impact
on the formation of the Kāpil Maṭh tradition.
Notes
1 See Jacobsen 1999.
2 I am quoting this from notes and memory.
3 “Lived religion” refers to religion as it is actually lived and experienced in the context of
everyday life.
4 Information given by Ṛta Prakāś and Bhāskara Āraṇya.
3 Kapila as the originator
of Yoga
Wherever Hariharānanda Āraṇya and disciples of Kāpil Maṭh established

āśramas, they were named after Kapila. It might appear strange that he named
his institutions after Kapila and not after Patañjali, the name of the author of
the Pātañjalayogaśāstra, since Āraṇya was a follower of Sāṃkhyayoga, and he
considered the Pātañjalayogaśāstra the most important text. In the late twenti-
eth and in the twenty-first centuries, globalized modern yoga Patañjali is every-
where, while Kapila is mostly missing. It seems therefore quite surprising that
when the yoga of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra started to receive increased attention
in nineteenth-century Bengal, a number of Hindu intellectuals and Orientalists
associated the teaching of this Yoga mostly with the sage Kapila and Sāṃkhya.
In nineteenth-century Bengal, the Yogasūtra and its author Patañjali had not the
prominent role they have today. Yoga of the yogins of nineteenth-century India
was associated with other traditions, especially Haṭhayoga, which in the nine-
teenth century was associated especially with the Nāth yogins. The Hatḥayoga of
the Nāth yogins had become “synonymous with yoga,” writes James Mallinson,
and the main original teachers of Nāthyoga, according to tradition was Ādināth,
Matsyendranāth, and Gorakhnāth, and others, and not Patañjali.1
In contrast to the founders of the other so-called six systems of philosophy of
the Hindu traditions, who mostly are just names without anything else known
about them,2 Kapila was associated with a number of sacred narratives and was
even in some Hindu traditions considered a divinity. Kapila was a mythological
figure associated with different teachings and sacred narratives and events, and
these figures and events have often become merged. Some pilgrimage places
are associated with him and narratives are told in the Epics and the Purāṇas.3
However, the Kapila who is associated with the foundation of the Sāṃkhya
system of religious thought can be identified as the mythological teacher of
Āsuri and thus the originator of a separate paramparā. The Encyclopaedia of
Purāṇas lists several Kapilas in addition to him, such as the son of Kardama
and Devahūti and the teacher of Vaiṣṇava Sāṃkhya,4 one of the serpent kings,
a son of Agni called Bhānu, a father of Śālihotra, and a son of Viśvāmitra
(see Mani 1975: 388). Other Kapilas are also known. One scholar has recently
argued that one Kapila was an important Vedic divinity (Couture 2017), while
Kapila as the originator of Yoga 37
another scholar has suggested that one Kapila was the main god of the non-
Vedic Magadha civilization (Bronkhorst 2007: 61–68). However that may be,
any relationship between these mythological figures and any historical person
who is supposed to have formulated Sāṃkhya philosophy is unclear, to say the
least. In the case of Kapila, separating history from mythology and literature
and tales intended just for entertainment has shown itself to be difficult. Never-
theless, the ideas of Sāṃkhya philosophy we have to assume were formulated
by human beings and not by gods. Sāṃkhya seems to have had a pluralis-
tic origin, with different persons working with similar concepts, and there is
no evidence of any ancient foundation text (sūtra text) composed by Kapila,
although several Hindu schools of thought have claimed to know the teaching
of such Kapila, and Sāṃkhya is sometimes referred to as just Kapila’s teach-
ing. According to the Sāṃkhyakārikā commentary tradition, Kapila taught the
Sāṃkhya teaching to a disciple called Āsuri who again taught Pañcaśikha. The
Bhāgavatapurāṇa (c. 800 CE), on the other hand, presents a child philoso-
pher called Kapila who apparently is different from the teacher of Āsuri of the
Sāṃkhyakārikā tradition and who taught the salvific knowledge of Vaiṣṇava
Sāṃkhya to his mother, Devahūti. The text Kapilāsurisaṃvāda, which is a
conversation between Kapila and his disciple Āsuri found in a few manuscripts
of the southern edition of the Mahābhārata, was perhaps a Sāṃkhya response
to this text and an attempt to take back the Kapila tradition from the Vaiṣṇavas.5
An attempt to give Sāṃkhya a foundation text in the sūtra format was the
fifteenth-century Sāṃkhyasūtra, which claimed to have been written by a per-
son called Kapila. It is not difficult to empathize with the Hindu philosopher
Śaṅkara who already in eighth century CE asserted that there had to be several
different persons called Kapila in order to make sense of the many contradic-
tory mythological narratives and teachings associated with the name.6
Hariharānanda Āraṇya and the Kāpil Maṭh tradition distinguish between the
divinity Kapila of the mythological narratives and an actual human person who
started the Sāṃkhya tradition of knowledge. According to the Kapil Maṭh tradi-
tion, “Kapila is not a god from the Purāṇas. He was a human being like us.” He
was “the first one to be enlightened, hence his successors are indebted to him.”
Therefore the worship of Kapila, according to the Kāpil Maṭh tradition, “means
following the ideal set by him” (D. Āraṇya 2003b: 1) (see Figure 3.1).
The name Kapila was probably well known in Kolkata at the time of
Hariharānanda Āraṇya, especially among saṃnyāsins and yogins also because
of the annual flow of ascetics and pilgrims through Kolkata to the Kapila fes-
tival on the island Ganga Sagar south of Kolkata, which is known in Hindu
mythology to be one of the meditation places of Kapila.7 The main temple at
Ganga Sagar is devoted to Kapila, and this is one of the largest pilgrimage
festivals in Bengal. Ascetics of one of the Daśanāmī Akhāṛās, the Mahānirvāṇī
Akhāṛā, worships Kapila as their guru, and some of these ascetics visit the
Ganga Sagar festival. Hariharānanda Āraṇya possibly encountered such ascet-
ics and worshippers of Kapila.
38 Kapila as the originator of Yoga
Figure 3.1 Statue of Kapila in the garden of Kāpil Maṭh in Madhupur

Hariharānanda Āraṇya believed Kapila was the greatest sage of India and the
country’s first philosopher, and that the teachings of Sāṃkhya “were accepted by
all the later religious and philosophical systems of India either in their entirety or in
parts” (H. Āraṇya 1981: xxv). The idea that Kapila was the first and earliest of the
founders of the Indian philosophical systems and that Sāṃkhya thus was the oldest of
the philosophies of India was common to a number of intellectuals in Bengal, as well
as a few European Indologists, and these views seem to have influenced Āraṇya and
Kāpil Maṭh, and were probably important for the rebirth of Sāṃkhyayoga in the late
nineteenth century. Being first and oldest were prestigious qualities. The influential
Vivekānanda also promoted the idea that Kapila was the world’s first philosopher and
“the great father of all philosophy” (Vivekānanda 2012, vol. II: 205); that, therefore,
“there is no philosophy in the world that is not indebted to Kapila” (Vivekānanda
2012, vol. II: 445); and that “[w]herever there is any philosophy or rational thought,
it owes something or other to Kapila” (Vivekānanda 2012, vol. II: 455). It follows,
according to Vivekānanda, that “[e]very metaphysician in the world must pay hom-
age to him” (Vivekānanda 2012, vol. II: 455). How Kapila’s Sāṃkhya philosophy
had spread to the world Vivekānanda explained in the following way:
Pythagoras came to India and studied this philosophy, and that was the begin-
ning of the philosophy of the Greeks. Later, it formed the Alexandrian school,
and still later, the Gnostics. It became divided into two; one part went to
Europe and Alexandra and the other remained in India; and out of this, the
system of Vyāsa was developed.
(Vivekānanda 2012, vol. II: 455)
The system of Vyāsa is of course the Sāṃkhyayoga of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra,

and Vivekānanda here attempted to explain also the relationship between Kapila
and Yoga.8 Yoga developed from the tradition of Sāṃkhya philosophy that
remained in India, according to him. Vivekānanda understood Sāṃkhya as “the
oldest rational thought in the world” (Vivekānanda 2012, vol. II: 455). This eleva-
tion of Kapila as a global founding hero of rational thought as such seems to pre-
sent something new in the nineteenth-century Bengal. In the preceding centuries,
there had been less interest in Kapila and his Sāṃkhya.
Absence of paṇḍits interested in Sāṃkhya and Yoga

A lack of paṇḍits interested in Sāṃkhya in Bengal in the first half of the nine-
teenth century indicates the novelty of the elevation of Kapila as “the world’s
first philosopher.” Nineteenth-century Bengal was the center of the intellectual
encounter between India and the British, an encounter that set off a rush of
remarkable intellectual creativity.9 This intellectual creativity not least had an
influence on religion and led to the emergence of new forms of Hindu tradi-
tions and a revival or rebirth of some of the old traditions. It generated a new
interest in the Indian philosophical tradition. The European presence prompted
criticism of some ideas and practices of Hinduism, and to the incorporation of
Western ideas into Hindu thought. It led to new interpretations as well as to
new forms of orthodoxy. These new forms of orthodoxy took in and assimi-
lated new elements, noted Wilhelm Halbfass, and was “by no means a mere
continuation of that which existed before the encounter with the West” (Hal-
bfass 1988: 219). In Bengal, the emergence of new forms and the revival of
old ones took place primarily among the bhadralok population. Some of the
sources of the renewal of Hindu traditions by the bhadraloks were new insti-
tutions of education and knowledge, responses to Christian missions, and the
Orientalists’ interest in ancient Indian traditions. The bhadraloks were influ-
enced by European traditions, but they also increasingly reacted against them.
A religious revival in Bengal promoted a vision of India as a great ancient civi-
lization whose spiritual message and ideals could be re-enacted in the contem-
porary world, and they could draw on support from some Orientalists’ visions
of India’s past.
It is well known that there was an absence of paṇḍits interested in Sāṃkhyayoga
(i.e., Pātañjalayogaśāstra) in nineteenth-century Bengal and India (see Chap-
ter 4). It is less known that the paṇḍits displayed the same lack of interest in
Sāṃkhya. In the “preface” of the translation of Sāṃkhyakārikā with commen-
tary by Gauḍapāda by Henry Thomas Colebrooke and Horace Hayman Wilson,
published in 1837 (a publication that was the result of Orientalist interests),10 Wil-
son observed the following about Sāṃkhya:
The subject indeed is but little cultivated by the Pandits, and during the whole
of my intercourse with learned natives I met with but one Brahman who
professed to be acquainted with the writings of this school. Opportunity was
wanting to benefit by his instructions.
(Wilson 1837: viii)
One difference between Sāṃkhya and Yoga seems to have been that the translation
of the major Sāṃkhya texts among Indologists started a couple of decades earlier
than the translation of the major texts of the Yoga system of religious thought and
that the texts of the Yoga system in the beginning perhaps attracted greater inter-
est among the Theosophists than the Indologists, probably because of the large
number of yoga powers mentioned in the Yogsūtra text. It was the subsequent
international elevation of the Yogasūtra due to some degree to the Theosophists’
interest in the texts that was important also for Vivekānanda’s publication of the
book Rāja Yoga in 1896. However, the situation appears to have been somewhat
similar for Sāṃkhya and Yoga in the early nineteenth century in that hardly any
paṇḍits had specialist knowledge of these systems.
Sāṃkhya had been neglected in India for centuries for several reasons. One
reason was the dominance of Vedānta. Another reason might be that, compared
to Vedānta, it was considered a philosophy that denied the existence of īśvara.
Only prakṛti and puruṣa were considered ultimate and independent princi-
ples in Sāṃkhya. Sāṃkhyayoga on the other hand recognized a special puruṣa
( puruṣaviśeṣa) named īśvara and was considered theist. It was theist in the
sense that it recognized a nirguṇa (“without attributes”) god. This god was not
a powerful being who could be worshipped in statues for assistance in daily life.
However, this was now an advantage. It seems to have been very important for
Hariharānanda Āraṇya to show that Sāṃkhya and Yoga recognized divinities,
especially the nirguṇa god, and this was probably to counter perceived criticism.
Many Bengali bhadralok condemned the worship of mūrtis (statues of gods and
goddesses) as being based on superstition, but a nirguṇa god was perhaps seen as
valuable in the current intellectual climate. Sāṃkhya was the oldest philosophy,
and it was not non-theist, as critics had claimed, since Sāṃkhyayoga, an inte-
grated part of Sāṃkhya recognized a nirguṇa god, it could be argued. Āraṇya
also maintained that Sāṃkhya accepted a creator god Hiraṇyagarbha whose emer-
gence corresponded with the creation of the world – i.e., a personification of the
material world.
Presenting the Buddha as a follower of Kapila

The relationship between Kapila and the Buddha was one of the topics discussed
among Orientalists and intellectuals in the nineteenth-century Bengal. The simi-
larity between the Yoga of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra and Buddhism was not hard
to notice. But at the same time, the contrast between the ideal of the ancient Indian
Buddhist monk and realities of many contemporary Hindu yogins was striking.
The systems of Sāṃkhya and Yoga became the subject of increasing interest in
late nineteenth-century Bengal, both among Orientalists and Indian paṇḍits, and
this was probably an important reason for its institutionalization into the living
tradition of Kāpil Maṭh. Kāpil Maṭh believes not only that Sāṃkhyayoga is the
oldest philosophical system in the world but also that the religion of Buddhism is
based on Sāṃkhyayoga. Research today dates the Yogasūtra to around 325–425
CE, but it should be noted that at the time Hariharānanda Āraṇya gained knowl-
edge of Sāṃkhya and Sāṃkhyayoga, leading Indian scholars such as the Kolkata-
based Rājendralāla Mitra and Western Indologists such as Richard Garbe were
arguing that Sāṃkhya was older than Buddhism and that Buddhism emerged as
an interpretation of Sāṃkhya. That Sāṃkhya was the foundation of the teachings
of the Buddha, on which the Buddha elaborated, seems to represent a widely
accepted scholarly view among intellectuals in Kolkata at the time.
Hariharānanda Āraṇya had an interest in Buddhism and translated the Pāli Bud-
dhist texts Dhammapada into Sanskrit (H. Āraṇya 1988b) and the Sanskrit text
Bodhicāryāvatāra into Bengali (H. Āraṇya 1998). Some of Āraṇya’s interpreta-
tions of Pātañjalayogaśāstra may even have been influenced by his knowledge
of Buddhism.11 One motivation for this involvement with Buddhist texts was
his views about the relationship between Sāṃkhya and Buddhism, and between
Kapila and the Buddha. One assumption in Hariharānanda Āraṇya’s teaching was
that “Buddhism as preached by Gautama Buddha was, to a large extent, based on
the fundamental tenets of Sāṃkhya-Yoga doctrine of Kapila” (Mukherjee 2001:
38) and that the practice of Sāṃkhyayoga “is what the Buddha did” (H. Āraṇya
1981: xxiv).12 This last remark is particularly significant, since an important aspect
of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra is that it is not a “how to do” book, but is mainly theo-
retical. It is a theory of yoga more than an instruction in yoga.
The view that the teaching of the Buddha was a variant of Sāṃkhya based on
a perceived similarity between the two and the belief that Sāṃkhya was the older
of the two philosophies was discussed and promoted in the nineteenth century by
European Orientalists. This probably added prestige to Sāṃkhya. The absence of
paṇḍits specializing in Sāṃkhya meant in addition that the Orientalists and other
intellectuals had a greater impact on the development than they perhaps otherwise
would have had. The mythical founder of Sāṃkhya was promoted by some Orien-
talists as the most significant person in giving shape to Indian religion and philos-
ophy – the first Indian philosopher and a teacher of the whole of humankind. Even
the Buddha was presented as a follower of Kapila’s teaching, and Buddhism was
presented as an interpretation of Sāṃkhya. Intellectuals in Bengal, who became
curious about Sāṃkhya and Yoga, perhaps partly in response to European and
Western interests, also adopted the view.
Since the Yoga school of Indian philosophy is a school of Sāṃkhya, it was
possible to merge the admiration of Kapila as India’s first philosopher with the
emerging fascination for yoga. Kapila was a rational thinker who used rational
analysis and yogic concentration to decipher the ultimate truth of the eternal,
unchangeable, and immortal self ( puruṣa) that is separate from matter ( prakṛti)
and was thus a savior of humankind by devising a way to make salvific liberation
possible and available to all.
The idea that Buddhism was originally a form of Sāṃkhya philosophy and that
Kapila had been the teacher of the Buddha was based on similarities between
Buddhism and Sāṃkhya. Another indication was that the name of the town of
the Buddha, which was called Kapilavastu, was interpreted to mean “Kapila’s
place” and understood to be a place in which Kapila’s philosophy had dominated.
In Aśvaghoṣa’s Buddhacarita, a text written half a millennium after the Buddha,
two of the teachers of the Buddha, Ārāḍa Kālāma and Udraka Rāmaputra, teach
forms of Sāṃkhya, and this could also give the impression that Sāṃkhya was
older and had shaped Buddha’s thinking. The word kapila is used in Buddhacarita
12. 21, but the meaning of both the enigmatic verse as well as the word kapila
here is not clear (see Johnston 1984, Part II: 169). Patrick Olivelle in a recent
translation of the Buddhacarita maintains that the kapila here refers to “Kapila
with his pupils” (Olivelle 2009: 337) and that they in the verse “are identified as
the spiritual principle of the cosmos” (Olivelle 2009: 459). Ārāḍa Kālāma also
appears in the Pāli Canon. In Majjhima Nikāya 26, Siddhārtha realizes the teach-
ing of Kālāma, but rejects his teaching since it does not lead to the goal he wants
to attain. Ārāḍa Kālāma and Udraka Rāmaputra might have been historical fig-
ures, which does point to a possible Sāṃkhyayoga influence on the thinking of
the Buddha, but Johannes Bronkhorst writes, “There are no indications that clas-
sical Yoga, or something like it, existed at the time of the Buddha” (Bronkhorst
2009: 59). Nevertheless, the possible historicity of these two yoga teachers of the
Buddha, who were early Sāṃkhyayogins, has consequences for the understand-
ing of the relationship of Buddhism and Sāṃkhya. The obvious strong Buddhist
influence on the Pātañjalayogaśāstra was at that time interpreted as the effect of
Sāṃkhyayoga on Buddhism, the assumption being that Sāṃkhya had arisen first
and Buddhism afterward. Buddhism was understood as a reworking of Sāṃkhya,
and it was argued that the Buddha’s teaching was, in reality, a form of Sāṃkhya.
Some of the foremost European Orientalists as well as Bengali intellectuals held
different variants of these views.
Sāṃkhya came to the attention of the early Western Orientalists and H. T. Cole-
brooke (1765–1837), an early European Sanskrit scholar, seems to have been the
first Orientalist to suggest the possibility that Buddhism could have borrowed
its doctrines from the Sāṃkhya philosophy in an article originally published in
1805 (Colebrooke 1805, 1873, vol. II: 100).13 Colebrook wrote, “The institution
of the Vedas are anterior to the Buddha, whose theology seems to have been bor-
rowed from the system of Kapila” (Colebrooke 1873, vol. II: 100).14 That Bud-
dha had borrowed from Sāṃkhya subsequently became one of the dominant
views supported by a number of researchers who often referred to Colbrooke’s
statement.15 It was held as late as the 1930s by Theodore Stcherbatsky, who
argued that Sāṃkhya is the predecessor and philosophical basis of Buddhism
(Stcherbatsky 1934: 737–760), and by F. Otto Schrader, who maintained that
the pratītyasamutpāda (dependent co-arising) was the Buddhist answer to the
Sāṃkhya theory of causation, the satkāryavāda (the doctrine of the preexistence
of the material effect in the material cause) (Schrader 1934–35).
The Orientalist Albrecht Weber in his History of Indian Literature, published
in 1882, defended the view that Kapila was the originator of both Sāṃkhya and
Buddhism, that Buddhism was originally a form of Sāṃkhya, and that the Bud-
dha’s teaching was in complete agreement with Kapila’s. But if that was the case
why did Buddhism become different from Sāṃkhya? According to Weber, it was
the Buddha’s followers who later developed his teaching in a separate direction,
as did Kapila’s followers. Weber wrote,
Although Buddha himself may actually have been in full harmony with the
doctrines of Kapila, as they then existed, yet his adherents developed these
in their own fashion; in the same way as the followers of Kapila also pur-
sued their own path, and so eventually that system arose which is now extant
under the name Samkhya, and which differs essentially from the Buddhist
philosophy.
(Weber 1882: 309)
The famous and influential Sāṃkhya scholar Richard Garbe seems to have argued
the view that Buddhism was originally a form of Sāṃkhya most systemati-
cally.16 In his “introduction” to the translation of Aniruddha’s commentary on the
Sāṃkhyasūtra, published in Kolkata in 1891–1892, Garbe presented a number of
arguments supporting the dependence of the Buddha on Kapila’s views. Garbe
referred to L. von Schroeder, who tried to prove Buddha’s dependence on Kapila
by identifying three points on which Kapila and the Buddha supposedly both
agreed: the elimination of the notion of God, the assumption of a multitude of
individual souls, and the conception of the absolute liberation of the soul from the
bonds of the material world as the highest aim (Garbe 1891–92: ii). Garbe thought
that the Buddha’s predilection for consistent classification “shows a continuity of
a peculiar scholastic method” (Garbe 1891–92: vii). He asks if this method was
transferred from the Buddha to Kapila or from Kapila to the Buddha and thinks
that the fact that Kapila’s teaching is called Sāṃkhya, which means enumeration,
is proof of the latter and that thus Kapila was the “founder of the enumeration
philosophy” (Garbe 1891–92: vii). A second argument of Garbe is that the “idea
that this life is a life of pain is nowhere so well developed as in the Sāṃkhya phi-
losophy” (Garbe 1891–92: vii). A third point Garbe makes to defend his view that
Sāṃkhya philosophy influenced Buddhism and not the opposite, is that Buddhism
has a more advanced view on the rejection of the sacrifice. Garbe notes that both
systems rejected self-torture as a form of asceticism and agree that a person’s pos-
ture during meditation should be steady and pleasant (Garbe 1891–92: xi). With
respect to the view on the self, Garbe points out that both systems consider the
world objects to be real, and both agree that the self cannot belong to the world of
evolution (Garbe quotes Oldenburg on this) and that the phrase n’ etaṃ mamam
n’ eso ’ham asmi, na me so attā (that is not mine, I am not that, that is not my
self) is a standing formula in the Buddhist scripture, and the same is expressed in
Sāṃkhya: nāsmi na me nāham (I am not [conscious], [consciousness] does not
belong to me, the I is not [conscious]). Garbe argues that the Buddhist denial of
the self is a more radical standpoint than that of Sāṃkhya and, therefore, Bud-
dhism is posterior to Sāṃkhya. Finally, Garbe highlights the similarities between
Kapila’s doctrine of the salvific goal of the complete isolation from matter and
the Buddhist goal of nirvāṇa. The main difference between Kapila’s and the Bud-
dha’s teaching was, according to Garbe, “The unadulterated Sāṃkhya doctrine
was, by nature, originally intended to be the property of a limited school only; the
doctrine of the Buddha, however, was from the beginning meant for a much wider
circle” (Garbe 1891–92: xv). Garbe then concludes that the Buddha must have
been a Sāṃkhya philosopher who took what he needed from the system, “what
appeared to him to be useful for the conversion and enlightenment of the masses”
(Garbe 1891–92: xvi). Garbe goes further and concludes that Kapila’s philosophy
was “regarded as authoritative in Kapilavastu and its environs, this explains most
naturally why the founder of Buddhism, who was born there, relied on that sys-
tem” (Garbe 1891–1892: xx). The name Kapilavastu is here taken by Garbe as the
final proof of his theory.17
The author of the multivolume History of Indian Literature, Maurice Winternitz
was also convinced that Buddha was trained in Sāṃkhya philosophy. He wrote,
Sāṃkhya is the philosophy of the Purāṇas to such an extent that it is com-

monly designated as the epical philosophy, and it may more correctly be
designated as the “Purāṇic philosophy”. In this philosophy was undoubtedly
trained Gotama Buddha, whose cosmological theories are essentially based
on Sāṃkhya. In case we hold the opinion that the age of the oldest Upaniṣads
could be about 800 B.C. at the latest, the foundation of the Sāṃkhya system
of Kapila was laid sometimes in between 800 and 550 B.C.
(Winternitz [1922] 1985: 544)
Hermann Jacobi also believed that the Buddha was influenced by Sāṃkhya and
had argued, in the words of A. Berriedale Keith, that
the atmosphere of thought in the time of the Buddha was filled with Sāṃkhya
ideas, and that the Buddha was influenced by these ideas, and strove in his
own system to produce some formula of causation which would be suitable
to serve as an explanation of the origin of misery which the Sāṃkhya and his
own system so strongly affirmed.
(Keith 1949: 27)
Jacobi traced the 12 elements of the pratītyasamutpāda to the Sāṃkhya theory of

evolution, and he also pointed out that the Buddhacarita of Aśvaghoṣa describes a
teacher of the Buddha, Ārāḍa Kālāma, whose teaching is reminiscent of Sāṃkhya.
Senart’s “Bouddhisme et Yoga” was published in 1900. Lanman (1918) noted,
probably correctly, that “the interplay of influences as between the Bhāṣya and
the Buddhist texts may well have been chiefly in the opposite direction” (Lanman
1918: 364) and observed “the diction of the author of the Bhāṣya was influenced
by downright reminiscences of Nikāya texts” (Lanman 1918: 365).
Keith draws the (correct) conclusion that Sāṃkhya and Yoga did not exist early
enough to have directly influenced Buddhism (Keith 1949: 34). Keith’s alterna-
tive solution to the problem was that a doctrine must have been developed that
was not Sāṃkhya but “from which both Sāṃkhya and Buddhism derived” (Keith
1949: 24). He then avoids having to claim any foundational influence of Bud-
dhism on Sāṃkhya or Sāṃkhyayoga.
Important Hindu intellectuals in Bengal before Hariharānanda Āraṇya also
argued that Sāṃkhya philosophy was the source of Buddhism. The famous Bankim
Chandra Chattopadhyaya (1838–1894), a leading and highly influential intellec-
tual, novelist, and poet in Bengal in the second half of the nineteenth century, was
deeply interested in religion. His writings on religion appeared in magazines and
journals such as the Calcutta Review in the 1870s and 1880s (Shome 2015). In
an essay on Sāṃkhya (“Sankhya Darshan and the Hindu Character”), Chattopad-
hyaya mentions at the outset that paṇḍits in Bengal do not study Sāṃkhya “with
the keenness it deserves” (Chattopadhyaya 2015: 52–53) but have been mostly
interested in Nyāya philosophy. Nevertheless, he notes that India as a whole has
been deeply influenced by Sāṃkhya. Even though it is one of the oldest darśanas,
many of its imprints can be found in Hindu society. And he claims,
To study the background of Hinduism one has to understand the basic fea-
tures of Sankhya. To a large extent Hindu society has developed along the
lines of Sankhya’s teachings and many traits of a Hindu person’s character,
even today, are found to be rooted in the theories of Sankhya.
(Chattopadhyaya 2015: 53)
Chattopadhyaya states that the version of Tantra that is popular in Bengal is a deri-
vation of Sāṃkhya, and he writes that the prevalence of Śiva and Kāli in Bengal
reminds him of Sāṃkhya, as does the sound of the drums of Durgā and Kāli pūjā.
Chattopadhyaya writes that in the 1,000-year period from the fourth century BCE
to the sixth century CE, Buddhism was the main religion in India and that period
“was the most economically thriving and culturally progressive period of our
country,” and, therefore, “Buddhism, no doubt was beneficial for India.” How-
ever, he then claims, “Sankhya Darshan is the genesis of this important religion
[of Buddhism]” (Chattopadhyaya 2015: 54). The central features of Buddhism
came from Sāṃkhya, according to Chattopadhyaya. He writes, “Contempt for the
Vedas, atheism and belief in nirvana are the three pillars on which the structure of
Buddhism was built,” and “all these three have their origins in Sankhya” (Chat-
topadhyaya 2015: 54). Nirvāṇa is just another word for the Sāṃkhya mukti, he
argues. Chattopadhyaya, in an article in the Calcutta Review in 1871, with the
title “Buddhism and the Sankhya Philosophy,” elaborated on how Buddhism was
based on Sāṃkhya and entered into a debate with Max Müller, who did not see
any relationship. Müller is quoted as saying, “It is difficult to understand how,
almost by common consent, Buddha is supposed either to have followed in the
steps of Kapila or to have changed Kapila’s philosophy into religion” (Chatto-
padhyaya 1871: 202). Chattopadhyaya, on the other hand, claims that the relation
between Buddhism and Sāṃkhya is the relation of offspring to parent. In the arti-
cle, he mentions, “Udayana Áchárya, the author of Kusumánjali, who describes
the Sánkhya philosophers as worshippers of the Ádi vidván (First Wise)” (Chat-
topadhyaya 1871: 193).18 Chattopadhyaya argues that “among all the streams of
thought that have originated in this world Sankhya is one of the most influential”
and that Sankhya has shaped “the attitude of a large segment of the human race”
(Chattopadhyaya 2015: 55). The greatest period of India was the Buddhist period,
maintains Chattopadhyaya, but the originator of Buddhist philosophy was Kapila.
And although the Buddha formulated Buddhism, he borrowed the teaching from
Kapila, according to Chattopadhyaya’s view.
Rājendralāla Mitra was one of the foremost Bengali Orientalist scholars of his
time. Mitra had translated the Yogasūtra with the commentary of Bhoja, published
in 1883, and in the valuable “preface” to his translation, an introduction that is
almost 100 pages long; he also promoted the view that the philosophy of the Bud-
dha was a modification of a Kapila’s Sāṃkhya (Mitra 1883: v). He stated,
The system of the Sakya Buddha is a modification of a more ancient and more
fully developed doctrine – that of Kapila, as known under the name Sankhya.
(Mitra 1883: v)
There is abundant evidence, both in Hindu and Buddhist works of unques-

tionable antiquity and authenticity, of the Sankhya and the Yoga systems hav-
ing been current before the time of the Buddha.
(Mitra 1883: xviii)
Rājendralāla Mitra understood well that the yoga philosophy described in the
Yogasūtra was Sāṃkhyayoga and different from many of the descriptions of yoga
in the Purāṇas and Smṛti literature which came to dominate the modern yoga
phenomenon (White 2014: 100). Mitra thought that the term yoga at the time of
the Buddha “had acquired its technical meaning to perfection,” that Buddha “bor-
rowed it from the followers of the Sánkhya school,” that “the Tapas of the Vedic
Ṛishis got the more expressive name Yoga at a later period,” and that “Kapila and
his followers gave it prominence in their system by making it the sole means of
salvation” (Mitra 1883: xxvi). Mitra quotes at length the Buddhist text Lalitavist-
ara, which describes the meditation of the Buddha, and comments,
The meditations he [the Buddha] practiced were all in accord with the rules of
the Yoga system, and even their technical names were the same. These facts
demonstrate the antiquity of the Sankhya and the Yoga doctrines.
(Mitra 1883: xviii)
The understanding of Sāṃkhyayoga of Hariharānanda Āraṇya is closer to Mitra’s

than many other modern Indian interpreters of the day. However, one very
important difference between the two is the view of the Vyāsabhāṣya (the Bhāṣya
part of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra). For Hariharānanda Āraṇya, the Vyāsabhāṣya is
the most important Sāṃkhyayoga text. It is the key text of Sāṃkhyayoga philoso-
phy. Mitra, however, had a low opinion of the Vyāsabhāṣya. Discussing whether
the Vyāsabhāṣya could be the work of Vyāsa, he wrote,
Compared to the works of leading scholiasts, the Bháshya appears to be the

production of a third-class writer. It certainly cannot be compared with the
“great commentary” of Patanjali, or with the equally renowned exegesis of
S’ankara on the Vedánta aphorisms. . Fairly good though it be, there is a
looseness, an indecision, a want of logical precision, in the Bháshya. . . . The
tone of the Bháshya is that of a third-class mediæval scholium.
(Mitra 1883: lxxix–lxxx)
Mitra and Āraṇya also differed on the dating of the Yogasūtra. Hariharānanda
Āraṇya argued that “the Yoga-sūtra preceded the advent of Buddhism or any other
religious or philosophical school” (H. Āraṇya 1981: xxiv), while Mitra stated,
“The doctrine as we have it in Pataṉjali’s work is of post Buddhist origin” (Mitra
1883: lxxviii). A fundamental difference between the two is their views on the rel-
evance of Yoga for today’s world, which are totally opposed: Mitra wrote that he
had no interest in Yoga: “No Yogí myself, not anywise interested in the doctrine”
(Mitra 1883: lxxxiii). Āraṇya, however, was a Sāṃkhyayoga saṃnyāsin who him-
self tried to practice the teaching of the Yoga texts and to realize the tattvas of
Sāṃkhya in meditation and attain kaivalya. For him, Sāṃkhyayoga “is profound
in its wisdom, precise in its logic and is entirely free from any blind faith or bias”
(H. Āraṇya 1981: xxiv). The doctrine that Mitra had no interest in, Āraṇya saw
as the foundation of all religious and philosophical systems of India (H. Āraṇya
1981: xxv).
Mitra strongly favored the idea of the greatness of ancient India, but he was
a modernist interested in the transformation of society. In the tension between
tradition and modernity that characterized the bhadralok culture of the period,
Hariharānanda sought freedom from society by following the ancient traditions of
Sāṃkhyayoga and the institution of saṃnyāsin. Mitra thought change would be
for the better, while Āraṇya looked for something unchangeable, the puruṣa prin-
ciple of Sāṃkhyayoga. In Bengal in the 1880s and 1890s, the dualism between
tradition and modernity also came to be understood as a dualism between spiritu-
ality and materiality, most famously in the thoughts of Vivekānanda, but by that
time, Keśab Candra Sen (Keshub Chandra Sen) (1838–1884) had already spoken
of the yoga faculty that Hindus “are specially endowed with, and distinguished
for,” and, argued Sen, “[t]his faculty, which we have inherited from our forefa-
thers, enables us to annihilate space and time” (quoted in De Michelis 2004: 89).
That Buddhism was dependent on Sāṃkhya was a dominant view promoted
by leading intellectuals in Kolkata. It is not unlikely that this view of Sāṃkhya
and Yoga as being at the foundation of Buddhism and Buddhist meditation and
Kapila as the founder of this philosophy had a strong influence on Hariharānanda
Āraṇya’s interest in and interpretation of Sāṃkhyayoga and on the formation on
the Kāpil Maṭh tradition. In the “preface” to his Sanskrit translation from Pāli
of the Buddhist text Dhammapada, published in 1905, Hariharānanda Āraṇya
argued that Sāṃkhyayoga and Buddhism belonged to the same tradition, called
ārṣa dharma (teaching of the ṛṣis) or ārṣaism, which, he claims, had been inaccu-
rately called Brāhmaṇism (H. Āraṇya 1988b: 0.14). Buddhism was a sect within
ārṣaism founded by a great leader, according to Āraṇya. The terms nirvāṇa,
vimokṣa, kaivalya, śānti, and mukti, he writes, are used indiscriminately by the
Ārṣas and the Buddhists. He notes that similar terms are used in Dhammapada
and the Yogasūtra. Since the path of the Ārṣas and the Buddhists is the same, the
goal must also be the same, he concludes. He points out that in Dhammapada
10.16, śraddhā, śila, vīrya, smṛti, samādhi, and dharmapraviniścaya are men-
tioned, which is similar to Yogasūtra 1.20 where śraddhā, vīrya, smṛti, samādhi,
and prajñā are mentioned as means for attaining nirvāṇa. He adds that maitrī,
karuṇā, muditā, upekṣā, ahiṃsā, satya, and brahmacarya are practically the same
for the Ārṣas and Buddhists. He noted that the means for attaining nirvāṇa in
Buddhism and in the teaching of the Yogasūtra “are practically the same,” and
since the path is the same, the goal must be the same (H. Āraṇya 1988b: 0.10).
The ṛṣis were, according to Āraṇya, divided into two schools of thought: one
school preached and practiced rituals “leading to worldly happiness ( Pravṛtti-
dharma), while the other believed in the creed or path of renunciation and libera-
tion (Nivṛtti-dharma)” (H. Āraṇya 1981: xxii). The lower dharma was associated
with puṇya (merit) and the higher dharma with nirvāṇa. Kapila was “the greatest
exponent” of nivṛtti dharma, which “owed its origin to those Ṛṣis who had dis-
covered the way to self-realization and evolved from their own spiritual life and
experienced a complete system of theory and practice for guiding others along
the path” (H. Āraṇya 1981: xxii). Āraṇya also claimed that pravṛtti dharma “has
been prevalent in all parts of the world,” but nivṛtti dharma “originated in and
belonged exclusively to, India” (H. Āraṇya 1981: xxii). Nivṛtti dharma was com-
mon in Buddhism and the other traditions of ārṣaism, according to Āraṇya. The
ultimate goal of pravṛtti dharma is the attainment of Heaven, and for this purpose,
it encourages the worship of god and saints and the practice of charity. But the
problem with pravṛtti dharma is that it does not give permanent liberation from
rebirth. This salvific liberation can be achieved only “through perfect knowledge
of one’s real self” (H. Āraṇya 1981: xxii). And Yoga is the method to attain this
liberation:
It is by proper Yoga or Samādhi (absolute mental concentration) and com-

plete non-attachment to worldly interests that one can attain such knowledge
which alone can remove Avidyā (misapprehension or imperfect knowledge of
the reality), the root cause of unhappiness and the cycle of rebirth.
(H. Āraṇya 1981: xxii)
It was Kapila who conceived and elaborated for the first time the theory of
the self of nivṛtti dharma, according to Āraṇya, and this knowledge found its
way ultimately into the Upaniṣads, above all in the Kaṭhopaniṣad. He believed
that “Yogasūtra preceded the advent of Buddhism or any other religious or philo-
sophical thought” (H. Āraṇya 1981: xxiv). One proof of that, he argues, is that
the “available biographies of Buddha indicate that he had spent several years as
a disciple of Arāḍa-kālāma [sic], a noted Sāṃkhya philosopher of his time” (H.
Āraṇya 1981: xxiv).19
The view of the Kāpil Maṭh tradition is that “Buddhism as preached by Gautama
Buddha was, to a large extent, based on the fundamental tenets of Sāṃkhya-Yoga
doctrine of Kapila” (Mukherjee 2001: 38). One of the most important sources for
Kāpil Maṭh’s views of Kapila and Yoga was most probably the ideas about Kapila
that were held and debated in Bengal at the time when Hariharānanda Āraṇya
developed his teaching. The teaching of Kāpil Maṭh seems, in other words, to
represent the institutionalization of ideas about Kapila current in some Orientalist
and educated bhadralok circles in Bengal in the 1880s and 1890s. Hariharānanda
Āraṇya assumed that the Yogasūtra preceded the advent of Buddhism20 and all
other philosophy in India and argued that the teachings of Sāṃkhyayoga were not
only accepted by the Buddha but also in fact by all religious and philosophical
systems of India (H. Āraṇya 1981: xxiv–xxv) and suggested that Kapila’s teach-
ing was not only at the foundation of Sāṃkhya, Yoga, and Buddhism but also all
religious tenets of the world:
We often forget our friends who help us the most. For example, we cannot
live for a moment without air, but how often do we remember its utility? Like-
wise we have forgotten Kapila, our greatest benefactor. Sāṃkhya preached
by Kapila has been the backbone of all religious tenets of this world.
(H. Āraṇya 2005a: 2–3)
Āraṇya quoted Mahābhārata 12.290.103–104,21 which proclaims, he thinks, that

the highest wisdom in great persons, the Vedas, among sages and ṛṣis, and in
Purāṇic tales, has come from Sāṃkhya and also knowledge of history and eco-
nomics, and all wisdom in this world. He then argued,
In like manner, the lofty spirit of Buddhism is based on Sāṃkhya principles.

Therefore the eternal spirituality which has been the source of joy and relief
for billions of individuals since time immemorial has its origin in Kapila.
There has been no greater savior in this world than him, nor can there ever be.
(H. Āraṇya 2005a: 3)
While the Hindu reform movements in Bengal, starting with Brāhmo Samāj and up
to Vivekānanda and the Rāmakṛṣṇa Mission in general, favored Advaita Vedānta,
Āraṇya was opposed to the philosophy of Vedānta and its interpretations and
argued that “selves are infinite in number” and noted that “[o]nly the Māyāvādin
says that the Ātmā is one while the followers of all the other systems of Indian
Philosophy hold the opposite view” (H. Āraṇya 2014a [1935]: 10). Bankim Chan-
dra Chattopadhyaya wrote that he was “quite aware that the principles of Sankhya
would be strongly rejected in today’s enlightened age” (Chattopadhyaya 2015:
57) and did not foresee the rebirth of Sāṃkhyayoga a couple of decades later.
The rebirth of Sāṃkhyayoga was part of the cultural process in which ancient
India was seen as being able to supply a rational religion that was deeply rel-
evant to the search for personal illumination that came to dominate the Hindu
movements in Bengal in the decades after 1870 (Nath 2011). In the next chapter,
I will consider this religious revival in late nineteenth-century Bengal and the
background for the production of a new type of yogin. I will look at some of the
changes in the religious culture that led to the rebirth of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra
and prepared the ground of a new ideology and for the bhadralok yogin.
Notes
1 James Mallinson explains this complicated relationship between Haṭhayoga and the
Nāth Yogis: “Although the Nāths’ adoption and adaptation of Hatḥa Yoga was very
successful – their Hatḥa Yoga became synonymous with yoga – the Nāths appear not to
have practiced their invention very assiduously. There have been few celebrated Nāth
practitioners of Hatḥa Yoga since the time of the composition of the Haṭhapradīpikā.
Meanwhile, the ascetic traditions among which the first formulations of Hatḥa Yoga
originated, namely, the forerunners of the Daśanāmī saṃnyāsīs and the Rāmānandīs,
adopted the new kuṇḍalinī-oriented yoga of the Nāths and continue to write about and
practice it up to the present day.” (Mallinson 2011b: 423).
2 Bādarāyana, Jaimini, Kaṇāda, Gautama, and Patañjali are considered the authors of the
founding sūtra texts of the systems Vedānta, Mīmāṃsā, Vaiśeṣika, Nyāya and Yoga.
3 See Jacobsen 2013: 96–121 for the pilgrimage traditions associated with Kapila.
4 In one late commentary, the Māṭharavṛtti the teacher of Āsuri and the son of Kardama
and Devahūti have merged (Māṭharavṛtti 1994). Māṭharavṛtti presents Kapila as an
incarnation of Viṣṇu and Kardama and Devahūti as his parents and this indicates that
the text has been influenced by Vaiṣṇavism and perhaps the Bhāgavatapurāṇa (see
Jacobsen 2008).
5 For the Sanskrit text and English translation of the Kapilāsurisaṃvāda, see Jacobsen
2008: 82–132.
6 See Jacobsen 2008: 214–215 for a discussion.
7 See Jacobsen 2008: 159–163 for a description of Kapila of the Ganga Sagar. In the
mythology however, the place was deep in the earth as the sons of King Sagara found
it by digging and the place would today be deep under the ocean as it was their digging
that created the hole that today is the ocean (sāgara).
8 In the nineteenth century there seems to have been a consensus that the Yogasūtra and
the Bhāṣya were written by two different persons, Patañjali and Vyāsa.
9 There is a large literature on this intellectual encounter. See Halbfass 1988 for excel-
lent introductory essays on it.
10 It is noteworthy that when the book was republished in Kolkata in 1888 it included a
Bengali translation of the Sāṃkhyakārikā and the Gauḍapāda commentary, by Deben-
dra Nath Goswami, which illustrates a growing interest in Sāṃkhya and Indian phi-
losophy among Bengalis. Goswami stated in the Preface that the book included “a
literal Bengali translation to help the Bengali-knowing public” (Goswami 1887: i).
11 See Maharaj 2013 for a discussion of Hariharānanda Āraṇya’s interpretation of smṛti
as mindfulness.
12 A disciple of the Maṭh writes about Dharmamegha Āraṇya that “Some visitors to
Kāpil Maṭh on seeing Swāmījī for the first time reportedly exclaimed, ‘but is he a
Buddhist!’.” He also comments that “to hear him speak about Lord Buddha was an
unforgettable experience. His face would light up, eyes grow moist, voice get choked
while narrating simple things like Aśoka’s inscription . . . or Buddha’s reactions on the
four momentous encounters when he ventured in the streets of the capital on the royal
chariot. We felt as though he was recalling these from living memory” (Chatterjee
2003: 155).
13 Colebrooke 1805: 369–470.
14 Colebrooke also wrote that he had selected the Sāṃkhya doctrines for exposition “on
account of the strong affinity which they manifestly bear to the metaphysical opinions
of the sects of Jina and Buddha” (Colebrooke 1873, vol. II: 240).
15 T. E. Colebrooke (in H. T. Colebrooke 1873, vol. I: 374n1) gives a list of those who at
the time (1873) were thought to support the statement which include Cousin, Hodgson,
Burnouf, St. Hilaire, Jones, and Wilson. In a discussion of Colebrooke’s view of the
issue, in The Life of H. T. Colebrooke by T. E. Colebrooke (H. T. Colebrooke, Miscel-
laneous Essays, Volume I), the author discusses the statement, and argues that it was a
“parenthetical remark as to the origin of some of the doctrines of the Buddha” and that
it has been “frequently referred to, both by those who concur with this opinion and by
those who are opposed to it” (Colebrooke 1873, vol. I: 374). Many Indologists quoted
this statement of Colebrooke in support of their view, such as St. Hilaire, who is quoted
saying: “William Jones, Colebrooke, Burnouf, M. Wilson, et, je pourrais ajouter, tous
les indianistes n’hésitent pas à reconnaître dans le Bouddhisme, devenu plus tard une
religion, un developpement et une copie de Sânkhya du Kapila” St. Hilaire, Des Vedas,
p. 147, quoted in Colebrook 1873, vol. I: 374n1).
16 Some of this and the following paragraphs have previously been published in Jacobsen
2017.
17 The fact that a philosopher sage Kapila is not described in the earliest Buddhist scrip-
ture and that the name mainly occurs in connection with Kapilavastu and the explana-
tion of that name, makes this interpretation highly unlikely. The absence of descriptions
of any philosopher or god named Kapila in the earliest Buddhist scripture is noticeable.
The name Kapilavastu may just be description of the place, “the red-brown place”.
18 Kāpil Maṭh worships Kapil as the ādividvān, the first knower, and the mantra of Kāpil
Maṭh is ādividuṣe kapilāya namaḥ (homage to Kapila who was the first knower).
19 See Jakubzcak 2012 for an evaluation of this statement. Ārāḍa Kālāma seems not to
have been referred to in the early texts of Sāṃkhya or Sāṃkhyayoga.
20 Nonetheless, he accepts that “The Bhāṣya (commentary) of the Yoga-sūtra, however,
older as it is than any other philosophical commentaries, appears to have been com-
posed after the spread of Buddhism” (H. Āraṇya 1981: xxiv).
21 The Sanskrit reads:
jñānaṃ mahad yad dhi mahatsu rājan, vedeṣu sāṃkhyeṣu tathaiva yoge, yac cāpi
dṛṣṭaṃ vividham purāṇaṃ, sāṃkhyāgataṃ tan nikhilaṃ narendra (12.290.103)
yac cetihāseṣu mahatsu dṛṣṭaṃ, yac cārthaśāstre nṛpa śiṣṭajuṣṭe, jñānaṃ ca
loke yad ihāsti kiṃ cit, sāṃkhyāgataṃ tac ca mahan mahātman (12.290.104)
4 The rebirth of Yoga and
the emergence of the
bhadralok yogin
The ideas and practices associated with yogins in nineteenth-century Bengal were
mostly not those associated with and taught in the Pātañjalayogaśāstra. Yogins
seem also to have had a low reputation, especially among the dominant bhad-
ralok, the modern educated upper-class groups of the Bengali society. However,
the yoga philosophy associated with the Pātañjalayogaśāstra, for a variety of rea-
sons, came gradually to be given more attention, and yoga attained a higher status.
This higher status worked together with the establishment of the idea of a different
type of yogin – one following the admired philosophy of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra.
Plurality of yogas and yogins

David White has argued that in India in the nineteenth century, there was a big
difference between the philosophical yoga tradition of the Yogasūtra and the
practices associated with yogins. He characterizes this as the difference between
“yoga practice” and “yogi practice” (White 2012). “Yoga practice,” according to
White, denotes a theory promoted in the Yogasūtra that meditation leads to lib-
eration from the world of suffering. “Yogi practice,” on the other hand, concerns
mainly the attainment of supernormal powers. White argues that a development
in Indian history the last centuries before the renewed interest in the Yogasūtra in
the late nineteenth century was that yogins increasingly had little “yoga practice”
but only “yogi practice”:
The gulf between yoga practice and yogi practice never ceased to widen over
the centuries, such that, by the time of the British Raj, India’s hordes of yogis
were considered by India’s elites to be little more than common criminals,
with their fraudulent practices – utterly at odds with the “true” science of
yoga, which, taught in the YS [Yogasūtra], was practiced by none – save per-
haps for a handful of isolated hermits living high in the Himalayas.
(White 2012: 12)1
White here may have made some exaggerations to make his case that the
Yogasūtra was not of any importance in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
Rebirth of Yoga and the bhadralok yogin 53
in the practical yoga tradition. However, Mallinson and Singleton have recently
argued that the Pātañjalayogaśāstra, nevertheless, must have also been important
to the Indian scholarly tradition in the early modern period because the text is
referred to frequently and “catalogue records of several hundred manuscripts of the
Pātañjalayogaśāstra copied during the early modern period show that throughout
the second millennium the Pātañjalayogaśāstra remained the most important text
on yoga for Indian scholars” (Mallinson and Singleton 2017: xxxvi, n34). On the
other hand, none of the texts summarized in the Yoga volume of the Encyclopedia
of Indian Philosophies from the centuries between Bhāvagaṇeśa (c. 1600–1700),
who was a disciple of Vijñānabhikṣu, and Hariharānanda Āraṇya were written
by Sāṃkhyayogins (Larson and Bhattacharya 2008: 334–367), pointing to the
absence of this tradition of yoga.2 White’s statement does also illuminate to some
degree the situation for Sāṃkhyayoga in that an absence of yogins who practiced
meditation to attain liberation from the world of suffering would imply an absence
also of Sāṃkhyayogins.
In nineteenth-century India, the term “yogi” referred to “in particular the haṭha
yogins of the Nāth linage, but was employed more loosely to refer to a variety of
ascetics, magicians, and street performers” (Singleton 2010: 4). Mark Singleton
argues,
The yogi came to symbolize all that was wrong in certain tributaries of the
Hindu religion. The postural contortions of haṭha yoga were associated with
backwardness and superstition, and many people considered them to have no
place in the scientific and modern yoga enterprise.
(Singleton 2010: 4, italics in original)
Singleton also noted, “The haṭha yogin had always been an agent of ritual pollu-
tion for caste Hindus. . . . This status is a key factor in the exclusion of the yogin
from the Indian yoga renaissance” (Singleton 2010: 7). However, there were more
types of yogins than these dichotomies of White and Singleton would suggest.
A critical discussion of various types of yogins was given by Śriśa Chandra
Vasu (1861–1918)3 in his Introduction to Yoga Philosophy (1915), which was
part of the Sacred Books of the Hindus series published as Yogaśāstra (it included
the Gheraṇḍa Saṃhitā and the Śivasaṃhitā). Yogins for him included not only
beggars, magicians and street performers, and Haṭhayogins but also “sentimental
Yogis of the recluse type” living in solitude in caves or deserts” (Vasu 1915: 3),
which would include Hariharānanda Āraṇya, and furthermore a type of charis-
matic yogin guru who, according to Vasu communicates serenity, happiness and
purity and is a natural leader. Vasu opens his introduction by claiming that yoga
is a science, but apparently only a miniscule part of it. He notes that the useful-
ness of this science has often been questioned and many even deny that it is a
science, and instead classified it along with alchemy and astrology. Vasu wonders
why they have reached that conclusion, “a conclusion contradicting almost all the
religious as well as the philosophical convictions of the ancient and the modern
54 Rebirth of Yoga and the bhadralok yogin
times,” but thinks that, “much disbelief and skepticism is to be attributed to the
ignorance of the real truths of Yoga.” He continues,
In India many understand by the word Yogi, those hideous specimens of

humanity who parade through our streets bedaubed with dirt and ash, –
frightening the children, and extorting money from timid and good-natured
folk by threats, abuse or pertinacity of demand. Of course, all true Yogis
renounce any fraternity with these. If these painted caricatures by any stretch
of language can be called Yogis, surely their yoga (communion) is with ash
and dirt, with mud and money.
(Vasu 1915: 2)
Next, he criticizes the Haṭhayogins, whom he claims have assumed the title of
yogins, and whom
by their bigotry and ignorance have proved a great stumbling-block to the

progress of this science [of yoga]. I mean the Haṭha Yogis, those strange
ascetics who by inflicting tortures and exquisite pains to their flesh, hope to
liberate their spirits. Through a mistaken idea that mind and matter must nec-
essarily be opposed to each other, they have evolved a philosophy of torture,
whose fundamental doctrine seems to be: – the greater power of the spirit, the
less you are pained by tortures. Some of these persons are seen sitting in the
same posture for years together, their legs half paralysed by unuse; some are
seen with their hands upraised, which they never bring down.
(Vasu 1915: 3)
They have done a good deal of mischief, notes Vasu, by engendering a belief that
“Yoga is perfectly unattainable without austerities” (Vasu 1915: 3).
Vasu then hits at a third class, “far more gentle rational, class of Yogis” called
recluses.
They are often very intelligent, and sometimes well educated. But to us, these
persons also seem to labour under a great error. By some false physical anal-
ogy they think that it is impossible to practice Yoga in household life, that to
attain perfection in Yoga one must leave father and mother, wife and children,
and run to deserts or high mountains.
(Vasu 1915: 3)
This type of yogin follows the traditional ideal of the renunciant, saṃnyāsin. He
does not mention Āraṇya in this connection, but Āraṇya’s choice of saṃnyāsa as
the only way to attain the goal of Sāṃkhyayoga, which is kaivalya, goes against
Vasu’s view of yoga. Vasu concludes his condemnation of yogins:
Looking on the disgusting spectacle of the ash-besmeared and lazy beggar,

the horrible self-inflictions of the Haṭha Yogi, and inhuman apathy of the
recluse, no wonder that many should think that Yoga is after all a great hum-
bug, not worth consideration of any sane man.
(Vasu 1915: 3)
However, one group of yogins is favored by Vasu, a type of charismatic guru who
communicates serenity, happiness, and purity, and is a natural leader who pos-
sesses siddhis (yoga powers). But he notes that this class of yogins, “who are called
Siddhas, and who can produce phenomena, are extremely rare” (Vasu 1915: 5).
Vasu describes them in the following way:
You can distinguish a real Yogi out of thousands, by that inexpressible seren-
ity of his countenance, that nameless something about his look, voice and
every movement of his limb, which are the invariable result of Śama and
Dama – control of the mind and the control of senses. Wherever a Yogi goes
he carries happiness and purity with him. It is impossible to see a Yogi with-
out being pleasantly influenced by him. He is the natural leader of human-
kind, his intense self-communion and concentration make him honoured and
respected, without any courting on his part. In short a Yogi carries his cre-
dentials on his face . . . be Yoga a delusion or hallucination it certainly makes
one happy.
(Vasu 1915: 5; italics part of original)
Vasu seems, in other words, to think having charisma and being admired are the
most important characteristics of a “real yogin.” His evaluation of the situation of
yoga is valuable, however, because it shows there was not one simple dichotomy,
between “yoga practice” and “yogi practice,” as White argues, but that there was
a plurality of types of yogins and that different dichotomies were possible. Vasu
also produced a dichotomy, but a different one than White’s. For White, “a hand-
ful of isolated hermits living high in the Himalayas” practiced “the true science of
yoga” (White 2012: 12), but for Vasu, these hermits were yogins laboring “under
a great error” who carried a belief that you have to be an ascetic “to an absurd
extent” to practice yoga (Vasu 1915: 3).
Another approach to the early twentieth-century yoga phenomenon is
encountered in the volumes of Surendranath Dasgupta on the philosophy of
Pātañjalayogaśāstra. He does not make many comments on contemporary yogins
or suggest any connections to the yogin phenomenon but treats yoga purely as
textual and philosophical reality of the past (Dasgupta 1920, 1922). The writings
of Hariharānanda Āraṇya represent much of the same textual and philosophical
Yoga tradition of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra as Dasgupta’s, but Āraṇya engaged
with the contemporary yogin phenomenon and made Sāṃkhyayoga a practice
tradition. Āraṇya commented on yogins whom he considered not real renunciants
but interested mostly in food and wealth. Āraṇya positioned himself on the side
of a scientific and rational yoga teaching, and as an honest yogin seeking to real-
ize its ultimate goal, liberation from rebirth, in contrast to most other saṃnyāsins
he encountered. Āraṇya considered liberation from rebirth as the only legitimate
goal of yoga, and only yoga that had this as its goal was real yoga. As a young
saṃnyāsin, Āraṇya wrote a piece of fiction, an autobiographical novel about a
Hindu renunciant, in Bengali with the title Apūrba bhramaṇbṛttānta (“A Unique
Travelogue”), published in 1907 under the pseudonym Śivadhyān Brahmacārī,
and here he expresses his discontentment with the contemporary yogins. While
the narrative may be more or less fictional, but based to some degree on experi-
ences during his early saṃnyāsin years, the views expressed by the narrator in
the book are most probably his own. In this book, Āraṇya has the main character
express strong criticism about contemporary saṃnyāsins. Śivadhyān observes that
most of them were interested mostly in material wealth and were not real renunci-
ants. The narrator Śivadhyān places himself and his search for Sāṃkhyayoga in
contrast to these other dishonest saṃnyāsins. He comments, “The very word San-
nyasin or religious mendicant has a hallowed association. But now a days many
good for nothing fellows have desecrated its sanctity” (H. Āraṇya 2001: 2). Mak-
ing this distinction between respected and revered yogins and improper and false
yogins was typical for some of the religious developments in Bengal at the time,
but this contrast between proper and improper yogins constitutes an important
element in the creation of modern yoga and has been a continuous concern (see
Alter 2004; Jain 2014).
In the Apūrba Bhramaṇbṛttānta, Āraṇya narrates how Śivadhyān discovers that
most saṃnyāsins he encounters are mainly interested in material wealth. However,
in addition, Śivadhyān is also critical of those contemporary Hindu renunciants
and monastic institutions that are engaged in sevā. He also considers them as devi-
ating from the proper rules of renunciation. This critique of social engagement
separates Āraṇya from many of the Hindu reform movements that focused on
sevā, perhaps attempting an ethicization of the renunciant institution as a response
to modernity and contemporary cultural criticism. Śivadhyān muses,
I came across many good natured fellows who after renunciation did a lot
for human welfare. But renunciation is not necessary for the purpose, nei-
ther should it be the goal of a religious mendicant. Rules and regulations of
renunciation laid down in the scriptures, may not be strictly followed now.
But the principal tenets have to be followed. Otherwise there is little hope for
attaining peace and religion loses much of its significance.
(H. Āraṇya 2001: 3)
Āraṇya does not seem to have considered such examples of ethicization of the
institution of saṃnyāsin acceptable. The condemnation of materialist and dishon-
est saṃnyāsins as well as saṃnyāsins who engage in society signals that Āraṇya
supported ancient paradigms and purist versions of the tradition. His cave dwell-
ing also confirms this. But these statements certainly express a common bhadralok
view that yogins tricked people with fraudulent practices. The real yoga worthy
of admiration was the yoga of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra, which aimed at salvific
liberation, kaivalya. This yoga, Hariharānanda Āraṇya argued, was Sāṃkhyayoga
based on Kapila’s philosophy.
Āraṇya believed the Sāṃkhyayoga teaching of salvific liberation was firmly
based on reasoning. He showed interest in natural sciences and Western philoso-
phy, especially in his later writings, and he considered Sāṃkhyayoga to be in
line with the methods and findings of science. In his last book Karmatattva (first
published in 1931, English translation The Doctrine of Karma in 2008), he stated,
“The final conclusions of modern science are similar to those of the Sāṃkhya
system” (H. Āraṇya 2008b: 32). The emphasis on Yoga’s compatibility with sci-
ence and reason is fundamental to Āraṇya’s Sāṃkhyayoga. In Karmatattva, in
particular, there are many references to science and Western philosophers. Such
alignment with science is a typical feature of modern Hinduism.4 Such views
favor a belief that the Sāṃkhya thinkers of ancient India already knew what West-
ern science discovered two millennia later.
Late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the emergence of a “bhad-
ralok yogin,” a new yogin who was associated with Yogasūtra. He belonged to
India’s modern educated upper-class elites, who had started to become interested
in the old tradition of yoga philosophy of the Yogasūtra and its commentary tradi-
tion. The Orientalists had called attention to the teachings and texts, and it had
created curiosity among Theosophists, Bengali paṇḍits, and others, and a num-
ber of new publications made them available to new audiences, and they became
meaningful to new groups. These new yogins were able to gain admiration and
attain sponsorship from the Indian elites who were looking for and experimenting
with new religious role models. In late nineteenth-century Bengal, the search for
religious identity, it has been argued, “engendered a need for religious specialists
(sadhus, yogis, and gurus), whose prestige as role models of a new ascetic puritan-
ism had substantially increased” (Sardella 2013: 25), and the role of the saṃnyāsin
attained a new significance as the essence of Indian spiritual culture. This new
ascetic puritanism generated a new yogin identity, which was important for the
new phenomenon of modern yoga as a whole. Matthew Clark in his study of the
Daśanāmī saṃnyāsins noted that by the 1890s, “the notion of the saṃnyāsī had
gained unprecedented significance, as the quintessential bearer of Indian spiritual
culture” (Clark 2006: 8). Clark points especially to the influence of Vivekānanda.
Many of these new religious specialists were not Brāhmaṇs, but were from other
upper-caste backgrounds. Their innovations and new interpretations of traditions
had probably some connection to their non-Brāhmaṇ background. Vivekānanda
was from the kayastha caste (considered a scribe caste)5 and so were the famous
Sri Aurobindo; Paramahamsa Yogananda the celebrated author of the Autobiog-
raphy of a Yogi; his brother Bishnu Charan Ghosh the originator of Ghosh yoga;
Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati, the guru of Bhaktivedanta Prabhupad, who was also a
kayastha; and other modern gurus from Bengal.6
Many have noticed the near absence in Bengal of the yoga of the Pātañja
layogaśāstra. On this absence of yoga in Bengal, Vivekānanda observed, “Our
Bengal is the land of Bhakti and of Jnana, where Yoga is scarcely so much as
talked of even” (Vivekānanda 2012a, Vol. VI: 233). June McDaniel has simi-
larly concluded that “while the popular understanding of yoga is disciplined
meditation leading to liberation or mokṣa, this is rarely found in the Bengali
tradition” (McDaniel 2012: 54). Whether it was in spite of this almost absence
of yoga practice or because of it that one of the beginnings of yoga in its modern
form was in Bengal is an intriguing question. The absence of yogins following the
Pātañjalayogaśāstra, as well as an absence of Brāhmaṇ interpreters of Sāṃkhya
and Yoga, did no doubt leave the door open for innovations.
The elevation of the Yogasūtra

The international elevation of the Yogasūtra as the foundation text for yoga
practice for an international and global culture of Yoga is one of the puzzling
phenomena relating to Hinduism in the twentieth century. The promotion of Patañ-
jali’s Yogasūtra as the foundation of yoga has been understood in the context of
nineteenth-century Orientalist as well as Indian nationalist discourses (Newcombe
2009: 987; Singleton 2008).7 The influence of Brāhmo Samāj is also included.
The Bengali monk Vivekānanda probably contributed more than anyone else to
the international redefinition of yoga as well as the growth of its prestige by plac-
ing yoga, defined very widely, at the center of Indian Hindu culture. However,
Vivekānanda was not the origin of the transformation of yoga. It was a few dec-
ades earlier in the nineteenth century that a new public interest in yoga started
to emerge. The Yogasūtra was given new roles, especially by Theosophists and
others. In the 1880s and 1890s, a number of English translations of the Yogasūtra
were published. These provided some of the basis for the presentation and inter-
pretations of Vivekānanda in his book Rāja Yoga (1896). In his lectures on yoga in
the United States in the winter 1995/1996, Vivekānanda responded to the greater
international public interest and opened up new channels of communication about
yoga, and combined the interest in yoga with the concerns of the emerging Indian
nationalism. The Indologist Rājendralāl Mitra’s publication only a decade ear-
lier, in 1883, of the Yogasūtra with the commentary by Bhoja (ca. 1050), also in
English, had not generated a similar international interest. However, the revival of
yoga had become apparent in the 1880s and 1890s.
As early as 1885, a yoga revival in India was referred to in the preface to J.
R. Ballantyne and Govinda Shastri Devi’s Translation of the Yogasūtra with the
Commentary by Bhoja, published by the Theosophical Society in Bombay, with
an “Introduction” by H. S. Olcott and a chapter called “Yoga Vidya” by Madame
Blavatsky (identified only as F.T.S.) (Tātya 1885). It was claimed that this revival
was created by the Theosophical Society – not an unreasonable claim – although
Orientalists such as William Ward, H. T. Colebrooke, H. H. Wilson, and J. R. Bal-
lantyne; Indian paṇḍits such as Śaśadhar Tarkacūḍāmaṇi and the aforementioned
Rājendralāla Mitra;8 the medical doctor Nabin Chandra Paul, who in 1850 or 1851
published A Treatise of the Yoga Philosophy, which mainly concerns breathing
( Paul 1888); the aforementioned Sanskritist and editor Śriśa Chandra Vasu who
published many works on Yoga, among the early ones, with Swami Sabhapaty,
Om: A Treatise on Vedantic Raj Yoga and Philosophy in 1880, which blended
Haṭhayoga, Pātañjalayoga, Vedānta, and Tamil Śaivism (Vasu and Sabhapaty
1880); and the famous Keśab Candra Sen (Keshub Chandra Sen), the leader of
the breakaway group Brāhmo Samāj of India and founder of “New Dispensation”
that merged influences from Hinduism, Christianity, and Western Esotericism are
also included in the list of persons who influenced the revival.
The translations into English of the Yogasūtra in particular laid the founda-
tion of the global transformation of yoga. Mark Singleton has suggested that it
was the Orientalist interest in the Yogasūtra that rescued the text from obscurity
(Singleton 2008: 79). This might be an overstatement but nevertheless correctly
draws attention to the importance of the Orientalists. The first brief account of the
Yogasūtra in English was in 1811 by William Ward, a missionary in Serampore,
in Account of the Writings, Religion and Manners of the Hindoos (Maas 2013:
55; Ward 1811). Colebrooke’s influential article of his 1823 lecture at the Royal
Asiatic Society on the philosophy of the Hindus published in 1827 identified
Yoga as a school of Sāṃkhya – a thesis confirmed by contemporary scholarship.9
An account of Yoga was given in H. H. Wilson’s Sketch of the Religious Sects
of the Hindus in 1846. J. R. Ballantyne’s translation of the first two chapters of
the Yogasūtra, with the commentary of Bhoja, was published in 1852 and 1953.
Rājendralāla Mitras’s translation was, as was noted earlier, published in 1883.
Theosophist M. N. Dvivedi published a book called Raja Yoga or The Practical
Metaphysics of the Vedanta in 1885, and The Yoga-Sutra of Patanjali in 1890. Wil-
liam Q. Judge published a translation in 1889, The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali:
An Interpretation. Translations also appeared in Bengali, which participated in the
emerging debates about the Yogasūtra. Vivekānanda’s interpretations were partly
influenced from Western Esotericism and Christian metaphysical frameworks
that were current in nineteenth-century America (Singleton 2008; see also De
Michelis 2004), but he was also influenced by the Baṅgabāṣī movement (named
after the magazine Baṅgabāṣī), a revivalist or conservative Hindu movement,
and the Bengali translations of the Yogasūtra. These Bengali paṇḍits “helped to
solidify the canonical status of the YS [Yogasūtra]. It became the touchstone text
by which debate on a variety of yogic topics was instituted” (Valdina 2013: 199).
Mark Singleton has suggested that this Orientalist scholarship and Vivekānanda’s
propagation of Rājayoga10 created a false impression that Patañjali’s Yogasūtra
had enjoyed hegemony throughout the course of yoga’s development (Singleton
2008: 79).
The Yogasūtra had previously enjoyed a quite limited influence, and there were
none or hardly any yogins or paṇḍits associated primarily with this text in India
when the Orientalists became interested in it as part of their concern with the
philosophical texts of ancient India. Ballantyne reports from Benares in his 1852
publication that he had great difficulty finding someone to assist him with the
Yogasūtra translation, because “[i]n these days no pandit claims to be teaching
this system” (Ballantyne 1852: ii, quoted in Singleton 2008: 80). The situation
was the same 30 years later. Rājendralāla Mitra writes in the “introduction” to his
translation of the Yogasūtra with the Rājamārtaṇḍa commentary text of Bhoja
that he had hopes of reading the work with the assistance of a professional yogin,
but that he was disappointed because he could not find any paṇḍit in Bengal “who
had made Yoga the special subject of his study” (Mitra 1883: xc). The situation
of Yoga in Bengal was, in other words, the same as with Sāṃkhya: a lack of
interest among paṇḍits. A lack of interest in Sāṃkhya among paṇḍits indicated a
lack of interest also in the Yoga school of philosophy since Yoga was a school of
Sāṃkhya philosophy. However, Yoga had by the seventeenth century also become
part of the discourse of Vedānta through texts such as Śivānanda Sarasvatī’s
Yogacintāmaṇi (1650–1700)11 and the Yoga Upaniṣads, and these interpretations
reflect not only the Haṭhayoga religious context of Yoga but also the philoso-
phy of Vedānta, which had become synthesized with Yoga in these texts. But this
had apparently not caused increased interest in the Yoga system among paṇḍits
in Benares or in Bengal. However, the fact that the Yogasūtra together with its
auto-commentary originally represented an interpretation of Sāṃkhya, and that
the Sāṃkhya philosophy of the text had become represented in discourses such as
Haṭhayoga and Vedānta, was perhaps one motivation for Hariharānanda Āraṇya
to create a living Sāṃkhyayoga tradition. He thought perhaps that they were mis-
taken in the way they presented the Pātañjalayogaśāstra.
Bhadraloks, the reconstruction of “authentic” religion and

the faith in science and reason
The identification of a yoga philosophy different from the practices of contem-
porary yogins was part of the renewal of the Hindu tradition by the elites. Main
sources of the renewal of Hindu traditions by these elites were new institutions of
education and knowledge, responses to Christian missions, the Orientalists’ inter-
est in ancient Indian traditions, and a large number of published books, journals,
and magazines. The English translation of the Yogasūtra with Bhoja’s commen-
tary by Rājendralāla Mitra represented an early effort to inform about yoga as phi-
losophy and as something different from the yogins found in contemporary Indian
society. His efforts related to the broader Orientalist attempts to construct a golden
age and the attempts to create a new definition of Hinduism by separating a textual
tradition from the lived experience and practice (Singleton 2008). Mitra refers to
practices of contemporary yogins as practices of “fanatical, deluded mendicants”:
Paṇḍits, when called upon to explain, frequently, if not invariably, mix up the
tenets of Pataṉjali’s Yoga with those of the Tantras, the Puráṇas, the Tantric
Sañhitás, The Paṉcharátras, and the Bhagavadgítá – works which have very
dissimilar and discordant tenets to inculcate. Some of the later avowedly
Yoga works are, moreover, exceedingly allegorical and mystical in their
descriptions, and in them the purport of the instruction is buried in a mass
of absurdity. Practices, too, have been inculcated in them which are certainly
repulsive. In judging, however, of the nature of Pataṉjali’s doctrine it is unfair
to associate it with the vagaries of fanatical, deluded mendicants, or with the
modifications and adaptations which it has undergone in the hands of Tantrics
and the Puráṇics.
(Mitra 1883: lvi)
Mitra’s translation can be understood as a bhadralok yoga project of separating
a supposed Brāhmaṇical or upper-class and caste yoga textual tradition from the
practices of contemporary yogins who were considered to be at odds with the
“true” science of yoga. The elites had been influenced by Western traditions, but
they also reacted against them, and the bhadralok yoga project can be seen as part
of the construction of the new Hinduism.
The bhadralok yoga project seems to represent a continuation of ideas, values
and attitudes promoted by Brāhmo Samāj, although not necessarily its bias toward
Advaita Vedānta. Brāhmo Samāj, launched in 1828 under the leadership of Rām
Mohan Roy, was the most important organization in the first part (up to the 1860s)
of the encounter between Indian and Western intellectuals, and it has been argued
that Brāhmo Samāj probably was the most important movement that formed the
Bengali culture of the nineteenth century (Kopf 1979). It has been claimed that
Brāhmo Samāj was the only religious movement in Bengal in the nineteenth cen-
tury that “penetrated all strata of Bengali society” (Ray 1965: 4). David Kopf, in
his well-known study of the Brāhmo Samāj, mentions a large number of influ-
ences of Brāhmo Samāj on Hinduism (Kopf 1979: 314–316). Some of these influ-
ences include the selection of the scriptural sources Vedas and Vedānta as the holy
book of Hindus; the earliest systematic theology of the Hindu religion (Hindu-
ism); the symbolic interpretation of Hindu rituals; the promotion of Hindu dharma
as social service and the re-evaluation of Upaniṣadic ethics; Indian nationalism;
a rationalist tradition that promoted piety, morality, and achievement, and denied
the efficiency of image worship; and the promotion of a rationalism in which reli-
gious principles “were raised through analysis and synthesis to an abstract plane
to appeal to the intellectuals” (Kopf 1979: 316). Kopf characterizes Brāhmoism
as “the thinking man’s religion” (Kopf 1979: 316). Brāhmo philosophers, Kopf
writes,
waged a relentless struggle to denude Hinduism of its “excesses” at the same

time as they reconstructed the “authentic” Hindu tradition by endowing it with
an intellectual respectability on a par with other major religious traditions.
(Kopf 1979: 44)
Kopf emphasizes faith in science and in reason as an important influence of

Brāhmo Samāj:
Faith in science and in reason were so crucial to all Bengali liberals until well
into the twentieth century that I think we are justified in looking upon these
leading ideas as the most fundamental and characteristic feature of Hindu
modernist ideology.
(Kopf 1979: 48)
Rām Mohan Roy had singled out Vedānta as the true source of the Hindu reli-
gion, and Brāhmo Samāj continued this promotion of Vedānta. This promotion,
and perhaps other influences caused Vedānta to become the dominant philoso-
phy of the bhadralok intelligentsia, and from the 1840s, writes David Kopf, “the
Vedanta, updated and revitalized by contemporary progressive values from the
West, served as the Bible of the Hindu reformers” (Kopf 1979: 157).
Historian have argued that the 1870s was a period of religious ferment in Ben-
gal, different in quality from the previous period, which was characterized by the
impact of European Rationalism and Christianity on the one hand and the reforms
of Rām Mohan Roy and Brāhmo Samāj on the other (Nath 2011). They argue
that up until around 1870, the religious controversies of intellectual Hindus were
secondary to the primary aim of combating European criticism by way of agitat-
ing for social reforms. However, in the 1870s, there appeared a dissatisfaction
with the Brāhmo Samāj creed and “religious seekers” were looking for “a faith
that would show the way to personal illumination” (Nath 2011: 43). By the end
of the 1870s, Nath notes, social reform was relegated to second place “by those
with whom the religious quest superseded all other questionings” (Nath 2011: 42).
Keśab Candra Sen is a representative figure of this search for personal illumina-
tion and became an important feature of the spiritual unrest in the 1870s. How-
ever, Rāmakṛṣṇa Paramahaṃsa, who was perhaps the most celebrated religious
figure in Bengal of this period, also promoted the pursuit of personal illumination.
Rāmakṛṣṇa Paramahaṃsa attracted a number of bhadralok people, among them
the famous Vivekānanda, who had a background in Brāhmo Samāj and Vedānta.
Rāmakṛṣṇa’s claim that he was able to see gods and goddesses seems to have
given some people the assurance of the validity of ancient religious truth and
the ability of personal realization. Vedānta appealed also probably because of its
claim to make people able to distinguish between popular religious practice and
the higher religious truth. From the 1870s, the elites in Kolkata began to turn
toward forms of religion, and this turn has been referred to as the “new Hindu
movement” (Nath 2011). There was an intellectual and religious revival among
the educated upper castes in Kolkata, which argued that India was a great ancient
civilization with a spiritual message that the goal of religion was an experience,
personal enlightenment, or self-realization (Nath 2011; Sarkar 2000). The ideas
that went into making this movement are, according to Nath, threefold: first, the
idea about a rational religion; second, that of personal illumination through reli-
gion; and third, that of an ancient Indian civilization “which was thought to be of
paramount relevance to the India that was going the Western way” (Nath 2011: 11).
The educated Hindu upper castes now turned away from the self-critical and
social questioning of the earlier era and toward a defense of the Hindu traditions
(Nath 2011; Sarkar 2000; Sen 1993, 2010). Scholars such as Max Müller made
the Sanskrit language and the Veda central to the academic project of understand-
ing religion, and the romantic approach to Indian religion had become reinforced
with the engagement of the Theosophists. The spiritual truth of ancient India was
seen as a source of dignity and a contrast to the contemporary religious scene.
Another Bengali historian, Amiya P. Sen, commenting on the same period of the
last decades of the nineteenth century, has identified one of the aspects of Hindu-
Bengali intellectual life as “revalidating older values and paradigms” (Sen 2010: 1).
The rebirth of Sāṃkhyayoga can be understood as part of the cultural process that
dominated the new Hindu movement in Bengal. Ancient India was seen as being
able to supply a rational religion relevant to the search for personal illumina-
tion as well as being a source of dignity and a contrast to the contemporary reli-
gious scene. Sāṃkhyayoga could give to yoga a dignity that contrasted with the
contemporary yogin phenomenon and supplied a rational religion relevant to the
search for personal illumination. Born in 1869 and raised in the vicinity of urban
Kolkata, Hariharānanda Āraṇya came from a zamindar (landowner) family and
received a modern education as well as Sanskrit tuition at a college in Kolkata. He
was certainly very aware of Brāhmo Samāj, Rāmakṛṣṇa Paramahaṃsa,12 Keśab
Candra Sen, the Theosophical Society, discourse about Hinduism, the growing
interest in yoga and the role of the saṃnyāsin, and the growing interest in the
Pātañjalayogaśāstra and the Sāṃkhya tradition in contemporary intellectual cir-
cles. Hariharānanda Āraṇya seems to belong to this category of persons described
by Nath (2011; Nath does not mention Āraṇya), who came to consider the reli-
gious quest and the search for personal illumination superior to any other concern.
The new bhadralok yogin

Rationality, the goal of personal illumination, and the return to the knowledge
traditions of ancient Indian civilization are central characteristics of the texts and
teachings of Hariharānanda Āraṇya and the institution of Kāpil Maṭh. The pro-
motion of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra and the Sāṃkhyayoga philosophy as rational
teachings and paths to personal enlightenment is here joined with the idea that
India was a great ancient civilization. Āraṇya seems to have believed that this
ancient teaching could be re-enacted in the contemporary world. The focus was
not on history and contemporary politics, but on elaborating on vāsanās and
saṃskāras (impressions of past experiences), by which ancient spiritual inclina-
tions and knowledge had been preserved, and the attainment of the contentless
witness consciousness, puruṣa beyond time and outside of history. This focus on
vāsanās and saṃskāras and on puruṣa made restarting the ancient philosophy of
Sāṃkhyayoga as the basis for a monastic practice possible. The past had not been
lost forever, but was stored in the present in the individuals as their vāsanās and
saṃskāras. Āraṇya’s choice to become a saṃnyāsin connects to the re-evaluation
of the role of the saṃnyāsin in late nineteenth-century Bengal. The goal of per-
sonal realization and romantization of ancient Indian civilization created an ide-
alized picture of the saṃnyāsin, exemplified in such varied manifestations as
Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyaya’s novel Ānandamaṭh (1882) and the choices
of Vivekānanda and the other disciples of Rāmakṛṣṇa, and influenced probably
several other bhadralok youth to become saṃnyāsins. The novel Ānandamaṭh
was probably a product of this admiration, but also acted as a stimulus to foster the
popularity of the heroic ascetic. The idea of the heroic celibate ascetic made sev-
eral youth and emerging adults among the Bengali bhadralok choose the lifestyle
of celibacy or of a saṃnyāsin. Jason Fuller has pointed out one of the basic moti-
vations arguing, “Following the suppression of the rebellion in 1857 there arose
in the 1870s a series of religious revivalist movements which sought to recover
and reclaim an Indian ‘tradition’ which had not been colonized” (2009: 162–163).
An important feature of the Sāṃkhyayoga of the Yogasūtra in the nineteenth
century was that no one practiced it. Ram Shankar Bhattacharya writes that prior
to Hariharānanda Āraṇya,
the texts of the Sāṃkhya-yoga system had become quite distorted. . . . Nobody
knew what spiritual practice was associated with the system. There were no
Sāṃkhya organizations or living Sāṃkhya practitioners known in India in
Ācārya Swāmījī’s [Hariharānanda Āraṇya’s] time.
Sāṃkhyayoga, according to Bhattacharya, was not associated with any persons.

Sāṃkhyayoga and the Yogasūtra were included in the traditions of ṣaḍdarśanas
and were connected historically with the Brāhmaṇical traditions, and they were
unrelated to other nineteenth century yogins and thus had no association with
their assumed immorality and ritual pollution. The Sāṃkhyayogins of Kāpil Maṭh
and their supporters had an upper-class bhadralok background (but not necessar-
ily Brāhmaṇ background). Sāṃkhyayoga was defined as different from the yoga
of all the other yogins; it was a Sanskrit philosophical tradition that belonged
to the elite. The other yoga traditions, writes Ram Shankar Bhattacharya “suffer
from looseness, bigotry and exaggeration” (Bhattacharya 2003: 147). In Bhat-
tacharya’s view, “The authenticity and reliability of the treatises on the Yoga sys-
tem other than the Pātañjala Yogadarśana is questionable.” And he adds, “[t]his
was Swāmījī’s [Dharmamegha Āraṇya] view” (Bhattacharya 2003: 147). That the
Pātañjalayogaśāstra and Sāṃkhyayoga philosophy was a yoga considered proper
for educated persons from an upper-caste background because it was practiced by
no one might very possibly, therefore, have been a factor in its revival.
Yogasūtra with and without the Bhāṣya

Another issue that may have influence the revival of Sāṃkhyayoga in Bengal in
the nineteenth century is the role of the Yogabhāṣya or Vyāsabhāṣya, the auto-
commentary on the Yogasūtra. Colebrooke had introduced his readers not only to
the Yogasūtra but also to the Yogabhāṣya, which he attributed to an author named
Vyāsa (Maas 2013). Moreover, Colebrooke referred to two (sub-)commentaries
of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra, Vācaspatimiśra’s Tattvavaiśāradī (c. 950–1000 CE)
and the Yogavārttika of Vijñānabhikṣu (sixteenth century CE) (Maas 2013). How-
ever, the first printed English translation of a section of the Yogasūtra did not
include these commentaries. Ballantyne edited the first two chapters of this work
without the Yogabhāṣya, but together with extracts from Bhoja’s Rājamārtaṇḍa
(c. 1000 CE), and, as was noted earlier, published it in 1852 and 1853, along
with the English translation (Ballantyne 1852). Govinda Shastri Deva, who trans-
lated Chapters 3 and 4 into English,13 continued the translation. Tookaram Tātya
revised Ballantyne’s and Deva’s translations, and they were reprinted in a single
volume for the Theosophical Society in 1885 (Tātya 1885). Rājendralāla Mitra’s
translation of the Yogasūtra did not include the auto-commentary Vyāsabhāṣya.
However, the Vyāsabhāṣya is the most important text of the Sāṃkhyayoga tradi-
tion, and since these translations excluded the Yogabhāṣya, they seem to have
promoted, unintentionally perhaps, a removal of Yoga from its Sāṃkhyayoga
philosophical context. Rājayoga came instead to denote the Yoga of the Yogasūtra,
and Rājayoga was a term that had come to mean the philosophy and practice of
Vedānta (see Dvivedi’s Rāja-Yoga, published in 1885) as well as Yoga in the line-
age of Keśab Candra Sen, the Theosophists, and others influenced by Western
Esoteric traditions (De Michelis 2004; Killingley 2014). The idea that Yoga was
Rājayoga was part of the attempt to separate Hindu religiosity into separate yogas.
Keśab Candra Sen introduced the fourfold scheme of bhakti, karma, rāja, and
jñana yoga, but Vivekānanda used them systematically (Collected Works, Vol.
VII: 71), and he popularized the identity of Rājayoga with Patañjali’s Yogasūtra.14
De Michelis has argued that “rājayoga as defined by Vivekananda was the key-
stone of Neo-Vedanta’s ‘orthopraxis’ and the concept of ‘realization’ ” and “the
keystone of Neo-Vedanta’s orthodoxy” (De Michelis 2004: 149). With Rājayoga,
Yoga was a means to the realization of the truth of Advaita Vedānta, and some of
the Sāṃkhyayoga teaching of the text was overshadowed.
Hariharānanda Āraṇya’s promotion of Sāṃkhyayoga might also be understood
as an opposition to the predominance of Vedānta as the central philosophy of the
bhadralok intelligentsia as well as an attempt to correct misleading interpretations.
The insistence that Yoga was Sāṃkhyayoga is found in Colebrooke’s publication
and in translations of the Yogasūtra, and other translations also stressed the idea
that there are few differences between Sāṃkhya and Yoga. Āraṇya’s understanding
shows kinship to this lineage of modern textual history of the Yogasūtra. Āraṇya
believed that Sāṃkhya was the oldest philosophy and that Yoga was Sāṃkhya, but
he did not enter into long debates about the Advaita Vedānta views in his texts.
Āraṇya had realized that original Yoga was Sāṃkhyayoga and not Rājayoga, and
wanted a return of Yoga to its ancient origin. The Yoga commentary texts Āraṇya
wrote are traditionalist, depending on Sanskrit textual traditions and scholarship.
His Yoga commentary texts built on and promoted the Vyāsabhāṣya and Sanskrit
textual commentaries on this text. Āraṇya’s engagement with the Vyāsabhāṣya
showed him that the Yogasūtra originally was a text of Sāṃkhyayoga and not
Rājayoga or Vedānta.
Is Āraṇya’s Yoga modern?

A short comparison of Hariharānanda Āraṇya with Vivekānanda, the founder of
modern yoga, illustrates to what degree Āraṇya’s Yoga can be considered to be
modern. Vivekānanda and Āraṇya were both bhadralok yogins and saṃnyāsins,
and seekers of personal illumination. But their careers and interpretations differ
markedly and, in spite of their similarities, two more different yogins can perhaps
not be imagined. Vivekānanda was a Hindu missionary, a guru who traveled to
where his disciples gathered. He wanted the saṃnyāsin to contribute to the Indian
nationalist project. Hariharānanda Āraṇya withdrew into a cave and did not get
involved in the world but laid the foundation for a new Sāṃkhyayoga orthodoxy.
Vivekānanda’s Rāja Yoga became a model for the worldwide Vedāntic interpreta-
tion of yoga of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Āraṇya perhaps reacted
against this interpretation of yoga of the 1880s and 1890s, which had identified
the Yoga of the Yogasūtra as Rājayoga and connected it to Vedāntic and Theoso-
phist and Western esoteric interpretations of Yoga. Vivekānanda supported a mon-
ist interpretation of Yoga and wrote,
Is going back to God the higher state, or not? The philosophers of the Yoga
school emphatically answer that it is. . . . man is God, and goes back to Him
again. . . . Every soul must disintegrate to become God.
(Vivekānanda 2012, Vol. I: 198–199)
Such Vedāntic interpretations of a Sāṃkhyayoga text must have been a source of

immense frustration for someone knowledgeable about Sāṃkhyayoga philosophy
of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra. The goal of Sāṃkhyayoga is not union but kaivalya:
aloneness. Kaivalya does not refer to disintegration, but to isolation. The idea is
the isolation of the puruṣa, not only from matter but also from the other selves.
There is a plurality of selves, according to Sāṃkhyayoga, and this plurality never
disintegrates to become a unity. Hariharānanda Āraṇya stated, “The self cannot
merge with anything. . . . Restlessness is the impurity of mind. Calmness is its
purity” (H. Āraṇya 2003: 103). Matter is one, prakṛti, but selves are plural, and
the selves are separate from the single prakṛti. Theosophists’ interpretations of
yoga with their emphasis on occult powers seemed to connect yoga to those con-
temporary yogins who were despised by the upper castes. Āraṇya was probably
influenced by the elevation of the Yogasūtra by the Orientalists, who gave high
value to Sāṃkhya as a rational philosophy, as well as the elevation of Kapila
as the originator of both Hindu and Buddhist philosophy, as was discussed in
Chapter 3.
Vivekānanda disparaged the Vedānta of the forest and the cave, and favored
what he called “practical Vedānta” and insisted that his monist philosophy should
transform society. Hariharānanda Āraṇya apparently did not consider “practical
Sāṃkhyayoga” a possible interpretation. Amiya P. Sen writes about Vivekānanda,
The life and labours of Swami Vivekananda most prominently capture some
of the tensions that came to characterize colonial Bengal in the closing years
of the nineteenth century. There is, for instance, the tension between pub-
lic engagement of a social activist and the reclusive detachment of a monk,
between rational reformism and realizing the spiritual potentialities in man.
(Sen 2010: 91)
This tension was present in Vivekānanda, argues Sen, but it indeed also illus-
trated well by the difference between Vivekānanda and Āraṇya.
Another dissimilarity between Vivekānanda and Hariharānanda Āraṇya is that
Vivekānanda was a missionary and a social reformer. Unlike a traditional guru, he
did not wait for disciples to come to him seeking knowledge. He was a traveling
lecturer who sought a public to convince them of his message. This is a mark of
the modern Hindu guru who seeks publicity and travels the globe. Hariharānanda
Āraṇya did the opposite; he sought solitude and meditation. Vivekānanda inter-
preted Vedānta to mean the teaching of the oneness of all creation and that as
a consequence of this sevā should be a part of the activity of the monks. They
should go out and be active in the world. According to Hariharānanda Āraṇya,
one did not have to become a monk to perform sevā. Vivekānanda transformed the
discourse of asceticism, yoga, and devotion into a nationalist idiom of “service to
the nation” (van der Veer 2001: 48). Hariharānanda Āraṇya remained aloof and
disconnected from contemporary politics and instead actualized the Yoga philoso-
phy of the past, which was stored in the present, he believed, in his vāsanās and
saṃskāras. Yoga was personal illumination, not social reform.
The teaching of Āraṇya represents a modern Sāṃkhyayoga tradition and was
probably in response to the search for a puritan and ascetic Hindu philosophy
that characterized the so-called Bengali renaissance and the interaction with
the colonial power. Brian Hatcher has emphasized how the “concern for sense-
restraint emerges from the colonial world of the bhadralok” (Hatcher 2007:
309). Jason Fuller argues that the revivalists were as “modern” as the reform-
ers: “Despite the very real differences between reformers and revivalists in the
colonial period, a holistic reading of the evidence indicates that most revivalists
were every bit as ‘modern’ as their so-called modernising and reform-minded
brethren” (Fuller 2009: 161–163). This means perhaps that Āraṇya, even though
he revived the ancient institution of the Sāṃkhyayoga saṃnyāsin, was as modern
as Vivekānanda. However, they also represented opposite trends.
This short comparison of Āraṇya with the founder of modern yoga Vivekānanda
illustrates that Āraṇya is not modern in the same way as Vivekānanda, but seems
to represent a form of new orthodoxy, an attempt to revive an ancient tradition but
not to reform it or use it for reforms. Āraṇya instead revived Yoga as Sāṃkhyayoga
philosophy and pursued the lifestyle of a traditional saṃnyāsin disconnected from
society.
One question about the background of Āraṇya’s Sāṃkhyayoga remains.
A Hindu ascetic initiated Āraṇya into saṃnyāsin. Who was this ascetic? Was he
a teacher, and was he a source of any of Āraṇya’s Sāṃkhyayoga teachings? Who
was Hariharānanda Āraṇya’s guru? Several authors on yoga in nineteenth-century
India have hinted at the possibility of the existence of isolated yogins in caves
who represented an unbroken linage of the ancient traditions of the Yogasūtra.
Did such Sāṃkhyayoga ascetics exist, and did Āraṇya come into contact with
such an ascetic? This will be the topic of the next chapter. I will discuss whether
Āraṇya learned Sāṃkhyayoga from a guru of a living Sāṃkhyayoga tradition.
I will also look at Āraṇya’s fictional autobiography and other material that tries to
identify sources of his Sāṃkhyayoga teaching.
Notes
1 White refers to Oman 1908: 3–30.
2 The authors included are Nārāyaṇa Tīrtha (c. 1600–1700), Nāgojī Bhaṭṭa or Nāgeśa (c.
1700–1750), Sadāśivendra Sarasvatī (c. 1700–1800), Anantadeva Pandita (c. 1800–
1900), Śaṃkarācārya (nineteenth century), Balarāma Udāsin (b. 1855), and Svāmin
Hariprasāda (first quarter of the twentieth century). None of them are identified as
Sāṃkhyayogins.
3 Śriśa Chandra Vasu was the translator of the first and most popular editions of “classi-
cal” Haṭhayoga available to a wide, English-speaking audience (Singleton 2013: 41).
Singleton notes, “His translations of haṭhayoga texts bear many of the same judgments
that are to be seen in the works of Vivekananda, Blavatsky, and others. In Vasu’s view
haṭhayoga practitioners are characterized by ‘bigotry and ignorance’ and readers are
warned to beware of ‘the danger of degenerating into haṭha Yoga’ ” (Singleton 2013:
41).
4 On the well-known similar phenomenon in Buddhism see Lopez 2002.
5 In a remarkably unfair book review in the American Journal of Theology, the fact that
Vivekānanda was not a Brāhmaṇ was used to discredit him: “The Swami’s Yoga is
neither Hinduism nor Christianity, but a mixture of both. And as the Swami’s Yoga,
so is the Swami himself. Neither of them is the genuine article. In the circumstances
it could scarcely be otherwise. The Swami is not a Brahman, but a half-Christianized
Sudra, and has consequently no right to the self-assumed title. . . . His assumption of
the Swami is from the Hindu point of view as improper as it would be to add the M.A.
to the B.A. degree without the university’s authority. So, also, in the matter of his dress.
It is not the genuine Yogi dress; and the life he is living is not Yogi life” (Macdonald
1898: 402). The review mentions Rājendralāla Mitra and states approvingly that he is
a Brāhmaṇ (Macdonald 1898: 403).
6 Changes in the job market may have played a role for these new career choices of
kayasthas.
7 The creation of yoga gymnastics for the sake of health happened in the twentieth cen-
tury and was not only, nor mainly a Bengali development, but also influenced by the
attention yoga had already received, both in India and globally, not least because of
developments in Bengal.
8 By the 1880s, paṇḍits had started to publish editions of the Yogasūtra.
9 “His now famous essay ‘On the philosophy of the Hindus. Part 1: Sánkhya’ (Cole-
brooke 1827) was not only one of the ‘first results of modern Indological research,’
(Halbfass 1988: 84) but arguably the first academic publication on Yoga philosophy
based on primary Sanskrit sources – in this case on manuscripts – at all” (Maas 2013:
55).
10 For the history of the concept, see Birch 2014.
11 Ram Shankar Bhattacharya, in his introduction to the English summary of the
Yogacintāmaṇi, writes, “This text truly attempts to integrate Pātañjala Yoga with Haṭha
Yoga unlike most other Haṭha Yoga texts” (Larson and Bhattacharya 2008: 535).
12 According to informants at Kāpil Maṭh, Hariharānanda Āraṇya, in his childhood, met
Rāmakṛṣṇa Paramahaṃsa once.
13 They were published in the periodical the Pandit, Vol. 3–6, fasc. 28–67 (1868–1871).
14 For Vivekānanda, any path towards spiritual perfection was called yoga. The other
yogas were identified with the descriptions of the Bhagavadgītā.
5 Gurus, book printing, and the
Sāṃkhyayoga lineage
In this chapter, I will consider the likelihood that Hariharānanda Āraṇya did
indeed meet a Sāṃkhyayogin ascetic who belonged to an ancient surviving line-
age of a Sāṃkhyayoga tradition. I will discuss the possibility that Sāṃkhyayoga
before Āraṇya was not a dead tradition, but that there was an oral tradition, as
suggested by Farquahar (Farquahar 1920: 289), White, and others, that was per-
haps “extending back to Patanjali himself” (White 2014: 224) and that Āraṇya
encountered this tradition.
The famous founder of Ārya Samāj, Dayānanda Sarasvatī, spent nine years in
the late nineteenth century wandering in the Himalayas looking for a yogin liv-
ing in a cave, which is how he defined the authentic yogin, but without success
(Sarasvati 1978). Cave dwelling was considered a sign of being a “real” yogin, but
Sarasvatī did not find anyone. Even if Dayānanda Sarasvatī was not able to find an
ascetic living in a cave in the Himalayas, were there nevertheless a few undiscov-
ered, isolated ascetics living there, and was there a Sāṃkhyayogin from a lineage
going back to Patañjali among them? David White opened up this possibility when
he stated, “The ‘true’ science of yoga, which, taught in the YS [Yogasūtra], was
practiced by none – save perhaps for a handful of isolated hermits living high in the
Himalayas” (White 2012: 12), and in a later publication, White directly claimed
that Āraṇya had received instruction from such a yogin who belonged to a lineage
going back to Patañjali (White 2014: 224). But did such Sāṃkhyayogin exist?
Rājendralāla Mitra, in the “preface” to his translation of the Yogasūtra with the
Commentary of Bhoja, writes that he had hopes of reading the work with a “pro-
fessional Yogi” but was disappointed. “I could find no Paṇḍit in Bengal who had
made Yoga the special subject of his study,” Mitra writes (1883: xc). He continues,
The only person I met at Benares who could help me was most exorbitant in
his demands. He cared not for the world and its wealth, and the only condition
under which he would teach me was strict pupillage under Hindu rules – living
in his hut and ever following his footsteps – to which I could not submit.
(Mitra 1883: xc)
So he did indeed meet one person who claimed to be able to explain to him the
Yogasūtra. However, we do not know anything about the religious or philosophical
70 Gurus, book printing, and Sāṃkhyayoga
affiliation of that person or the basis for the claim. But does this hint from Mitra and
claim from White mean that the Sāṃkhyayoga tradition of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra,
nevertheless, was a living tradition before its revival by Hariharānanda Āraṇya? Is
it possible that Āraṇya met one of these hermits who initiated him into this tradi-
tion? In other words, was there a living Sāṃkhyayoga tradition in India throughout
the nineteenth century, and did Hariharānanda Āraṇya come into contact with such
a tradition? Or is living Sāmkhyayoga a form of “modern” yoga created in an
environment that favored rationality, ethics of the philosophy of ancient India, and
disfavored rituals and priestly power? In other words, is the Sāṃkhyayoga of the
Kāpil Maṭh tradition altogether a new tradition of yoga, although based on ancient
texts and institutions, that responded to the needs of the Bengali bhadralok for a
spiritual approach to religion based on the idea that India was a great ancient civi-
lization and with the goal of personal enlightenment – i.e., responding to the same
processes that created modern yoga – or is it a continuation of an ancient linage
based on an unbroken oral transmission?
David White in his biography on the Yogasūtra (2014) has argued that the
Yogasūtra tradition in the centuries preceding the nineteenth century had pri-
marily become a dead tradition. White writes, “By the sixteenth or seventeenth
century Patanjali’s Yoga system had largely become the abandoned stepchild of
Indian philosophy” (White 2014: 75). However, the Yogasūtra probably had not
been completely abandoned, but it had become dominated by other interpretations
it seems, especially that of Vedānta and Haṭhayoga (see Mallinson and Singleton
2017). However, in his book, White, surprisingly, makes one exception to his
claim that the Yoga system had become an abandoned tradition in the centuries
prior to the nineteenth century and was then revived by Orientalists, Theoso-
phists, Vivekānanda, and others. He claims there was a living oral tradition of
Sāṃkhyayoga in northern India in the nineteenth century that stretched back to
the original Sāṃkhyayoga tradition of Patañjali and the environment in which
the Yogasūtra was originally composed in the fifth century CE (White 2014:
223–224). The inheritor of this oral tradition, White claims, was the tradition of
Hariharānanda Āraṇya. He claims that Āraṇya, during the years he spent in a cave
in Bihar (1892–1898), “received instruction” from a Swami who “belonged to a
lineage extending back to Patanjali himself” (White 2014: 224).1 There is, how-
ever, no evidence to support this claim; none is presented in White’s book.2 That
Hariharānanda Āraṇya “received instruction” from a Sāṃkhyayogin while living
in caves in Bihar (1892–1898) is not part of the oral tradition of Kāpil Maṭh or any
historical memory of the tradition of Yoga that Hariharānanda Āraṇya founded,
nor is it mentioned in any previous text, and it seems perhaps to be based on
an inaccurate memory of texts White has read. However, the claim raises again
the question of what was the source of Hariharānanda Āraṇya’s yoga teaching
and, not least, why does Āraṇya’s Sāṃkhyayoga appear traditional and “authen-
tic”3 to the extent that scholars believe it to be a representative of the “original”
Sāṃkhyayoga and even of an oral tradition with connections to the original line-
age going back to Patañjali? Why is Hariharānanda Āraṇya’s yoga practice and his
commentaries on the Pātañjalayogaśāstra perceived as an exception to the main
Gurus, book printing, and Sāṃkhyayoga 71
claim that the Pātañjalayogaśāstra tradition was mainly an abandoned tradition
before it was revived and reinvented by Orientalists, Theosophists, Rājendralāla
Mitra, Vivekānanda, and others?
The first reason Āraṇya has been perceived as an exception to the main claim
that the Pātañjalayogaśāstra tradition was mainly an abandoned tradition before
it was revived and reinvented in the nineteenth century is that it has been difficult
to understand the origin of Āraṇya’s Sāṃkhyayoga. Āraṇya prohibited his disci-
ples from writing his biography, and his disciples have obeyed that command. As a
result, Kāpil Maṭh provides very little information about the pre-saṃnyāsin years
of Hariharānanda Āraṇya. Only very basic information is known: Āraṇya was
from Howrah, on the outskirts of Kolkata, on the west bank of the river Hooghly.
His father was a zamindar and owned large areas of agricultural land in Bengal,
and the family belonged to the bhadralok upper caste and upper class of Kolkata.
His caste was kayastha, one of the foremost non-Brāhmaṇ bhadralok castes in
Kolkata (as was noted in Chapter 4, it is the same caste as Vivekānanda and a
number of Bengali and other Indian gurus of the modern era), and his family name
was Bose. He was a younger contemporary of Vivekānanda. Āraṇya received
college education in Presidency College in Kolkata but left college education to
become a saṃnyāsin.4 He wrote in Bengali and Sanskrit, but he knew English.
A few short texts were written in English on request such as the introduction to
his Dharmapadam, but he asked others to translate the Kāpilāśramīya Pātañjal
Jogdarśan into the English and selections of his texts such as the excerpts in the
Sāṃkhya Catechism.
A second reason Āraṇya has been perceived as an exception to the main claim
that the Pātañjalayogaśāstra tradition was mainly a dead tradition before it was
revived and reinvented is that he lived the life of a traditional saṃnyāsin. A third
reason Āraṇya has been perceived as an exception to the main claim is probably
his fondness for cave dwelling and because he initiated the tradition of cave dwell-
ing at Kāpil Maṭh. As we have seen earlier Āraṇya first dwelled in the caves in
Barabar Hills, next to Gaya in Bihar, from 1892 to 1898. After moving around for
some years visiting places such as Varanasi, Haridwar, and Uttarakashi, he built
a small āśram for himself in Kurseong, south of Darjeeling (see Āraṇya 2001,
preface), and after staying for some periods in Kapil Āśram in Triveni in Hooghly,
he finally settled in Madhupur, now situated in Jharkhand, in Kāpil Maṭh, where
a devotee Haridās Majumdār bought a property and had a small āśrama built
for him. This āśrama was turned into an artificial “cave” for Āraṇya, who lived
there for more than 20 years. In May 1926, Āraṇya asked for the entrance to the
construction to be blocked, and he lived for the rest of his life, until 1947, in that
“cave.” He seemed to have been aware that his unusual ascetic practice had an
effect on the devotees and would strengthen the authority of his teaching. That
Āraṇya has been accepted by some as representing an older lineage transferred
as an oral tradition for centuries is, therefore, it seems, also because of his ascetic
practices. He practiced quite extreme asceticism in terms of solitude.
A fourth reason as to why Āraṇya has been perceived as an exception to the
main claim that the Pātañjalayogaśāstra tradition was mainly an abandoned
tradition is probably his excellent skills in Sanskrit and the understanding of the
Sāṃkhyayoga teachings in their original language. Āraṇya was one of the most
respected modern Indian interpreters of the Sāṃkhyayoga philosophy. He argued
systematically that Yoga is a school of Sāṃkhya and wrote acclaimed commen-
taries on the Pātañjalayogaśāstra. The Sanskrit text of the Bhāsvatī was pub-
lished in Varanasi in 1934 by Chaukhambha Sanskrit Sansthan in a book that
included classical commentaries on the Pātañjalayogaśāstra, the Tattvavaiśāradī
by Vācaspatimiśra, Pātañjala Rahasya by Rāghavānanda Sārasvatī, and the
Yogavārttika of Vijñānabhikṣu thus providing a classical Sanskrit context to his
own commentary (see Śāstrī 1989; H. Āraṇya 2000: 409–632). The stotras he
composed in Sanskrit (H. Āraṇya 2007) are the “sacred book” of the Sāṃkhyayoga
community of Kāpil Maṭh (see Chapter 8). The stotras are recited every morning
and evening. The akhaṇḍ pāṭh (continuous recitation without break) of this text
marks the anniversaries of the samādhis of the gurus. Hariharānanda Āraṇya’s
mastery of the Sāṃkhyayoga teachings and command of the Sanskrit language is
another reason why his teaching has been seen as conforming to an original yoga
tradition.
But where did Āraṇya’s knowledge and Sāṃkyayoga interpretations come
from? How did he become a Sāṃkhyayogin? Was there an oral tradition of
Sāṃkhyayoga? If there was no person in Bengal “who had made Yoga the special
subject of his study,” from where did Hariharānanda Āraṇya get his knowledge?
In what sense was Āraṇya a traditional yogin, and to what degree was he part
of the new yoga of the Yogasūtra that emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries? According to the unanimous tradition of Kāpil Maṭh, Āraṇya was initi-
ated into the order of saṃnyāsins in 1892 by a saṃnyāsin called Trilokī Āraṇya.
He met Trilokī Āraṇya in Triveni around 45 km north of Kolkata (Bhattacharya
2003: 144). Trilokī Āraṇya was probably returning from the Gaṅgā Sāgar festival
the large annual bathing festival on Sagar Island, south of Kolkata. Triveni is on
the western bank of the river Ganga. The annual bathing festival on Sagar Island
is celebrated on January 14, so this initiation took place in the middle of Janu-
ary. According to the tradition of Kāpil Maṭh, Hariharānanda and Trilokī spent
only one day together and never met again. Bhāskara Āraṇya informs in an essay
written in Bengali “Kāpilāśram Kathā” (“The Story of Kāpilāśram”) that a monk
called Saccidānanda Āraṇya also received initiation by Trilokī Āraṇya in Triveni
that day (see B. Āraṇya 2012: 8).
Āraṇya wrote a poem in Sanskrit, printed in Bengali letters, in the dedica-
tion to his text Sāṃkhya Prāṇatattva published in 1902 in which a paramparā
of a living Sāṃkhyayoga tradition is presented. This poem is, as far as I know,
the only place Āraṇya refers to Trilokī Āraṇya. To my knowledge, he does not
mention or elaborate on Trilokī Āraṇya anywhere else in his many published
writings. This dedication is a poem containing 11 lines that mention several
names of ascetics: Śrībhāsvatprajña, Paraṃsvabhāraṇa, Triputi Āraṇya, and
Trilokī Āraṇya, who is called his guru. They are claimed to be teachers of
Sāṃkhyayoga. Thus, in this poem, Hariharānanda Āraṇya seems to present a
Sāṃkhyayoga lineage.
The poem presents a guruparamparā. It states in the first lines that Paraṃsva
bhāraṇyaḥ learned yoga from his guru Śrībhāsvatprajña (sāṃkhyayoganidhānasya
śrībhāsvatprajñayoginaḥ, āsīt paraṃsvabhāraṇyaḥ śiṣyo yogavidāṃ varaḥ),
and he taught Sāṃkhyayoga to his disciple Tripuṭi Āraṇya who again taught it to
Trilokī Āraṇya (tatas tripuṭyāraṇyaś ca bhūṣayāmāsa medinīm, tasya śiṣyavaro
’bhūcca śrītrilokī munīśvaraḥ).5 In the last two lines, Āraṇya calls these his para-
magurus and also another ācārya is mentioned Pramānanda (śrīparamagurubhyo
’tha trilokīgurave tathā, pramānandāya dīnasya cācāryāya namo ’stu me). These
names are not mentioned or referred to in the other writings of Hariharānanda
Āraṇya.
However, according to the unanimous tradition of the Kāpil Maṭh tradition, and
restated by Bhāskara Āraṇya in the essay “Kāpilāśram Kathā,” no information
was transferred from Trilokī Āraṇya to Hariharānanda Āraṇya because Trilokī
Āraṇya was a “maunī sādhak” – a yogin who “had taken the vow of silence”
(Bhattacharya 2003: 144).6 If this history is true, that Trilokī Āraṇya was the one
who initiated Āraṇya and that he was completely silent, and most probably it is,
then this initiation guru (dīkṣā guru) obviously cannot be the source of Āraṇya’s
Sāṃkhyayoga. Kāpil Maṭh does not trace the teaching of Hariharānanda Āraṇya
to Trilokī, and Trilokī is not honored in any of the Kāpil Maṭh institutions. The
teaching of Hariharānanda Āraṇya is traced to the Sāṃkhyayoga of Kapila, who
was born with perfect knowledge after having practiced yoga in previous lives
according to the Sāṃkhyayoga tradition and the teaching of whom is available in
the textual tradition of Sāṃkhya and Sāṃkhyayoga.
There is reason to believe, therefore, that this paramparā poem published in
the dedication to Āraṇya’s text Sāṃkhya Prāṇatattva in 1902 is a work of fiction.
There are several arguments to support this. In the period in which the poem was
published, Āraṇya did write several works of fiction. The aforementioned autobio-
graphical novel Apūrba Bhramaṇabṛttānta (A Unique Travelogue) was published
under the pseudonym Śivadhyān Brahmachari in 1907.7 An allegorical narrative
was published in 1906 (H. Āraṇya 2014b). The narrative treats the Sāṃkhyayoga
principles and concepts as persons in a kingdom. It describes a conflict in the
city of Citta (mind) situated in the Ahaṃkāra Kṣetra (field of the ego) along the
bank of the river Kāla (time), which is just below the Buddhi plateau ( plateau of
the intellect). Above these two kingdoms is the enclave of emperor Puruṣa ( pure
consciousness). The city is ruled by Icchā Devī (goddess of will) and her minister
Vicāra (analysis). The conflict in the city Citta is caused by two persons called
Avidyā (ignorance) and her son Pramāda (error, intoxication). The story tells how
Icchā Devī, being transformed into Nivṛtti Devī (withdrawal), and her husband
Viveka Dev (discrimination) manage to bring peace to the kingdom. Pramāda
misappropriates the funds of the state and diverts the resources to his followers
Kāma (lust), Krodha (anger), and Lobha (greed). The situation gets out of hand
due to ignorance and intoxication, and the persons Tattva Vicāra (reason based on
the Sāṃkhya principles), Prajñā (wisdom), and Viveka (discrimination) and their
followers Śraddhā (faith), Smṛti (Memory), Vairāgya (detachment), Svādhyāya
( purification), Pratyāhāra (restraint of sense organs), Prāṇāyāma (control of
breath), and others start to rebel against the monsters Pramāda and Avidyā. Tat-
tva Vicāra and the followers withdraw to a fort called Yoga, and through their
action, Avidyā and Pramāda have to retreat, and the viṣayas ( people – i.e., the
senses) stay loyal to the leaders Nivṛtti Devī and her husband Viveka Dev. How-
ever, Pramāda sneaks into the Yoga Fort disguised as a renunciant and gives false
advice trying to get Nivṛtti Devī to leave the Yoga Fort. But Nivṛtti Devī prac-
tices Sādhanā in the Yoga fort and gives birth to śānti ( peace). “With the advent
of Śānti all elements of Avidyā are held in check” (H. Āraṇya 2014b: 65). The
narrative ends with Princess Nivṛtti Devī constructing a house called nirmāṇa
citta with a platform Prajñā (wisdom), and from there, she sings the song of śānti
( peace). She then aims her most effective weapon para vairāgya (final renuncia-
tion) at Avidyā (ignorance), and as a result, Avidyā hides in the hole of Avyakta
(the unmanifest material principle), and Nivṛtti and Viveka “physically shut the
hole of Avyakta for all time to come, thus attaining eternal bliss” (H. Āraṇya
2014b: 65). Śānti Dev then “residing over a region of selflessness offers eternal
bliss to Puruṣa Dev” and misery disappears, and “[a]t the instance of Puruṣa Dev,
mind is restful, enjoying eternal bliss” (H. Āraṇya 2014b: 65). Hariharānanda
Āraṇya’s poem about a guruparamparā of Trilokī Āraṇya seems to be part to the
same type of fictional Sāṃkhyayoga literature as this allegorical narrative about
the Sāṃkhyayoga teaching.
Āraṇya claimed to be a daśanāmī monk, which perhaps indicates that Trilokī
also belonged to this order. However, Āraṇya is not a daśanāmī name. The
daśanāmī name is Araṇya (Dazey 2011: 304).8 Why Hariharānanda choose the
spelling Āraṇya instead of Araṇya is not known. Maybe the name came first and
the attempt to associate it with the daśanāmī order afterward?
The fictional biography Apūrba Bhramaṇbṛttānta is about a young man who
loses his father at a young age, and when he completes his education and plans to
join the legal profession, his mother also suddenly dies. He then loses all interest
in worldly life, sells everything, and goes to Varanasi to study Western and Indian
philosophy for two years. He masters Sāṃkhya, Vedānta, and Yoga and decides
to dedicate his life to attaining mokṣa. He sets out to find a guru, but finds mostly
hypocrites and good-for-nothing saṃnyāsins who “desecrated its [the institution
of saṃnyāsa’s] sanctity” (H. Āraṇya 2001: 2). He moves to the Himalayas where
he discovers a magical place of meditation, which teaches him Sāṃkhyayoga.
The fictional biography was an attempt to teach Sāṃkhyayoga through the
narrative of a saṃnyāsin and his spiritual progress. Autobiographies were not
common in Bengal at that time. Robert Darnton in a statistical study of book
production in British India between 1850 and 1900 noted that “Favorite British
genres such as travel and biography hardly counted statistically and probably
did not take root in India before 1900” (Darnton 2002: 255). Autobiography was
at that time a relatively new genre in India, which was claimed to have been
started by the autobiography of Rassunadri Devi (Bhattacharya and Chakravorty
1976: 22), first published in two parts: the first in 1876 and the second in 1906.9
The Brāhmo Samāj “played a prominent role in the emergence of the Bengali
autobiography,” as did “the inculcation through British education institutions and
Government-sponsored publishing of the value of historical and biographical
writing” (Hatcher 2001: 585, see also Bhattacharya and Chakravorty 1976: 22).
Brāhmo Samāj popularized the art of autobiography, and Devendranath Tagore
(1817–1905) published the autobiography Ātmajīvanī in 1898, which gave an
account of his religious development and described how “from a young man
of luxury he gradually found himself to be another man” and is considered “a
Pilgrim’s Progress of the 19th century Bengal” (Bhattacharya and Chakravorty
1976: 22). Āraṇya’s fictional autobiography seems to fit the Brāhmo Samāj
and Protestant idea of the autobiographical chronicling of spiritual progress,
but also indicates an artistic playfulness. Autobiography was a Western literary
genre transposed into the Indian setting, and while the fact that Āraṇya pub-
lished a fictional autobiography and at the same time prohibited his disciples
from publishing a biography might raise some suspicion about the actual origin
of his Sāmkhyayoga, he clearly did not try to appear premodern. The autobio-
graphical novel creates a fictional beginning of Āraṇya’s life as an ascetic. Taken
together with the poem, it indicates he was playing with different origins of his
Sāṃkhyayoga. In this fictional autobiography, the source of his knowledge is
described a temple of wisdom situated in the Himalayas, which had been con-
structed with yoga powers by a saint named Ashwajit long time ago (H. Āraṇya
2001: 46). According to this text, the wisdom of Sāṃkhyayoga is located in a
magical meditation temple in the Himalayas. The fictional autobiography also
shows that Āraṇya had command of many literary genres and points to his mod-
ern urban background.
The first renunciants Śīvadhyān meets are described as false ascetics, occupied
with mundane affairs, overfed, dressed in costly silk and shawl, and living in
luxury. Other renunciants are poor but their only interest is to get alms, and they
do not pursue any spiritual goals. Other renunciants cheat people through magic,
which is made possible because people believe that yogins possess extraordi-
nary powers. Other renunciants again try to master scripture and give sermons
“impressing people through jugglery of high sounding words” (H. Āraṇya 2001:
11), but these people have no time to practice and thus they “deviate from the
true spirit of religion” (H. Āraṇya 2001: 11). There are others, continues Āraṇya,
“who are held in high esteem by people who get swayed by their practicing vari-
ous Āsanas.” People place them “on high pedestal and falsely consider them to
have attained emancipation.” Some people have the ability of thought reading,
and in the West, they would make a living as magicians, the author comments, but
in India, “they don the mendicant’s garb and are called astrologers with power to
see the future” and “dupe people both educated and illiterate by posing as spir-
itual masters and cheating people of their hard earned money” (H. Āraṇya 2001:
11). Some devotees are attracted to “well groomed and good looking mendicants
with a large number of devotees.” But Śivadhyān on further investigations found
that their good looks were due to their high standard of living due to the devotees
donations and that devotees are drawn to gurus with “good manners and high
flown languages.” Hardly any of the renunciants he meets follow the ideals, which
he himself ascribes to. Śivadhyān writes that he “used to feel depressed at times to
find such impostors in the name of religion.”
I started blaming myself for being a part of that crowd. . . . The downfall of
Hindu Society may be attributed to its habit of treating such idle, addicted,
good for nothing fellows as holy men.
(H. Āraṇya 2001: 10)
The view expressed here about the honoring “good-for-nothing” yogins as cause
of the downfall of the Hindu society was, as we noted earlier, typical of the upper-
class view of yogins at the time. The book’s author next contrasts the real yoga
of Sāṃkhyayoga with these degenerate yogins: “I argued and found solace in the
thought that there must be some truly religious and divine personalities living in
this world,” because it is “by posing after them that cheats are able to make their
living” (H. Āraṇya 2001: 12). Having discredited the contemporary yogin and
saṃnyāsin scene, the reader is made to understand that there beyond the contem-
porary yogin and saṃnyāsin scene can be found another type of yogin who tries
to live according to the ancient model.
Śivadhyāna becomes a renouncer and goes first to study philosophy in Varanasi.
Thereafter, he lives for two months in the Barabar Hills in Bihar and then travels
widely. Śivadhyāna goes to the Kapilas Mountain in Orissa and listens to the story
of a Vaiṣṇava renunciant, and he confronts him with the idea of Kaṭhopaniṣad, of
the divine as immutable self, which Śivadhyān is interested in.
The first honest ascetic he finds is a yogin staying alone in the Nilgiri Hills. This
yogin tells Śivadhyān how seldom a perfect yogin appears but that such a new
perfect person may be coming soon.
You know how intensely difficult it is to attain salvation through concentra-

tion of the mind (yoga). Only rarely does a saint succeed in attaining salva-
tion and there is often a gap of centuries before another one succeeds. Once
a saint reaches the goal, some of his followers may achieve partial success
following his path. In course of time his influence gets obliterated. Now,
I believe no such influence is working in this world. But there are indications
that a real saint will soon appear on the scene. The whole world will feel and
accept his presence.
(H. Āraṇya 2001: 15)
Here Āraṇya seems to present his thoughts about the current absence of
Sāṃkhyayogins and hopes and expectations about his own yoga mission. The
guru then explains to Śivadhyān that “a saintly person can control external forces
more effectively than all [educated persons’] efforts put together” and that when
educated persons “recognize the inadequacy of their mundane knowledge” they
will attempt “to acquire the supreme spiritual knowledge” (H. Āraṇya 2001: 15).
Āraṇya had in 1892 stopped his education at Presidency College for life as a
saṃnyāsin, seemingly because he had become disillusioned about secular educa-
tion. The guru adds that when these educated people will see him undisturbed
even when beset with calamity they will realize that there is a higher goal than
“momentary pleasure.” The guru advised Śivadhyān to learn from everyone he
consider superior to himself and stressed that “solitude is absolutely necessary”
and “[i]n solitude only those with power of introspection fight to eradicate the
roots of all desire” (H. Āraṇya 2001: 16). The guru instructed him that there was
little difference between bhakti and yoga because “both strive for keeping the
mind firmly on the desired object” (H. Āraṇya 2001: 16). The goal of yoga the
guru described was “to keep the idea of supreme self glowing in mind” (H. Āraṇya
2001: 17), and he explained that “[i]n yogic literature this is what is called unin-
terrupted and steady form of discriminative enlightenment. Hence real knowledge
comes through renunciation and concentration on the idea of Supreme Self” (H.
Āraṇya 2001: 17). The method consists of becoming established in recollection
(smṛti) on the desired object so that the mind becomes one-pointed, and “when
the mind becoming one-pointed, all bonds of nescience are broken” (H. Āraṇya
2001: 17). The guru distinguished between three types of devotees. Those who
are intelligent enough to be able “to follow philosophical discourses,” but are
“deeply emotional,” turn to devotion. Those who are neither intelligent nor emo-
tional, “but can control body functions effectively, prefer practicing yoga.” Yoga
here apparently refers to the practice of āsana and prāṇāyāma. In the third way,
knowledge is for those who do not have much control of the body and emotions,
but can understand philosophical discourse. But the guru adds that to attain salva-
tion by any of them one should have “exalted emotions,” “full control over one’s
body,” and “possess a sharp intellect.” “Unless and until these three qualities are
simultaneously present in a man all efforts become futile” (H. Āraṇya 2001: 17).
The guru stressed,
Lasting happiness can come only when three conditions are fulfilled simul-
taneously viz. the aspirant gets the desired object, that object is immutable
and mind of the aspirant remains stable. Hence, control your mind through
Samādhi, try to realize the inner self who is immutable and start adoring the
inner self with the adoration which it deserves. Then you will achieve eternal
peace and happiness.
(H. Āraṇya 2001: 18)
The guru finally advises him that after he has finished traveling around in India,
he should settle down in place “for spiritual practice.”
The next chapter of the fictional autobiography is mainly a story and interpreta-
tion of divinity told by a Vaiṣṇava avadhūta. It gives the narrator of the story an
opportunity to reflect on what an incarnation of the divinity is. “The true incarna-
tion of God will be a light passing through the world. It will illuminate people’s
soul” (H. Āraṇya 2001: 25). The avadhūta adds, “[T]he supreme Lord will not
penalize sinners,” a comment probably on Christianity. The whole story makes
Śivadhyān ponder, “Many people have their conviction on the basis of folk lores
where the ideas on God are not realistic” (H. Āraṇya 2001: 26). Śivadhyān’s the-
ology is that God “is omniscient and is equally approachable by all living beings.
Different people may worship Him in different forms” (H. Āraṇya 2001: 26). This
view is a mainstream view of the divine in modern Hinduism. Why is there so
much discussion about God in this text? This is perhaps because Āraṇya addresses
discussions current in Kolkata at the time. The idea of God discussed in Bengal at
the time with the impact of the British colonial rulers and Christian missionaries
seems to be some of the background for these discussions more than philosophical
issues in the Sāṃkhyayoga or Sāṃkhya traditions, although the divinity favored is
the Sāṃkhyayoga concept of a divine yogin in samādhi.
Śivadhyān then travels in India for three years and traveling in the Himalayas
toward Tibet with some Tibetans, he is told about a spiritual place in the vicinity
of where he has reached. He tries to find it, and sitting on a peak, he sees far away
a circular plot of land: “At the centre of the spot there was a temple not natural
but built or created by someone. The temple was built in clusters, each having a
different colour” (H. Āraṇya 2001: 29). At first, he thought it was a strange natu-
ral formation or a hallucination, because “[i]t was clearly impossible for human
beings to construct a structure in such an inaccessible location” (H. Āraṇya 2001:
31). But who could have built it? Was it an architecture of ancient times? Or was it
built by some extra terrestrial power, or by a new type of people? The Tibetans try
to dissuade him from taking the journey to the temple, because it is far and dan-
gerous, and he will die if he tries. Thus the story of the travel becomes a story of
a heroic spiritual quest. He makes warm clothes and collects food provisions for
a month and starts walking. The trek to reach the temple is long and dangerous.
After five days, he reaches the temple. Surrounding it was a plane surface stretch-
ing for miles, a lake, and a bridge into a beautiful garden. This area was encircled
by snow-covered peaks. The idea of the place has similarities to the Shambhala
myth, a Buddhist idea, which the Theosophists had promoted and given new
attention to, and the idea and descriptions of Āraṇya’s book may perhaps have
been influenced by such ideas and the attention it had received in occult circles.
The book situates the author as an honest ascetic in a world of mainly, with
some exceptions, false or mistaken ones. The book follows the narrator from
when he becomes a monk, his meeting with others, his overcoming of desires and
the descriptions of his yoga practice, and the experiences that follow constitute the
central elements of the text. The most admired ascetics encountered in the book
are not Hindu ascetics, but two Buddhist monks, one belonging to the ancient past
and the other to the more recent past of one hundred years ago. This fits with the
Orientalists’ and Indian educated elites’ romantic notions of India of the ancient
period and the re-evaluation of Buddhism among Hindu intellectuals at the time
(Jacobsen 2012c; Joshi 1983; Ramteke 1983), and the contrasting of the ancient
period with the present, which was seen as decayed and corrupt. The book is a
display of Āraṇya’s bhadralok project of recreating Sāṃkhyayoga philosophy,
which he saw as the “original yoga,” as a living monastic practice. The book starts
with the person leaving ordinary life for monkhood, and ends with his attainment
of higher spiritual experiences after some years of practice (for these attainments,
see Chapter 7). It is based partly on Āraṇya’s own early year saṃnyāsin experi-
ence, and there are some similarities with his own life, but the book is a mixture
of facts and fiction and is best understood as a text of fiction promoting Āraṇya’s
Sāṃkhyayoga project. In the way the book is structured, a heroic Sāṃkhyayogin
is juxtaposed to false mendicants who are mainly after riches and food. The book
first denounces the contemporary yogin phenomenon as a backward tradition that
goes against the ideas of real asceticism, which is morally pure and honest and
directed at attempting to attain mokṣa, which is the proper goal of saṃnyāsin. The
book describes a yogin of Sāṃkhyayoga who represents all the ideals of renun-
ciation, drawing from Sāṃkhyayoga and also from Buddhism. Here is how he
explains knowing about yoga:
I had already gone through Yogic scriptures but had never been able to prac-
tice it so intently.
(H. Āraṇya 2001: 72)
In other words, Yoga – i.e., Sāṃkhyayoga – Śivadhyān had initially learned from
books.
The fictional autobiography seems to have been an attempt by Āraṇya to ground
Sāṃkhyayoga in the mystique of the Himalayas, and also an attempt to teach
Sāṃkhyayoga through the narrative of a saṃnyāsin. The criticism of the yogins
of India connects his project to the process of the creation of modern yoga by sup-
porting the distinction between the real yoga of the philosophical Yoga tradition
and the degenerate practices of the other yogins. The fictive paramparā and the
autobiographical novel can be read as attempts to connect the new Sāṃkhyayoga
tradition to a sacred origin and an authoritative source beyond the textual tra-
ditions. Rājendralāla Mitra noted, “Manuscripts of the Yoga-sútra are common
enough in Bengal” (Mitra 1883: xci). So while there was no oral tradition of
living Sāṃkhyayoga, there was great availability of manuscripts. And by 1890,
there was great availability of the new media of printed books, not only of the
Yogasūtra but also of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra and the classical commentaries
such as the Tattvavaiśāradī. Adinath Chatterjee, an old disciple of the Maṭh noted
in the “preface” to the Yoga Philosophy of Patañjali and the Bhāsvatī that “[i]t is
difficult to explain the phenomenon that was Swāmī Hariharānanda Āraṇya. He
met his Guru only briefly and after his initiation as a Saṃnyāsin he chanced upon
an old text of Sāṃkhya-yoga in a library” (Chatterjee 2000: xviii). This is how
Chatterjee explains the source of Āraṇya‘s Sāṃkhyayoga. He does not mention
which book this was. After Āraṇya saw it in a library, he bought a copy, and it
was this copy that he took with him to the cave in Bihar, where he stayed from
1892 to 1898, and kept for the rest of his life. Hariharānanda Āraṇya’s copy of
this book is still in Kāpil Maṭh, in the cave where he stayed from 1926 to 1947,
the cave in which the current guru Swāmī Bhāskara Āraṇya now resides. It was
probably this book that was his teaching guru, his source of knowledge. Bhāskara
Āraṇya generously allowed me to examine the copy on one of my many visits, in
2011. The copy does contain some of Āraṇya’s handwritten notes. Unfortunately,
the book is in a bad state, and most of the pages have become stuck together,
making it impossible to read in it. The title pages, however, are easily readable.
The book is a Sanskrit text in devanāgarī script published in Kolkata in 1891. The
title of the book is Yogadarśanam and it was published by Vyāptiṣṭamisanayantra
in Kalikātā (Kolkata). The title page of the book reads, Yogadarśanam: Bhaga-
vanmahāmunipatañjalipraṇitam; Nikhilatantrāparatantrapratibha; Vācaspati-
miśraviracitatattvavaiśāradyākhyavyākhyābhūṣita- maharṣikṛṣṇadvaipāyanapraṇ-
ītabhāṣyā ’laṅkrtam; Srīmadudāsinasvāmibālarāmeṇa viṣamasthalaṭippaṇanir-
māṇapuraḥsaraṃ susaṃskrtam.10 Translated into English, the title page would
say that the volume contains the philosophy of Yoga (Yogadarśana) made by the
great sage Patañjali, adorned with the commentary with the name Tattvavaiśāradī
composed by Vācaspatimiśra, decorated with the Bhāṣya made by the great sage
Kṛṣṇadvaipāyana (i.e., Vyāsa) and beautifully adorned with the gloss printed
underneath by Udāsina Bālarāma. In other words, the book contains the Yogasūtra,
the Vyāsabhāṣya, Vācaspati Miśra’s Tattvavaiśāradī, and Bālarāma Udāsina’s
Ṭippaṇa on the Tattvavaiśāradī. Bālarāma Udāsina was born in 1855 and was
a Vedāntin and his commentary summarized Vācaspatimiśra’s Tattvavaiśāradī
(Larson and Bhattacharya 2008: 366). Bālarāma Udāsina also composed a com-
mentary on the Tattvakaumudī by Vācaspatimiśra called Vidvattoṣinī (Larson
and Bhattacharya 1987: 509). Udāsina was a follower of the Udāsina tradition
and studied Vedānta. The Yogadarśanam: Bhagavanmahāmunipatañjalipraṇi-
tam; Nikhilatantrāparatantrapratibha was apparently first published in 1890, but
Āraṇya’s copy, which I examined, was from 1891 and is either a misprint or a
copy from a second printing. Vyāsabhāṣya is the most important Sāṃkhyayoga
text and Tattvavaiśāradī is the most important philosophical commentary on the
Vyāsabhāṣya. The Sāṃkhya scholar Gerald Larson argues that these three texts
Yogasūtra, Vyāsabhāṣya, and the Tattvavaiśāradī constitute what he calls the
“core textual complex” of the philosophy of Yoga. Vācaspatimiśra was a Vedāntin
and not an adherent of Yoga philosophy, but Larson suggests,
His work, however, in the various philosophical traditions is highly regarded

by almost all interpreters and can be taken seriously as reflecting authentic
knowledge in depth about various systems of Indian thought in his time.
(Larson 2008: 70–71)
Larson argues that the other commentaries on the Yogasūtra are mostly dependent
on the Vyāsabhāṣya and the Tattvavaiśāradī, and also often do not reflect “authen-
tic knowledge.” It is unclear what Larson means by “authentic knowledge” here,
but Āraṇya’s source was exactly those texts, which Larson considers to represent
“authentic knowledge” of the “core textual complex” of Yoga.
Through the detailed study of this book for years in a cave in Bihar, and perhaps
also other texts, Hariharānanda Āraṇya, with his excellent understanding of San-
skrit, gained access to the Yogasūtra, Vyāsabhāṣya, and the Tattvavaiśāradī, and
the summary of the text by Bālarāma Udāsina – i.e., the classical Sāṃkhyayoga
philosophy. Āraṇya does not seem to refer to Bālarāma Udāsina or any other
contemporary translations and editions of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra, as far as
I know.
That Āraṇya’s Yoga philosophy appears classical and orthodox, as if repre-
senting the last person in an old lineage of teachers as implied by some authors
is no doubt because his Sāṃkhyayoga was based on studying these texts which
constituted the “core textual complex” of Sāṃkhyayoga. The mistake of claiming
that there was an oral tradition of Sāṃkhyayoga, with which Āraṇya came into
contact, or represented the last living person of, is based on not paying sufficient
attention to a technological revolution that had been taking place in India in the
nineteenth century, and which had an enormous influence on religious develop-
ment: the printing and mass production of books. Book printing made knowledge
available to a larger number of people with education who did not need access to
an oral tradition in order to read the texts. Āraṇya was probably a product of that
same interest in Yoga that led to the translations and the printing of several San-
skrit editions of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra with the Tattvavaiśāradī in the last quar-
ter of the nineteenth century Bengal. Several editions were already printed in the
1870s. There had been a growing interest in the Yogasūtra among Sanskrit schol-
ars in Kolkata. Among those who bought these Sanskrit books was Hariharānanda
Āraṇya, who took one of these books with him to the Barabar caves. His teaching
guru was probably this printed Sanskrit book and not some encounter with an oral
tradition of Sāṃkhyayoga. Āraṇya had access to manuscripts through Oriental
libraries in Kolkata such as the library of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, and he
collected also himself some books and manuscripts in Sanskrit, Pāli, and Bengali.
Books and manuscripts were available to those who were able to read them and
had the time to study them, and they could to some degree, but not fully perhaps,
replace the importance of oral traditions.
Āraṇya probably never met another Sāṃkyayogin except those who later
became his own followers,11 but due to his ability to read Sanskrit texts and his
linguistic skills, and his academic training from university education, he was
able to teach himself Sāṃkhyayoga. The Pātañjalayogaśāstra, Vācaspatimiśra’s
Tattvavaiśāradī, and Bālarāma Udāsina’s commentary on the Tattvavaiśāradi,
in combination with university education, meditation, and ascetic living, and
love of solitude, are at the foundation of Āraṇya’s own commentaries on the
Pātañjalayogaśāstra. In this situation of the revival of yoga, Hariharānanda
Āraṇya’s purpose seems to have been to place Yoga in its proper Sāṃkhyayoga
context and to get back the dignity of the institution of saṃnyāsa. Āraṇya
responded to the book-printing revolution that had taken place in India in the
nineteenth century and which had an enormous influence on religious develop-
ment, and he himself published a great a number of books in Sanskrit and Bengali,
mostly theoretical books on Sāṃkhyayoga, but also, as was noted earlier, practical
advices and a book of fiction. Āraṇya’s access to the Sāṃkhyayoga tradition was
through the Pātañjalayogaśāstra and the commentary Tattvavaiśāradī, and his
own commentaries are in the same style as these “classical” commentaries, which
represent traditional scholarship, but with some references and interpretations
that make them products of his own time, such as references to Daniel Dunglas
Home12 when explaining the Yoga power of flying (Yogasūtra 3.42).13 Here he
shows awareness of nineteenth-century transnational discourses on spirituality,
but such references are infrequent and rare in his commentaries.
In Kāpil Maṭh, the picture of the first guru hanging above that of Hariharānanda
Āraṇya is a print of the sage Kapila. There is no reference to, mention, or drawing
of Trilokī Āraṇya. Trilokī Āraṇya is completely absent in the material religion of
Kāpil Maṭh (see Chapter 9). The mantra of Kāpil Maṭh pays homage to Kapila
(ādividuṣe kapilāya namaḥ). Kapila is considered the originator of Sāṃkhyayoga,
but there is no continual lineage of teachers leading back to him, or to Patañjali
for that matter. Interestingly, Āraṇya does not seem to refer to any of the Ben-
gali translations of the Yoga texts that had appeared in print before him, such as
those of Kālīvar Vedāntavāgīś (Calcutta 1884) and Maheścandra Pāl (Calcutta
1886) (see Valdina 2013), or to translations into English such as those by Ballan-
tyne (1852), Shastri (1868–1869, 1870–1871), Tātya (1885), Rājendralāla Mitra
(1883) or Vivekānanda (1896). This may be because none of these persons were
Sāṃkhyayoga saṃnyāsins, and because Āraṇya was producing his own lineage
as a saṃnyāsin by returning to the ancient Sanskrit texts and his own interpreta-
tion of them, thus he seems to have intended building a lineage directly from
the Pātañjalayogaśāstra. Āraṇya was probably a product of that same interest in
Yoga that led to the printing of several editions of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra and
the Tattvavaiśāradī, and the translations of Yoga texts. He lived as a traditional
saṃnyāsin, and it is his ascetic living, his fondness for solitude, and his ability
in Sanskrit that gave him access to Sāṃkhyayoga orthodoxy and give his textual
interpretations the impression of representing an ancient lineage and an aura of
antiquity.
Sāṃkhyayoga with its Pātañjalayogaśāstra is considered one of India’s so-
called classical philosophical systems (darśana) and was the only Yoga system
that became included as one of the so-called six Brāhmaṇical systems of phi-
losophy (ṣaḍdarśanas). That this Yoga philosophy had been included among the
six Brāhmaṇical systems of philosophy (ṣaḍdarśanas) gave it prestige and led
to interest among Orientalists and Theosophists in the nineteenth century, who
looked at this form of yoga as particularly valuable, genuine, and trustworthy.
That this Yoga system had its origin in ancient India and was based on ancient
Sanskrit texts gave it prestige. Ancient India and Sanskrit were considered to be
more equal to European civilization in worth and value than many contemporary
Indian religious cultures. They were instead often looked upon as decayed tradi-
tions. Sanskrit was a language related to Greek and Latin, and ancient India was
thought of by Orientalists as a similar type of civilization and became subject of
romantic imaginations, for many of the Orientalists ancient texts were held in high
esteem, while contemporary culture was seen as a degenerated form. It may in this
connection be worth quoting the influential Max Müller from his The Six Systems
of Indian Philosophy. Here is how Müller imagined the context of the creation of
the ancient Indian philosophical systems:
It was only in a country like India, with all its physical advantages and
disadvantages, that such a rich development of philosophical thought as
we can watch in the six systems of philosophy, could have taken place.
In ancient India there could hardly have been a very severe struggle for
life. The necessaries of life were abundantly provided by nature, and people
with few tastes could live there like the birds in a forest, and soar like birds
towards the fresh air of heaven and the eternal sources of light and truth.
What was there to do for those who, in order to escape from the heat of the
tropical sun, had taken their abode in the shade of groves or in the caves of
mountainous valleys except to meditate on the world in which they found
themselves placed, they did not know how or why? . . . [W]hat was there
to do for the members of the small settlements dotted over the country, but
to give expression to that wonder at the world which is the beginning of all
philosophy?
(Müller 1899: vii–viii)
Such romanticizing and idealizing of the Indian past, was part of the Oriental-
ists world view. Their study of ancient texts formed what they thought should be
considered “authentic” Hinduism. “Authentic” Hinduism was to be found in the
ancient texts, especially in the śāstras.14 Their views impacted the development of
parts of Hindu religion and especially in urban centers and among those educated
at the modern educational institutions.
According to Müller, of the six systems, the only living system in contemporary
India was the Vedānta in its many forms.
Of the other systems, the Nyāya only finds devotees, especially in Bengal, but
the works studied are generally the later controversial treatises, not the ear-
lier ones. The Vaiseshika is neglected and so is the Yoga, except in its purely
practical and most degenerate form.
(Müller 1899: xx)
He does not mention Sāṃkhya in that context, but his condemnation of con-
temporary yoga is unambiguous, and the contrast he makes between “live there
like the birds in a forest, and soar like birds towards the fresh air of heaven
and the eternal sources of light and truth” and contemporary yoga practiced
in “most degenerate form” illustrates in a typical way the dominant Oriental-
ist idea at the time of the purity of the past and degenerate polluted present.
Müller regretted that the ancient method of philosophical study was dying out
in India but welcomed “a new class of native students who, after studying the
history of European philosophy, have devoted themselves to the honorable task
of making their own national philosophy better known to the world at large,”
and he hoped that his book
may prove useful to them by showing them in what direction they may best
assist us in our attempts to secure a place to thinkers such as Kapila and
Bâdarâyana by the side of the leading philosophers of Greece, Rome, Ger-
many, France, Italy, and England.
(Müller 1899: xx)
Such romantic views of the past and a view of the present as degenerative
but with a possibility of recovering the past and re-actualize it by focusing on
the ancient philosophical systems seem to have been important elements for the
restarting of the tradition of Sāṃkhyayoga. The British idea of a commonality
between ancient Indian culture and the civilization of Europe, with the Sanskrit
language as a key role in this commonality, gave prestige both to Sanskrit as well
as to traditions of ancient India. Ancient India was what matched Europe, and by
restarting a tradition of ancient India in its Sanskrit form, equality with European
civilization was in some sense perceived as achieved or achievable.
Āraṇya seems to have been aware of Orientalist scholarship and made assump-
tions on the basis of some of that scholarship. Academic interest in Sāṃkhya and
Yoga did create an increased curiosity and interest in Sāṃkhyayoga among some
bhadraloks. Āraṇya’s first book, the Yogakārikā, a Sanskrit kārikā based on the
bhāṣya part of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra, was apparently completed the same year,
in 1892, as he became a saṃnyāsin, and, if that date is correct, seems to have
been as much a product of his academic learning as of his renunciant practice. It
is also striking that Āraṇya refers to the Indologist Rājendralāla Mitra but does
not refer, in any of the text I have read, to any of the leaders of Hindu reform
movements such as Dayānanda Sarasavatī, Rām Mohan Roy, Keśab Candra Sen,
or Vivekānanda.
That Āraṇya also utilized sources from academics to recover the past is illus-
trated in the comments by Nandalal Sinha, who in 1915 published a compilation
of a large number of Sāṃkhya texts as a volume in the Sacred Books of the Hin-
dus. In it, he included “a few of the Aphorisms of Panchaśikha with explanatory
notes according to the Yoga-Bhāṣya which has quoted them.” Interestingly, in his
introduction to that part of the book, Sinha mentions Hariharānanda Āraṇya. Here
we see how Āraṇya depended on scholarly works, but what he did with them dif-
fered because, as a Sāṃkhyayoga saṃnyāsin, the Sāṃkhyayoga texts represented
for him now a living tradition. Nandalal Sinha in his comments on the sources for
his aphorisms of Pañcaśikha does not seem to understand the difference between
researching Sāṃkhyayoga and maintaining Sāṃkhyayoga as a living tradition of
yoga. Sinha writes,
In the Preface to his edition of the Sâmkhya-Pravachana-Bhâṣyam of

Vijñâna Bhikṣu, Mr. Fitz-Edward Hall has collected eleven aphorisms of
Panchaśikha quoted by Vyâsa in his said Commentary. Another collection
of extracts from the same source has been published, under the title of
Pañchaśikha-âchârya-praṇîta Sâmkhya-Sûtra, by Paṇḍita Râjâ Râm, Profes-
sor of Sanskrit, D. A. V. College, Lahore, in Nos. 4 and 5, Vol. VIII, 1912,
of the series entitled Ârṣa-Granthâvali, Lahore. This collection contains
twenty-one aphorisms including one of Vârṣagaṇya. Quite recently, again,
we had a peculiar opportunity of examining the MS. of another collection
of aphorisms attributed to Pañchaśikha, prepared by Svâmî Hariharânanda
Âranya of the Kâpila Âśrama in the District of Hooghli. This was obviously
not an original compilation, but a reproduction of the Lahore publica-
tion, with a few additions, one of which was taken from the Veda without
acknowledgment!
(Sinha 1915, Appendix VII, p. 1)
It is obvious from this quotation that Āraṇya’s source for his Pañcaśikhādīnāṃ
Sāṃkhyasūtrāṇām Bhāṣyaṃ was Pañchaśikha-āchārya-praṇīta Sāṃkhya-Sūtra,
by Paṇḍita Rājā Rām. Āraṇya’s contribution was his Sanskrit commentary on the
text. Since Āraṇya was a saṃnyāsin, he claimed his own Yoga practice as author-
ity. However, the comment by Sinha displays an expectation of Sanskrit being a
dead language. He seems to think that writing Sanskrit as Āraṇya did was being
in some way disingenuous, because the Sanskrit tradition, as well as Sāṃkhya
and Sāṃkhyayoga, supposedly belonged only to the past and not to the present.
Āraṇya’s Yoga seems to have caused some cognitive dissonance in Sinha, or per-
haps just disappointment since he seemed to have hoped to find an ancient manu-
script. Antiquity represented for him authenticity. However, the printed edition of
Āraṇya’s text with a translation and introduction by Jajneswar Ghosh, a devotee
of the Kāpil Maṭh, starts the preface by making clear that Sāṃkhyayoga is tradi-
tion with a living teacher and states, “This edition is intended primarily for those
who cannot have the inestimable privilege of hearing the exposition of the Sūtras
by their saintly compiler” (Ghosh 1997: 1). In other words, the text is a supple-
ment to an oral teaching, which Ghosh considered the most authentic source. He
ends his introduction by stating,
The task of compiling and expounding all of them has been done here by one
who has lived the life of the Sāṃkhya Yogin and realized the worth of the
principles embodied in them better than any one could do who had felt only
an academic interest in the system.
(Ghosh 1997: 91)
Ghosh here writes as a disciple of Āraṇya. Āraṇya’s text consists of 21 sūtras

and his own Sanskrit commentary. The text ends with “iti sāṃkhyayogācārya-
śrīhariharānanda – āraṇya pañcaśikhādīnāṃ sāṃkhyasūtrāṇām bhāṣyaṃ
samāptam (H. Āraṇya 1977a: 72). Āraṇya’s intention was to continue the lin-
age of Sāṃkyayoga teachers of producing Sanskrit texts. For him Sanskrit was
not a dead language! Gopinath Kaviraj’s “foreword” from 1936 to Āraṇya’s
Sāṃkhyatattvāloka illustrates the difference between researching Sāṃkhyayoga
and maintaining Sāṃkhyayoga as a living tradition of yoga and makes a good
contrast to Sinha’s evaluation. Gopinath Kaviraj welcomes the book and con-
cludes that the booklet comes “from the pen of a practical Yogin whose deep
personal experiences stand behind all his utterances” (Kaviraj 1977: iv). Here are
contrasting ideas of what constitute tradition. For Kaviraj “deep personal experi-
ences” constitutes a living tradition. For Sinha, that Āraṇya’s source was a pub-
lished book seems to have made his teaching without value.
The Pātañjalayogaśāstra is a text in Sāṃkhyayoga theory, but what should
Sāṃkhyayoga practice be? Āraṇya experimented with the life style and ascetic
practices of a Sāṃkhyayoga saṃnyāsin and gave meditation instructions in his
writings, many of which seem to be based on his own experiences. However, with-
out instruction by a guru in a living tradition, Āraṇya remained oriented around
books and textual knowledge, and this shaped the institution of Kāpil Maṭh. This
is the topic of the next chapter.
Notes
1 On the two small pages on which White makes this claim, there are a number of fac-
tual errors. The factual errors in White’s text are as follows: First, White writes that
the Barabar Hills are in Jharkhand, but they are outside of the city of Gaya in Bihar.
Second, he writes that Āraṇya received instructions from Trilokī Āraṇya while in the
Barabar Hills, but Āraṇya did not receive instructions from Trilokī Āraṇya and did
not meet him in Barabar Hills. They met in Triveni north of Kolkata, and the meet-
ing lasted only a very short time, probably one day, and no instruction took place. All
sources of the Kāpil Maṭh tradition are in agreement on this and there are no other
sources available. Third, White writes that Trilokī Āraṇya claimed to belong “to a
lineage extending back to Patanjali himself,” but no such claims are known neither
in the written nor the oral tradition of Kāpil Maṭh. Fourth, White claims that the title
of Āraṇya’s Bengali commentary on the Yogasūtra published in 1911 was Bhāsvatī.
However, the title of this Bengali commentary is Kāpilāśramiya Pātañjal Jogdarśan.
Bhāsvatī is the title of a Sanskrit commentary on the Pātañjalayogaśāstra and was
published in 1934. Fifth, White claimed that after 1911, Āraṇya returned to the Barabar
Caves, where he gathered a small following of disciples, but Āraṇya never returned to
the Barabar Caves. He settled in Madhupur in 1924 and entered the artificial cave there
in 1926. This artificial cave in Madhupur has remained the center of the Kāpil Maṭh
institution since.
2 White gives a reference to the Kāpil Maṭh Website www.samkhyayoga-darshana.com.
However, there is no information on this or other web pages of the Kāpil Maṭh to sup-
port the claims.
3 White uses the term “authentic scholar-practitioner” (2014: 224).
4 This should not necessarily be interpreted as resistance to education or to the colonial
power, but as a personal choice related to religion and Yoga.
5 The quoted text is from a reprint of the poem in Hariharānanda Āraṇya, Divine Hymns
with Supreme Devotional Aphorisms (Madhupur: Kāpil Maṭh 2007), n. pag. I have
corrected a few typos in the text.
6 Bhattacharya notes, “Neither Swāmījī [Dharmamegha Āraṇya] nor anybody else could
tell me more about Swāmī Trilokī Āraṇyajī” (Bhattacharya 2003: 144).
7 The use of the name Śivadhyān Brahmachari does pose a problem and it is perhaps not
obvious that Hariharānanda Āraṇya was the original or only saṃnyāsin name.
8 In the Hindu tradition, initiation happens in many ways. The Sāṃkhyayoga guru
Omprakāś Āraṇya claimed that he had received initiation from Hariharānanda Āraṇya
in a dream, which was considered valid (Information provided by Bhāskar Āraṇya,
March 2017).
9 The first example of the Western genre of autobiography in India was apparently the
autobiographical writing of Rām Mohan Roy’s Autobiographical Letter published in
1832/33 (Bhattacharya and Chakravorty 1976).
10 Interestingly, this is the same Sanskrit edition that John Haughton Woods made use of
for his translation of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra with the Tattvavaiśāradī published in
1914 (Woods 1988). The editor of the book and author of the ṭippaṇa was as stated in
the title Bālarāma Udāsina and Woods writes in the preface that he made use of “the
edition of Bālarāma . . . because it is based on northern manuscripts and because of the
valuable notes in the editor’s ṭippaṇa” (Woods 1988: xi).
11 Sociological and anthropological studies of ascetics in India do not mention encounter-
ing any Sāṃkhyayoga ascetics, even studies that have tried to give a complete over-
view of all ascetics at sacred sites (see Ghurye 1953; Hausner 2007; Oman 1905; Sinha
and Saraswati 1978).
12 Home 1863.
13 Āraṇya writes, “In spiritist literature there are records of mediums having gone up [in]
the air during séances” (H. Āraṇya 1981: 319).
14 Michael S. Dodson notes that the Orientalists’ focus on ancient texts instead of con-
temporary understanding “served to construct a vision of ‘Hindu religious practice’
with reference to idealized, brahmanical vision set out in ancient Sanskrit śāstra
( philosophical-religious texts), and which served to further marginalize ‘popular’, or
syncretic religious practices in European understandings of Indian religion. In essence,
time was perceived to have stood still in India, at least as regards the social and cultural
meaningfulness of religious doctrine” (Dodson 2007: 39).
6 The textual tradition of the
Kāpil Maṭh institution
The objective of this chapter is to analyze some of the central aspects of the
Sāṃkhyayoga teaching promoted in the texts of the Kāpil Maṭh tradition. The
texts were originally published in Sanskrit and Bengali, and a few pages in
English. Many of the Bengali and Sanskrit texts have been translated into English
and most of the texts into Hindi. The texts of Kāpil Maṭh are of diverse genres:
Sanskrit compositions both of independent Sanskrit philosophical texts and com-
mentaries; Bengali philosophical commentary texts, works of fiction, collections
of essays, letters, and instructions in Bengali; and Sanskrit stotras (see appendix).
I will, in the following, analyze some selected texts in detail, and while ana-
lyzing them, I will discuss some of the main themes. Some examples also from
other texts that illustrate these themes will be included. The main texts to be ana-
lyzed are Hariharānanda Āraṇya’s Śivoktayogayuktiḥ and Yogakārikā as exam-
ples of early texts, Kāpilāśramiya Pātañjal Jogdarśan as his most important text,
Paramābhaktisūtra on how Sāṃkhyayoga connects to bhakti, and the Doctrine of
Karma (Karmatattva), which is his last book. His hymns, Stotrasaṃgraha, will be
discussed in Chapter 8, which will deal with lay practice in the Kāpil Maṭh tradi-
tion. Shorter texts that give practical instructions in yoga, found in the writings of
Hariharānanda Āraṇya and Dharmamegha Āraṇya, will be analyzed in Chapter 7.
Śivoktayogayuktiḥ
Āraṇya’s first publication was a short Sanskrit text of 64 slokas “Śivoktayogayuktiḥ”
(“Spoken by Śiva engaged in yoga”). This text presents Sāṃkhyayoga in a form
of conversation between the god Śiva and the goddess Śakti. The text contains an
interesting criticism of knowledge gained from books or sermons and of the utter-
ings of mantras as sources of salvific liberation as well of Vedānta.
“Śivoktayogayuktiḥ” was published in 1892, the same year Hariharānanda
Āraṇya took initiation as saṃnyāsin in Triveṇi.1 The text is a conversation between
Śiva and his consort Bhāvanī, and the topic of the conversation is yoga. Goddess
Bhāvanī asks Śiva to explain five aspects of yoga.
The text promotes the Sāṃkhyayoga teaching, but uses a traditional Hindu tex-
tual setting. The choice of using Śiva to preach Sāṃkhyayoga may be because
Śiva himself was known as a divine yogin and the god of yoga, and to give the text
Textual tradition of Kāpil Maṭh 89
religious authority. During the first years of Āraṇya’s renunciant life, he had an
inclination toward Śaivism, perhaps due to the patronage of the āśram in Triveni
at the time.2 The text does mention Kapila as an example of a saint, but he does
not take part in the conversation. This is the only text as far as I know in which
Āraṇya has a popular Hindu god teach Sāṃkhyayoga. In later texts, it is Kapila
and his lineage of teachers, Pañcaśikha, Patañjali and so on, who are presented as
the teachers of Sāṃkhyayoga.
The five requests from Bhāvanī to Śiva are for him 1) to explain why yoga
is considered essential even though it is so difficult (sloka 2), 2) to elaborate on
the logic by which one can be sure about the existence of the self (sloka 9), 3) to
explain how one can know the self (sloka 15), 4) to tell how yoga practice brings
salvific liberation (sloka 44), and 5) to identify the knowledge that leads to libera-
tion and those who possess this knowledge (sloka 49).
Śiva answers the first question, why yoga practice is essential even though great
people in the past found it hard and almost impossible to practice, by stating that
yoga initially brings nothing but pain, but for those who have stamina the results
will be blissful. Yoga is the toughest of all tasks, Śiva says, and since initial suf-
fering has a matching happiness at the end, happiness gained from yoga is unique.
The self is attainable only by yoga. The goddess then asks Śiva to elaborate on
how the existence of the self can be proven. Śiva answers that the sense of “I am”
is self-evident because no person can ever prove that “I do not exist.” Śiva then
explains the difference between the knower and the knowable. The self, ātman, is
pure, eternal, unitary, indivisible, the cause of coming into being of the universe,
and the refuge of all beings. Bhavānī asks how it is possible to know the ātman,
and Śiva explains the difference between the seer (draṣṭṛ) and the seen (dṛśya). In
verse 18, the duo of puruṣa and prakṛti is presented as the cause of the universe.
The cause of temporality is called avidyā and can be eliminated by yoga. Karma
and vāsanās lead to a sequence of rebirths. The self is realized by yoga and the
realization of the self secures liberation from the cycle of rebirth. A person who
gains a desired object, whether on earth or in heaven, thinks it will last forever, but
he is sadly mistaken and is similar to a traveler in the heart of a desert longing for
a glass of water. All mortals are affected by pleasure, pain, and delusion. Pain is
like darkness, and pleasure is like a momentary flash of lightning in a dark night,
which adds to the subsequent darkness. Truthfulness, non-injury, compassion, and
charity can be practiced fully only as a part of yoga. Only a yogin is really truth-
ful in his words and actions, and the way out of this worldly life is through yoga.
Ordinary people kill many living beings by their normal bodily movements, but a
yogin is truly non-violent for he keeps his body motionless and this brings peace
to all living beings around him.
Bhāvanī requests Śiva to explain how yoga brings salvific liberation. Śiva
replies that the root cause of bondage is thinking that one’s body, organs, and
mind are one’s possessions. This can be counteracted by some of the limbs of the
eightfold yoga: Pratyāhāra leads to severance from the sense organs, prāṇāyāma
leads to severance from the body, and dhyāna to severance from the mind, which
is the last hindrance. Yamas and niyamas sever the bond with all external objects.
90 Textual tradition of Kāpil Maṭh
Once the yamas and niyamas are mastered, the aspirant attains samādhi and there-
fore prajñā (knowledge).
Bhāvanī then notes that the Upaniṣads teaches that knowledge leads to libera-
tion, and asks what is the nature of the knowledge that leads to liberation. Śiva
answers that only the practice of yoga, and not knowledge from books, can bring
liberation. If merely uttering the mantra brahmāham (I am brahman) can cause
release, then even parrots could be liberated. Those whose interests in life are
confined to what they eat and where they sleep, are as good as animals, and if they
in addition go on repeating the mantra brahmāham, they will go to hell when they
die, Śiva declares. And further,
those who lead an idle purposeless life without any spiritual practice but take
the garb of a mendicant merely for access to hospitality from devout house-
holders and get engaged in controversies with other likeminded people cul-
minating in exchanges like “I know Brahman, but you do not” will no doubt
go straight to hell when they die.
(śloka 64, Āraṇya 2006b: 60)
Truly wise people sit immovable and are silent. The body of the truly wise ceases
to function like a common man’s because of the yogin’s renouncement of it, writes
Āraṇya in sloka 56. The persons with no ego, who refrain from all activities, are
liberated. Those who are born with a passion for spiritual practice have mastered
yama, niyama, and āsana in their previous life, and they attain salvific liberation
from practicing only dhāraṇā, dhyāna, and samādhi. For others the eight limbs of
yoga should be practiced in their totality. Finally, Āraṇya emphasizes that those
who are without sufficient latent impressions of practicing the preliminary limbs
of yoga, because they have not practiced them in previous lives and do not start
by practicing ahiṃsā and truthfulness but begin right away to imitate saints like
Kapila and go straight to dhāraṇā, dhyāna, and samādhi, will fail.3
The text illustrates well Āraṇya’s yoga project. There is no effort to make yoga
a popular practice, quite the opposite; he presents it as an extremely difficult prac-
tice, the toughest of all tasks, and the text is in Sanskrit. The choice of Sanskrit
indicates that it represented orthodoxy or “authenticity” and a living tradition.4
The text seems to be an attempt to instruct about what yoga should be. It is not,
as is modern yoga, an attempt to open yoga up for larger groups and a variety of
purposes. Yoga, according to Āraṇya, is only for saṃnyāsins and the path of yoga
takes many lifetimes because the appropriate vāsanās for yoga need to be devel-
oped. The practice of samādhi, concentration, which is the core of Sāṃkhyayoga,
is for those who have already mastered the first limbs of yoga such as yama and
niyama and immovability of the body (āsana) in previous lives. These statements
seem be intended as a criticism of others involved in renunciation and yoga and
the purpose is to assign yoga its proper place. One should start with ahiṃsā, but
one who has mastered all the external limbs of yoga in previous lives can go
directly to the practice of samādhi, and Āraṇya seems to have considered himself
such a person. The theory of vāsanās explains the difference between guru and
disciples. What is also apparent in this text is that Āraṇya wants to make the role
of the renunciant an honorable one. He distinguishes it from false ascetics, and
this strategy may be seen as typical of the bhadralok yoga. He mentions ascet-
ics who take the garb of a mendicant in order to exploit householders into giv-
ing them free food and who participate in quarrels. He is also critical of persons
who believe that knowledge of the Upaniṣads can bring liberation. Yoga is dif-
ficult but necessary for attaining liberation, but the parts of yoga need to be per-
formed in a certain order. Perfection in ethics is a requisite for progress in yoga,
and, according to slokas 47 and 48, when the yogin masters yama (ethical rules)
and niyama ( purifications), he attains samādhi, and from the samādhi, he attains
prajñā (knowledge) and salvific liberation. The emphasis on yama and niyama
and the lack of interest in āsana is perhaps an attempt of distancing real yoga
from Haṭhayoga practices. A hierarchy of yogas is constructed. The practitioners
of āsana are those who have not already mastered yama, niyama, and āsana in
their previous life, while Sāṃkhyayogins attain salvific liberation by practicing
only dhāraṇā, dhyāna, and samādhi. That a person has inclinations (vāsanās) for
Sāṃkhyayoga proves, in other words, that he has already mastered yama, niy-
ama, and āsanas in a previous life. It seems important to present Sāṃkhyayoga
as different from the practices of other yogins, and he explains the difference by
referring to rebirth and impressions of past experiences (vāsanās and saṃskāras).
He confirms the idea of the bhadralok yogin, who has moved beyond the āsana
practice, who can be distinguished from ascetics who rely on mantras and those
who do not perform any spiritual practice. Āraṇya apparently criticizes Vedānta
by stating, “If merely uttering the mantra brahmāham (I am brahman) can cause
release, then even parrots could be liberated by that process” and emphasizes the
ideal of yoga as follows: truly wise people sit motionless and silent, and their bod-
ies cease to function like a common man’s because they have renounced them. It
is the persons with no ego and who refrain from all activities who attain liberation.
The Yogakārikā
The most important of Āraṇya’s early writings is the Yogakārikā (“Verses on
Yoga”), which was written perhaps around the same time as Śivoktayogayuktiḥ.
Like Śivoktayogayuktiḥ, the Yogakārikā is also a Sanskrit text, but in this text, the
mythological frame has been omitted, and the textual authority is not two divini-
ties in conversation but a sūtra text, the Yogasūtra. The Yogakārikā is a versified
commentary on the Yogasūtra based on the Vyāsabhāṣya with a short prose com-
mentary. The text consists of the Yogasūtra, summaries of Vyāsa’s commentary
in the form of śloka verses, a short explanation of the ślokas, and an explana-
tory commentary called Saralā Ṭikā (“Easy commentary”). The text shows that
Āraṇya had discovered the importance of the Vyāsabhāṣya in the interpretation
of the Yogasūtra. In the “foreword” to the Yogakārikā, written by Dharmamegha
Āraṇya, Dharmamegha states that the Yogakārikā was written in 1892, but pub-
lished in 1910. The title given in the handwritten manuscript was apparently
Yogakoumudī (D. Āraṇya 2008: iii), which means “Moonlight on Yoga,” and gives
associations to the Tattvakaumudī (“Moonlight on Sāṃkhya”), Vācaspatimiśra’s
(950 CE) famous commentary on Iśvarakṛṣṇa’s Sāṃkhyakārikā (400 CE). The
translator of the Yogakārikā, Deepti Dutta, remarks in her “translator’s note” that
“Yogakārikā from no less an author than Srīmat Swāmī Hariharānanda Āraṇya
may be said to occupy a place alongside Sāṃkhyakārikā of Īśvarakṛṣṇa” (Dutta
2008: i). Dutta seems to hint at the possibility of the text becoming a Kārikā text
for Yoga philosophy similar to that of the Sāṃkhyakārikā for Sāṃkhya.
The Yogakārikā shows Āraṇya’s excellent education in Sanskrit and his ability
to compose in Sanskrit, and his knowledge of Yoga philosophy. The Yogakārikā
is a scholastic text and is in line with the Pātañjalayogaśāstra tradition. It does
not impose the philosophy of any other system on the Yoga system, such as
Vedānta, which had become more common in India since Śivānanda Sarasvati’s
Yogacintāmaṇi, a text, as was noted earlier, that attempted to integrate Pātañjala
Yoga and Haṭhayoga, composed sometime between the sixteenth and early nine-
teenth century (Larson and Bhattacharya 2008: 536). The Yogakārikā is written
in the established style of the Sanskrit philosophical traditions, as kārikā and
bhāṣya/ṭīkā. Āraṇya, at the time of writing the Yogakārikā, had become a renunci-
ant, but there is no mention in the text of him having met any contemporary yogins
or saṃnyāsins. There is no reference to any contemporary contexts that would
make it possible to relate the text to contemporary society, persons, or events. The
explanations and examples in the text seem to a large degree to be based on the
Bhāṣya. The explanations of the Bhāṣya are also sometimes referred to, such as
the commentary on Yogasūtra 2.5 ( p. 107), to illustrate that avidyā does not mean
the absence of real knowledge, but false cognition, in the same way as amitra
(non-friend) does not mean the absence of a friend, but an enemy. One central
issue in Āraṇya’s philosophy is discussed in sūtra 2.18, the twofold purpose of the
world of bhoga and apavarga:
The seen world has a twofold purpose: experience of pleasure and pain
(bhoga) and emancipation (apavarga). No other purpose can be seen. Expe-
rience is to enjoy or despise objects considering them as good or bad because
of identification of buddhi with puruṣa. When the seer and the seen are
known as different, that is emancipation of the buddhi. Hence experience
(bhoga) and emancipation (apavarga) are the two functions of the knowable
object. They don’t have any other interest.
(H. Āraṇya 2008a: 126, translation Deepti Dutta [modified])
His views on āsanas are stated in kārikā 2.84 and 2.85, along with the Ṭīkā.
When āsanas become “steady and comfortable, then only these āsanas are con-
sidered as limbs of Yoga, otherwise they distract our mind” (H. Āraṇya 2008a:
172). The body should be felt as “non-existent like the body of a dead man as it
were like a piece of wood” (H. Āraṇya 2008a: 172). “Posture gets perfected when
the adept habitually meditates: ‘My body has, like void, dissolved itself in infinite
space and I am like the wide expanse of the sky’ ” (H. Āraṇya 2008a: 173). The
Yogakārikā argues that the identification of the Self with the body (asmitākleśa)
is the root of attachment and aversion, and that spiritual practice is needed to
eradicate asmitākleśa and thus stop the cycle of rebirth (H. Āraṇya 2008a: 287).
Likewise, prāṇāyāma is understood as “the practice of arresting the mind-flow
in consonance with the arresting of inhalation and exhalation. Prāṇāyāma does
not become conducive to Yoga where suspension of inhalation and exhalation
is not coupled with that of the citta (mind-field)” (H. Āraṇya 2008a: 174). So
prāṇāyāma is for the purpose of samādhi and nothing else.
While explaining the yoga powers (siddhis, vibhūtis) Āraṇya treats the text as
a scholastic text. He tries to convey the intended meaning by repeating it in the
style of the textual tradition. Omniscience is said to be “simultaneous knowledge
of all past, present and future states of existence,” but the text does not elaborate
on what that exactly means and there are no references to any experiences of the
author himself.
The division of the Yogasūtra into four chapters, Āraṇya understands in the
following way:
In the first part the author (sūtrakṛtā) has explained salvific liberation
(kaivalya) from the standpoint of concentration (samādhi); in the second part
from the standpoint of the fourfold truths about suffering, the cause of suffer-
ing etc.; in the third part from the standpoint of the yoga powers (vibhūti); and
in the fourth part from the standpoint of the rational analysis of the difference
between buddhi and puruṣa.
(H. Āraṇya 2008a: 255, translation by the author)
The idea that the second part explains salvific liberation from the standpoint of
the fourfold truths about suffering is central for the Kāpil Maṭh tradition. In the
last part of the Yogakārikā, Āraṇya writes at length on rebirth, karma, saṃskāras,
and vāsanās. These topics are also treated at length in Kāpilāśramīya Pātañjal
Jogdarśan and later became the subject of a book-length publication Karmatat-
tva. Rebirth, karmāśaya, vāsanā, and memory (smṛti) are some of the main inter-
ests, because Sāṃkhya and Yoga analyze the world and the mind in terms of cause
and effect, the doctrine of karma is similarly based on cause and effect relation-
ships and the idea of saṃskāras and vāsanās means that efforts to progress in
Sāṃkhyayoga in previous lives have been preserved for the present life.
The Kāpilāśramīya Pātañjal Jogdarśan

The Yogakārikā is the first of three commentaries Āraṇya composed on the Yoga-
sūtra/Pātañjalayogaśāstra. The Pātañjalayogaśāstra was clearly his favorite
text. The other two commentaries are Kāpilāśramīya Pātañjal Jogdarśan (H.
Āraṇya 1981, 1988a) and the Bhāsvatī (H. Āraṇya 2000: 409–632). Contrary to
most other writers of commentaries on the Pātañjalayogaśāstra, and early trans-
lators, Āraṇya was himself both a renunciant and a follower of Sāṃkhyayoga. At
a young age, he decided to dedicate his life to the attainment of kaivalya, which is
the goal of the Yoga teaching. This makes the Kāpilāśramīya Pātañjal Jogdarśan
an exceptional text. N. E. Sjoman has noted that among the translations of the
Yogasūtra and commentaries, “only Hariharānanda Āraṇya’s translation, which
is the least known amongst students of yoga, has any relation to actual practice”
(Sjoman 1999: 37). Āraṇya, notes Sjoman, “tried to realize the principles of the
doctrine as a spiritual/philosophical discipline and translated taking account of
his meditation experience” (Sjoman 1999: 37). This fact makes the text excep-
tionally interesting, and the text gives a number of instructions in Sāṃkhyayoga
meditation. The commentary has been influenced by the Bhāṣya in particular,
but also the Tattvavaiśāradī commentary of Vācaspatimiśra. Āraṇya refers to the
commentaries by Vācaspatimiśra, Bhoja, and Vijñānabhikṣu in only a few places,
but he seems familiar with them. Commenting on the word ekatattvābhyāsa in
Yogasūtra 1.32, he presents their different interpretations of the sūtra and then
presents his own. Ekatattvābhyāsa means concentration on the divine inside or
on an idea contemplated upon, which is opposed to the vṛttis (fluctuations) of the
mind. He does not draw on Vācaspatimiśra, Bhoja, and Vijñānabhikṣu for author-
ity, but the authority of his text is based on his own person and his long experience
as a Sāṃkhyayoga renunciant. Āraṇya’s text differs by focusing more on medita-
tion practices and the goal of nirodha, and is less oriented around philosophical
debates.
The style and format of the Kāpilāśramīya Pātañjal Jogdarśan has similari-
ties to a traditional commentary and is, for example, strikingly different from
the modern commentary of Vivekānanda published 15 years earlier, which draws
much on “Neo-Vedāntic occultism” (De Michelis 2004). The point of Āraṇya’s
commentary is not to present something new, but to recover the past and restart
an ancient tradition. He explains how Sāṃkhyayoga works for the attainment of
kaivalya. It is written in an authoritative voice, relying on his own authority as a
Sāṃkhyayoga renunciant. I will analyze some of the most important themes of
this text and also draw from some of his other texts while examining these themes.
The Kāpilāśramīya Pātañjal Jogdarśan is considered his magnum opus and can
serve as the basis for analyzing these themes.
Hiraṇyagarbha
It can be argued that the idea of a creator who is the Lord of the universe and who
holds together the universe is a logical step following from the Sāṃkhya idea of
the manifestation of the world from contact between puruṣa and prakṛti. Since
the first product of the contact between puruṣa and prakṛti is the emergence from
prakṛti of buddhi or citta, which is a mental principle, this mental principle, intel-
lect, or mind has to be the mind of someone. The first product of prakṛti is not the
gross elements such as earth and water, and the mind developing from these mate-
rial principles, but mental principles are the first to emerge from prakṛti, and gross
elements are later in the sequence. This makes a big difference in how the process
of creation can be conceived. That the first principle to emerge from prakṛti is the
principle of mind means that what emerges is a person and from his mind emerges
the other 23 tattvas that make up the world. The world therefore seems to be a
material manifestation of a supreme being. In another text, Hariharānanda Āraṇya
presents an additional argument:
Since the external sensations have easy acceptance in the mind, the underly-
ing reality from which they originate has to be mental. In other words, one
has to accept the existence of an external mind of a ‘Being’ which affects
minds of all beings here on this earth.
(H. Āraṇya 2003: 5)
Āraṇya draws on the support of the Veda. He further explains that Sāṃkhya
holds the view that the mind of this being excels in dharma, jñāna, vairāgya, and
aiśvarya. Āraṇya then asks how it is possible for one particular being to have so
many superior qualities, and explains that this person attained these qualities by
the method of Sāṃkhyayoga in previous births (H. Āraṇya 2003: 5). Therefore,
the creator god, Hiraṇyagarbha of Sāṃkhyayoga, was a Sāṃkhyayogin in his pre-
vious life. So although Sāṃkhyayogins are rare to find on earth, the creator god
himself is a Sāṃkhyayogin! The Kāpil Maṭh tradition mostly refers to this divine
being as Hiraṇyagarbha but also Bhūtādi. The external cause of the tanmātras
(subtle principles), which are the material causes of the gross elements, is, accord-
ing to Āraṇya, this divine mind:
The Tanmātras are the minutest sensations of subtle objects received by the
senses. The external cause of such perception is the ego of the Great or Divine
Mind known as Bhūtādi.
(H. Āraṇya 1981: 102)
In Pātañjalayogaśāstra 3.45, this Bhūtādi is called the pūrvasiddha, the previous

perfected one. It is used to explain why yogins with extraordinary powers cannot
change the laws of nature:
Na ca śakto ’pi padārthaviparyāsāṃ karoti, kasmād, anyasya yatrakāmāva

sāyinaḥ pūrvasiddhasya tathābhūteṣu saṃkalpāditi.
Yogins with such powers do not utilize them for disturbing the disposition
of the world because they do not or cannot go against the will of a previous
perfected One who has brought about the existing disposition of things.
(In H. Āraṇya 1981: 326)
On Yogasūtra 3.45, Āraṇya explains that the pūrvasiddha is Hiraṇyagarbha (H.

Āraṇya 1981: 327), and he also identifies this god with the Saguṇa, the creator,
protector, and destroyer. He thinks this doctrine is also identical with the Sāṃkhya
view. The name Hiraṇyagarbha is known from ancient Vedic texts in Ṛgveda
10.121, where Hiraṇyagarbha appears as the source of creation who arose in the
beginning. This idea of creation coming from the golden germ is a well-known
concept in Hindu philosophy. However, there was probably hardly any or no wor-
ship of a god called Hiraṇyagarbha at the time of Āraṇya, and there were no
religious groups directing their devotion (bhakti) to the worship of a god with
this name. Āraṇya believed Sāṃkhyayoga was “Ārṣa-dharma or the religion of
the ṛṣis” (H. Āraṇya 1981: xxi) – i.e., a tradition identified with the Vedic reli-
gion.5 Āraṇya was not interested in the religion of the Purāṇas and the worship
of images of gods and goddesses (mūrtis). This is typical of one strand of the
religion of the Bengali bhadralok, which became manifest in the Brāhmo Samāj
movement. The idea of returning to the Veda has also similarity to Dayānanda
Sarasvatī’s Ārya Samāj. Āraṇya’s Sāṃkhyayoga can be seen as building on the
religious puritanism of the Brāhmo Samāj and their promotion of the Vedic tradi-
tion, especially that of the Upaniṣads, as the core and peak of the Hindu traditions.
However, Āraṇya wanted to direct this revival of Vedic knowledge in the direction
of Sāṃkhyayoga and away from the Advaita Vedānta favored by Brāhmo Samāj,
which had also become mixed with occult traditions in late nineteenth-century
cosmopolitan Kolkata. Āraṇya believed Hiraṇyagarbha, “the omniscient and all-
pervading Creator,” was the “original exponent of Yoga Philosophy” (H. Āraṇya
1981: xxiii). According to Āraṇya, Hiraṇyagarbha taught the system to some
ṛṣis. Āraṇya mentions that Sāṃkhya believed that Kapila was born with superior
knowledge and non-attachment acquired in a previous birth, and that he attained
supreme spiritual knowledge by his own genius. Yoga, on the other hand, notes
Āraṇya, believes that Kapila “acquired his knowledge through the grace of God
(Saguṇa Īśvara or Hiraṇyagarbha)” (H. Āraṇya 1981: xxiv). This gives an addi-
tional function to Hiraṇyagarbha. Since Hiraṇyagarbha was a Sāṃkhyayogin who
perfected dharma, jñāna, vairāgya, and aiśvarya in his previous life, he was able
to transfer these principles to Kapila. Both Sāṃkhya and Samkhyayoga, however,
comments Āraṇya, believe it was Kapila who “propounded the Sāṃkhya-yoga
philosophy as we find it today” (H. Āraṇya 1981: xxiv). When Āraṇya explains
Yogasūtra 4.4, the statement that all created minds (nirmāṇacitta) are created from
pure “I” sense (asmitāmātrā),6 he takes the opportunity to show how it is possible
for Īśvara, at the end of a cycle of creation, to favor those qualified for liberation.
Āraṇya explains that a yogin who arrests the functioning of the mind for a limited
period, can, when the mind starts functioning again, bring a constructed mind
(nirmāṇacitta) into existence. This explains the activities of Hiraṇygarbha/saguṇa
īśvara. That there is a saguṇa īśvara, a god who is creator, protector, and destroyer,
is not a view found in the Sāṃkhyakārikā. The view can, however, be found in
the Sāṃkhyasūtra, a fifteenth-century text.7 The text states that one who in the
previous life attained merging in prakṛti ( prakṛtilaya) re-emerges together with
the next creation as an īśvara who is omniscient and omnipotent and that such a
god is accepted in Sāṃkhya (Sāṃkhyasūtra 3.56–3.57). Sāṃkhyasūtra 3.56–3.57
promotes a similar idea as the pūrvasiddha (the previously perfected one – i.e.,
Hiraṇyagarbha) of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra 3.45. It is noteworthy that Āraṇya at
no place in his commentary identifies the pūrvasiddha with any of the names of
the personal gods of Hinduism, and neither does the Vyāsabhāṣya or the sūtra text
itself. While the name Hiraṇyagarbha is not used in the Pātañjalayogaśāstra, and
Prajāpati only once (3.26), divine figures are plentiful in the text. The puruṣaviśeṣa
or nirguṇa Īśvara of the Yogaśāstra has received much attention in the phenom-
enon of modern Yoga, probably because he is not contradicted by modern cos-
mology, as he transcends prakṛti, but according to Pātañjalayogaśāstra 3.26, the
cosmic regions are populated with numerous divine beings. Divinity is a possible
rebirth, as it is in Buddhist and Jain traditions with which the Pātañjalayogaśāstra
is closely related. Sāṃkhya preaches neither theism nor atheism, according to
Āraṇya (H. Āraṇya 2003: 5). Hiraṇyagarbha appeared as creator and lord of the
universe because of his latencies (vāsanās). He is not involved in rewarding the
virtuous or punishing the vicious, because such a god would be unacceptable to
Sāṃkhya, according to Āraṇya. Hiraṇyagarbha will attain kaivalya at the end of
the present kalpa ( period of creation) when the material effects dissolve into the
material cause (H. Āraṇya 2003: 6). The end of a period of creation is, in other
words, the creator god’s mokṣa. Gods, stresses Āraṇya, like all other living beings,
are made up of the 25 tattvas – that is, they are made up of puruṣa and prakṛti (and
its material effects), so gods are not independent principles.
Samādhi
The main theme that pervades all of Hariharānanda Āraṇya’s texts, from the early
texts to his last, is that of samādhi. In order to understand Sāṃkhyayoga, samādhi
needs to be understood. Samādhi, writes Āraṇya, “is the highest stage of medi-
tation.” In samādhi, the mind is full of the nature of the object meditated upon
and the reflective knowledge ceases; “meditation losing consciousness of self,
is Samādhi” (H. Āraṇya 1981: 252). Samādhi is the only means to realizing the
puruṣa principle and thus the realization of mokṣa.
In plain language, when in the process of meditating, consciousness of self

seems to disappear and only the object meditated upon appears to exist,
when the self is forgotten and the difference between the self and the object
is effaced, such concentration of the mind on the object is Samādhi. This
characteristic of Samādhi should be clearly understood and carefully remem-
bered, otherwise nothing can be realized about Yoga.
(H. Āraṇya 1981: 252)
Āraṇya then quotes the Bṛhadāraṇyakopaniṣad and Kaṭhopaniṣad for support and
concludes, “Through Samādhi, and by nothing else, can one realize the Self” (H.
Āraṇya 1981: 252). And if a person attains samādhi, “he will not be born again.
When samādhi is attained, liberation is secured in that birth and there is no further
birth with a gross body” (H. Āraṇya 1981: 354). Yoga is samādhi and samādhi
is Yoga. This can be considered the main doctrine of the Kāpil Maṭh tradition.
Attainment of samādhi produces vāsanās (traces, imprints) for attaining samādhi
again, so from practice samādhi becomes stable.
The English translation of the Kāpilāśramīya Pātañjal Jogdarśan is introduced
by a short essay titled: “Yoga: What it is and what it is not.” Here, Āraṇya defines
Yoga:
The ability to stop at will the fluctuations or modifications of the mind which
is acquired through constant practice in a spirit of renunciation is called Yoga.
True Yoga is practiced with a view to attaining salvation.
(H. Āraṇya 1981: xxvii)
Stopping the fluctuations of the mind is attained by “the art of keeping only one
idea before the mind’s eye and shutting out all other ideas or thoughts” (H. Āraṇya
1981: xxvii). Āraṇya then mentions two central features of Yoga: the suppression
has to be caused by will and it has to be developed into a habit by constant practice
“in a spirit of renunciation” and not for personal gain. He notes that feats such as
holding the breath for some time in a particular body posture is not Yoga because
the power of concentrating the mind at will on any particular object is not a nec-
essary condition of performing these feats. Āraṇya next explains that concentra-
tion has two stages, holding one item of thought for a long time is called dhyāna
(meditation), forgetting even one’s own mind with the mind fixed only on the
object contemplated upon is samādhi (concentration). Everything that is an object
for puruṣa can be an object of concentration. There are therefore different kinds
of samādhis according to the object focused upon. Not only objects such as sound
but also faculties such as ahaṃkāra can be objects of concentration. This is called
sabīja samādhi. The highest form of sabīja samādhi is concentration on the pure
“I” (asmitāmātrā). When the power of samādhi is strengthened, the yogin can
be absorbed in any object of the category grāhya (objects comprehensible by the
senses), grahaṇa (internal or external senses), and grahitṛ (the receiver, empirical
self). In the early stages, Āraṇya writes, “devotees are instructed by experienced
teachers” (H. Āraṇya 1981: xxviii).
When success in concentration has been achieved, Āraṇya argues, the yogin
attains perfection in knowledge and will power (i.e., yoga powers), and if the
yogin has not attained perfection in knowledge and will power, he has not attained
perfection of samādhi. Āraṇya notes, “A person having attained such perfection
may not like to display his enlightenment or will-power” but that those who try to
display them but are unsuccessful and still claim to be proficient in samādhi “must
be laboring under a delusion” (H. Āraṇya 1981: xxix). One of the fruits of yoga
(samādhi) is the cessation of misery, which happens with the ability to control the
cognitive faculty and rise above perceptions of external objects and attachment to
the body and the senses (H. Āraṇya 1981: xxix). Cessation of misery is the result
of yoga.
Yoga or samādhi is of two kinds, writes Āraṇya: samprajñāta and asamprajñāta.
Samprajñāta samādhi is habitual one-pointedness through which one can realize
the highest form of empirical self and the highest stage of comprehension of the
phenomenal world. When one is also able to shut these out, that is asamprajñāta
samādhi. It is only at the asamprajñāta samādhi stage that one can attain complete
cessation of physical and psychical activity and at this stage only “the solitary
existence of Puruṣa or metempiric Self remains. That is the ultimate goal of Yoga,
which is perpetual peace of mind or Kaivalya Mokṣa, i.e. liberation” (H. Āraṇya
1981: xxix). Finally, Āraṇya distinguishes samādhi from other forms of reduc-
tion of restlessness, which has nothing to do with samādhi. There can be three
states of mind, he explains, luminously calm (sāttvika), restless (rājasika) and
stupefied (tāmasika). Āraṇya explains that if there is a reduction of restlessness
(rājasika), it does not follow that the mind would be luminously calm (sāttvika),
but it might instead be stupefied (tāmasika). “Trance” and some mental diseases
are examples of the stupefied (tāmasika) mind. Mere cessation of mental activity
is not therefore Yoga. Yoga is only when the mind can be stopped at will and fixed
on the grāhya, grahaṇa, or grahitṛ – that is, on the objects of concentration. Even
if trance and samādhi may have some likeness, they are as different and contrary
as darkness and light, concludes Āraṇya. This is an important distinction, and it
is therefore quite wrong to translate samādhi as “trance,” as is sometimes done in
English-language texts on yoga.
Instructions for attaining the salvific goal

The Sāṃkhya categories are used to instruct in the methods of attaining the salv-
ific goal. A number of methods are described. Āraṇya often uses the concepts of
tattvas such as buddhi, puruṣa, and so on, and the three guṇas, sattva, rajas, and
tamas, and the concepts of grāhya (knowables), grahaṇa (instruments of recep-
tion) and grahitṛ (receiver) in his instructions on how the mind can become one-
pointed and attain samādhi.
Puruṣa is the illuminer of the momentary phases of the mutation of Buddhi.

Buddhi is co-existent with mutation and Puruṣa is what remains when the
mutation ceases. That is why mutation cannot reach Puruṣa. This is really
how a Yogin realizes the principle of Puruṣa. First, he realizes Tanmātra, e.g.
the light Tanmātra, taste Tanmātra, out of the various gross elements, i.e. the
variety in color or in taste etc. Then gradually by deep meditation he realizes
the disappearance of these principles in the I-sense. By realizing that the sub-
tle principles of Tanmātra are nothing but variations of the I-sense, he arrives
at the pure awareness of the “I” as a principle or category and then with
discriminative knowledge he realizes the Puruṣa principle. Thus by gradually
shutting out subtle and yet more subtle mutations he is established in that
principle, i.e. gets a clear idea of that principle.
(H. Āraṇya 1981: 24–25)
On the statement in the same sūtra that self is the reflector of the buddhi, Āraṇya
comments,
The reflector of Buddhi, which is the highest form of the phenomenal Self, is
beyond Buddhi, that is the immutable Consciousness or Puruṣa. This idea of
reflection is the way of reaching the Puruṣa principle. After realizing the prin-
ciple of the pure I-sense by force of concentration, its reflector, the Puruṣa
principle, has to be realized by process of meditation. This really is Viveka-
khyāti or final discriminative knowledge.
(H. Āraṇya 1981: 25)
On sūtra 1.20, when explaining smṛtisādhana, Āraṇya instructs,
when practicing contemplation on the various Tattvas or principles, i.e.

Bhūta-tattva, Tanmātra-tattva, Indriya-tattva, Ahaṃkāra-tattva and Buddhi-
tattva (respectively the principles of gross elements, subtle monads, the
organs, the I-sense and the pure I-sense), their peculiar features should be
envisaged and recollected for purposes of Smṛtisādhana. The highest practice
relates to constant remembrance of the discrimination between Puruṣa and
Prakṛti, the pure Consciousness and the knowable.
(H. Āraṇya 1981: 51)
And how is this remembrance to be practiced? Āraṇya explains,
While practicing this, the thoughts arising in the mind should be kept before
the mind as it were, i.e. your thought-process should always be the subject
of your scrutiny and no extraneous idea, i.e. nothing other than that which is
being thought of, should be allowed to crop up therein, and you should go
on watching what your mind is receiving. This is the chief means of cleaning
your mind, i.e. for attaining self-purification. This is the best form of Smṛti-
sādhana. Without Smṛti-sādhana pure Consciousness cannot be realised. Cul-
tivation of memory can be practiced in the midst of all action, even while
walking, sitting or lying down.
(H. Āraṇya 1981: 51)
The completely arrested state of mind, which is effected after acquiring dis-
criminative enlightenment, i.e. Smṛti about the Seer, the reflector of the ego,
is the state leading to the attainment of Kaivalya or liberation.
(H. Āraṇya 1981: 53)
The fact that the I-sense, which is a phase of Buddhi, is not Puruṣa (or metem-
piric Self or pure Consciousness) has to be realised first in a mind, made
calm and clear through concentration; then by shutting out therefrom all other
knowledge the ability to remain absorbed in the knowledge about Puruṣa, or
is Viveka-khyāti or discriminative enlightenment. Through Viveka, Buddhi
ceases to act, i.e. Nirodha-concentration ensues.
(H. Āraṇya 1981: 53)
This nirodha (cessation) brings omniscience, but with continuing nirodha con-
centration and renouncing omniscience, the nirodha becomes habitual through the
force of saṃskāras (traces). This is asamprajñātasamādhi because at this stage
knowledge and even vivekakhyāti are also shut out.
Another method to attain samprajñāta samādhi is īśvarapraṇidhāna, which
means, according to Āraṇya, “feeling the existence, in the innermost core of the
heart, of God” and “to rest content by surrendering oneself to Him” (H. Āraṇya
1981: 56). Āraṇya notes that this God’s grace “would be directed towards confer-
ment of the highest benefit on the devotee, viz. attainment of Mokṣa or the state
of liberation and not worldly pleasures, which is best not to seek from God” (H.
Āraṇya 1981: 56). According to Sāṃkhyayoga, worldly pleasure and sorrow are
due to one’s own karma. Āraṇya stresses the Sāṃkhyayoga idea that this god
is made up of both puruṣa and prakṛti. Here Āraṇya argues that Kapila and the
other original teachers of religion of salvific liberation (mokṣadharma) acquired
their knowledge from Īśvara. “Ṛṣis propounded the Śāstras; these have thus been
derived from God. From Īśvara came the Śāstras and from the Śāstras the knowl-
edge of Īśvara” (H. Āraṇya 1981: 59). However, according to Sāṃkhya and Yoga,
there are multiple divinities, and Īśvara is only one of many gods:
There are many persons who have special powers. Īśvara is One such, but his
special feature is that no one has as much power as He has, nor can anybody
else’s power exceed his; that is why he is called Īśvara.
(H. Āraṇya 1981: 59)
Apparently, Īśvara assumes a created mind, and this is the way he can help to liber-
ate beings by giving them proper knowledge. According to Āraṇya, “That liberated
persons can work with such created minds is the finding of the Sāṃkhya philosophy”
(H. Āraṇya 1981: 62). The mind is created from prakṛti and can be dissolved at will.
Āraṇya gives detailed and useful instructions on the method of īśvarapraṇidhāna
in his comments on Yogasūtra 1.28. For Āraṇya, meditation on īśvara leads from
the outside object to the puruṣa principle. What we think is an entity is one of
the three knowables grāhya, grahaṇa, or grahitṛ. A beginner thinks of īśvara as
an outside object, but the next step is to think of the divine as residing within us.
Buddhi and I-sense are realized as part of oneself, since it is impossible to realize
someone else’s buddhi and I-sense, so the divine has to be thought of as part of
oneself (as “I am He”). He is to be thought of as part of the heart (hṛdaya). The
heart is an important concept in Āraṇya’s yoga instructions, but it is not one of
the main concepts of Classical Sāṃkhya and Yoga, although hṛdaya is used in the
Pātañjalayogaśāstra twice (3.34, 3.39) and hṛdayapuṇḍarīka (the innermost part
of the heart) also twice (1.36, 3.1). It is not one of the 25 tattvas. According to
the Pātañjalayogaśāstra, the heart is the seat of knowledge (3.34), the vital force
prāṇa is described as reaching up to the heart (3.39), contemplation practiced on
the innermost part of the heart leads to knowledge of the buddhi (1.39), and the
innermost part of the heart is one possible place to fix the mind on during dhāraṇā
(3.1). If it is not one of the tattvas, what is it and how can it be localized?8 The
heart, according to Āraṇya, is the place inside where we feel happiness and sad-
ness. It is, in other words, a center of emotions. This place is the center of the
I-ness (asmitā) related to the body. Āraṇya points out that the brain is the center
of mental actions, and that when mental fluctuations are stopped for a period of
time, “it can be felt that the sense of ego is going down to the heart” (H. Āraṇya
1981: 66). In meditation of the heart, the subtle I-sense is realized, and this is
then pursued upward into the brain, according to Āraṇya. The heart and brain
merges, and this is the subtlest center of I-sense. A beginner could imagine the
divine as a luminous figure inside the heart and as a liberated person who has a
calm mind and a blissful face.9 The person should develop the ability to rest in
a feeling of godliness and imagine “a transparent white limitless luminous sky”
within the heart (H. Āraṇya 1981: 67). He should then imagine that his I-sense is
within that divine being. Next, he should merge his mind with the mind of Īśvara
residing in this white limitless luminous sky within his heart and think that one is
“completely within the God in one’s heart” (H. Āraṇya 1981: 67). Then he should
recollect that the blissful feeling is “I” and he should bring his mind into the same
state of calm and bliss as the mind of God. This practice leads to the realization of
the self – i.e., kaivalya (H. Āraṇya 1981: 67).
In his comments on Yogasūtra 1.29, Āraṇya argues that Īśvara, which is con-
sciousness only, is the nirguṇa Īśvara and that “amongst the Sāṃkhya-yoga sect”
there was also praṇidhāna of saguṇa Īśvara. Saguṇa Īśvara is Hiraṇyagarbha,
according to Āraṇya. “The Saguṇa Īśvara of Sāṃkhya-yogins is a calm, absorbed
being engaged in contemplation of the Self” (H. Āraṇya 1981: 69). Āraṇya then
argues that the two methods of praṇidhāna to a nirguṇa and to a saguṇa deity
“divided the devotees into two sects,” but there were no differences in their aims.
He argues, “The result of thinking of a reposed, self-cognizant, absorbed being
inside the heart will be a similar feeling of those attributes in the devotee’s heart
and this will lead him eventually from knowables to the instruments of knowing”
(H. Āraṇya 1981: 69–70). He believes the devotee will then feel he is a manifesta-
tion of saguṇa brahman.
Another method is to repeat the mantra OM combined with prāṇāyāma. This
leads to one-pointedness, which leads to samprajñātasamādhi and from this
asamprajñātasamādhi is attained.
Commenting on Yogasūtra 1.34, Āraṇya gives instructions in prāṇāyāma. The
focus is on exhalation. First, effort is placed on exhaling slowly; second, one
should focus on keeping the body still and relaxed; and third, one must endeavor
to keep the mind empty of any thoughts. Inhaling happens naturally and is not
regulated by effort (H. Āraṇya 1981: 79).
In the commentary on Yogasūtra 1.36, Āraṇya elaborates on meditation on an
inner light or effulgence. Here the method of reaching the contemplation of the
buddhisattva or pure I-sense (asmitāmātrā) is described. One should first imagine
in the “lotus,” which is explained as the core of the heart and said to be called the
abode of brahman, “the presence of a limitless uninterrupted expanse of clear
effulgence like the sky” (H. Āraṇya 1981: 83). Āraṇya, commenting on this sūtra,
describes several methods of meditations all focusing on a limitless uninterrupted
expanse of clear effulgence, but with either contemplation on the object (grāhya),
instruments (grahaṇa) or the receiver (grahitṛ). Describing the contemplation of
the receiver (grahitṛ), he writes, “Unless the exact nature of the contemplation on
Asmitā is understood it is not possible to comprehend what the state of salvation
is” (H. Āraṇya 1981: 84). So what is it about contemplation on asmitā that is of so
vital importance? The center of the I-sense pertaining to body and sense organs is
the heart, writes Āraṇya.
Concentrating on the heart, suspending all movements of the body, the feel-
ing of serenity felt all over the body should be contemplated upon. When
such contemplation is mastered, the sensation referred to is found to be very
pleasant. The cessation of the activities of all the organs results in an unspeci-
fied pleasant state. This unspecified sensation is the undiversified sixth sense,
viz, I-sense, Asmitā. One can realise pure I-sense by concentrating on this
ego or Asmitā. It should be remembered that the awareness of one’s own self
is called Asmitā.
(H. Āraṇya 1981: 84)
In his comments on the next sūtras, Āraṇya further explains in brief meditation on
a passionless mind (1.37), contemplating the images of dreams (1.38), stabilizing
the mind on any particular thing (1.39), and stabilizing the mind on the smallest
and the greatest object (1.40). The next sūtras deal with samāpatti, the state of
being absorbed, when related to empirical awareness involving words (savitarka),
without words (nirvitarka), pure contemplation with notions (savicāra), and with-
out notions (nirvicāra). The goal is to master nirvicārasamādhi. The yogin then
attains truth-bearing insight (ṛtambarā prajñā). The traces or latent impressions
(saṃskāras) of that experience counteract the other saṃskāras, and, finally, the
yogin achieves nirbīja samādhi (samādhi without content).
Āraṇya emphasizes that a person who learns by listening or by reasoning that
the puruṣa is different from the buddhi, does not really know much. If he learns
from listening or reasoning that he is not the body and is still affected by the
distress or pleasure of the body, then “there is hardly any difference between him
and an ignorant man” (H. Āraṇya 1981: 105–106). On the other hand, one who
is constantly thinking on such matters as “ ‘I am not the body,’ ‘External things
are sorrowful and therefore should be forsaken,’ ‘I shall not resolve on worldly
affairs,’ etc., and fully realises their essence . . . is on the right road to liberation”
(H. Āraṇya 1981: 105).
Karma theory
Chapter 2 of the Yogasūtra deals with physical actions “performed with the
object of the attainment of Yoga i.e. stability of mind, or actions which indi-
rectly lead to Yoga” (H. Āraṇya 1981: 114). These are tapas, svādhyāya, and
īśvarapraṇidhāna. One of Āraṇya’s main interests seems to have been karma
theory. In his comments on Yogasūtra 2.12, he explains the most important
concepts in Sāṃkhyayoga’s ideas of karma. Saṃskāras or latent impressions
of two types, based on wrong knowledge, are called sabīja, and those based on
true knowledge are called nirbīja. The nirbīja saṃskāra is of the arrested state of
mind and is impotent. Those saṃskāras that are based on wrong knowledge are
also called karmāśaya. Karmāśaya are latent impressions of actions. Any mani-
fest state of the mind leaves an imprint and these imprints are the karmāśaya.
Karmāśaya can be of two types, latent impressions of virtuous and vicious
actions. Karmāśaya causes birth, the span of life, and the experience of pleasure
and pain in that life. Vāsanās, (subconscious latency) are the saṃskāras based on
the feelings experienced from the results of karmāśaya. Vāsanās do not by them-
selves bring results, but for karmāśaya to yield results, the appropriate vāsanā
is necessary. As Āraṇya explains, “Latent impressions of actions which produce
results are called Karmāśaya, while the latent impression of feelings arising out
of the threefold consequences of action e.g. birth, life-span, and experience of
pleasure and pain, is called Vāsanā or subliminal impressions” (H. Āraṇya 1981:
357). “Karmāśaya is like a seed, Vāsanā is like a field, the birth or embodiment
is like a tree and experience is like a fruit” (H. Āraṇya 1981: 133). Āraṇya argues
that karmāśaya accumulated in one life is responsible for the next, so karmāśaya
comes from only one life, but vāsanās (latencies) are from many lives without
a first beginning and therefore numerous vāsanās have accumulated in the mind
(H. Āraṇya 1981: 140, 357). Karmāśaya (latent impression of action) thus mani-
fests the appropriate vāsanā. The result of vāsanā is memory, argues Āraṇya;
memory is a sort of knowledge or vṛtti of the mind, and for each vṛtti, there is an
associated feeling (H. Āraṇya 1981: 357). The manifestation of vāsanā (latent
traits) is caused by karmāśaya. Karmāśaya is the cause of memory, and from
memory, vāsanās are formed. This is the cycle. The destruction of the cycle
is through karmāśaya and starts with following the life of a renunciant. From
true knowledge, the afflictions (kleśas) become reduced and the subtle afflictive
saṃskāras are annihilated by the arrested state of mind (H. Āraṇya 1981: 134).
Āraṇya argues that beings who suffer for their bad deeds in purgatory have no
free will and that beings in heaven have little free will. However, since the senses
of the celestial beings are “developed on the Sāttvika, i.e., enlightened basis,”
they can bring results, and those of them who have previously attained perfection
in samādhi, and have control over their minds can act to contribute to further
advancement, Āraṇya thinks. The relationship between knowledge, ignorance,
and karma is well explained:
Fluctuations due to nescience are the general states of the manifested

mind. When through knowledge, nescience is destroyed, the “me-mine”
feeling, from which springs the identification of the self with the body, is
destroyed completely and consequently the fluctuations of the mind also
cease. When the mind remains completely arrested there can be no birth,
nor span of life nor experience of pleasure or pain as they are co-existent
with fluctuations only.
(H. Āraṇya 1981: 139)
The subject and the object
The purpose of Yoga practice is to eliminate suffering. The cause of suffering is
the union (saṃyoga) of the subject and the object (draṣṭṛdṛśyoḥ), as stated in sūtra
2.17. Āraṇya explains how the root cause of the manifest can be independent
whereas the object of the seer is dependent:
The root cause of the object is the unmanifested. If not seen by the Seer, the
object remains unmanifested. Due to its inherent changeability, however, it
goes on mutating. In that respect it is an independent entity. But as it is seen
by the Seer, it is his object – and as such is dependent. As a matter of fact, all
manifest entities are either objects of experience as good or evil or else they
are for bringing about liberation.
(H. Āraṇya 1981: 149)
Āraṇya’s longest commentary is on sūtras 2.18 (eight pages), 2.19 (eight pages),
2.20 (five pages), and 2.23 (three pages). These are sūtras that describe the nature
of the object and the subject and their relationship – that is, the fundamental dual-
ism of Sāṃkhya and Sāṃkhyayoga. The most important, from the point of view
of practice, is, as Āraṇya argues, that human experience happens when the subject
and the object appear to be of the same kind. This takes place because of igno-
rance and is of two kinds, the apprehension of things as desirable and of things as
undesirable. The identification of the subject and the object leads to ideas such as
“I am happy” and “I am unhappy.” But when the subject and the object are seen
as separate, as in the example of “I am free from pleasure and pain,” that is libera-
tion, according to Āraṇya (H. Āraṇya 1981: 165).
Āraṇya refers to “modern science” only very few times to find support for his
views in the Kāpilāśramiya Pātañjal Jogdarśan. On Yogasūtra 2.19, he writes to
defend the view of a causal relationship between the elements (bhūtas) (that ākāśa
[space] is the cause of vāyu [air], vāyu the cause of tejas [fire], and so on) and argues,
Scientific investigation shows that if the vibrations of sound are stopped it

produces heat, heat produces light, and from light (sun’s rays) all chemicals
(like vegetable products) are formed. Finest particles of the chemicals give
rise to the sense of smell.
(H. Āraṇya 1981: 171)
This is one of a few instances in which science is referred to in the Kāpilāśramīya

Pātañjal Jogdarśan commentary in support of the Sāṃkhyayoga view, but it nev-
ertheless shows that Āraṇya early on sought support from the language of science
to explain and defend Sāṃkhyayoga.
The realization of puruṣa is described repeatedly in the text, and explored in
depth in 2.20 and 2.23.
After the realization of Buddhi-tattva ( pure I-sense), when the cognitive fac-
ulty (i.e. Buddhi) is arrested for a time for getting to the Puruṣa principle, it
(Buddhi) emerges again under the impulse of its latent impressions and the
intense knowledge which then arises of Puruṣa as a separate principle beyond
Buddhi is Darśana or true discriminative enlightenment. It is the knowledge
of discrimination based on the retained impressions or the latency of the
arrested state of the mind in which Puruṣa remains alone. Therefore the only
result of such discernment is an arrested state of the mind, i.e. disunion of
Puruṣa and Prakṛti.
(H. Āraṇya 1981: 192)
The right view (darśana) is salvific liberation (apavarga) and the wrong view
(adarśana) is experience, bhoga, the modification of the mind as the experience
of pleasure and pain. On attainment of knowledge, the experience of pleasure and
pain ceases and the wrong knowledge of seeing buddhi and puruṣa also ends.
The cessation of objects of knowledge is the liberation of puruṣa. Thus, argues
Āraṇya, “discriminatory knowledge gradually leads to kaivalya or liberation” (H.
Āraṇya 1981: 192).
The ideal yogin

We have seen that Hariharānanda Āraṇya considered yoga to consist of medi-
tation and concentration and renouncing sensuous objects. In contrast to mod-
ern postural yoga, Āraṇya focused mainly on yamas, niyamas, and samādhi. In
Āraṇya’s commentaries on the yamas and niyamas, he mentions his ideas about the
ideal yogin. According to Āraṇya, “as the latencies of wrong knowledge weaken
through the practice of Yogāṅgas, discriminative knowledge gets clearer. Subse-
quently through engrossment acquired through Samādhi, full discernment dawns”
(H. Āraṇya 1981: 205). Thereby, discriminative knowledge becomes established,
“buddhi is arrested and liberation is attained” (H. Āraṇya 1981: 206). A presuppo-
sition is an understanding of the doctrine that “all sensuous objects bring sorrow.”
The sensuous objects need to be forsaken completely. Āraṇya therefore focuses
on yamas, niyamas, and samādhi, since restraint, knowledge, and concentration
are the most important factors in the salvific process.
How ahiṃsā works toward kaivalya is illustrative of the understanding of the
yamas. The practice of restraints (yamas) and observances (niyamas) means “not
to act under the influence of wrong knowledge” (H. Āraṇya 1981: 205). Violence
(hiṃsā) is based on wrong knowledge, a modification of aversion. “Inclination
to inflict injury is the principal offshoot of aversion.” Through the practice of
ahiṃsā, the effect of wrong knowledge in the form of aversion is stopped. But
ahiṃsā is not only to refrain from injuring living beings; it is also the practice of
developing “feelings of amity towards all living beings” (H. Āraṇya 1981: 209).
Selfishness has to be given up. And what is hiṃsā?
To nourish one’s own body with the flesh of another is the chief form of
inflicting injury. Besides, seeking one’s own comfort inevitably involves
causing pain to others.”
(H. Āraṇya 1981: 209)
But, asks Āraṇya, since it is not possible to enjoy material objects without hurt-
ing others, how is it possible to practice non-injury? Āraṇya then states that the
yogins know this and therefore practice yoga to avoid being born again, and this is
the highest form of non-injury. The next best is to avoid inflicting injury on trees
and animals. The third best is to avoid, as far as possible, inflicting injury only on
“the higher animals” (H. Āraṇya 1981: 209). Āraṇya then explains, “The spirit
of non-injury is abandonment of the evil tendencies such as malice, hatred, etc.,
from which arises the propensity to inflict injury on living beings” (H. Āraṇya
1981: 209). Unless there is an underlying feeling of cruelty, it is not an act of
violence, and cutting grass involves less evil intention than killing a person. But
for the yogin, observance of ahiṃsā is an absolute vow, so even cutting grass is
forbidden. The practice of harmlessness should be toward humans and animals,
as well as plants.
First, they refrain from doing harm to human beings – even to an attacker –
and commit as little harm as possible to animals even to the extent of only
frightening away a snake and not killing it. Next they practice harmlessness
to plant life. This is how the Yogins, in spite of their having to commit una-
voidable harm in the mildest form, go on intensifying the spirit of non-injury
and ultimately through proficiency in Yoga get liberated from embodied
existence and thus make themselves non-injurious to all creatures.
(H. Āraṇya 1981: 210)
To practice truthfulness, Āraṇya emphasizes initially the observation of silence.

Then, in order to dispose the mind to truth, one should avoid reading fiction and,
finally, abandon worldly truths. Most of his comments on truthfulness are, inter-
estingly, on the avoidance of reading fiction. Āraṇya thought there was a conflict
between literature and spirituality. “Thoughts of spiritual principles do not get any
foothold in the minds of ordinary men which remain preoccupied with imaginary
things. Such people derive only a partial glimpse of truth from parables, analogies
etc.,” he writes (H. Āraṇya 1981: 210). Literature is of no use for yogins. Yogins
leave aside “all imaginary or unreal things” and “engage their speech and mind in
matters of truth and established facts.” The luxury of imagination has to be given
up for “real practice of truth” (H. Āraṇya 1981: 210). An extraordinary flourishing
of fiction writing was taking place in Bengal in this period (Rabindranath Tagore
won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913) and Āraṇya perceived the ideals of
yoga as being, in some sense, in opposition to the flourishing of Bengali literature.
Truth is an ultimate value for Āraṇya and “Untruth should not be spoken even
with the best of motive; half-truth is even worse” (H. Āraṇya 1981: 210).
Āraṇya saw celibacy as a presupposition for attaining the goal of yoga. But
“[m]ere refraining from the sexual act is not continence.” Āraṇya quotes a saying:
“Thinking of, talking about, joking, looking intently, secret talk, resolve, attempt
and execution, are the eight forms of sexual indulgence, say the sages” (H. Āraṇya
1981: 211). He recommends frugal meals, arguing, “Plenty of milk and butter may
be Sāttvika ( pure) food for an ordinary person but not for a Yogin” (H. Āraṇya
1981: 211). It is noteworthy that Āraṇya, when writing about celibacy, draws no
parallel between the separation of puruṣa and prakṛti and the withdrawal from
sexuality. The dualism between puruṣa and prakṛti is not perceived as a dual-
ism between the male and the female. This is correct according to Sāṃkhya and
Sāṃkhyayoga philosophy, but during my field research, I encountered among
some Sāṃkhyayoga laypeople the view that celibacy is the key practice because
the goal of separation of puruṣa and prakṛti is the separation of male from the
female and female from the male.10 However, I have not encountered it in the
writings of the Sāṃkhyayoga ācāryas. In popular culture, puruṣa and prakṛti
are understood as male and female. However, for Āraṇya, buddhi’s dissolution
into prakṛti in order to leave puruṣa alone does not seem to have anything to
do with gender. According to Sāṃkhya and Sāṃkhyayoga, the ego has one part
that is mutable and one that is immutable. The knower, draṣṭṛ or consciousness,
is immutable. Freed from all that is knowable (dṛśya), the knower is realized as
immutable consciousness (H. Āraṇya 2005a: 257).
With regard to the importance of avoiding possessions, Āraṇya notes that there
is “trouble in acquiring objects which give us pleasure and enjoyment, trouble
again in trying to preserve them and unhappiness when we lose them.” In addition,
“possessing them leaves latent impressions of longing for them and thus causes
sorrow in the future” (H. Āraṇya 1981: 211). One should only accept things that
are necessary for maintaining the body. If one preserves wealth without utilizing
one’s abundance for the good of others, this is selfishness. The Yogins on the other
hand “seek to reach the limit of unselfishness” and therefore “it is inevitable for
them to give up completely all objects of enjoyment” (H. Āraṇya 1981: 211).
Āraṇya notes that a jñānayogin should not seek yoga powers (siddhis) through
tapas, which leads to divine powers, but devote himself only to renunciation and
discriminative knowledge (on Pātañjalayogaśāstra 2.43). Since Sāṃkhyayogins
do not long for a life in heaven but for kaivalya, they do not want the powers
and can attain kaivalya without attaining the siddhis of the body and senses. He
argues that the yamas and niyamas assist the attainment of kaivalya, but that
īśvarapraṇidhāna, which is one of the niyamas, leads directly to samādhi. After
samādhi is gained by īśvarapraṇidhāna, one can gain salvific liberation through
saṃprajñāta samādhi and asamprajñāta samādhi (on Yogasūtra 2.45).
Āraṇya also instructed on the diet of the ideal yogin. In connection with
prāṇāyāma he notes that too much food, physical exercise, and mental labor
diminishes the chances of success in prāṇāyāma. He comments that foods con-
taining carbohydrates should be eaten, and oil and fat should not be taken in
excess. But he notes that, ultimately, the yogin has to give up consumption of fat
altogether (H. Āraṇya 1981: 242). Fasting is necessary for success in prāṇāyāma
since it “reduces the necessity for breathing.”
Āsana and prāṇāyāma

Body postures, āsanas, have little significance in Sāṃkhyayoga. Āsana for Āraṇya
is sitting upright with the spine kept straight. The body should retain a perfect
steadiness and a sense of comfort, “making the body effortless like a corpse” (H.
Āraṇya 1981: 229). By practicing āsana, one experiences the sensation of void
space and feels like the body is non-existing and strengthens the knowledge that
“I am not the body.”
The point of prāṇāyāma is to stop the fluctuations of the mind as long as the
breath is stopped and to also gain a feeling of void space, according to Āraṇya.
Dhāraṇā should be practiced together with prāṇāyāma. Āraṇya mentions
Haṭhayoga practices in connection with the sūtras on prāṇāyāma and refers to
people who supposedly have the ability to stop breathing for many days. Āraṇya
notes, “It is needless to say that Yoga has nothing to do with these powers” (H.
Āraṇya 1981: 234). Yoga means control of the mind, and not merely control of
the body, Āraṇya observes. When the mind is controlled, the body will also be
brought under control, but not the other way round! There may be full control of
the body, without any control of the mind. Āraṇya gives lengthy instructions in
several forms of Sāṃkhyayoga prāṇāyāma (H. Āraṇya 1981: 232–239). A main
form of Sāṃkhyayoga prāṇāyāma includes the “heart” and “the observation of
internal space.”
Taking the region of the heart as the centre, it has to be felt that a feeling of
touch is spreading all over the body from above the heart during inhalation
and the same feeling is being gathered and brought back to the region of the
heart during exhalation. In this way it is necessary in the beginning to regard
the whole body (specially up to the soles of the feet and the two palms) as the
space under observation.
(H. Āraṇya 1981: 236)
This strengthens the quality of sattva in the body and results in a feeling of ease
and the function of breath may be stopped for a long time. Consequently, the
transformation of awareness can also be stopped for a long time. Āraṇya fur-
ther instructs that the carotid artery should be imagined as a flow of effulgence.
Moreover, he says that prāṇāyāma has to be performed with a feeling of internal
touch. At exhalation, it should feel as if the whole body has been gathered in the
heart region and is then proceeding with the exhaled air up to the lower part of the
cranium. During inhalation, one should feel as if a sensation of touch is proceed-
ing from the region of the heart and spreading like a flow of air pervading all parts
of the body. “This is how ‘space’ has to be observed. In the effort at suspension,
‘space’ has to be observed keeping the heart in view, along with an indistinct
feeling of touch all over the body” (H. Āraṇya 1981: 236). Āraṇya argues that
the heart should be perceived as transparent sky or effulgent light. One could also
meditate on the image of one’s desired deity as being in the heart. Another way of
performing prāṇāyāma, recommended by Āraṇya, is to practice japa in sets such
as Om-Om, Om-Om, Om-Om-Om, so that it is easy to keep count of japas. In the
instructions on prāṇāyāma on Yogasūtra 2.51, Āraṇya returns to the idea of “a
clear, transparent, luminous or white, all-pervading, infinite void,” which should
be “imagined in the region of the heart at the centre of the chest” (H. Āraṇya
1981: 240). Prāṇāyāma should be practiced with “a Sāttvika form of ease in the
lungs and over the entire body” (H. Āraṇya 1981: 241). The feeling of lightness
and ease is necessary to make prāṇāyāma perfect, argues Āraṇya. It is noteworthy
also that prāṇāyāma has to be practiced together with meditation. If not, warns
Āraṇya, “in some cases it brings lunacy” (H. Āraṇya 1981: 242). Therefore, “if
the mind cannot first be made vacant through meditation in respect of an internal
region, it is preferable not to take on Prāṇāyāma” (H. Āraṇya 1981: 242). The
mind should be fixed on a void in the internal region. Mere suspension of breath
is not yogic prāṇāyāma, notes Āraṇya.
There are many people who can naturally suspend breathing. It is such peo-
ple, who remaining buried, show their magical power and earn money. This
is neither Yoga nor Sāmādhi. . . . The suspension of Prāṇa, which either
arrests modifications of the mind or makes it one-pointed, constitutes Yogic
Prāṇāyāma. . . . Therefore, unless the mind is steadied and made free from
attachment to objects, it is not Yogic Prāṇāyāma. It would be only a physical
feat.
(H. Āraṇya 1981: 243)
The fixity of the mind on the internal region developed during prāṇāyāma is
called dhāraṇā (H. Āraṇya 1981: 244), “yet it is not the primary Yogic Dhāraṇā,”
but a form of “contemplative thinking” (H. Āraṇya 1981: 243, 250). Pratyāhāra
means stopping the senses with the aid of prāṇāyāma, but Āraṇya suggests it
should be practiced with yamas and niyamas, “otherwise the kind of Pratyāhāra,
brought about on a person (e.g. by hypnotism) by somebody with a wicked mind,
may cause harm” (H. Āraṇya 1981: 249).
Saṃyama
The region of the heart plays a central role in Āraṇya’s explanations of Yoga.
As we have already seen in his commentary on Yogasūtra 1.28, the heart was
explained in connection with īśvarapraṇidhāna, but it also plays a role in dhāraṇā.
In ancient times the lotus, i.e. the core of the heart, was the principal region
or object for fixation of the mind, so also was the light upspringing therefrom
called the light from Suṣumnā, the nerve within the spinal column. Later a
system of keeping the mind steadfast on the six or twelve plexuses within
the body came into vogue. According to the Sāṃkhya system these twelve
plexuses, on which the mind can be fixed, fall under the three categories of
objects. They are Grāhya – the knowable, Grahaṇa – the organs of reception
and Grahitā – the receiver.
(H. Āraṇya 1981: 250)
The principal method of fixity of mind on objects is the “adoption of the efful-
gence of the heart as the support for fixity on the pure I-sense or Buddhi” (H.
Āraṇya 1981: 250).
Āraṇya returns to the concept of the heart many times. On Yogasūtra 3.26,
about knowledge of the cosmic regions by practicing saṃyama (application of
dhāraṇā [fixation], dhyāna [meditation] and samādhi [concentration]) on the
sun (sūrya), he comments that sūrya here refers to the solar entrance suṣumnā.
Suṣumnā is “the point of contact between the soul and the body,” and explains
Āraṇya, “the most sentient part of the body is the heart” (H. Āraṇya 1981: 302).
He continues,
The chest is generally the centre of the “I”-feeling; therefore the part
which is most sentient and which has the most subtle feeling is the heart.
The current of subtle feeling flowing up from the heart towards the brain
is the Suṣumnā.
(H. Āraṇya 1981: 302)
The heart is mentioned in Yogasūtra 3.34, on saṃyama (fixation, meditation, and

concentration), and it states that by practicing saṃyama on the heart (hṛdaya), one
gains knowledge of the mind (citta). Āraṇya recommends watching the actions
of the mind from the heart, and this is an important step toward knowledge of
puruṣa (H. Āraṇya 1981: 309). The next step is saṃyama on buddhi having the
knowledge of puruṣa, which leads to the realization that the fluctuation of buddhi
is an object of knowledge and therefore different from puruṣa, which can never
become an object. The pure I-sense is explained by Āraṇya to be in the middle
between the absolute conscious contentless puruṣa and a sense of experience that
is working for the purpose of puruṣa. Pure I-sense is called “pseudo-Puruṣa” (H.
Āraṇya 1981: 312). Thereafter, “on the cessation of the Buddhi, the Self becomes
self-established and reaches the state of liberation, or the state of being-in-itself”
(H. Āraṇya 1981: 311). Āraṇya explains what the knowledge of puruṣa is. The
knowledge of puruṣa is buddhi, empty of all objects and shaped after puruṣa,
when witnessed by puruṣa:
“I am the seer (knower)” – this form of knowledge is Buddhi shaped after

Puruṣa. Puruṣa himself cannot be the object of Saṃyama but the pseudo-
Puruṣa or pure I-sense, the “I” regarding itself as the seer, is the subject of
Saṃyama.
(H. Āraṇya 1981: 312)
Fixity on the tattvas is explained as the Sāṃkhya form of dhāraṇā. It is

described in the following way:
Initially fixing their minds on external objects impinging on the organs, they
fix their minds on organs as belonging to the I-sense, on I-sense as based
on the pure I-sense, and pure I-sense as overseen by Puruṣa. In conformity
with these assumptions attempts are made to realize and rest in Self which is
absolute Awareness.
(H. Āraṇya 1981: 250)
Dhyāna is reached when the thought process on the same object becomes continu-
ous (H. Āraṇya 1981: 251).
Extraordinary powers
The Yogasūtra chapter on saṃyama (fixation, meditation, and concentration)
(Chapter 3) covers mainly extraordinary knowledge and powers, but Āraṇya
stresses that these types of knowledge and powers are impediments to kaivalya
and are different from the knowledge called prajñā. Prajñā refers primarily to
the ultimate knowledge of the tattvas (grāhya, grahaṇa, and grahitā), which is
a step toward kaivalya, argues Āraṇya (H. Āraṇya 1981: 254). Extraordinary
knowledge and powers, on the other hand, do not bring kaivalya. Knowledge
that brings kaivalya has four stages, according to Āraṇya: grāhya-samāpatti,
grahaṇa-samāpatti, grahitā-samāpatti, and vivekakhyāti (H. Āraṇya 1981:
255). Āraṇya distinguishes between the tattva dṛṣṭi and the vyavahārika
dṛṣṭi. Tattva dṛṣṭi is the philosophical point of view pursued in Yoga, while
vyavahārika dṛṣṭi is the practical worldly point of view. The tattva dṛṣṭi means
that all characteristics are ultimately reduced to the three guṇas sattva, rajas,
and tamas (H. Āraṇya 1981: 272).
Āraṇya ascribes enormous power and the ability of extraordinary knowl-
edge to samādhi.11 He tries to give explanations for several extraordinary pow-
ers and knowledge mentioned in the Pātañjalayogaśāstra. Knowledge of the
past and the future can be gained through the power of perception purified by
samādhi:
All the details of a cause can be realized through Saṃyama and thus the
effects can also be known. The effects, of which these form the causes, can be
traced by the same process. In this way knowledge about the past and future
is obtained.
(H. Āraṇya 1981: 282)
Āraṇya then refers to clairvoyance, telepathy, etc., to show that the senses
are not the only channels of knowledge. He believes that it has been amply
proved that we can have knowledge about the future through dreams that
come true. And, therefore, since the mind ordinarily has the capacity to know
the future, this power can be developed to perfection by samādhi (H. Āraṇya
1981: 282).
Pātañjalayogaśāstra 3.26 describes the structure of the cosmic regions. These
regions become known by yogins who practice saṃyama on the sun (sūrya),
which Āraṇya interprets as the suṣumnā, which is “[t]he current of subtle feel-
ing flowing up from the heart towards the brain” (H. Āraṇya 1981: 302). Āraṇya
believes there is a lamp-like object within the heart with innumerable rays, one
of which goes up to the solar region. Saṃyama should be practiced on this par-
ticular ray. But how to explain the belief that concentration on an internal ray of
light gives knowledge of the regions of the universe? Āraṇya interprets this idea
as follows:
Every creature has its super-mundane soul, and all-pervading Buddhi is

only limited by the action of the senses. As these limitations disappear the
power of the Buddhi goes on increasing and one goes up from the higher
to higher regions. Thus the elimination of the coverings of the Buddhi is
related to the attainment of different Lokas or regions. From the point of
view of the Buddhi there is no such thing as far and near. Thus Buddhi of
each creature and the stellar regions are on the same plane, and the power
of attaining them is gained when the Vṛttis or modifications of Buddhi are
purified.
(H. Āraṇya 1981: 303)
While this is a logical explanation according to the Sāṃkhyayoga view, Āraṇya

does not give examples in this text of having had such experiences of knowledge
of the regions. In the fictional autobiography A Unique Travelogue, however, the
narrator tells about his experience of the regions.12 In the final comment on sūtra
3.26, Āraṇya points out that the significance of knowing the structure of the cos-
mic regions is their contrast to kaivalya:
Unless the constitution of the different regions of abode and the nature of the
residents thereof, described in this Sūtra, are clearly understood, the sanctity
and greatness of the state of liberation would not be appreciated. Through
piety the lower Deva regions are attained, while in accordance with the dif-
ferent Yogic states the higher Deva regions are reached. The state of Kaivalya
or liberation is beyond all Lokas and no one returns from there.
(H. Āraṇya 1981: 304)
Āraṇya focuses his comments systematically on kaivalya, which is the goal of

Sāṃkhyayoga practice, and by relating the knowledge of the cosmic regions to the
greatness of the state of liberation, he is able to define the purpose of the descrip-
tion of the lokas to also be kaivalya. That kaivalya is beyond both the regions of
the lower devas and the higher devas, shows the greatness of kaivalya. It is the
supreme goal, even beyond the gods. The point with this description of the lokas
is not the mapping of the world: “The location of the different regions of the
universe as described herein, was accepted by the ancient Yoga philosopher as
being current at the time” (H. Āraṇya 1981: 303). Interestingly, according to this
interpretation, this power is not able to provide knowledge of the cosmic regions,
but only about the cultural assumptions of the cosmic regions.
As the citta, according to Yoga, is different from the body, it follows that it can
be withdrawn from the body. Āraṇya argues that if the yogin concentrates on the
thought “I am not the body,” and becomes immersed in that thought, the actions
of the body stop, “and the mind becomes free from the body” (H. Āraṇya 1981:
314). Āraṇya thinks that this explains how the mind of a yogin can enter another
person’s body and influence it.
To fly in the air is possible by saṃyama (fixation, meditation, and concen-
tration) on the relationship between the body and space (ākāśa), according to
Yogasūtra 3.4. Āraṇya explains the power in the following way:
Ākāśa has the property of sound. Sound is nothing but a flow of activity with-
out any form. To think that the body is nothing, but a collection of activities
and is vacant like Ākāśa, is to think of the relationship between the body and
Ākāśa. This is done by contemplating an unstruck sound (Anāhata-nāda) per-
vading the body. That is why it has been said in another Śāstra that by contem-
plation on a particular unstruck sound, movement to the sky is accomplished.
(H. Āraṇya 1981: 318)
In his comment on this sūtra, Āraṇya refers to a nineteenth-century Spiritist

medium, D. D. Home (1833–1886) “who used to go up in the air.” This is one of
the few examples in the main text of the Kāpilāśramīya Pātañjal Jogdarśan of a
reference to a contemporary person. He does in one section refer to contemporary
magicians, without identifying anyone in particular, to explain how one mind can
control many created minds (nirmāṇacitta), which seems to reflect contemporary
popular discourse on the phenomenon: “As the mind of the magician, which func-
tions like the dominant mind, acts on the minds of the spectators and produces
mass-hypnotism, so does the dominant created mind of a Yogin act on other sec-
ondary created minds” (H. Āraṇya 1981: 352). He also refers to Haṭhayoga litera-
ture to support his claims that during prāṇāyāma “the body is to be thought of as
light as air, it sometimes actually becomes light” (H. Āraṇya 1981: 319). Finally,
Āraṇya refers to modern science to justify the belief of yogins in flying through
the air. Modern science holds the view that the atoms are made up of smaller
particles, electrons, protons, and neutrons, and between the electrons and protons
there is a lot of space, argues Āraṇya.
Our ego acting on the materials constituting the body shapes them into the
form of a body and makes it feel heavy. By concentrating on the relationship
between the body and Ākāśa, it is possible to transform the ego. The Sūtra
can be explained in that way.
(H. Āraṇya 1981: 319)
Āraṇya systematically emphasizes Yoga as control of the mind leading to

kaivalya. He refers a few times to Spiritism, Haṭhayoga, and to his interpretation
of modern science to explain that the phenomenon was not unknown in other
traditions of knowledge, to give the statements of the text additional legitimacy.
He seems to have perceived that the readers of the book would be critical to
the phenomenon of yogic flying, and he used available discourses to defend the
Pātañjalayogaśāstra.
The power of omniscience and omnipotence mentioned in Yogasūtra 3.49 is
explained by Āraṇya by relating them to the Sāṃkhyayoga theology. Omnisci-
ence means “simultaneous knowledge of all past, present and future character-
istics of all things.” Supremacy means that all phases are “knowable all at the
same time” (H. Āraṇya 1981: 331). When these powers are acquired, “the Yogin
becomes like almighty Īśvara.” This is the highest state of the buddhi, argues
Āraṇya, and this combination of buddhi and puruṣa is called “Mahān Ātmā or
the Great Self.” In this state, Yogins live in some tangible sphere, as manifested
adjuncts can only exist in a manifested world, Āraṇya explains. “The state imme-
diately higher than this is that of liberation. . . . To abide in the state beyond
supernormal powers and omniscience, in which the Self remains alone is libera-
tion” (H. Āraṇya 1981: 333). Āraṇya does not add any comments on Yogasūtra
3.51, which describes how yogic beings are tempted by celestial beings to come to
their heavenly worlds instead of aiming for salvific liberation from rebirth – i.e.,
kaivalya. What is important for Āraṇya is kaivalya, “because complete annihila-
tion of sorrow cannot be affected through supernormal knowledge or powers” (H.
Āraṇya 1981: 345).
The powers, from the point of view of Sāṃkhyayoga, are disturbances of the
mind. Since the purpose of Sāṃkhyayoga is one-pointedness and knowledge of
the puruṣa can be attained only when the mind is closed – i.e., contentless –
attainment of powers is antagonistic to the attainment of kaivalya. Other forms
of yoga may aim at attaining powers, but for Sāṃkhyayoga to treat the powers as
goals of practice makes no sense, since the goal is to realize the peace of content-
less consciousness. If it is correct that the Pātañjalayogaśāstra was written by
a Sāṃkhyayogin, as evidence seems to suggest, arguments that try to claim that
attainment of the powers are the goals also of this Yoga seem mistaken. Because
of the prestige of the Yogasūtra part of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra, followers of
other forms of Yoga have projected their own yogic goals on the text. From the
point of view of attainment of kaivalya, however, the powers have no value in
themselves. They are at the most signposts showing the Sāṃkhyayogin that he
is progressing and is following the correct road to kaivalya. Since samādhi is
the means to kaivalya, the powers are really distractions. Nevertheless, they are
important for understanding the Sāṃkhyayoga ontology.
Āraṇya has an interesting view of how omnipresence is possible. Since the
mind that has attained supernormal powers through knowledge is omniscient,
it means that the mind must be all pervading (H. Āraṇya 1981: 362). Āraṇya
believed that when “the Sāttvika or sentient faculty is cleared of dross and reaches
its highest form, then all objects, past, present and future, would exhibit them-
selves before the mind’s eye at the same time and everything will be present” (H.
Āraṇya 1981: 370). An important function of the yoga powers is that they confirm
the worldview of Sāṃkhyayoga, primarily the existence of the subtle body and
the independence of the mind from the body, and Sāṃkhyayoga theology. They
also prove, according to Āraṇya, that knowledge can be attained in ways not yet
understood (H. Āraṇya 2008a: 164).
Criticism of Buddhism
Āraṇya refers a few times to Buddhist meditation in the Kāpilāśramīya Pātañjal
Jogdarśan in order to show similarities and to assist comprehension (H. Āraṇya
1981: 53, 54). He recognizes that the four Brahmavihāras of the Buddhists are
those mentioned in Yogasūtra 1.33 for the purification of the mind (friendliness
to those who are happy, compassion to those who are miserable, goodwill toward
the virtuous, and indifference to those who follow vice). On Yogasūtra 4.14, he
argues that the view of the Buddhist Vijñānavādins is mistaken and argues that it
is not true that “there can be knowledge of an external object which does not exist
at all.” Even what we experience in dreams is dependent on external objects as
they are based on “latent expressions of the external objects” (H. Āraṇya 1981:
372). He argues against the Buddhist “nihilists” who “with a view to achieving
annihilation of the five Skandhas. . . , the goal for the attainment of which they
make so much ado, is in their opinion mere voidness, and this renders their view
absurd” (H. Āraṇya 1981: 386). Āraṇya criticizes the Buddhist view of anātman,
no-self:
Mokṣa or liberation or Nirvāṇa really means separation from sorrow. Separa-

tion connotes two things – sorrow, and disassociation of the sufferer there-
from. It is, therefore, more correct to say that on liberation, sorrow, i.e. mind
containing sorrow, and the sufferer therefrom are separated. This apparent
sufferer is the Self or Puruṣa mentioned in the Sāṃkhya philosophy.
(H. Āraṇya 1981: 387)
Jīvanmukti
The main topics of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra for Āraṇya are samādhi, supernor-
mal powers, karma and vāsanā, and mokṣa or kaivalya. Yoga is concentration,
samādhi, according to Āraṇya, and the purpose of samādhi is the attainment of
salvific liberation, kaivalya, which means isolation from matter and to realize
aloneness or ultimate solitude. The belief of Sāṃkhyayoga is that in samādhi,
when there is discriminative knowledge, the kleśas (afflictions) are burned and
like roasted seeds become unproductive (Pātañjalayogaśāstra 4.28). The most
fundamental of the kleśas is ignorance, and with discriminative knowledge, igno-
rance can “become infructuous like roasted seeds” (H. Āraṇya 1981: 396). But
“[a]ll latent impressions born of nescience do not die out as soon as discriminative
knowledge is acquired, but they are gradually thinned. From the residual latent
impressions of wrong cognition which still linger, modifications born of nesci-
ence arise occasionally” (H. Āraṇya 1981: 396). Latent impressions of wrong
cognition give rise to modifications such as “I” and “mine,” and in order to stop
that, the latent impressions responsible for such modifications have to be stopped.
This is done by latent impressions of the ultimate stages of knowledge. Then,
according to Āraṇya, the mind ceases to exist and becomes dissolved in prakṛti.
“Therefore, for the permanent disappearance of the mind, no means other than
gathering latent impressions of knowledge need to be thought of” (H. Āraṇya
1981: 397). When omniscience is disregarded, “perpetual discriminative enlight-
enment prevails and the Samādhi that follows is Samādhi of the highest knowl-
edge” (H. Āraṇya 1981: 398). This samādhi is called dharmamegha. Through
dharmamegha samādhi the yogin is freed from all afflictions and is called a
jīvanmukta, “liberated though alive.” Such a yogin does not do anything, accord-
ing to Āraṇya, and if he does, he does it with a nirmāṇacitta. Āraṇya argues
that a person who has attained discriminative knowledge, but has not yet fully
stopped the mind and its changes (vṛttis) is also a jīvanmukta. It is impossible for
a jīvanmukta to be reborn, and one proof of that is that “[t]hose who have been
born are all (more or less) deluded. One who is free from delusion is not known
to have been reborn” (H. Āraṇya 1981: 399).
I have gone into some detail in the description of the content of the Kāpilāśramīya
Pātañjal Jogdarśan because it is the most important text of the Sāṃkhyayoga of
Kāpil Maṭh. In the text, Āraṇya gives a number of instructions and interpretations
of Sāṃkhyayoga. These are based on both his knowledge of Sāṃkhyayoga texts
and his experience with practices as a saṃnyāsin and he might have learned or
partly learned some of these views and practices from others and then developed
them further as part of his Sāṃkhyayoga practice.
Paramābhaktisūtra
Āraṇya wrote that dharmamegha samādhi was the highest achievement through
“devotional practice” and that according to Sāṃkhya a jīvanmukta “is one who
has attained the highest stage of devotional practice” (H. Āraṇya 1981: 398,
399). This seems to contradict other understandings of Sāṃkhya. Āraṇya did
favor a form of Sāṃkhyayoga bhakti (devotion) and wrote in the Sanskrit text
Paramābhaktisūtra that this bhakti is “not restricted to any particular sect. On the
contrary, worshippers all over the world are traversing some part or the other of the
same road of devotion” (H. Āraṇya 2007: 60). The Paramābhaktisūtra engages
with the Bhagavadgītā as a text of Sāṃkhyayoga as well as the Upaniṣads, and
Āraṇya quotes abundantly from them in support for his arguments about which is
the supreme form of bhakti. Devotion is defined as a state of mind of one who has
a great person (mahāpuruṣa) as his object. And this devotion is not of the nature
of passion and attachment, since there can be no attachment to either brahman,
which defies verbal description and transcends what can be apprehended by the
mind, or one’s self ( puruṣa), which can only be realized by the total suppression
of the mind with all its changes (vṛttis). Āraṇya argues, “[t]he commonly accepted
definition of bhakti found in the scripture, viz. ‘intense adoration of Īśvara’ can-
not have universal application” (H. Āraṇya 2007: 62). He adds that “even atheists
like the Buddhists who do not believe in God, worship the saintly persons of their
respective sects” and after death attain the same world as their object of worship
(sālokya). There is no difference between the bhakti of Buddhist devotees of the
Buddha and the bhakti of a devotee of Īśvara, Āraṇya argues, and thus bhakti to
the self or to brahman without attributes is also bhakti and “is not the monopoly
of worshippers of Īśvara” (H. Āraṇya 2007: 63). Āraṇya recommends one’s own
self as the object of devotion. Due to their saṃskāras, some people have differ-
ent likes and dislikes, and therefore they worship with different feelings such as
peacefulness, servility, friendship, etc. Devotion toward things that are dear to
one in this life is due to saṃskāras. A devotee of a peaceful īśvara adopts a feel-
ing of peace, while a devotee of some princely god ( prabhu) takes the attitude of
a servant, and devotees who consider their object of devotion as a lover, father,
mother, or child, assume the appropriate attitude. Persons are inclined to worship
differently and that is sanctioned in the Bhagavadgītā 10.8, according to Āraṇya.
In Bhagavadgītā 10.8 Kṛṣṇa says that he is the source of everything and that the
wise worship him in different forms. Sūtra 14 of the Paramābhaktisūtra reads,
śreṣṭhaḥ praśāntabhāvaḥ śānter niratiśayotkarṣāt

(H. Āraṇya 2007: 76)
[Devotion] with a peaceful state of mind is the best because it leads to the
supreme state of peace.
Āraṇya explains that a supreme state of peace is kaivalya and is the goal of all
persons. Kaivalya is the highest state attainable and worshiping with a peaceful
mind immediately brings the supreme state of peace. He quotes Kaṭhopaniṣad in
support of the view that the “absolute quietening of the body and mind is essen-
tial for realizing the goal” (H. Āraṇya 2007: 78). Such a peaceful mind can be
attained by the feeling that the self is the dearest of all or by the feeling that the
deity Mahāyogeśvara (in the Kāpil Maṭh tradition one of the names of the īśvara
of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra) is the dearest of all. This is parā (higher) and aparā
(lower) bhakti. The followers of aparā bhakti also realize their self as it is stated
in Yogasūtra 1.29 that devotion to the puruṣaviśeṣa (nirguṇa īśvara) leads to the
realization of the self. Those who have an extremely distracted mind should per-
form external worship such as offering flowers, singing songs, etc., according to
Āraṇya, as this worship gives rise to love for the deity. For those who already
possess love for the deity, internal worship is appropriate. At the peak of devotion,
when the devotee focuses on the object of devotion, the mind and organs come to
a stop as in yogic concentration. The highest stage of devotion to a deity consists
in awareness only of the deity and thus the person attains peace. The result of this
aparā bhakti is knowledge of the object of devotion and this can lead to the attain-
ment of sālokya, residence in the same celestial sphere as the divinity. Therefore,
devotees who dedicate themselves to Śiva or Viṣṇu as servants will come to the
worlds of Śiva or Viṣṇu. Āraṇya then describes the highest form of bhakti ( parā
bhakti) and states that knowledge of the tattvas of Sāṃkhya, together with the
nature of the deity, leads to the knowledge of the self (tattvajñānācchāntātmādhi-
gamaḥ). The self can be realized directly through meditation or through devotion
to the deity. The supreme form of devotion is found in the highest detachment
( paravairāgya) when there is no trace of desire left and one abides in the Self.
With paravairāgya, absolute detachment, the peace becomes undisturbed. The
result is eternal peace: peace culminates in mokṣa or kaivalya.
Knowledge of the tattvas, combined with paravairāgya, leads to the realization
of the self, but according to the Paramābhaktisūtra, all forms of bhakti lead to
salvific goals because Sāṃkhyayoga is the highest goal, and therefore all other
practices lead toward the Sāṃkhyayoga goal. They can in principle all work
toward the knowledge of the self, which nevertheless is a gradual process. The
Paramābhaktisūtra seems to be an attempt to include all forms of bhakti in the
Sāṃkhyayoga worldview, turning everyone into Sāṃkhyayogins, but on different
levels with regard to the realization of the truth of Sāṃkhya.
Karmatattva and science

A distinguishing characteristic of Āraṇya’s latest book Karmatattva compared
with his other texts, is the many examples of and comparisons with views of
Western scientists. The book seems to address “the Western thinkers” (H. Āraṇya
2008b: 160), but as it was written in Bengali the intended audience seems to have
been Bengali intellectuals, or perhaps he expected it to be translated into English.
This development of textual production, from displaying Sanskrit orthodoxy to
addressing Western thinkers, harmonizes with the considerations that probably
also led to the publication of the English-language Sāṃkhya Catechism in 1935.
The Sāṃkhya Catechism appears to have been an attempt to reach non-Bengalis
and the Kāpil Maṭh tradition’s growing interest at the time in entering into a dia-
logue with the English-speaking world. The Karmatattva attempted to initiate
a conversation with writers associated with Western science as well as psychi-
cal research societies. Āraṇya previously had mostly followed the ancient San-
skrit commentary tradition, seeking to place himself in the “classical” tradition,
to restart Sāṃkhyayoga as a form of orthodoxy. However, in the Karmatattva,
he apparently follows a new strategy. He now tries to show that the truth of the
ancient philosophy of Sāṃkhyayoga is supported by modern science. The Karma-
tattva relates to modernity in a quite different way than his Sanskrit and Bengali
commentary texts do. Summing up the theory of karma, Āraṇya states,
Of all the theories advanced by man, the theory of karma is the most rational.
It is not based on mere metaphysical speculation. The Sāṃkhya system is
practical science which can help people to annihilate pain, to adopt the right
conduct with confidence and enthusiasm and derive benefit at every step.
(H. Āraṇya 2008b: 55)
The book does not contain a bibliography, but in the book’s lengthy first chap-
ter, “Introduction” (1–58), Āraṇya refers to or quotes a number of English, Ger-
man, and American scientists, philosophers, and writers, many of whom were
leading voices of the period and refers to some of their books: George Senter,
Outlines of Physical Chemistry ( published 1911);13 Charles Darwin (1809–1882);
W. Carr, Principles of Relativity ( published 1920); H. W. Conn, The Story of
Life’s Mechanism ( published 1912); Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), Riddle of the
Universe (first English edition 1901); Oliver Lodge (1851–1940), Baruch Spi-
noza (1632–1677); Sir Arthur Eddington (1882–1944); J. B. Burke, Origin of Life
(first edition 1906); James Jeans (1877–1946), The Mysterious Universe (first
published 1930); Frederick Soddy (1877–1956); Robert A. Millikan ( physicist,
1868–1953); Max Planck (1858–1847); Edward Andrade (1887–1971); L. Bol-
ton (?); Sigmund Freud (1856–1939); William James (1842–1910), Principles of
Psychology (1890); Charles Lyell (1797–1875); Jean Lamarck (1744–1829); H.
H. Sheldon (1893–1964); A. T. Schofield (1846–1929); Karl Landsteiner (1868–
1963); Ernest MacBride (1866–1940), Zoology ( published 1915); and, finally,
the Indian scientist Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858–1937). Bose is the only Indian
scientist mentioned. It is striking that Āraṇya does not mention any Indian phi-
losophers or scholars on Sāṃkhya, in particular the famous Surendranath Das-
gupta (1887–1952), who also discussed the relationship of Sāṃkhya to science.
However, the book shows that Āraṇya was interested in, and had knowledge of,
modern science and not only ancient Sāṃkhyayoga philosophy. His isolation in
the cave did not mean isolation from the contemporary world of science. Āraṇya
also makes comparisons in this text to Greek philosophers such as Plato and Aris-
totle, to neo-Platonism and Plotinus; to modern European philosophers such as
Leibnitz, Schopenhauer, Schelling, and Hume; and to F. W. H. Myers, the founder
of the Society for Psychical Research, an organization that was founded (in 1882)
to understand paranormal phenomena. Āraṇya’s purpose is to show that both the
methods and the conclusions of modern science are similar to those used and
reached by Sāṃkhyayoga several thousand years ago.
The Sāṃkhya system is based on direct observations. The perceptions of

modern science, in spite of their subtlety are not superior to the observations
of the ancient Sāṃkhya theory as the basis of a philosophical system.
(H. Āraṇya 2008b: 23)
One example of arguing for the similarity of Sāṃkhyayoga and modern science is
Āraṇya’s understanding of the cosmic mind. Āraṇya argued, as was noted earlier,
that since the first manifestation of prakṛti is a mental principle – i.e., the bud-
dhi (intellect), the creation of the world has to be an emergence of the mind of
someone – namely, Hiraṇyagarbha (also called Prajāpati, Brahmā, and Īśvara).
Āraṇya quotes scientists who argue that “one form of thought – our own minds –
runs parallel to and is concomitant with another form of thought – perhaps more
permanent – though that we cannot say – which we call matter, electricity or
ether.” Āraṇya concludes from his discussion that
hence the tenet of the Sāṃkhya system that there is a cosmic mind (of
Prajāpati), underlying the external world is being acknowledged in the
world of science. Material sciences are engaged only in the study of external
phenomena. We have demonstrated how the final conclusions of modern sci-
ence are similar to those of the Sāṃkhya system.
(H. Āraṇya 2008b: 32)
Modern science has, in other words, confirmed the conclusions known to Sāṃkhya
several thousand years ago.
In the Karmatattva, Āraṇya discusses Darwin’s theory of evolution and quotes,
in connection to this, Karl Landsteiner, Ernest MacBride, H. H. Sheldon, and A.
T. Schofield. Āraṇya argues that
the theory of karma is neither connected with nor opposed to the theory of
descent. . . . Actions performed in the present life bring about much change
in living creatures but there is no proof and no certainty that all the known
species have come into being by such transformations.
(H. Āraṇya 2008b: 53)
Āraṇya goes against the theory of evolution and favors instead a theory of muta-
tion, which he thinks is more logical and in harmony with the theory of karma.
“According to the theory of karma there have been, through eternity, innumer-
able jīvas, who, when given the necessary corporeal substance, take on a physical
frame” (H. Āraṇya 2008b: 52–53).
The main points in the teaching of karma, according to Āraṇya, are as follows:
1) Prakṛti and puruṣa are the causes of a living being, who is a conglomeration of
the mind, organs of perception, action, and vital forces, and its action is karma. 2)
Since jīva, born of the union of prakṛti and puruṣa, has existed for eternity, karma
is also eternal. 3) Action forms impressions (vāsanās and saṃskāras), which gen-
erate further actions and this is how the stream of karma continues. 4) Every jīva
carries the impressions of innumerable bodies belonging to different species and
is able, based on karma, to assume any form at birth. 5) There are two kinds of
actions, those performed because of past impressions (bhogabhūta) and voluntary
action performed in opposition to them ( puruṣakāra, self-effort), and all acts pre-
scribed or forbidden by scripture belong to the voluntary action category. 6) All
beings seek pleasure and the avoidance of pain, and since pleasure and pain are
experienced due to past tendencies, voluntary action in the form of self-restraint
is required in order to experience more pleasure and less pain. Āraṇya thinks that
popular narratives about karma in Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain traditions do not
have a rational foundation but are like fables and that descriptions of heaven and
hell as given in scripture are merely imaginary. The theory of karma, on the other
hand, is rational because death is “naturally followed by a good or painful rebirth
as a consequence of one’s tendencies” (H. Āraṇya 2008b: 56).
The text builds on Āraṇya’s commentary on the Pātañjalayogaśāstra.
Karmāśaya from the last birth is the cause of the present birth, while the vāsanās
from innumerable rebirths can become actualized in the present rebirth. Āraṇya
argues that the strongest impressions are the first to bear fruit and impressions
from the previous life are stronger than those of previous lives, and this is called
the rule of ekabhavikatva.
The book Karmatattva shows the close connection in the teaching of
Sāṃkhyayoga of the ideas of karma, rebirth, duḥkha, and kaivalya. The theory of
karma starts with the question of who is the doer. The word “I” refers to a num-
ber of factors that work together, argues Āraṇya: vital forces ( prāṇa), the body,
organs of perception and action, the mind, ahaṃkāra, and buddhi. Action is when
they work together either for bhoga (satisfaction of instinctive desires) or apa-
varga (salvific liberation). Āraṇya distinguishes between three kinds of activities:
physical elements like air and fire, the mechanical activity of non-living material
objects, and the action (karma) of living beings (H. Āraṇya 2008b: 6). The differ-
ence between activity and action is that “Activity is spontaneous but action is not.
Activity which varies from one individual to another is called action [karma]” (H.
Āraṇya 2008b: 7).
Āraṇya was quite aware that Sāṃkhyayogins were a very small number of
people. Sāṃkhya is a complex philosophical system, and he understood that the
emphasis in Sāṃkhya on reasoning, combined with the goal of liberation from
rebirth, was attractive to only a limited number of people. In an essay called
“Necessity of Rational Understanding of the Fundamentals of Liberation” (H.
Āraṇya 2005a: 253–256), which Āraṇya wrote after he had started to include
many references and discussions of Western science in his texts, which seems to
have been in the 1930s, he states,
Of late there have been further onslaughts on Sāṃkhya by people who have
been misguided by cursory readings of Western Philosophy and the findings
of modern science to construe that these too are opposed to the Sāṃkhya
view. So what is required now is to prepare and present a comprehensive
overview of Sāṃkhya philosophy which would show that its basic principles –
conscious Puruṣa and inert prakṛti, conglomerate of three guṇas – being eter-
nal verities are compatible with the latest discoveries of science and can hold
their own in spite of all the onslaughts.
(H. Āraṇya 2005a: 254)
Here Āraṇya explains that the reason he needed to engage with Western science
was that opponents to Sāṃkhya had started to refer to Western science in order to
portray Sāṃkhya as a mistaken view. This would explain his change of discourse
from using the authority of Sanskrit language and texts to seeking authority from
Western science.
Notes
1 An English translation was printed in the journal Sāṃkhyāyan, published by Kāpil
Maṭh in 2006, pp. 56–60. Adinath Chatterjee informs in a footnote to the translation
that “Śivoktayogayuktiḥ” was published in 1892 by Dhrubananda Agnihotri. Chatter-
jee notes that Āraṇya composed the text at “a young age” (H. Āraṇya 2006b: 56).
2 According to Bhāskara Āraṇya, the early patron of the Kāpil Āśram in Triveni was a
Śaiva and one of his demands, as a prerequisite for his support was that worship Śiva
should take place there (interview with Bhāskara Āraṇya, March 2017).
3 The last śloka reads, “Arrogant unrestrained people without the base of sufficient latent
impressions of practicing the preliminary limbs of yoga like truthfulness and non-
injury to all living beings and with minds engulfed in the dross of rajas and tamas
(distractions and delusions) venture to imitate saints like Kapila and go straight to the
core of yogic practices (fixation of mind, meditation, etc.) are destined to fail miser-
ably” (H. Āraṇya 2006b: 60; translation Adinath Chatterjee, slightly modified).
4 This view of Sanskrit as representing orthodoxy or “authenticity” is exemplified by
the Yoga volume of Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies (Larson and Bhattachraya
2008). In the volume, only texts in Sanskrit are included, also a summary of Āraṇya’s
Śivoktayogayuktiḥ, while there is no summary of Āraṇya’s most important text, the
Kāpilāśramiya Pātañjal Jogdarśan, probably because it is in Bengali.
5 Ārṣa means “derived from the ṛṣis.” The guru of the founder of Ārya Samāj Dayānanda
Sarasvatī, Virajānand and his disciples divided all Hindu scriptures between ārṣa and
anārṣa texts. The ārṣa texts were the work of the ṛṣis and therefore authoritative.
All texts created later than the Mahābhārata they considered anārṣa and unaccepta-
ble. This difference would make it possible, according to Virajānand to judge which
Hindu text were true and which was false (see Jones 1976: 31). Āraṇya uses ārṣa in
a different meaning. For Āraṇya ārṣa dharma, or ārṣaism which according to him
had been wrongly termed Brāhmaṇism, was divided in pravṛtti and nivṛtti dharma.
Āraṇya was not a Brāhmaṇ and might also for this reason have disliked the concept of
Brāhmaṇism, which does privilege the Brāhmaṇs.
6 Asmitāmātrā is used in the Pātañjalayogaśāstra 1.36, 2.19, 3.24, and 4.4.
7 The Sāṃkhyasūtra was probably compiled by Aniruddha, who also wrote the first
commentary on the text, the Sāṃkhyasūtravṛtti.
8 Hausner notes that among contemporary saṃnyāsins she studied the heart is “the body
point most often correlated to the ātman” (Hausner 2007: 167).
9 When Dharmamegha Āraṇya initiated new disciples he gave them a small photo of the
drawing of Yogeśvara and recommended the disciples when they started meditation
to look at it briefly, then close the eyes and imagine him inside. As Yogeśvara only
contemplates himself, so are the disciples supposed to (information provided by Asoke
Chattopadhyay 12.6.2017).
10 Interview with devotees at the Kāpil Sāṃkhyayogāśram in Sarnath, January 2013.
11 For an essay on Āraṇya and extraordinary powers, see Jacobsen 2012a.
12 In a letter written from Barabar Hills in 1894, he writes about experiences of extraor-
dinary knowledge (H. Āraṇya 2003: 113–119; see Jacobsen 2012a for an analysis).
13 Misspelled in the English translation edition as “Sentar.”
7 Sāṃkhyayoga meditation
instructions of the Kāpil
Maṭh tradition
Hariharānanda Āraṇya considered yoga to be mainly about knowledge, meditation,

and samādhi. He considered silence, a strong inclination for solitude, and a dislike
of crowds as preconditions for samādhi. Yoga is to be performed alone, not in a
group. In Chapter 6, I analyzed a number of detailed instructions and explanations
of samādhi from Āraṇya’s Bengali commentary on the Pātañjalayogaśāstra, and
a number of these instructions may refer to his own experiences, although he does
not mention himself or identify experiences as his own in that text. In this chapter,
I analyze some instructions published separately from the Sanskrit and Bengali
scriptural commentaries of Kāpil Maṭh. Instructions in meditation were printed
in the Appendixes in the Bengali commentary on the Pātañjalayogaśāstra and its
edition in English. In addition, in some of Hariharānanda Āraṇya’s other writings
are found what could be described as “descriptive accounts of meditative states
based on the personal experiences of accomplished adepts” (Scharf 1995: 236).
These are shorter, but quite detailed instructions in the practice of Sāṃkhyayoga
meditation that seem to be based on the author’s own Sāṃkhyayoga practice. In
these instructions are descriptions, therefore, of the practical methods of attaining
the Sāṃkhyayoga truth of the unchangeable and immortal witness consciousness,
the inner self, which is the absolute subject, according to Sāṃkhyayoga, and the
accompanying realization of the dissolution of the manifestations of prakṛti into
their material cause, which was the goal of the yoga of Kāpil Maṭh’s gurus.
Āraṇya seems to have favored texts and not living teachers, and he also seems
to have favored writing and not speaking. He preferred quietness, living in silence
and solitude in the confines of a cave for months at a time. However, he wrote
books, essays, letters, and stotras, etc. Dharmamegha Āraṇya also favored silence
and being permanently enclosed in a cave, remaining silent for months on end.
He communicated with disciples through letters but also speeches at Kāpil Maṭh
on festival days. In these instructions to disciples, the two Sāṃkhyayoga gurus
explain sādhanā, seemingly based on their own experiences, and in these instruc-
tions they communicate their own meditation methods – i.e., their own yoga
practice. In Hariharānanda Āraṇya’s Progressive and Practical Sāṃkhya-yoga,
an English translation of a number of essays, letters, and discourses mostly writ-
ten in Bengali, are some examples of such instructions (H. Āraṇya 2003). Many
Sāṃkhyayoga meditation instructions 125
of the essays of the book are scholastic and about texts, but there are also some
instructions for Sāṃkhyayoga practice directed to devotees in the form of letters
as well as descriptions of Āraṇya’s own Sāṃkhyayoga practice. In Āraṇya’s fic-
tional autobiography, there are detailed descriptions of the narrator’s meditation
experiences, but since the text is presented as fiction, it is impossible to know its
connections to the empirical world. However, many of the stories are probably
built on his own experiences. We will look at some descriptions of meditation, as
they do express his understanding of Sāṃkhyayoga practice. The Sāṃkhyayoga
practices described in Āraṇya’s books are mostly informed by, and conform to,
the Sāṃkhyayoga worldview, and they describe a progress in spiritual attainment.
The published writings of the second guru, Dharmamegha Āraṇya, are mostly
about Sāṃkhyayoga practice and there will be a few references to these in the
chapter. In addition, a disciple of Dharmamegha Āraṇya who was the head of a
Sāṃkhyayoga monastery in Sarnath, Omprakāś Āraṇya, gave spoken instructions
on Sāṃkhyayoga meditation to groups of devotees in his Kāpil Sāṃkhyayogāśram
in Sarnath as well as in a meditation hall and shrine in Surya Hotel in Varanasi in
which Omprakāś Āraṇya stayed for periods of time and which, after Omprakāś
Āraṇya passed away in 2012, was made into a shrine to honor this Sāṃkhyayoga
guru. The owner of the hotel, Abhai Singh, was a disciple and patron of Omprakāś
Āraṇya. Abhai Singh made audio recordings of some of Omprakāś Āraṇya’s last
instructed meditations. These guided meditations have since been played again
and again for the devotees in Varanasi and Sarnath as part of their weekly meet-
ings at Kāpil Sāṃkhyayogāśram and Hotel Surya. In this chapter, some of these
instructions in Sāṃkhyayoga practice of Hariharānanda Āraṇya, Dharmamegha
Āraṇya, and Omprakāś Āraṇya will be analyzed in order to further answer the
following questions: What does it mean to perform Sāṃkhyayoga? What kind of
yoga is Sāṃkhyayoga?
The value of Sāṃkhya is only for a few individuals

One basic assumption of the Sāṃkhyayoga tradition of Kāpil Maṭh is that only
very few people will find Sāṃkhyayoga attractive and that Sāṃkhyayoga in real-
ity is a practice meant only for those very few individuals. Kāpil Maṭh did not try
to popularize Sāṃkhyayoga. It is probably more correct to say that it has tried to
make it revered and admired, and available to a select few with predispositions
(vāsanās) for Sāṃkhyayoga inherited from previous lives. Hariharānanda Āraṇya
believed that a very small number of people are capable of progressing on the path
of Sāṃkhyayoga, and, therefore, in spite of organizing Sāṃkhya Catechism for
publication in English (Āraṇya 2014a; Brahmacārī 1935), he did not conceive of
Sāṃkhyayoga as a mass movement.
Āraṇya distinguished between four types of people according to how they were
able to relate to Sāṃkhya: those who are ignorant and are guided by blind faith,
those who try to understand by using the science of reasoning (logic) but give up
halfway, those who master the science of reasoning but do not bother to use it to
126 Sāṃkhyayoga meditation instructions
shape their behavior, and, finally, those few who are able to master the subject and
follow it steadfastly to the end (H. Āraṇya 2005a: 255). The Sāṃkhya explanation
of the principle of puruṣa is for those very few of the last group of people, argues
Āraṇya, “who are bent on reaching the goal of liberation” (H. Āraṇya 2005a: 255).
Āraṇya notes that when people “criticize writings on Sāṃkhya for their terseness,
for their undue emphasis on reasoning, they tend to ignore their utility for this tiny
but important group” (H. Āraṇya 2005a: 255). Sāṃkhya is, in other words, only
intended for a very small number of people, those with intellectual capability and
who aim at attaining mokṣa. Dharmamegha Āraṇya shared the view that Sāṃkhya
was understood by and of interest to only very few people, and only a small num-
ber of those few would choose it as a way to attain mokṣa. He wrote,
You can give an idea of the high tenets of Jñāna-yoga, that is Sāṃkhya, to
anyone who inquires about them in a spirit of reverence but only a few would
be able to comprehend them. Still fewer might accept them and only one or
two amongst them would take the final plunge wholeheartedly and unhesi-
tatingly and reach the other shore. To others, all this talk about salvation is
“words, words and words,” to be utilized for scribbling articles or for the
soap-box oration.
(D. Āraṇya 1989: 74)
Reflections like these might perhaps be meant to address followers of the Maṭh
who would have been troubled by the fact that the Maṭh attracted few disciples and
gained little attention when other movements in Bengal such as the Rāmakṛṣṇa
Maṭh and Mission and Bhārat Sevāśram Saṅgha were flourishing and attracting a
large number of monks and laypeople, or perhaps they were intended as a solace
for the gurus for the same reason:
Please also bear in mind that everybody is born with his own Saṃskāra
(latency) and unless a strong Puruṣakāra (free will) is there to press forward,
nobody can advance towards salvation. So there is nothing to be sorry about
if your advice on Nivṛtti (abstention) is not listened to. All persons may not
possess the required aptitude for it.
(D. Āraṇya 1989: 75)
Aloneness
However, attracting few followers seems perhaps to be related to a second
basic assumption of the Sāṃkhyayoga tradition of Kāpil Maṭh, the doctrine of
aloneness. With the emphasis on aloneness, attracting many followers would be
self-defeating. “Build up the strength to depend wholly on yourself,” writes Dhar-
mamegha Āraṇya (1989: 75). One should train the mind in order to be able to tell
oneself “I will remain unruffled even if no one in this world is there to help me”
(D. Āraṇya 1989: 75).
It is isolation from the world and not engagement with it that will help the yogin
to get rid of suffering. Since all is suffering (duḥkha), with the exception of the
liberated puruṣa, which is in reality always separate from prakṛti, Hariharānanda
Āraṇya advises that in order to eliminate suffering one should focus on the self,
and not the improvement of prakṛti – i.e., the material world. Aloneness is an ulti-
mate value. The truth about the unchangeable and immortal witness conscious-
ness is that it is independent from matter as well as from other selves. That the
guru lives permanently inside a cave with no entrance or exit and without inter-
action with anyone most of the time, is an institutionalization of this ultimate
value of aloneness as well as a signal that solitude is the method to realize the
ultimate goal. Realization of puruṣa represents a withdrawal from the world, and
the withdrawal from the world into a cave is the final step of ascetic practice. It
somehow signals that the guru is close to realizing the final goal of ultimate and
eternal solitude, kaivalya. In harmony with this value of aloneness and solitude,
Dharmamegha Āraṇya advised disciples to focus on being alone in the world
while performing yoga:
While on [sic] Āsana imagine yourself as being completely alone in this

world having none to call your own and none whom you would consider as
your friend or foe.
(D. Āraṇya 1989: 70)
Hariharānanda Āraṇya’s entrance into the cave can be considered a defining

moment in the history of Kāpil Maṭh. Ananta Sengupta, who witnessed the event,
described it in detail in a letter to his wife, dated May 17, 1926. Sengupta had gone
to Āraṇya’s āśram with Haridās Majumdār, who had arranged the building of the
artificial cave. Majumdār is in the letter quoted to have said, “I have not done any-
thing worthwhile. At least let me try to help someone who has ventured on the path
of salvation” (Sengupta 2003: 147–150). Sengupta described the artificial cave
and noted that a saṃnyāsin lived there and that “he reminds me of the Buddhist
monks of bygone eras” (Sengupta 2003: 148). This is an important observation
because it indicates that Sengupta did not associate Āraṇya’s appearance with any
contemporary yogin or yoga phenomenon in India, but with ideas about ancient
Buddhist traditions of monasticism. He associated Āraṇya with Buddhism, which
was to some degree an association Āraṇya had attempted to create, since he con-
sidered Sāṃkhya and Buddhism to have had a common origin in the teachings of
Kapila, and Buddhism to be a development from Sāṃkhyayoga. That Āraṇya’s
appearance was associated with Buddhist monks, and not Sāṃkhyayoga monks,
was perhaps also because no visual tradition of ancient or medieval Sāṃkhyayoga
monks was known. Sengupta reveals from his visit, “Swamijī has decided that
tomorrow he would have the entrance to the cave blocked, detaching himself
completely from the external world” (Sengupta 2003: 148). He reports that the
disciples complained that they would miss his company and his sermons. In reply,
Āraṇya argued that he would now be closer to them and that his teachings would
“reach the core of their being” (Sengupta 2003: 148). The day after, Āraṇya gave
a sermon before the cave was closed with him inside:
Whether you live in a forest or in a cave, there is no respite from sorrow until
and unless you can consciously eliminate all desires from the mind. For, the
craving of objects which ushers in sorrow is eternal and not extraneous. Only
a pure mind can conquer grief.
(Sengupta 2003: 149)
Āraṇya said in conclusion that the “enjoyment of objects of desire leads to crav-
ing for more” until it kills you, like a man who is desirous of mangoes climbs
a mango tree, slips and falls to his death. So one should be careful all the time,
which will not hinder occasional slips, but “it will protect you from a big fall,”
Āraṇya advised his followers (Sengupta 2003: 149). After the distribution of food
blessed by the guru ( prasād), a mason closed the entrance of the cave. Āraṇya’s
last words to the disciples before being enclosed in the cave was, according to
Sengupta’s letter: “Let your intake be pure, practice meditation and always ensure
that the company you keep is ennobling” (Sengupta 2003: 150). Sengupta adds an
explanatory parenthesis after “Let your intake be pure” to explain that it referred
not only to food, but also to all sense experiences, “intake not only by mouth but
through all the sense-organs” (Sengupta 2003: 150). The size of the opening in
the cave was according to measurements given by Āraṇya: the opening should be
so that a kerosene container could be passed through it (D. Āraṇya 2003a: 153).
Dharmamegha Āraṇya mentioned in a letter written on August 30, 1924, two
years before Hariharānanda Āraṇya entered the cave, the spiritual practice in
Madhupur and noted that Hariharānanda “passes his days virtually without speak-
ing to anyone. . . . He is not at all concerned with his transient corporal body,
his entire attention is focused on the indestructible eternal soul” (in H. Āraṇya
2003:146). It is this fondness of solitude and quietness, and the neglect of the
body that has characterized Sāṃkhyayoga in practice as exemplified by the Kāpil
Maṭh tradition of Hariharānanda Āraṇya.
The Yoga of Sāṃkhyayoga: a paradigmatic method of

Sāṃkhyayoga concentration
In the Sāṃkhyayoga of the Kāpil Maṭh tradition, yoga mainly refers to efforts
to make the mind still and, in particular, stop all of the mind’s activities. This
relates to the two assumptions mentioned earlier, that Sāṃkhyayoga is useful for
only a very small number of people and that solitude is an ultimate value. Seeing,
hearing, talking, moving, etc., are all modifications of the mind, and these, and
other fragments of knowledge such as desire, hate, attachment, etc., are known in
Sāṃkhyayoga philosophy as vṛttis. The sum total of these vṛttis is the mind. The
restlessness of the mind means that it constantly shifts from one object to another.
The fluctuations of the mind follow the pattern set by latent impressions of the
actions of one’s previous births, which is known as the fruits of karma. According
to Dharmamegha Āraṇya, when the will to restrain the organs from their respec-
tive objects is awakened, the restlessness of the mind will start to abate. Yoga is
defined by Dharmamegha Āraṇya as the means of putting the will to restrain the
organs from their respective objects into practice (D. Āraṇya 1989: 72).
Yoga is also understood as this peaceful state of mind, in which all its modi-
fications have been stopped (Yogasūtra 1.2). This state is only attainable by
Sāṃkhyayoga, according to the Kāpil Maṭh tradition. Dharmamegha Āraṇya had
to defend this definition of yoga from other meanings of yoga such as body pos-
tures and control of breath:
The tranquil state of the mind is attainable only through Yoga. Yoga is the
stopping of the modifications of the mind (Yoga-sūtra 1.2). The word Yoga
has no other meaning though sometimes it has been used for denoting con-
trol of breath, particular postures of the body for purposes of exercise, etc.
Yoga mainly denotes efforts to make the mind still, ultimately stopping all
its activities.
(D. Āraṇya 1989: 72)
Different forms of Sāṃkhyayoga meditation can be used to attain this ultimate

cessation and the gurus of Kāpil Maṭh describe several methods of stopping all
the activities of the mind. In Hariharānanda Āraṇya’s essay “Jñāna-Yoga or Prac-
tice of Yoga Through Self-Consciousness” (H. Āraṇya 1981: 411–415), there is
a description of the yoga of knowledge leading to complete cessation, and the
instruction represents a paradigmatic method of Sāṃkhyayoga concentration,
according to the Kāpil Maṭh tradition.1 The essay starts by emphasizing the impor-
tance of silence and by quoting Kaṭhopaniṣad on the necessity to restrain speech
and the speech center in the mind. Kaṭhopaniṣad 3.13, which Āraṇya believed
was written by a practicing Sāṃkhyayogin, reads:
Yacched vāṅmanasī prājñas tad yacchej jnāna ātmani

Jñānam ātmani mahati niyacchet tad yacchec chānta ātmani
A wise man should curb his speech and mind,

control them within th’ intelligent self;
He should control intelligence within the immense self,
and the latter, within the tranquil self.2
Āraṇya starts his explanation of the yoga practice of Sāṃkhyayoga by comment-

ing that when jñānayoga (“knowledge yoga”) begins, the person has already
learned from a teacher, reflected on the teachings, acquired an “abiding insight
into reality,” and managed to abstain from acts ruled by desire. These attainments
are understood as a secondary means to samādhi. Jñānayoga is appropriate for the
person who has already completed these preliminary steps. The preliminary steps
are not easy, and Āraṇya argues that they are not complete before the movement
of the organs of speech is stopped, that is, before the yogin has become mauna,
able to remain silent for a long time. Also, all processes of thought that have their
origin in ignorance have to be stopped. This means that the person also has to have
a good understanding of the Sāṃkhyayoga philosophy. In addition, all longing for
external objects has to have stopped. When there is the resolution to give up long-
ing for external objects and to cease all activity and thought processes originating
in ignorance, then, Āraṇya writes,
There is a sense of relaxation in all the organs of voluntary activity due to the
disappearance of their functional tone or readiness to energize, and above all,
a stiffness like that of inanimate objects is experienced in the organ of speech.
This is the first stage of Jñāna-yoga and is technically known as the resolution
of speech into will.
(H. Āraṇya 1981: 412)
This comment by Āraṇya seems to be based on his own experience and prac-
tice of the discipline of mauna. If the person experiences problems with inhibit-
ing speech, Āraṇya recommends using the syllable “Om” to shut out all other
thoughts and their expressions. Sāṃkhyayoga meditation is, however, preferably
performed without the use of a mantra.
When the habit of keeping thoughts out of the mind has been perfected, what
remains is the consciousness of the ego (ahaṃkāra) of external reality. When
desires and resolutions, and their verbal accompaniments, have disappeared,
attention becomes naturally focused on the ego and the mental processes that
are felt to belong to it, according to Āraṇya. At this stage, the yogin envisages
the ego enthroned in the back of the head enjoying an outlook of the finer mental
processes that still continue. When perfection of this stage is attained, “all sense-
impressions bring to the fore consciousness of the knower – the Ego, and of its
cognizing activity” (H. Āraṇya 1981: 412). There is then a decline in brain activ-
ity and this “has its counterpart in the feeling that the Ego descends, as it were,
to the region of the thorax or has its seat all over the space between it and the
brain” (H. Āraṇya 1981: 412). Success in this step completes the second stage in
jñānayoga, which Āraṇya calls “the absorption of the Will in the cognizing Ego.”
Moreover, here the mental repetition of Om can help, but this linguistic aid also
has to be given up as the yogin advances.
The next stage is “the disappearance of perceptual consciousness, so that the
ego-sense has complete and uninterrupted possession of the field. The ego is then
felt to illuminate or reveal boundless space from its home of light in the region of
the heart” (H. Āraṇya 1981: 412). Significantly, light and the notion of the heart
are prominent features in these descriptions. At this stage, there is no obstacle to
the ego’s capacity of apprehension. The yogin should now give up the idea of size
and location and contemplate an inner light that is neither here nor there.3 If he is
able to achieve this, he experiences unsurpassed joy.
In the next stage, the pure ego or pure “I” sense (asmitāmātrā) is recognized as
an object. Therefore, a subject that is never an object has to be searched – a self
that never becomes part of the non-self. The ego is at this stage felt to be a reflec-
tion. But here analytical enquiry is necessary to realize the difference between
the ego and the self, according to Āraṇya, and this is the final stage of jñānayoga.
Āraṇya writes that this stage consists of
the reflection that what appears as mine like the body or the senses is not the
genuine Self, nor what poses as the recipient of experience but is all the same
determined by it, not again the pure Ego which in spite of its simplicity is yet
an appearance.
The perfection of this discriminative knowledge, argues Āraṇya, leads to the

complete cessation of physical and mental activity. In this way, the cessation
of suffering and/or the liberation of puruṣa is brought about. The role of “ana-
lytical enquiry” based on Sāṃkhya philosophy is characteristic of this stage of
meditation.
Āraṇya adds an explanation of the final liberation. The last principle after
ahaṃkāra in the Sāṃkhya understanding of the structure of the mind is mahat or
buddhi. Mahat, when it has been realized, argues Āraṇya, dissolves at once into
the unmanifest (avyakta) “as soon as the other developments of the mind are com-
pletely inhibited, for the self must posit itself against a non-self, however vague
or shadowy, to be what it is.” And, he concludes,
So this nucleus of empirical existence disappears along with everything else

in it, leaving unconditioned Awareness, in whose light they appeared for a
time, to shine forth in solitary grandeur.
(H. Āraṇya 1981: 415)
The Sāṃkhya doctrine nāsmi nāham na me from Sāṃkhyakārikā 64 expresses

this same progress, according to Āraṇya. As Āraṇya explains it, na me means
“I do not need anything” or “I do not possess anything,” nāham means “I am
not even this body and the senses,” and nāsmi means “I in its purest sense,
i.e. puruṣa, is not even the knower of the subtlest experiences” (H. Āraṇya
2005a: 152).
In another description of Sāṃkhyayoga meditation, Āraṇya uses the 25 tat-
tvas as a method. In this meditation the yogin reduces the world into the tattvas
of Sāṃkhya and, working with the tattvas, from the gross to the subtle, he is
able to dissolve reality. The meditation starts with focusing on an object and
then reduces the world into its simplest constituents. The twenty-fifth is the
puruṣa, pure consciousness, and the realization of the puruṣa is the goal. In
the essay “Tattvas and Their Realisation,” Hariharānanda Āraṇya explains the
method for attaining this goal. Realization in the title means “the keeping of any
object, internal and external, in a state of direct cognition through Samādhi”
(H. Āraṇya 1981: 417). Puruṣa and prakṛti cannot be apprehended in the same
way as the other tattvas, but only by stopping the flow of all vṛttis. Tattvas are
attained by practicing dhāraṇā, dhyāna, and samādhi (i.e., saṃyama). Āraṇya
explains the process as follows: through dhāraṇā, fixation of the mind on any
desired object, the mind can hold on to one modification of the mind, a vṛtti,
continuously. In dhyāna, the same process of holding on becomes less inter-
rupted. In dhāraṇā, the flow of knowledge is similar to a succession of drops
of water, in dhyāna to the flow of oil or honey, according to Āraṇya (H. Āraṇya
1981: 416). When the yogin, after continued practice, becomes completely
absorbed in the object of contemplation and forgets even his own self, that is
samādhi. “Getting established in Samādhi is, however, extremely difficult,”
writes Āraṇya, and continues,
Very rarely does a person succeed in doing so, because to attain Samādhi
one must be totally free from all cravings for material objects and possess
extraordinary zeal and knowledge.
(H. Āraṇya 1981: 417)
There is no attempt here to popularize yoga as an easy practice available to

all, nor is the goal of yoga promoted as something everyone can attain. Also,
the body is not given any value, the point is to leave the body, not cultivate
it. Āsana and prāṇāyāma have value in so far as the body needs to be totally
relaxed and still so that, according to Āraṇya, sense organs and action organs
work independently of the body. To explain the practice of having the sense
organs and action organs function independently of the body, Āraṇya adds an
example from his contemporary cultural environment, that of hypnotic clair-
voyance, which was a fad early in the twentieth century. Hypnotic clairvoy-
ance, he thinks, proves that senses can work independently of the seats of the
physical organs, that is, independent of the body. Then it is also easy to under-
stand, according to Āraṇya, that the mind can be detached from the body and
can become fully under the control of the yogin and give him supernormal
power of cognition (H. Āraṇya 1981: 417).
Āraṇya next gives a concrete example, how to realize the gross element of
fire or light, tejas bhūta. As a gross element, it is one of the first tattvas to be
realized in the process toward puruṣa. How does one go about realizing it? One
has to focus on a visual form of a particular object, Āraṇya explains. The red
color of a flower is a good visual form. In samādhi, when the mind is focused
only on the red color “all other perceptible characteristics like sound and touch,
etc. will fade away and it would appear as if only the red color exists” (H.
Āraṇya 1981: 418). Knowledge of the flower will disappear and the gross ele-
ment of fire (tejas bhūta tattva) will be realized. To realize the sound element
one should concentrate on the various sounds arising out the interior of the
body, which constitute the anāhatanāda. The other gross elements are realized
in the same way.
Realization of tanmātras is described next and Āraṇya gives the example of
rūpa tanmātra (subtle principle of form). Here Āraṇya also compares the process
to hypnotism:
When after being hypnotized, the hypnotic gazes at the eyes of the hypnotist,
those eyes tend to grow in size as he comes under the spell and ultimately
when he is completely hypnotized, those eyes seem to cover his entire field
of vision. Same thing occurs at one’s own will in Samādhi.
(H. Āraṇya 1981: 418)
Āraṇya had experience with samādhi, but I do not know if he had experience
with hypnotism. However, he was interested in extraordinary powers, since the
idea of the subtle body as different from the gross body is open to such powers,
and he also seems to have thought that reports of extraordinary powers could be
used to prove the Sāṃkhyayoga idea of the subtle body. In the article “Subtle
Essences and Extra-Sensory Perception,” printed in the appendix in Karmatattva
(Āraṇya 2008b: 155–164), he gives examples from the Psychic Research Society
to prove his case. To explain further how the rūpa tanmātra is finally realized in
yoga, Āraṇya writes that one should concentrate on the field of vision, focusing
on a particular fraction of that vision and then make that fraction expand so that
it fills the entire field of vision. When the vision becomes completely still, when
there is no feature of optical activity, “the sense of vision will come to a stop” (H.
Āraṇya 1981: 419). Āraṇya compares this to dreamless sleep when the subject
loses knowledge of all objects. The tanmātra is defined as the “subtle knowledge
of any of the Bhūtas produced by the minutest stimulation and received as such
by the mind” (H. Āraṇya 1981: 419). This minutest realization of a mahābhūta
is the realization of its tanmātra. Āraṇya describes realization of rūpa tanmātra
as perceiving “the subtle form as an undiversified single light element” (H.
Āraṇya 1981: 419). Every color will produce the same visual sensation since the
tanmātras are “undiversified” – i.e., devoid of diversities like blue, yellow, and so
on – and are thus called aviśeṣa.
Next comes the realization of the external organs (indriyas). Āraṇya explains,
Just as, after the realization of the Bhūtas, a person apprehends the Tanmātras
by further quieting the corresponding sense organ, so by relaxing them, i.e.
making them more receptive to gross stimulation, he can apprehend the
Bhūtas again. During the realization of Tanmātras there remains the sub-
tlest form of receptive activity in the respective sense organ. If that again
is made still all knowledge of the existent world is shut out. A person is
able to realize the sense-organs after he has mastered the art of shutting out
knowledge of the external world and also of reviving the cognition of the
Tanmātras and the Bhūtas by relaxing the Indriyas (thus increasing their
receptivity).
(H. Āraṇya 1981: 420)
Perceiving the world as full of animate and inanimate beings is false, but when
perceiving the world as bhūtas and tanmātras, this false perception ends and the
world appears to be devoid of diversity. The Sāṃkhyayogin should then turn
inward and toward his ahaṃkāra (ego). Then, the Sāṃkhyayogin “can clearly
comprehend that the cognition of objects rests entirely on ego, and emanates from
the mutation of the ego underlying the various sense-organs” (H. Āraṇya 1981:
420). And when the sense organs become still, the ego withdraws from them. Then
with the slackening of the effort to keep them completely inactive the close
connection between ego and the respective sense-organs surfaces itself and
along with it comes knowledge of the external world. When the Yogins can
realise this they can directly apprehend that external organs are permeated by
one’s ego and all knowledge is due to the specific mutations of the ego.
(H. Āraṇya 1981: 420)
The yogin then realizes that all external organs consist of and are based on the
ahaṃkāra or asmitā (ego), and that diversities like sound and color are based on
changes occurring in the ego. Next, the yogin realizes that with the withdrawal
of the ahaṃkāra the body becomes motionless like in samādhi and that the sense
organs reappear when the ego subsides in them.
When one apprehends through Samādhi that sense-organs, organs of action

and the Prāṇas are nothing but specific channels of the ego by which it comes
into contact with the external world, one is said to have realised Indriya-tattva.
(H. Āraṇya 1981: 421)
To stop all mental processes such as will and then abide in the active I-sense is
to realize the ahaṃkāra tattva. Ahaṃkāra is the “root of all physical and mental
activities.” Next is the Buddhi-tattva, which is the ultimate knower and doer. The
buddhi is connected to the sense organs through the ego (ahaṃkāra). “By reflect-
ing on I-sense alone one can reach Buddhi-tattva” (H. Āraṇya 1981: 421).
If one transfers one’s reflective attention from the “knowables” to the

“knower,” one realizes the Buddhi-tattva or Mahat-tattva.
(H. Āraṇya 1981: 421)
This pure state of the knower, argues Āraṇya, is the cause of all sentience in the
organs. Āraṇya notes that knowledge now does not derive from the indriyas alone
and thus one attains omniscience. Omniscience follows from the sense of all-
pervasiveness in the realization of the buddhi. Realization of the buddhi is thus a
highly unusual state and the person is now godlike:
Those who realize the Mahat-tattva are like Saguṇa-īśvaras (Gods with attrib-
utes) and are found in Satyaloka, the highest level of existence according to
the Vedas. Prajāpati Hiraṇyagarbha is one such God.
(H. Āraṇya 1981: 422)
Realization of the buddhi is possible, argues Āraṇya, by “diverting the mind from
all feelings of attachment to the body and concentrating it on I-sense alone” (H.
Āraṇya 1981: 422). The buddhi is mutable because it is continuously being trans-
formed into I-sense, and also in samādhi there is a subtle mutation in buddhi, but
even these mutations stop with the realization of puruṣa:
The Yogin having identified himself with the inner self in Samādhi becomes
completely detached even from the stimulations of the senses which produce
omniscience. He then becomes established in the absolute Self, unbounded
by space and time, and therefore immutable and stripped of everything related
to non-self. And that is Puruṣa-tattva.
(H. Āraṇya 1981: 422)
When all mental and physical activities are completely stopped, only unchangea-
ble puruṣa remains. “Recollection of this experience is the realization of Puruṣa,”
argues Āraṇya. The knowledge attained by samādhi of the distinction between
puruṣa and buddhi is the highest knowledge. Āraṇya next explains how this
relates to the three guṇas of prakṛti. The highest knowledge is a form of modi-
fication of sattva guṇa; severance of all connection to non-self is the supreme
renunciation and the highest form of rajas guṇa; and the total arrest of citta and
remaining in the state of nirodha-samādhi is the highest tamas guṇa. Through
the collective means of these three processes, one can attain the equilibrium of
the three guṇas, which signifies the attainment of prakṛti. Āraṇya notes, “The
realisations of Puruṣa and Prakṛti are identical” (H. Āraṇya 1981: 423). Āraṇya
teaches that kaivalya is attained through the cessation of all mental fluctuations by
supreme renunciation and discriminative knowledge. Furthermore, “it becomes
natural to remain in the arrested state” and then permanent salvific liberation is
guaranteed (H. Āraṇya 1981: 423). Finally, he reminds disciples that kaivalya is
“far more desirable than the achievement of omniscience and omnipotence” (H.
Āraṇya 1981: 423).
Āraṇya’s description of the realization of the tattvas is scholarly, and he never
once refers directly to himself having had these experiences but it seems reason-
able to assume that many of his explanations point to his own meditation experi-
ences rather than just being theoretical explanations.
Hariharānanda Āraṇya’s meditation instructions to followers

Hariharānanda Āraṇya wrote a number of instructions to disciples or followers or
others who wrote to him, in which he responded to questions they had about their
own Sāṃkhyayoga practice. In these instructions, Āraṇya emphasized the need
to renounce and focus on the ultimate goal – i.e., puruṣa – in order to progress in
the spiritual practice. Some of these instructions have been printed in the publi-
cations of Kāpil Maṭh.4 One section “Guiding the Sāṃkhya-Yogin” (H. Āraṇya
2003: 97–110) contains five instructions for practice. In one of the letters to a dis-
ciple he gives the following advice: “do remember – one cannot progress unless
one is prepared to forego everything else for all time to come” (H. Āraṇya 2003:
99). Renunciation seems here to be proposed as indispensable for Sāṃkhyayoga
practice. He emphasizes the practice of silence and absolute stillness of mind
and body, of fixing the mind in meditation on ahaṃkāra or buddhi, and always
aiming at the realization of the puruṣa principle. One should aim only at the ulti-
mate salvific goal and renounce everything else. A good example is the undated
instruction “Meditation on Self and Restraint of Inner Speech” (H. Āraṇya 2003:
99–102), possibly written to his disciple Dharmamegha Āraṇya. Hariharānanda
Āraṇya starts by advising that practice has to be continued without any break for
a long time and that progress initially will be very slow. He comments that one
gains nothing “by experiencing some state of hypnotic trance” and one has to
get rid of such trances in order to advance. Progress will come from withdrawal
from external activities and practicing smṛti (recollection) and vairāgya (detach-
ment). If the mind tries to engage in petty matters, this should be countered by
“studying texts on allied topics or giving discourse or specific advice to genuine
seekers” (H. Āraṇya 2003: 99). But most important is to overcome such inter-
ests by strict introspection with a spirit of detachment, telling oneself “I am not
interested in such trifles” (H. Āraṇya 2003: 99). Āraṇya adds that, “whatever you
do, guard yourself from other’s eyes,” which shows his fondness for solitude
and cave dwelling, and the necessity of it, according to the Kāpil Maṭh tradi-
tion. Sāṃkhyayoga is not a communal activity. It is ideally to be performed in
solitude.
Āraṇya next gives advice on how to practice absolute silence. The yogin should
start by “keeping the entire mouth engaged in a continuous flow of nasal M,” and
this will lead to the vocal organ becoming still. After that, Āraṇya explains, there
will be the sensation of something flowing upward from the vocal organ “to the
back of the head where cognition takes place” (H. Āraṇya 2003: 99–100). Then
the yogin can hear a sound moving upward in the body. One should be able to
feel this upward flow, and one should make sure it does not fade away. “The flow
is being cognized at its upper terminating point, and the cognizer is jñāna-ātmā
(I-sense or the knowing self) which is like the lamp of knowledge” (H. Āraṇya
2003: 100). So long as one perceives the flow to be inside, jñāna-ātmā remains
like a lamp, Āraṇya notes. Āraṇya continues, “With greater concentration when
the apperception shrinks only to ‘knowing’, it becomes the indicator of mahān-
ātmā, pure I sense” (H. Āraṇya 2003: 100). One should then have the mind think
that it is the inner stream that produces the “inward looking perception.” Āraṇya
warns followers that with the slightest use of will, “the I-sense will turn outward.”
For success, therefore, not only the mind but “the body will also have to be made
absolutely still like an inert object.” Then the practice will be perfect, reflecting
the knower.
When absolute quiescence of both body and mind results in elimination of

even the exciting cause (viz. sensation of the upward flow from the mouth
to the head) that initiated apperception of self, awareness of pure I-sense
would disappear and only then does one reach the ultimate goal of spiritual
practice. . . . Essence of spiritual practice is keeping oneself focused on the
ultimate goal, i.e. Puruṣa and let the sense of ego gradually run down.
(H. Āraṇya 2003: 100)
Āraṇya next warns that forgetfulness of the desired objective is the main obstacle
on the path, and that this is especially applicable to those who have made some
progress. Forgetfulness of the goal appears as volition due to attachment, aver-
sion, and “infatuation in petty, unfruitful matters” (H. Āraṇya 2003: 101). When
that happens, Āraṇya advises disciples to try to recall exactly what initiated “the
internal chatter” which led to the act of volition. If it was something trifling, one
should resolve to “not think anymore of such worthless trivialities, which only
bring in endless misery” (H. Āraṇya 2003: 101). The yogin should then engage
even more enthusiastically in new rounds of speechlessness and recollection of
the self. The yogin should tell himself “to nip self-forgetfulness in the bud is my
only mission: I have nothing else to do” (H. Āraṇya 2003: 101). The yogin will
ultimately reach the state of total arrest. Āraṇya then advises the disciple that he
can also perform japa to stop the “internal chatter”: he does not name any mantra,
but says a mantra should be recited 30 times, concentrating on the vocal cords,
30 times on jñāna-ātmā, 30 times directed to mahān-ātmā ( pure I-sense), and 10
times to śānta-ātmā – i.e., puruṣa, pure consciousness. This cycle of 100 recita-
tions should be repeated. The body should be seated, remain motionless, with the
eyes open and directed downward. Āraṇya comments that this form of medita-
tion is called nidhyāna in Buddhist terminology.5 It can be maintained also when
meeting people, except when one is actually speaking, and one can withdraw into
oneself. Āraṇya tells the disciple that it is most important that self-forgetfulness
must not creep in and that “with that end in view your entire life-style needs to be
altered, attuned to Yogic practices” (H. Āraṇya 2003: 102).
Āraṇya’s mother, sister, and his sister’s son were all involved in yoga practice.
Āraṇya received a letter from his mother (dated July 31, 1919) asking for advice
about yoga, and the letter he wrote in reply (August 4, 1919) is printed in one of
the collections of his essays (H. Āraṇya 2003: 103–106). His mother wrote that
she was able to “experience and remain in” the “subtle self,” and asked, “The self
that I feel as ‘I’, who is the self? And what am I merging with?” (in H. Āraṇya
2003: 103). She also informed him that she saw a wonderful light within and
heard the sound “Om,” which, she noted, “emanates automatically from within.”
She expected Āraṇya to be able to explain these experiences. In the letter Āraṇya
started his explanations by stating that the self cannot merge with anything and
explains “[g]enerally, people think the self merges in brahman or something like
that, but in reality it is not so” (H. Āraṇya 2003: 104). Brahman, according to
Āraṇya, means being free from false identifications and without false identifica-
tions, the person becomes all knowing like brahman. Āraṇya further explains
the meditation on the light within. The light is “a prevision of the goal of spir-
itual practice” and “by constant practice of visualising the luminescence the mind
becomes still.” And who is the knower of the light? The knower of the light is
the self. But that is not the end, because there is a self that is beyond all knowing
and “because of which our subtlest ‘I’ can be apprehended” (H. Āraṇya 2003:
104). Āraṇya, thereafter, explains īśvara. He can never be found in the external
world, but “everything is to be found inside oneself” (H. Āraṇya 2003: 104). He
then instructs his mother on how to meditate on this god. Īśvara “dwells in our
hearts,” he writes, and one has to surrender one’s “me and mine” feeling to him.
Then, withdrawing from sight and sound, concentrating only on him, one can
become godlike, and godlike means the manifestation of this divine possibility
in us (H. Āraṇya 2003: 105). Thus meditation on īśvara means becoming like
īśvara. Constant recollection of the self or brahman is the state of jñāna-ātma,
according to Āraṇya, and is the state of “remaining firm in the self.” He speci-
fies that it is the “disappearance of the false sense of ego that ushers in the full
knowledge of the self” (H. Āraṇya 2003: 106). Āraṇya concludes his letter to his
mother by stressing one of his main doctrines, that of solitude: “You will progress
further if you avoid talking to others and concentrate only on meditation” (H.
Āraṇya 2003: 106).
A short instruction on prāṇāyāma recommends that disciples recollect “peace
in the region of the heart” experienced in meditation and hold on to it while exhal-
ing. “And imagine, as you inhale, peace from the heart spreading all over the
body.” Āraṇya recommends feeling with each cycle of breath peace in the heart.
This peace, explains Āraṇya, is the practice of the recollection (smṛti) of the self.
Āraṇya also advises that prāṇāyāma can be blended with the chanting of OM; O
as breath is taken in and M while exhaling (H. Āraṇya 2003: 108).
Outer and inner silence and the experience of peace while recollecting (smṛti)
the self constitute key elements of Āraṇya’s yoga instructions to disciples. In
an instruction to a disciple, he advised how to silence the “inner chatter” (H.
Āraṇya 2003: 108–109). This chatter is, according to Āraṇya, caused by “contact
of the faculty of knowing with the storehouse of latent impressions, and the fluc-
tuating mind is ever busy drawing out appropriate memory from the store” (H.
Āraṇya 2003: 108). To stop the process one should tell oneself “I have no need
of anything. I will not do anything,” and concentrate only on introspection of the
self. The latent impressions of this activity will remove the impressions of other
past actions, according to Āraṇya, because in this process “buddhi would leave
the latent impressions alone and restrict itself to revealing the self” (H. Āraṇya
2003: 108). It appears Āraṇya believed that the resolve of renunciation would
remove all other latent impressions (saṃskāras). After these impressions have
been eliminated, discriminative knowledge (viveka) would follow, in which “even
knowledge of the self is discerned as a knowable – distinct and different from the
Seer” (H. Āraṇya 2003: 109). “This leads to the dying out of knowledge of the
empiric self” (H. Āraṇya 2003: 109). The main obstacle in this process, as stated
by Āraṇya, is self-forgetfulness, which needs to be overcome also in sleep. In
other words, to attain the goal, everything in life has to be about the realization of
the self; if not, the chatter of the mind will return.
In a short instruction to a disciple in the practice of discrimination (H. Āraṇya
2003: 110), Āraṇya recommended imagining the ego or “I” to be the sum total
of that which is perceived by the senses and mind, and to hold on to that con-
cept through recollection. One should then focus the attention on knowing per
se, devoid of the objects. One should think that the knower of that sense of “I” is
the seer, and this, according to Āraṇya, is viveka. Realization of viveka comes in
stages, argues Āraṇya, first dhāraṇā, then dhyāna, and finally samādhi. Therefore,
having withdrawn the mind from external objects, one should practice discrimina-
tion and try to improve on it. Another method is to focus one’s attention on the
seer and think that one has no longing for anything in this world, not even the
longing to think about objects. Stopping the mind comes from withdrawal from
all activities, both physical and mental, and such a cessation of the mind will bring
the state of buddhi or pure I-sense. This should be practiced every day (H. Āraṇya
2003: 110).
Descriptions of meditation in A Unique Travelogue

A Unique Travelogue (Apūrba bhramaṇbṛttānta) (Āraṇya 2001, 2006a), an
allegory of the spiritual development of a Hindu yogin saṃnyāsin, teaches
Sāṃkhyayoga by way of describing a young monk’s journey and gradual mastery
of the yoga of Sāṃkhyayoga. The book tells the story of an ascetic, Śivadhyān
Brahmacārī (Brahmacārī 1907), under whose pseudonym the book was published,
who finds a meditation temple called Ṛddhi Mandir (“the temple of yoga pow-
ers”) in the Himalaya while he is traveling toward Tibet.6 In the middle of the
book is the saṃnyāsin’s discovery of the enormous and magical building structure
of Ṛddhi Mandir, which he learns has been made by the yoga powers of a Bud-
dhist monk. The yogin who created it made it function so that yogins would be
able to rise through its structure to higher levels within the building, depending
on the successful completion of tests which would show how far they have pro-
gressed. As they progress in renunciation and concentration, they are able to move
upward in the building structure. In this gigantic building complex there are many
caves, in which the ascetic practices meditation. As he progresses he has a num-
ber of experiences, illusions, as well as insights, which mark his gradual progress
toward the spiritual goal. Descriptions of Sāṃkhyayoga meditations constitute
part of the second half of the book. The temple Ṛddhi Mandir is described as
a Sāṃkhyayoga meditation structure. The temple was “magnificent and situated
on a semi-elliptical surface. The first one was blackish, the second red and third
white. Each section was 75 to 90 feet tall” (H. Āraṇya 2001: 40). The colors black,
red, and white are the colors of the three guṇas of Sāṃkhya and the temple might
be intended to represent prakṛti (see Figure 7.1). The Ṛddhi Mandir represents in
material form the progress of the Sāṃkhyayoga ascetic, getting rid of tamas and
becoming more and more dominated by sattva. The references to religion in the
text on Ṛddhi Mandir are mostly Buddhist. The founder of it was a Buddhist and
some of the vocabulary used is explained by references to Buddhism (H. Āraṇya
2001: 48). The three parts of the structure of the temple have names derived from
supposedly Buddhist terms, Upasampadāgār, Maggajivinagār and Maggajināgār.
Upasampadā refers to the ritual of ordination of the Buddhist monk; Maggajivin
Figure 7.1 A model of the Ṛddhi Mandir, in the garden of Kāpil Maṭh
according to the text, denotes one who is following a spiritual path, and Magga-
jina refers to one who has reached the end of the path (see H. Āraṇya 2001: 45).7
Śivadhyān finds a text in the Ṛddhi Mandir authored by a Buddhist monk called
Dhīravīrya, who had been there 100 years earlier. The text explains its structure
and function, and ends by stating that the text was for the guidance of the coura-
geous and honorable monks who would visit the sacred temple in the future (H.
Āraṇya 2001: 43).
Śivadhyān next describes the tests he attempts to pass. They are tests on the
attainment of the renunciation of desires and the ego. The name of the chapters
indicates the progress: “The First Test,” “The Last Results of My First Test,” “Illu-
sions of Mind,” “Second Test – Firm Spiritual Practice,” “Third Test – and Suc-
cess,” “Path of Spiritual Practice,” “Platform for Meditation,” “Clairvoyance,”
“Realization of the External Principle,” and “Realization of Internal Principles.”
This is a progress in Sāṃkhyayoga practice starting from the control of desires,
control of the body and senses, control of internal organs, and the attainment of
yoga powers.
The progress is described as tests, failings, the gaining of new insights, and
advancing to the next level. Some of the insights are as follows: “I would have to
overcome the desires within me and then and then alone I would be in a position to
attain salvation” (H. Āraṇya 2001: 55), “tongue and genital organ stand in the way
of renunciation” (H. Āraṇya 2001: 61), and “desire for wealth, greed and sexuality
are the main obstacles to spirituality. If these desires are not conquered one cannot
adopt the path of true religion” (H. Āraṇya 2001: 61).
When Śivadhyān is in the first part of the temple, he reflects on renunciation,
a test that he has to pass in order to move upward. Meditating in a cave, he is
shocked to discover that desires still lie dormant within him, which sometime
become so strong that he runs out of the cave. He writes, “Now I could feel
why solitary confinement is such a grave punishment. Also I could feel that
only saints having full control over themselves can find solace in such a place”
(H. Āraṇya 2001: 48). Āraṇya frequently presents solitude and asceticism as a
heroic act.
The second test starts with Śivadhyān trying to get rid of feelings such as jeal-
ousy and hatred and cultivate feelings of love, piety, kindness, and indifference.
His guru has taught him a method for achieving this. He tries to feel happy about
the happiness of others and feel sympathy for those in distress. However, he still
desires food. Nonetheless, he gains the insight that greed for food and sexuality
stand in the way of the path to true religion. He vows never to eat any food he
craves and he becomes more determined to take a vow of celibacy (brahmacarya).
A significant part of the book is about the person’s search for a god, especially
finding the right conception of god. He writes confidently, “In course of time
I could realize the true image of God through Yogic practice” (H. Āraṇya 2001: 56).
The god he describes is the god of Sāṃkhyayoga:
He is not influenced by any affliction, action, result of action or latency

thereof. He is always inactive, clam [sic] and quiet. He is liberation incarnate.
This is the real perception of God – without any attribute. . . . In fact I had
begun worshipping him as Hiranyagarbha [sic] (Lord of the Universe). It is
only through continuous yogic practice that ultimately I came to realize his
true identity. He is in Samādhi all the time. . . . Just as when we are in con-
centration the body retains our soul, similarly the Lord resides in the universe
as a soul in the body.
(H. Āraṇya 2001: 56)
He then describes a method of meditation on this god. “I chalked out an image
based on my ideas of a smiling face immersed in yogic ecstasy.” “Then I felt that
I was in full possession of him and I was happy.” But that thought of happiness
did not always work:
So I made a little detour. I began to think of my near and dear ones – I started
with the thought of my mother. As happiness started to engulf me I would
replace the thought of my mother by thinking of my idea of God. Thus my
mind would become steady. Gradually I would be in a trance.
(H. Āraṇya 2001: 57)
A month-long exercise of focusing on the “serene, smiling appearance” of this god

in Samādhi enabled him to master this practice, he reports (H. Āraṇya 2001: 57).
Another method of meditation was to concentrate on the opening in the wall of the
cave through which the light came. As it turned out, the opening of the cave “had
a divine power which enabled it to project ideas as real” (H. Āraṇya 2001: 58).
His understanding of the Sāṃkhyayoga view of god is confirmed:
From Sāṃkhya philosophy I had gathered that God does not interfere in the
happenings of the world, the cause and effect cycle revolves automatically.
But I had received many results by praying to God. So I had doubts in this
regard as well. But now doubts were completely resolved. . . . absorbed in
meditation I would experience complete identity with God. . . . God is above
all action. The deities e.g. Brahma, Indra, Yama and such others distribute
bounties to human beings. God does not come into the picture at all.
(H. Āraṇya 2001: 62–63)
After six months of yoga and after his first-time failure to move upward, he tried
again. He felt like he was losing consciousness and woke up walking along a
road. He realized that he was in the middle of a conflict. The country had been
invaded, the old king had died, and a new regime was in power. He was asked
to join those opposed to the power. Then he realized that he followed the path of
renunciation and he should make no difference between friend and foe: “When
people attain the qualities of patience, forgiveness, truthfulness, honesty, firmness
etc., the country becomes prosperous” (H. Āraṇya 2001: 66). The author takes this
opportunity to comment on the situation in “the country”:
Imposters posing as pious men had captured people’s psyche. Now religion
appeared to be a step for further gratification of worldly desires. If mendi-
cants were prepared to face more hardships than what they were facing pre-
viously as householders only then one could have faith in them. But at that
time so-called mendicants were living more comfortably and luxuriously
than family men.
(H. Āraṇya 2001: 66)
He realized the self-defeating goal of political change: “the conqueror would in
course of time turn dishonest because of the wealth and power they would be
enjoying. The cycle would be complete. The vanquished would then be the con-
querer [sic]” (H. Āraṇya 2001: 67). Śivadhyān instead thought that he should
strive for the spiritual path for both the conqueror and the conquered. Both parties
would benefit. At that time, he felt something touch his forehead and realized
he had reached the upper floor of the palace. He had passed the test. This test of
managing to avoid politics could have been a comment on the political situation
in India at the time. However, such comments in general identify the meaningless-
ness of engaging in political conflicts by supporting one of the parties, as it leads
only to new injustices while “spiritual uplift . . . would be ultimately beneficial to
both the parties” (H. Āraṇya 2001: 67).
On the second floor, there were three openings or doors with the names “Clair-
voyance,” “Meditation Platform,” and “Realization of the Tattvas.” The medita-
tion platform was a seat on a rod, which would, when the yogin was qualified,
take him to the third floor of the Ṛddhi Mandir. Śivadhyān tried to sit on it, but it
went down, indicating he had not yet advanced enough in his practice, and instead
electrical sparks came out of his limbs. After some time Śivadhyān was able to sit
on the meditation platform and practice yoga. What is imagined here is a machine
that is able to read and respond to a person’s progress in yoga and the attainment
of samādhi.
He divides the goals in two: attaining one-pointedness and practicing
samādhi. Śivadhyān states that he had learned one-pointedness from Yoga texts
and the guru he met in South India: “I had learnt about one-pointedness of mind
from Yogic scriptures and from my preceptor” (H. Āraṇya 2001: 72). Śivadhyān
tells the reader that he now practices one-pointedness seriously and states that
true knowledge, defined as knowledge that reveals the Sāṃkhya tattvas and
retains them in the mind, cannot be attained without one-pointedness. In other
words, Sāṃkhya cannot be realized without Yoga. The text describes the meth-
ods Śivadhyān used to attain one-pointedness and samādhi. One-pointedness
is attained in walking meditation, recalling and retaining “pleasant saintly
thought.” He writes that he “knew quite well that sentience, mutability and
retentiveness – the three Gunas [sic] would follow one after another as if in a
cycle” (H. Āraṇya 2001: 74). He tries to retain sattva for as long as possible.
Sometimes his mind is steady, but then disturbed. He writes that he occasionally
used a Sanskrit verse to keep his mind steady. His practice of samādhi is then
described. In samādhi,
both thought process and external efforts have to be fully controlled. Organs
of knowing, acting and breathing etc. have to be arrested simultaneously.
This is of course not possible while moving. One has to sit steadily in such a
session. The process is a bit difficult and will not be easily clear to an ordinary
mind. So I should be brief. What we generally call a relaxed position is really
an effortless state. In fact, along with such effortless state of body and mind,
breathing, heartbeat, pulsation and such other signs of life will have to be
quietened [sic] down and made steady to attain the blissful state.
(H. Āraṇya 2001: 74)
The author comments on other ways of attaining samādhi and includes Col.
Townsend, Haṭhayogins, and other yogins, among them the phenomenon of
Haridās Yogi, well known for his supposedly extraordinary capacities, but com-
ments that “Samādhi is absolute stillness of the body and senses” and that,
therefore, Haridās Yogi was not in samādhi, since he states that when he was sup-
posedly buried for three months, he “used to tell that he had gone to some other
parts of the universe and seen many strange things there” (H. Āraṇya 2001: 75).
Śivadhyān reveals that he took the seat of clairvoyance twice. The person sit-
ting on this seat “would get into the state of Samādhi for a while and have super-
normal experience of the object of desire” (H. Āraṇya 2001: 78). The purpose
was “to have a clear vision of the universe and its inhabitants.” According to
Pātañjalayogaśāstra 3.26, this is possible, but Śivadhyān does not refer to any
textual authority. Śivadhyān then has a vision of the universe, first as space and
then as time. He concludes that “Just as vastness may be unlimited, so is small-
ness,” “space is limitless,” and “time is also limitless” (H. Āraṇya 2001: 82). On
omniscience, he concludes:
Omniscience actually means absence of any obstacle to knowing. Since

things to be known are limitless, yogis try to achieve only Kaivalya (libera-
tion) even ignoring omniscience. For growth and decay or appreciation and
depreciation that prevail in all external objects do not apply to the state of
liberation.
(H. Āraṇya 2001: 83)
Śivadhyān also made a realization about human beings:
Difference between ordinary people engrossed in small things and yogis hav-
ing profound knowledge dawned on me. I realized that though the whole
mankind is one single species, there is no limit to the different types compris-
ing it.
(H. Āraṇya 2001: 83)
The final two chapters are about the realization of the Sāṃkhya tattvas. Śivadhyān
realizes the mahābhūtas and the tanmātras. He attempts to describe his experi-
ence, but warns, “The entire subject of viewing the constituent principles is very
subtle even for Yogins. Yogins’ comprehension is simply out of bounds for an
ordinary person” (H. Āraṇya 2001: 85). He first realizes the mahābhūtas through
his senses, starting with the sensation of the earth principle. This is described in
the following way:
The mind became concentrated on the tip of the nose. I began to smell various
scents and [my] mind became so engrossed with the sensation of smell that
I could even get the smell of the materials making up the nose . . . the smell
occupied the whole of my mind disregarding everything else. . . . It appeared
as if the sensation of smell was all that existed in the world.
(H. Āraṇya 2001: 85)
Similarly, taste, vision, touch, and hearing led to the realization of the other
mahābhūtas. Next, the tanmātras, starting with the realization of sound:
I could listen to the faint sound which ultimately dissolved itself into finer
and finer stages such that further dissolution would lead to complete silence.
Thus the finest of fine vibration overpowering all the differentiation entered
into my senses through the ear. That sort of vibration can never cause any
feeling of happiness, misery and the like.
(H. Āraṇya 2001: 86)
He similarly experiences the tanmātras of touch, vision, taste, and smell. Reflect-
ing on this attainment, he states,
I could feel the significance of learning the constituent principles and its con-
tribution towards attainment of liberation.
(H. Āraṇya 2001: 86)
He reflects that material objects are usually understood according to human needs
and perceptions, and associated with certain characteristics, and this causes hap-
piness, grief, and attachment, but
if the elements of matter be viewed separately by their respective sense organs

in their minutest details then the entire external world would lose much of its
significance. Thus I came to know how useful the knowledge of constituent
principles is for attaining salvation.
(H. Āraṇya 2001: 87)
Śivadhyān concludes by describing samprajñāta samādhi as “when the Tattvas

are revealed through intense concentration and retained permanently in a one-
pointed mind” (H. Āraṇya 2001: 87).
Finally, the internal principles, the instruments of knowledge, were to be
experienced and retained in the mind. The body and external objects were now
experienced as unsubstantial and aggregates of action. Then “the mind began to
travel inside – towards its I-sense, which holds the mind and body together” (H.
Āraṇya 2001: 89). The sensation of space disappeared and only the feeling of time
remained:
The exterior cover dissolved itself. I experienced a feeling that a person nor-
mally has when falling from a high altitude. Similarly, if that falling man
were supported in the void by a soft force and its fall was thus arrested,
he would become calm and steady. I had a similar feeling, that of serenity,
calmness and fearlessness, free from earthly bondage. I felt entirely liber-
ated. The external world was devoid of any content and the inner self became
supreme. Thus I had full perception of the inner principles of mind.
(H. Āraṇya 2001: 89)
Śivadhyān comments that he had reached this state by depending on the I-sense
and that he had not conquered the ego. If he had achieved that, he would have
been able “to get rid of the influence of all external elements and concentrate
only on the inner self” and would then “have been fully liberated” (H. Āraṇya
2001: 89). But that was not to be. Śivadhyān is unable to reach the third floor of
the Ṛddhi Mandir. Finally, Śivadhyān understands why Aśvajit did not complete
the magic building. If all people were happy on earth, no one would search for
kaivalya: “Distress goads people to search for peace” and “to think in terms of
the well being of this vast world is an illusion” (H. Āraṇya 2001: 91). Eager to
publicize what he had discovered, Śivadhyān decides to return to the world and
after a difficult journey, he reaches human habitation and finally Hardwar. In the
epilogue of the book, he adds some information for the reader, that “there was no
controlling authority” in the Ṛddhi Mandir, it functioned automatically. This is
in line with the Ṛddhi Mandir being a reference to prakṛti and its manifestations
understood from the point of view of the Sāṃkhyayoga renunciant, and with the
help of which kaivalya can be attained.
Having returned to the world of humans, Śivadhyān discovers, to his disap-
pointment, that people are not interested in listening to him:
People were so much engrossed in worldly affairs that they did not have time
to listen to religious discourse. So I could not get the right person to listen to
all these experiences.
(H. Āraṇya 2001: 94)
Śivadhyān soon regretted leaving the Ṛddhi Mandir and decided to withdraw
from the human world and try to find the temple again, and this time, he would
not return to the human world, and thus ends the fictional autobiography.
The yoga instructions of Omprakāś Āraṇya

One of the disciples of Dharmamegha Āraṇya became a Sāṃkhyayoga guru in
Sarnath. An āśram was built there which has many similarities to Kāpil Maṭh in
Madhupur. It has reproduced Kāpil Maṭh’s structure and aesthetic style but there
are also some differences such as the choice of decorative inscriptions (see Chap-
ter 9). Omprakāś Āraṇya honored both Hariharānanda and Dharmamegha Āraṇya.
Large and small paintings of these gurus, together with Kapila and Yogeśvara
(Īśvara of Yoga), are found at the Kāpil Sāṃkhyayogāśram in Sarnath. One dis-
ciple of Omprakāś Āraṇya financed the building of the Kāpil Sāṃkhyayogāśram
in Sarnath and the printing of Hindi translations of the writings of Hariharānanda
and Dharmamegha Āraṇya, which Omprakāś translated from Bengali. Omprakāś
Āraṇya, unlike the current guru of Kāpil Maṭh, Bhāskara Āraṇya, gave instructed
yoga meditations to his small group of lay followers. In Kāpil Maṭh in Madhupur,
there is no collective instructed meditation practice, the main practice is the morn-
ing and evening recitation of the stotras of Hariharānanda Āraṇya, which focus
on reverence of the Sāṃkhyayoga gurus, divinities, and teachings (see Chapter 8).
The following accounts of instructed Sāṃkhyayoga meditations are based on the
audio recordings of Omprakāś Āraṇya’s spoken meditation instructions and are
meant as illustrative examples and do not in any way intend to give a complete
portrayal of the teachings of Omprakāś Āraṇya.8
I will analyze four instructed Sāṃkhyayoga meditations of Omprakāś Āraṇya,
which I recorded in 2013.9 They exemplify the performing of Sāṃkhyayoga and
Sāṃkhyayoga in practice. The meditations took place early in the morning at a
Sāṃkhyayoga institution in Varanasi, next to a room in which Omprakāś Āraṇya
often stayed and in the Kāpil Sāṃkhyayogāśram in Sarnath. Around 15–20 peo-
ple usually participated, seated in padmāsana (see Figure 7.2). In front of them
was a shrine with pictures of Kapila and other Sāṃkhyayoga gurus of the Kāpil
Maṭh lineage. The group first recited together in a melodious way the hymns of
Hariharānanda Āraṇya from the Stotrasaṃgraha, which took around 30 minutes.
Then after a few minutes’ silence, the audio recording of Omprakāś Āraṇya’s
instructed meditations started. Omprakāś was speaking in Hindi, which was also
the language of the participants. The Sāṃkhyayoga meditations focus on space and
Figure 7.2 Participants in Omprakāś Āraṇya’s instructed Sāṃkhyayoga meditations in

Varanasi
the witness consciousness, time, and death. The main point of all four instructions
was to show the participants how to abandon any identification with body, senses,
and mind, and to guide them toward the realization of their immortal inner being.
This inner being is the witness consciousness (draṣṭṛ puruṣa; Hindi: draṣṭā puruṣ)
and is identified as the knowing self or just the knower ( jñātṛ; Hindi: jñātā).
In “Meditation Instruction Tape I,” Omprakāś Āraṇya started to explain that
one must be aware of the mahat tattva – that is, the buddhi, intellect, or pure
I-sense. The sensation of sound and touch should be felt merging with the mahat
tattva inside us. The mahat tattva is only mahat tattva when it is looking in the
direction of the draṣṭā puruṣ (i.e., the witness consciousness).10 One should leave
the external world and look only at draṣṭā puruṣ. The mahat tattva is faced by
ahaṃkār, manas, the sense and action capacities, and the sensations of touch, taste,
smell, etc., and all things made up of fire, water, air, space, and earth. And behind
the mahat tattva is the nirvikār draṣṭā puruṣ, which is no other than Sadāśiv.11
Inside the mahat is only the feeling of the witness, he continues. The mahat is
experiencing that the draṣṭā puruṣ, which is nirvikār (without form), is Sadāśiv.
Mahat is thinking of nothing but Sadāśiv and becomes more and more stable. The
draṣṭā puruṣ is beyond the guṇas (guṇātit). Since mahat is facing draṣṭā puruṣ
and because it is being drawn to that which is beyond the guṇas (guṇātit), it is
also becoming more and more guṇātit (beyond the guṇas). Omprakāś reminds us
that we now should focus on inhaling and exhaling, and the mind should be quiet.
Buddhi is flowing toward draṣṭā puruṣ, he says. This flow is inside the buddhi.
The feeling of the witness is uninterruptedly maintained inside the buddhi. It is
not flowing in all directions. The citta is being imprinted with what the buddhi is
thinking of or remembering, and the buddhi facing toward draṣṭā puruṣ is think-
ing of only the feeling of the witness. Sensations such as sound and touch become
introverted. The sensation of sound is being lost, and its jñān (knowledge), the
power of awareness contained in it, is blending with the mahat tattva. The sen-
sation of touch becomes lost and merges with buddhi. The color of form (rūp)
becomes lost and its awareness merges with buddhi. Sadāśiv is similarly merging
into it. Only the feeling of the witness (draṣṭā bhāv) is becoming more and more
stable and utterly peaceful. The five mahābhūts are subtler than the body made of
the five mahābhūts. Greater than the subtlety of the mahābhūts are touch, taste,
smell, etc. Action capacities are more subtle than these, sense capacities are more
subtle, and the antaḥkaraṇ, which is called manas, is more subtle than all of them.
You have to imagine, says Omprakāś, that all these powers are withdrawing from
the external world and coming inside, and that the manas has become void, and
the draṣṭā has rid you of any fascination with the intellect (buddhi). This is a jour-
ney from east to west, he says, using a spatial metaphor, and from gross to subtle.
West here does not mean a cardinal direction, but simply a bhāv of moving in an
ever more subtle direction. The use of space here is because there is a movement
from outer to inner. Omprakāś continues to say that one must imagine that the
jñātā ātmā is becoming more and more stable and immensely calm, and that one is
breathing in a relaxed manner and one’s draṣṭā bhāv is uninterruptedly maintained
in one’s buddhi. The mahat tattva state is there only when there is remembrance
of witness feeling (draṣṭā bhāv) inside. This feeling of seeing and knowing is the
witness feeling (draṣṭā bhāv). It should be imagined as being stable in the intellect
(buddhi). One must imagine that one is pulling one’s attraction away from sensory
experience and inwards toward oneself, and that this feeling of being the knower
is uninterrupted. One has to imagine that one is pulling back from the world, con-
cludes Omprakāś Āraṇya. This is followed by a silent meditation.
In this meditation, the idea of space is used to move the attention from the outer
world to the inner world. Sāṃkhyayoga meditation is about the realization of the
witness consciousness, and Omprakāś tries to get the practitioners to focus on the
feeling of the witness consciousness (draṣṭā bhāv). This instruction illustrates
how Sāṃkhyayoga meditation aims directly at the realization of puruṣa; there
is no emphasis on the perfection of āsana and prāṇāyāma before moving on to
the next stages. It is assumed that those interested in practicing Sāṃkhyayoga
have already perfected āsana and prāṇāyāma in their previous life, and advanced
beyond that stage, as was argued by Hariharānanda Āraṇya. The focus is on medi-
tation and turning inwards.
In “Meditation Instruction Tape II,” Omprakāś Āraṇya tries to make the dis-
ciples understand time and focus on the present. First, he instructs that the body
should go limp and empty, and to focus on the peaceful soul within the buddhi.
The soul is always in the present and its awareness is as the knower. One should
focus on and remember the peaceful ātmā. This knowing is peaceful, just like
when we go to sleep. The knower sees itself and everything else fades away,
according to Omprakāś. We remember the present and the present is the knower,
which is peace. There is no curiosity about form, smell, touch, etc., in the ātmā.
They are registered by the senses, but then erase themselves, and our attention
is on the ātmā. The ātmā-buddhi is seeing itself, according to Omprakāś. Sensa-
tions and perceptions arise, last for a length of time, and erase themselves, while
the focus is on the self. Memories of the past and worries about the future come,
stay for a while, and are erased. Our vision is stable, focusing on our ātmā. Our
awareness pays attention to the sensations of the knower ( jñātā bhāv), describes
Omprakāś. Then he asks the participants to focus on time. Our ātmā buddhi is
aware that the body will fade away. The body will be destroyed and the sensations
will be wiped out, but our peaceful ātmā will not. Says Omprakāś,
One day we will die. Our body will fall off, but our peaceful ātmā will remain.
We are not aware of that which has no beginning or no end, of the past and
the future, only the present. How can past and future exist if the present never
ends?
This awareness of the present is peace. One concentrates on the sensations of the
knower and the peace of the present. The more the ātmā watches itself, the more
the outside world fades away. The śānt ātmā remembers only the present. All
things, birth, disease, and death take place in this eternal present, but we are calm,
situated in our śānt svarūp, he instructs. This is the feeling (bhāv) that should
always remain. The knower ( jñātā) is peace (śānt) and the feeling of knowing
is peace. Nothing is there but the knower. The sensation of being is the name of
the knower. Go completely limp, Omprakāś instructs the disciples, breaths are
becoming fewer and fewer, and one day we will stop breathing. The body will die,
but the prāṇ is not going anywhere; it will lose itself in the ātmā, and the body will
drop off. And he concludes,
Imagine that you are letting your body go absolutely limp, losing yourself in
your śānt ātmā, are merging with it. “This bhāv should remain for all time” –
it is only with this firm resolve that one will attain peace (śānti). One should
forget that one is a body.
The subject of “Meditation Instruction Tape III” is the process of dying. Omprakāś
starts by saying, “Let the body go limp like a corpse. . . . Become as if a dead body
even while you are alive.” One should breathe in and out without effort and there
should be no rigidity in any part of the body. Omprakāś explains that change is
taking place in the body the whole time and one day one will die and that one
should not only practice dying but also search for immortality. In this meditation
on dying, one does not put any checks on breathing, because a dying person can-
not do that, Omprakāś instructs. The mind should be emptied. Omprakāś reminds
the sādhaks that Patañjali said that āsan (body posture) should be stable and
pleasant. Omprakāś interprets stīrasukham āsan to mean not only that the body
should be stable but that speech and the mind should be stable and still too. Just as
with a dying person, the body should go limp and inactive. Omprakāś instructs the
sādhaks that the mouth should drop open, that one should feel that death is very
near, one is short of breath, and maybe there are only a few breaths left. There is
no mental resolve or desire left in the mind, Omprakāś instructs. There is empti-
ness of thoughts. The person becomes empty with respect to family, society, and
to everything. Omprakāś says,
People surround a dying person, but the latter is at a total loss to understand
anything. The sādhak deliberately brings this about. . . . His vocal chords
become progressively limp. . . . That emptiness of speech is reflected in our
knowing self. It becomes silent.
Knowledge of objects of sensory perception remains, but just a very slight regis-
tering of them continues to take place in the sense organs, Omprakāś states, but
in this knowing there is no sense of being in a body or of a body shape. There is
neither speech nor thought, and the knowing self ( jñān ātmā) is in a pure state.
Speech and thought have stopped and the sādhak is letting go of the body and
mind. Death could come at any moment now, Omprakāś instructs. The moment
breathing stops, the body becomes disassociated from us. The ātmā becomes
more and more calm. “I am neither this nor that. I am peace (śānti)” is the only
feeling that prevails. The “knower” experiences that there is feeling of peace (śānt
bhāv) inside. The feeling “I am peace” dominates.
Everything is coming to an end. There is nothing more to think about. This

thinking, too, takes place inside the peaceful knowing self (śānt jñān ātmā).
Dying is being experienced. . . . We are ‘seeing’ that our body is progressively
dying. . .
There should be no effort to perfect this posture (āsan) of the peaceful self (śānt
ātmā), explains Omprakāś. In this āsan, there is awareness neither of people, nor
of one’s own body, nor of objects of sensory perception. There is no jñān or resi-
due of the mahat. This absence constitutes the flow of happiness (sukha). The
person is calm in samādhi. This peace is the nirvikār draṣṭā puruṣ, the witness
consciousness beyond form. This peace will continue after the body becomes
separated from us.
We will not go to any far-off place, or rise to some seventh heaven like a bal-
loon filled with helium, or to any heaven or hell after leaving this body. Nor
will we be in the mortal world (mṛtyu lok). We will remain fully immersed
in our śānt ātman. It will always be “present” in that state, no future or past,
for eternity. . . . The only thing that remains in existence is the peaceful self
(draṣṭā puruṣ). It is the “there not being anything” characteristic of the śānt
ātman that is its inalienable sukh. . . . One can practice this posture (āsan)
even while lying down or walking, all one needs to do is perceive one’s body
as being dead, and maintain a stable situation in the śānt ātman.
He explains, “We become stabilized in this state and go on letting go of our body
and our prāṇ, letting go of everything comfortable. We become devoid of all
effort.” “How to die?” asks Omprakāś, and concludes: “This is the way to die: the
end of our prāṇ should coincide with our becoming peaceful (śānt).” Thus ended
this guided Sāṃkhyayoga meditation.
The “Meditation Instruction Tape IV” is on the state of kaivalya. Omprakāś
instructs how mantra meditation can lead to kaivalya. He starts by pointing out
that the purpose of mantra recitation ( jap) is to attain the state of the “detached
observer.” The rules of yoga such as yam and niyam help toward that state. He
then explains that their opposites such as sensory indulgence, violence, stealing,
unkindness, etc. are countered by mantra recitation ( jap). But the ultimate goal
of mantra jap is to attain supreme peace. To attain that, one has to purify the
buddhi-tattva (intellect). There should be an awareness of the intellect (buddhi),
and that what we are watching at the buddhi place is our “seeing,” our sense of
knowing ( jñātā bhāv), the witness consciousness (draṣṭā bhāv). “All we need to
do is make this jñātā bhāv, this draṣṭā bhāv surface on to the buddhi. And we need
to tear apart the spider web ( jāl) inside us, which consists of all things that are
opposite to yam and niyam.” Omprakāś instructs us to recite the mantra inwardly
without uttering it, and to think about why we utter it: to tear apart the spider web
inside, to prevent worries and thoughts from coming. The ultimate aim is the total
calming of the buddhi so that it attains its pure sāttvik state of unperturbed peace.
One should repeat the mantra and adopt the śānt bhāv in the citta. “Thoughts
about the past and the future and all things opposed to yam and niyam become
empty (śūnya).” The calmer the sense of the knower ( jñātā bhāv) becomes, the
purer it becomes. “When a thought enters the buddhi,” says Omprakāś, “the puruṣ
by virtue of being the enjoyer of that thought, becomes impure because the seer
(draṣṭā) unwittingly becomes the enjoyer of the object (dṛśya).” Therefore, the
sense of knowing inside the buddhi should be totally calm. No future or past
should be present and there should be an absence of the silent speech that usu-
ally goes on inside us. There should be no effort in the manas while reciting the
mantra. It should be effortless. There should be no vibration in the sense of the
knower ( jñātā bhāv) inside our buddhi. If the buddhi sattva becomes purified, so
will the draṣṭā puruṣ (witness consciousness). The goal is samādhi and the sense
of the knower ( jñātā bhāv) inside our buddhi should be serene and flow serenely,
in the tranquil samādhi state. The purified buddhi flows as smoothly as a river, one
should not even be aware of its existence. The buddhi contains the sense of the
knower ( jñātā bhāv) and this also becomes more serene. The cittavṛttis that con-
tinue to be formed in the intellect (buddhi) become calm. Omprakāś now refers
to Patañjali and says: “Patañjali was right when he said that when sattva-buddhi
and draṣṭā puruṣ become similar to each other in terms of purity, that is the salv-
ific liberation (kaivalya) of the witness consciousness (draṣṭā puruṣ).” Therefore,
“the calmer the intellect (buddhi), the purer it is, the more activity in it, the more
impure it gets.” Omprakāś says that we should “seize calmness right from the
beginning.” There should not be awareness of anything other than the tranquility
(śānt bhāv): the jñātā (knower) is stably situated in the buddhi. It is nothing more
than a witness (śākṣī) of the latter.
It is not that we are blocking the buddhi and subsequently we will have to
bring about salvific liberation (kaivalya). It’s like this: buddhi steps aside
from in front of the witness consciousness (draṣṭā puruṣ) – and salvific lib-
eration (kaivalya) is attained automatically: clouds disperse from in front of
the sun and the sun is as it is. The stepping aside of the intellect (buddhi)
automatically translates into salvific liberation (kaivalya).
These guided meditations for Sāṃkhyayoga laypeople are not discourses on eth-
ics or āsana or prāṇāyāma, or any other preliminary matters of yoga, but they
aim directly at the practice of samādhi and the attainment of the witness con-
sciousness, which is salvific liberation. We should strive for calmness right at
the outset and experience the standstill of the present moment. Omprakāś used
the Sāṃkhyayoga concepts and map of reality to guide the meditator towards
his inner self and away from the world in order to realize the dualism of buddhi
and puruṣa. Sitting quietly, calming the breath, switching off the five senses, and
focusing the buddhi toward the witness consciousness makes the buddhi more and
more similar to puruṣa. Finally, buddhi steps aside from being in front of puruṣa
and that is the realization of kaivalya.
Since these and perhaps also some other meditation instructions were saved as
audio copies, they are played again and again for the Sāṃkhyayogins in Varanasi
and Sarnath, and they seem to have attained another status than they originally
had.12 These repeatable spoken instructions have gained canonical status.
It is notable there is no gradual attainment or preliminary practice such as the
perfection of āsana or prāṇāyāma. Rather, “one should seize the calmness right
from the beginning,” instructs Omprakāś Āraṇya. In each of these meditations,
Omprakāś Āraṇya tries to lead the Sāṃkhyayogins directly to the realization of
the witness consciousness, their puruṣa.
According to the Kāpil Maṭh tradition, “yoga mainly denotes efforts to make
the mind still and ultimately stopping all its activities” (D. Āraṇya 1989: 72). The
cessation of all the activities of the mind is understood as samādhi. The Kāpil
Maṭh tradition distinguishes between primary and secondary means to achieving
this cessation. As specified by this tradition, yama, niyama, āsana, prāṇāyāma,
and pratyāhāra are secondary means of bringing about yoga – i.e., stopping the
modifications of the mind. Dhāraṇā, dhyāna, and samādhi are the primary means.
Samādhi is considered extremely difficult to attain. It is to be sought in solitude
and by oneself without relying on anybody else, but the Sāṃkhyayoga gurus do,
as we have seen in this chapter, provide instructions and much good advice on
how to progress in Sāṃkhyayoga.
Notes
1 When I have asked the current guru Bhāskara Āraṇya about Sāṃkhyayoga meditation,
he has several times answered by just referring me to this essay and told me to read it
slowly and many times.
2 Translation by Patrick Olivelle (1996: 239–240).
3 Dharmamegha Āraṇya also writes about this light, “a pristine metaphysical Light shin-
ing within you and imparting the inner vision,” as a person progresses in this yoga (D.
Āraṇya 1989: 72). This inner vision, states Dharmamegha, removes “from your eyes
the coloured glasses through which you are now viewing it” and reveals “the stark real-
ity of the world” (D. Āraṇya 1989: 72).
4 English translations are found in H. Āraṇya 2003.
5 The Pāli form is nijjhāna (found in Majjhima Nikāya 95) and means introspection.
6 Ṛddhi is the Sanskrit equivalent of the Pāli iddhi. It refers to the extraordinary powers
attained by meditation in the Buddhist tradition.
7 The names of the three levels of the building can be rendered as “Hall of renunciation,”
“Hall of one who is following a spiritual path,” and “Hall of one who has attained the
supreme knowledge (reached the end of the path)”.
8 I met Omprakāś Āraṇya only a few times, the first time in 1999, but the following
analysis is based on the audio recordings of his instructed meditations. The audio
recordings were organized by a disciple and are owned by him. The devotee started
recording the instructions when Omprakāś was old and they had begun to worry what
would happen to them after his death. The audio recordings were played for a group of
disciples in the morning after the singing of the Sāṃkhyayoga stotras and I made audio
recordings of them in January and February 2013.
9 The tapes have been labeled Meditation Instruction Tape I to IV. The translation from
Hindi to English has been done with the assistance of Krishna Mohan Mishra.
10 Since the instructions of Oṃprakāś Āraṇya are in Hindi, I have used the Hindi forms
in the transliteration.
11 Sadāśiv is not a concept used in classical Sāṃkhya and Sāṃkhyayoga. Omprakāś does
not explain why he uses the term. The term sadāśiva is used in one of the stotras com-
posed by Hariharānanda Āraṇya, verse 10 of Mānasapūjā, and is here a name of the
god dwelling in one’s body, which is said to be a temple (deho devālayaḥ prokta ātmā
devaḥ sadāśivaḥ). It is perhaps intended to emphasize the property of peace of the wit-
ness consciousness draṣṭṛ puruṣa.
12 Even though I took part in many instructed meditations, these four instructed medita-
tions were the only ones played on the audio recorder.
8 Monastic life and recitation
of Sanskrit stotras
Peace is a most fundamental value in Sāṃkhyayoga. It follows from this that

daily life in the Kāpil Maṭh monastery is very quiet. The number of devotees of
Kāpil Maṭh is nonetheless small and most of the time the guru is in seclusion and
unavailable to the devotees. During the days he is not available the monastery is
mostly deserted with only the caretakers present. A few laypersons, between 20
and 30 usually come, mainly from Kolkata, and stay for a short time during the
first five days of the Bengali month when the guru is available in the window
opening of the cave. Kāpil Maṭh maintains a conventional guru-disciple relation-
ship. However, the guru never goes out from the artificial cave in which he lives
and thus does not move around in the Maṭh. This lack of movement adds to the
peaceful atmosphere in the Maṭh and also maintains a physical distance between
the guru and the disciples. A few more people visit for the festivals (utsavs), but
even these festivities are celebrated in a restrained manner. During the early dec-
ades of the history of Kāpil Maṭh, disciples of the Maṭh would visit mainly for the
celebration of Kapil utsav during their Christmas vacation.
Silence is an essential component of the yoga of Kāpil Maṭh, since silence is an
important aspect of peace. The four months ( July to October) of cāturmāsya vrat
are traditionally the months of additional austerity for saṃnyāsins with emphasis
on control of body, speech, and mind. In these months the guru never comes to the
opening in the Kāpil Mandir. In the past, when there were other monks in Kāpil
Maṭh, they also practiced the cāturmāsya vrat. Maintaining silence is an impor-
tant aspect of this vow, which adds to the quietude and peacefulness of the Maṭh.
The puruṣa principle is beyond language and also all sounds. The cāturmāsya vrat
may also include the study of texts (svādhyaya) and silent recitation. Silence is
also seen as part of the perfection in ahiṃsā as spoken words generate disagree-
ments and are sources of conflict. Silence and mental restraint and concentration
are considered means to salvific liberation. Mental restraint and concentration
have to be practiced steadily over a very long time, as a life-long commitment as
a saṃnyāsin for the attainment of kaivalya, according to Kāpil Maṭh.
Renunciants mostly belong to monastic orders. Hariharānanda Āraṇya identi-
fied sometimes as a daśanāmī, but he does not seem to have maintained regular
contact with any of the daśanāmī orders. As a Sāṃkhyayogin, he also denounced
156 Monastic life and recitation of stotras
the Vedānta philosophy of Śaṅkara. As was noted earlier, Araṇya (short a) is one
of the daśanāmī names, but not Āraṇya (long ā). The name Araṇya means forest
and indicates a person living in isolation in the wilderness detached from society.
In a letter written in 1928, Āraṇya states his views on his daśanāmī identity. He
writes,
We are followers of Sāṃkhya and are saṃnyāsins . . . of one of the ten orders
(daśanāmīs). Although these orders are said to be instituted by Śaṅkarāchārya,
we do not consider him to be the pioneer in propagating renunciation.
(H. Āraṇya 2003: 133)
Hardly any sādhus come to Kāpil Maṭh to visit and no sādhu except for the
guru is currently associated with the Maṭh. While this absence of people might
point to a lack of popularity, and perhaps indicate that this Sāṃkhyayoga guru-
śiṣya tradition is slowly coming to an end, lack of popularity should also be under-
stood as a good thing and as partly intended.
Few religious traditions have praised solitude more than the Hindu traditions
and the appreciation of solitude and the distaste for crowds are considered precon-
ditions for spiritual life. Removal of avidyā, ignorance, and the realization of truth
are attained alone. It is the sages living alone in caves in the Himalayas who have
been thought to realize the highest wisdom and to know the secrets of the mean-
ing of human existence. Sondra Hausner in her study on sādhus in contemporary
north India observes that caves “are famous symbols of sādhu sādhanā because
the isolation of a mountain retreat resonates with the image of anti-social soli-
tude” (Hausner 2007: 114). The cave “symbolizes social isolation, a place where
even a sedentary renouncer is laid bare to the elements of nature and is undis-
tracted by social interactions or concerns” (Hausner 2007: 114). However, she
noted that the cave belongs to the ideal and that in practice, sādhu life is extremely
social, and being a renunciant can be a very social role. But even though sādhus
mostly travel and remain in groups, “everyone knows that sādhus are supposed to
be alone – isolated while they practice their sādhanā – and ideally in a high moun-
tain cave, interacting with no one” (Hausner 2007: 190). In addition, she observed
that, “contemporary ashrams are usually not sites for individual contemplation,
but places of group life” (Hausner 2007: 116). Many monasteries are like large
households and contradict the idea of the renouncer as an isolated individual.
Kāpil Maṭh, however, does not fit at all this general description of contemporary
āśrams. Silence (mauna), tranquility (śānti), dispassion (vairāgya) and fondness
for solitude (ekāntaśīla) characterize the Sāṃkhyayoga practice of Kāpil Maṭh.
The focus is on the teachings of Sāṃkhyayoga, on the suffering of life, and on
the ideal of withdrawal from the external world and the world of the senses, and
directing the mind toward the inner being and to an understanding of the witness
consciousness ( puruṣa). As one lay disciple answered, when I remarked that he
visited Kāpil Maṭh often (every month), “Yes, that is because I want to know the
knower.”1 The focus is not only on the withdrawal of puruṣa from matter but also,
as was noted earlier, the ultimate isolation of the puruṣa from all other puruṣas.
Monastic life and recitation of stotras 157
Withdrawal is not only from society at large but also from other human beings,
because other humans are a main source of disturbance, according to the Kāpil
Maṭh tradition.
Kāpil Maṭh keeps alive the heritage of Hariharānanda Āraṇya and Dharma-
megha Āraṇya but the number of devotees is small and many are elderly. Several
of the disciples are relatives of persons who first took dīkṣā in Madhupur from
Hariharānanda Āraṇya or Dharmamegha Āraṇya. Being disciples of Kāpil Maṭh
became for them a family tradition. Many of the disciples are also related as many
members of some families took initiation (dīkṣā) and they have continued to visit
since childhood.
Hariharānanda Āraṇya and others belonging to Kāpil Maṭh, such as Ram
Shankar Bhattacharya, may have had hopes that the Yoga of Kapila would appeal
to a large part of humanity (see p. 36–37, 58), but since solitude and silence are
so highly valued in the tradition, having been able to remain small should prob-
ably also be seen as a sign of success. Solitude is the ideal, not merging with
others, and, as noted earlier, when meditating one should picture oneself totally
alone. Sāṃkhyayoga is in some ways an example of the institutionalization of the
human desire for solitude. The idea of union with all other souls, as promoted by
some schools of Hindu theology, is not attractive because it is hard to see from a
Sāṃkhyayoga perspective how not being isolated from other beings would bring
peace. Consistency between teachings and the style of living was a characteristic
of Hariharānanda Āraṇya. The teachings of Sāṃkhyayoga aim at stopping the
mind and dissolving it permanently into prakṛti in order to realize the aloneness
(kaivalya) of puruṣa. Only in this state of kaivalya, according to the doctrine of
Sāṃkhyayoga, is complete and eternal undisturbed peace attained.
But apart from valuing solitude and peace, what does it mean to perform
Sāṃkhyayoga as a layperson in the Kāpil Maṭh tradition? Hariharānanda Āraṇya
and Dharmamegha Āraṇya were Sāṃkhyayogin renunciants (saṃnyāsins), but
what kind of Sāṃkhyayoga do their followers, who are laypeople, practice? What
does it mean to perform Sāṃkhyayoga as a lay follower? The main answer is that
the practice of Sāṃkhyayoga as a layperson is first of all an intellectual pursuit of
trying to understand the teachings and texts of Sāṃkhyayoga and to apply them to
one’s own life. However, most of those associated with the Kāpil Maṭh tradition
agree that understanding Sāṃkhyayoga is very difficult. Sāṃkhyayoga is a phi-
losophy and a system of religious thought that is intellectually demanding and, for
Sāṃkhyayoga to have salvific results, no one can do the thinking for you. Bhāskara
Āraṇya emphasizes that one has to realize it “on one’s own accord; God does not
get it done” (B. Āraṇya 2007: i). According to Bhāskara Āraṇya, Sāṃkhya is the
theory and Yoga the practice: “in order to attain liberation one has to realize the
twenty-five principles or tattvas of Sāṃkhya through the practice of Yoga” (B.
Āraṇya 2007: i). Sāṃkhyayogins attempt to understand the Sāṃkhyayoga phi-
losophy, especially the theory of the tattvas, and attempt to realize them through
meditation. This is what Hariharānanda Āraṇya and Omprakāś Āraṇya aimed at
in their meditation instructions, as we saw in Chapter 7. For the followers of
Kāpil Maṭh, it may mean attempting to read the texts of Hariharānanda Āraṇya
and Dharmamegha Āraṇya and honoring the living guru (see Figure 8.1). When
I have asked Bhāskara Āraṇya about difficult issues in the teachings of Sāṃkhya
and Sāṃkhyayoga, he once answered that he was also trying to understand the
teachings of his gurus and recommended that instead of asking him I read the
books of Hariharānanda Āraṇya.
The disciples of Kāpil Maṭh generally do not claim to understand fully the
teachings of Sāṃkhyayoga. They comment that it is too difficult and that they will
need another rebirth in this world to understand Sāṃkhyayoga. Implied in such
statements is an admiration for Hariharānanda Āraṇya who was able to understand
the Sāṃkhyayoga philosophy and explain it not only in Bengali but also in San-
skrit.2 However, a few disciples do have intellectual interests in Sāṃkhyayoga and
have answered my question of what is Sāṃkhyayoga by elaborating on the nature
of puruṣa as the unchangeable contentless witness consciousness and prakṛti as
the continuous transformation of the three guṇas as witnessed by puruṣa – that
is, the nature of the seer (draṣṭṛ) and the seen (dṛśya) and the nature of the tat-
tvas. Bhāskara Āraṇya, one time I asked him what is Sāṃkhyayoga meditation,
explained that its aim is to focus on the asmitā, I-sense, but not the I-sense “I am
the body” or “I am a man” and so on, but on the pure I-sense, asmitāmātrā, “just
the I.”3 When I some years ago asked Ṛta Prakāś, who was a monk at Kāpil Maṭh
for around 15 years,4 what was Sāṃkhya meditation practice, he answered that
meditators go directly for the highest goal – that is, the realization of the puruṣa –
and not through a step-by-step analysis of the tattvas. His form of meditation, he
Figure 8.1 Bhāskara Āraṇya meeting devotees in the opening of the cave

explained, was concentration on the light inside the back of his head.5 This form
of meditation is not unique to Sāṃkhyayoga, and for Ṛta Prakāś, it might have
originated in a practice he started before he joined Kāpil Maṭh. However, con-
centration on luminosity is part of the Kāpil Maṭh meditation and Hariharānanda
recommended that a beginner could imagine the divine as a luminous figure
inside the heart (see p. 102). The luminous figure in the heart should be imagined
as calm and peaceful, similar to the liberated person. As was explained earlier,
when Dharmamegha Āraṇya initiated lay disciples he gave them a small picture
of Yogeśvara (īśvara of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra) and told the lay disciples to
look at it when they meditate, then close their eyes and imagine Yogeśvara inside.
Hariharānanda Āraṇya further recommended that when one’s own mind becomes
calm and able to rest in the feeling of godliness, then one should imagine a trans-
parent white limitless luminous sky within the heart. Next, knowing that god per-
vades that space, the devotee should know that his whole self is in god who is
present in his heart. Finally, the mind should be merged with the mind of Īśvara
residing in the void-like space within his heart. When this is practiced, it leads,
according to Āraṇya, to the realization of the self (H. Āraṇya 1981: 56). But for
many disciples Sāṃkhyayoga means especially honoring the Sāṃkhyayoga gurus
and the melodious recitation of Sāṃkhyayoga stotras.
As already mentioned, for those familiar with yoga as a modern phenomenon
and a global practice, yoga is often understood as āsana and prāṇāyāma and,
increasingly among the public, as some sort of Indian spiritual gymnastics with
emphasis on its health benefits. In modern yoga, doing āsanas is often presented
as concerned with the removal of stress, confusion, and the pressures of modern
life. Āsana in Sāṃkhyayoga, as explained earlier means simply sitting comfort-
ably with a straight back, and practicing āsana here means training the body to
be still just like an inanimate object, and prāṇāyāma means breathing regularly
in a controlled manner so that the limbs of the body do not distract the mind.
Āsana, comfortable sitting, is a prerequisite for dhyāna and samādhi. The body
should be still and feel emptied. The body is an inanimate object that appears
animate because of the puruṣa, the principle of consciousness inside it, according
to Sāṃkhyayoga. The emphasis on solitude and aloneness in the Sāṃkhyayoga
tradition of Kāpil Maṭh is also in the practice of āsana. In āsana, one should
imagine oneself completely alone. There is a striking contrast between this state-
ment and the many forms of yoga that promote yoga as a way to improve the
health. Modern yoga would, from a Sāṃkhyayoga point of view, probably be
interpreted as an expression of an obsession with the body that will ultimately
lead to great disappointment, since the body, regardless of how well it is taken
care of, and how flexible the limbs are made to become, will inevitably turn into a
corpse. One of the main doctrines of the Sāṃkhyayoga of Kāpil Maṭh is the state-
ment of the Yogasūtra 2.15 that, for the discriminating persons, all is suffering
(duḥkham eva sarvaṃ vivekinaḥ). Hariharānanda Āraṇya comments on Yogasūtra
2.15 that “Enlightened Yogins of pure character finding the cycle of rebirth to be
full of sorrow, try to bring about its cessation” (H. Āraṇya 1981: 147). Āraṇya
explains, “Cessation of misery and dissolution of the mind are the same thing . . .
we practice for liberation with the resolution ‘Let me be free from misery by sus-
pending the activities of the mind’ ” (H. Āraṇya 1981: 149). He argues that this
practice is rational and proves the existence of the puruṣa principle:
It is rational to think that “I shall be free from misery when the activities of
the mind are stopped,” i.e. there will then remain a pure “I” free from the
pangs of misery. The Self beyond the mind is the real nature of the agent. If
the existence of that agent is not admitted, then the question “for whose sake
is liberation being sought” cannot be answered.
(H. Āraṇya 1981: 149)
The avoidance of pain means the avoidance of the uniting of the subject and the
object (Yogasūtra 2.17). The goal of Sāṃkhyayoga is the avoidance of this union,
and when this union ends, the cycle of rebirth also ends. The Sāṃkhyayoga gurus
and saṃnyāsins have dedicated their life to the attainment of this goal. Laypeo-
ple on the other hand believe that their devotion to the Kāpil Maṭh tradition can
improve their understanding of Sāṃkhyayoga and bring them closer to the goal
but realize that it may take many life times to attain mokṣa or kaivalya. Laypeople
can improve their understanding, but only saṃnyāsins can attain the goal.
In the Sāṃkhyayoga of Kāpil Maṭh, the secondary and primary means to the
realization of puruṣa are distinguished. Primary means are stages in meditation
while secondary means are all that prepares one for meditation. Formulated in
terms of the eightfold yoga of the Yogasūtra, yama, niyama, āsana, prāṇāyāma,
and pratyāhāra are secondary means to bring about the tranquil state, while
dhāraṇā, dhyāna, and samādhi are primary means. For persons who are not
monks, yama and niyama, the code of conduct based on ahiṃsā and speaking the
truth, etc., is basic practice.
Most importantly, practicing Sāṃkhyayoga as a layperson in the Kapil Maṭh
tradition means to maintain a relationship with the living Sāṃkhyayoga tradition.
Maintaining this relationship means engaging in forms of Sāṃkhyayoga bhakti,
which includes paying homage to the guru as well as honoring the gurus who have
passed away by visiting their samādhisthānas.6 However, the most important type
of layperson Sāṃkhyayoga practice for maintaining a relationship with the living
Sāṃkhyayoga tradition is reciting stotras composed by Hariharānanda Āraṇya.
The recitation of these stotras was started by Hariharānanda Āraṇya, but Dhar-
mamegha Āraṇya apparently introduced the special way of reciting them. The
recitation is melodious but without musical instruments. The sound is monoto-
nous and is different from both Vedic recitation and bhajan and kīrtan singing,
which are the most widely practiced forms of Hindu devotional music in India.
The Kāpil Maṭh way of reciting these stotras seems unique to this tradition. It was
probably introduced both as a form of laypeople meditation and to create coher-
ence and a sense of community. Devotees are supposed to recite these hymns
daily in the morning and in the evening. The evening program is shorter. At home,
they supposedly recite the stotras alone. Since it is considered as a preparation
for meditation it is to be performed in solitude, and even wife and husband are
supposed to recite them separately. However, when at Kāpil Maṭh, they are sung
together in the Kāpil Mandir and it has become a communal activity and func-
tions as a confirmation of a common Sāṃkhyayoga identity. The singing of the
hymns takes place early in the morning, starting at seven o’clock and lasts for
around 35 to 40 minutes. In the evening, it starts after sunset so the timing var-
ies slightly according to the time of year. Most of the disciples know the songs
by heart as many have participated since childhood and the recitation of them is
part of their daily meditation practice, but some members bring their own copy of
the Stotrasaṃgraha (either in Bengali [H. Āraṇya n.d.] or Devanāgarī script [H.
Āraṇya 1997]), the texts of stotras published by the Maṭhs.7
Two themes dominate the Sāṃkhyayoga stotras of Kāpil Maṭh. First, the vener-
ation of īśvara, also called Yogeśvara, Mahāyogeśa, and Mahāyogeśvara, a divin-
ity praised in the Pātañjalaogaśāstra and in the Kāpil Maṭh tradition, and of the
masters of yoga such as Kapila, Āsuri, Pañcaśikha, Patañjali and the two deceased
gurus of Kāpil Maṭh. Second, the veneration of the teachings of Sāṃkhya, the
salvific goal of kaivalya, and the aspiration to attain this goal. The daily melodious
recitation of stotras, which praise divine beings and Sāṃkhya teachers, explain
the main concepts of Sāṃkhya, and express spiritual longing, is a contemplative
practice and also a form of Sāṃkhyayoga bhakti. The stotras also function to
communicate to the devotees the essentials of the Sāṃkhyayoga teachings. This
bhakti is not emotional or ecstatic, but puritanical and contemplative.
The recitation of stotras is both a solitary practice and a practice that brings
the community of Sāṃkhyayogins together in a communal ritual. At Kāpil Maṭh
and Kāpil Sāṃkhyayogāśram, they recite together in the Kāpil Mandir next to the
Kāpil guhā. The same hymns, 11 in number, are sung every morning. The daily
recitation of the stotras is in the following sequence:
1) Om Ādividuṣe Kapilāya Namaḥ;

2) Mahāyogeśayogeśastutiḥ;
3) Maheśvaranamaskāraḥ;
4) Īśvarapraṇidhānastotram;
5) Mumukṣācatuṣkam;
6a) Samādhiṣaṭkam;
7a) Ātmasvarūpamananam;
8a) Mānasapūjā;
9) Samāptipāṭhaḥ;
10) Ācāryavandanā;
11) Swāmījīvandanā.
During the extended ritual on the fifth day of all Bengali months, the
Sāṃkhyayogins chant all the stotras in the Stotrasaṃgraha. They then add 6b)
Mahāyogeśvarastotram; 7b) Tattvanididhyāsanagāthā; and 8b) Saṃvegagītiḥ.
On festival (utsava) days (annual days for Kapila, Hariharānanda Āraṇya, and
Dharmamegha Āraṇya), they also recite all stotras in the afternoon. On each
Monday, they also chant the Yogisaṃkaragītiḥ. The Yogisaṃkaragītiḥ is a stotra
that praises Śiva as the God of Yoga. Monday is associated with Śiva, which is
probably why it is recited on that day. However, there is no special worship of
Śiva in the Kāpil Mandir. Nevertheless, in the garden outside of Kāpil Mandir
between the mandir and the samādhisthānas is a small pile of stones, referred
to by Bhāskara Āraṇya as a mini-Kailās, on which there is also placed a small
liṅga. The hymn Yogisaṃkaragītiḥ is devoted to Śiva as the embodiment of the
divine ( parameśa) and as a yogi (śaṃkara dhṛtayogiśarīra). It was perhaps
composed in the early saṃnyāsa days of Hariharānanda Āraṇya when the con-
versation between Śiva and Pārvatī, the text “Śivoktayogayuktiḥ” (“Spoken by
Śiva engaged in yoga”) was also composed. One of the gods of Sāṃkhyayoga is
Hiraṇyagarbha, who is praised as the ātman of the three gods Brahmā, Viṣṇu, and
Śiva (brahmaviṣṇuśivātmane) in the mantra repeated twice a day by devotees of
Kāpil Maṭh.8
In the daily stotra program, the first four stotras are directed toward
Sāṃkhyayoga divinities and teachers, the next five stotras are devoted to the
desire to attain the salvific goal of Sāṃkhyayoga, and the final two are dedicated
to the deceased gurus of Kāpil Maṭh.
The pattern of singing and reciting ślokas composed by Hariharānanda Āraṇya
is common of all the festivals. Kāpil utsav is celebrated on December 21.9
Hariharānanda Āraṇya died on April 14, 1947, and every year on this day, the
lay devotees gather at the Maṭh to pay their respects to Hariharānanda Āraṇya
by singing and reciting stotras and reading from his books. Also, the day in 1926
on which Hariharānanda Āraṇya confined himself in the cave is commemorated
with songs, recitations, and readings. Dharmamegha Āraṇya died on October 19,
1985, and on this day, the devotees pay their respects to him by reciting stotras
and read from Dharmamegha’s writings. Finally, on the twenty-sixth day of the
month of Pauṣa ( January 11), the anniversary of Sādhu Mā’s death is observed by
the disciples of Kāpil Maṭh. Sādhu Mā was the sister of Hariharānanda Āraṇya
and mother of Dharmamegha Āraṇya.10 Also at this festival, the devotees sing and
recite stotras. Given its ritual importance, the Stotrasaṃgraha may be considered
the sacred scripture of the Sāṃkhyayoga tradition of Kāpil Maṭh. For most, the
Stotrasaṃgraha is an oral text, since they know it by heart.
Stotras praising divinities of Sāṃkhyayoga

The content of the stotras can mainly be divided in two, as was noted earlier,
the praising of īśvara and significant divinities and teachers, and the praising
of the teachings of Sāṃkhyayoga and expressions of the desire to attain its salv-
ific goal. The hymns of devotion to Īśvara are based on descriptions found in
Pātañjalayogaśāstra 1.23–1.29 and, according to Hariharānanda Āraṇya, these
conceptions of Īśvara were common to Yoga and Sāṃkhya. Several properties of
Īśvara are described in the stotras. Īśvara is devoid of ignorance, a sense of ego,
attachment, detachment, and desires. He is not an effect of anything, nor is he the
one who creates and maintains suffering and worldly pleasure. Īśvara is devoid
of defects. Among his noble qualities is his ability to be ever concentrated, ever
peaceful, to have knowledge of his own self, and to be established in himself. He
realizes himself within himself and his mind is controlled. He is the beginning-
less reality, the omnipresent essence of the world and the great god of Yoga, the
highest and the greatest of all. God is beyond delusion and is compassion personi-
fied. He is the sole shelter of gods and humans, and removes disease in the form
of birth and erases the experience of things different from the self. Īśvara is the
shelter of yogins to whom he grants peace of mind. Īśvara is not a savior because
unless one accomplishes the dissolution of the mind by oneself, it can never be
permanent. The purpose of this characterization of Īśvara is to assist the yogin in
the practice of īśvarapraṇidhāna. The stotras to Īśvara illustrate the particular
devotional sentiment of Sāṃkhyayoga.
In the following, I summarize the content of stotras but because of Stotras
aṃgraha’s ritual importance and position as sacred scripture, I in addition give the
Sanskrit text with translations of three of the stotras (Mahāyogeśayogeśastutiḥ,
Mumukṣācatuṣkam, and Ātmasvarūpamananam) as examples.
The first stotra recited after homage has been paid to Kapila and Hiraṇyagarbha
is the Mahāyogeśayogeśastutiḥ (“Praising the great god of Yoga and the teach-
ers of Yoga”). In this stotra, first Īśvara and then the guruparamparā (lineage of
gurus) of the Sāṃkhyayoga of Hariharānanda Āraṇya is paid homage to: Kapila,
Āsuri, Pañcaśikha, Buddha, Patañjali, and Vyāsa. Buddha is included because
he is seen as a follower of the teaching of Sāṃkhya. By reciting it, the disciples
connect themselves and their guru to a tradition that is several thousand years
old. The absence of any mention of Trilokī Āraṇya and his supposed lineage in
this and the other stotras is to be noted. This absence corroborates the argument
that the lineage of the single poem discussed in Chapter 5 was fictitious, and
that the Sāṃkhyayoga texts were the source of the tradition and teachings of
Kāpil Maṭh.
Mahāyogeśayogeśastutiḥ
1. Om, īśānaṃ tāpanāśaṃ niratiśayavibodhātmakopādhiyuktaṃ

nityaiśvaryasya citraṃ bhuvanamayam alaṃ yasya sambodhane na,
kaivalyasthānayuktaṃ guṇamalarahitaṃ taṃ kṛpākalpavṛkṣaṃ
śraddhāvīrya-prajāta-smṛti-muditahṛdo dhīmahi śreyase naḥ. Om.
For my own liberation,

with my heart happy because of the memory of god,
born of faith and great effort,
I meditate on the controller of the universe,
the destroyer of the threefold suffering,
who is said to consist of unsurpassed
consciousness,
whose repertoire of permanent divine powers
consists of the whole of creation,
cannot be sufficiently described,
who is ever liberated,
who is devoid of blemishes in the form of the guṇas,
and grants everything one desires
by grace.11
2. dharmo jñānaṃ vivekākhyam iha hi sahajaṃ yasya pūrvārjitatvād

vairāgyaṃ caihikānuśravikaviṣayakaṃ yadvaśīkārasaṃjñam,
kṛtvā dhyānena sākṣāt prakṛtipuruṣayor yo vivekaṃ susūkṣmam,
ādau cakre ca sṛṣṭiṃ sa jayatu kapilo hy ādividvān maharṣiḥ.
May that great sage

and the first knower Kapila
excel,
to whom merit and knowledge
called discriminative wisdom naturally belongs,
and even detachment
to objects here and hereafter called vaśikāra,
because it had already been acquired previously,
and who first of all
by means of meditation,
having realized the subtle discrimination between prakṛti and puruṣa,
instructed the world.
3. yenopadiṣṭaṃ prathamaṃ hi tantraṃ yaḥ prādurāsīj jagataṃ hitāya,

ya ādividvān aviluptadhīś ca namo ’stu tasmai kapilarṣaye me.
I pay homage to that seer Kapila,

who has taught the Sāṃkhya teachings,
who became manifest for the benefit of the whole world,
who was born with knowledge
and whose knowledge does not disappear.
4. ya ādivaktuḥ paramaṃ samāpa jñānaṃ prabhātiṃ ca śaśīva sūryāt,

tam āsuriṃ kāpilamaṇḍalasya guruṃ namāmi pravaraṃ budhānām.
I offer my homage to that teacher Āsuri,

who is the best of the gurus
belonging to the tradition of Kapila,
and who,
like the moon receiving light from the sun,
received the highest knowledge
from the first teacher.
5. sarvasaṃnyāsadharmāṇāṃ tattvajñānaviniścaye,
suparyavasitārthaś ca nirdvandvo naṣṭasaṃśayaḥ,
ityevaṃ bhāratācāryair nuto yo munipuṅgavaḥ,
sāṃkhyasūtrasya kartāraṃ tañ ca pañcaśikhaṃ numaḥ.
I pay homage also to Pañcaśikha

the author of the Sāṃkhyasūtra,
the best of the sages,
respected by the authors of the Mahābhārata
as one who attained his goal fully,
treated everyone the same,
who had his doubt destroyed
about acquiring the knowledge of reality
of all the duties of the saṃnyāsin.
6. vairāgyakāruṇyavivekabodhāḥ yasyehaloke ’pratimā vibhānti,

āpyāyate yasya vaco ’mṛtena viśvaṃ hariṃ taṃ sugataṃ namāmi.
I offer my homage to the Buddha

who is the remover of the suffering of the people,
whose detachment,
compassion,
and judicious knowledge
shines unparalleled in this world,
and by whose nectar-like speech
the universe is easily satisfied.
7. sahasraraśmer ghṛṇibhir yathāndhaṃ yadvākyabhābhir manasas

tathāndham, vilīyate taṃ tamasaḥ parasthaṃ patañjaliṃ prājñaguruṃ
namāmi.
I offer my homage to that learned teacher Patañjali

who is beyond darkness,
and by means of the light of whose speech
the ignorance of the mind
gets banished
in the same way as the darkness
gets banished
by the rays of the sun.
8. maitrī-dravāntaḥ karaṇāc charaṇyaṃ kṛpāpratiṣṭhākṛtasaumyamūrtim,

tathā praśāntaṃ muditāpratiṣṭhaṃ taṃ bhāṣyakṛdvyāsamuniṃ namāmi.
I offer my homage to the sage Vyāsa,

who has authored the commentary [on the Yogasūtra],
who grants shelter to suffering persons
because his mind has softened with friendship with all,
who has a pleasant physical form
because he is fully immersed in compassion,
and is completely peaceful
and fully immersed in happiness.
9. vibhānti vijñānavibhānuliptāḥ sūtraprabhāsvanmaṇayo nibaddhāḥ,

śrībhāṣyacāmīkarabhūṣaṇe hi vivekamauler avataṃsabhūtāḥ.
Shining jewels in the form of the Yogasūtra

fixed in the golden ornaments of the glorious commentary
and made bright with the light of the highest knowledge,
shine like the crown
on the head
of discriminative knowledge.
10. mahāyogeśayogeśastutimayān paṭhec chuciḥ,

ślokān āśramisevyān yo niṣṭhāṃ sa sāttvikīm iyāt.
A person
who after being purified
will recite the verses which are full of praise
for the greatest god of Yoga
and perfect yogins [such as Kapila]
and which are recited by persons
living in different stages of life,
will become established in sattva12
11. yasya deve parābhaktir yathā deve tathā gurau,

tasyaite kathitā hy arthāḥ prakāśante mahātmanaḥ.13
Only to those great persons who have the highest dedication

to the god
and similarly to his teacher
do the meanings of these things shine forth.
12. ajñānatimirāndhasya jñānāñjanaśalākayā,

cakṣur unmīlitaṃ yena tasmai śrīgurave namaḥ14 (H. Āraṇya 2007: 2–6).
Homage to that glorious teacher

by whom
the eye [of the disciple] which is blind due to an eye disease
in the form of ignorance,
has been opened
by the thin stick with medicine on the end
in the form of knowledge.
The second stotra, the Maheśvaranamaskāraḥ (Homage to the supreme deity)
is also addressed to īśvara and describes some of his qualities (for Sanskrit text
and Āraṇya’s English translation see H. Āraṇya 2007: 7–12; for another transla-
tion of the stotra see Jacobsen 2012b: 334–335). He is called supreme among the
īśvaras (īśvarāṇāṃ paramaṃ), which is according to the doctrine that there are
many divinities referred to as īśvara. He is also called the “highest divinity (deva)
among the divinities (devas), the supreme god of all the gods” (devatānāṃ para-
mañ ca daivatam, patiṃ patīnāṃ paramaṃ). In the homage to this Maheśvara,
yogic qualities are ascribed to him such as being free from attachment and aver-
sion, and being “always located in the lotus in the form of my heart” (sadā
vasantaṃ hṛdayāravinde).15 Both the words śiva and viṣṇu are used. The stotra
says “My homage to the omnipresent ruler” (vyāpine viṣṇave namaḥ) and “hom-
age to that god who is the shelter of yogins, and grants peace of mind and to
the god who grants auspiciousness” (vande yogijanāśrayañca śamadaṃ vande
śivaṃ śaṅkaram). Āraṇya might not have intended the words as names of gods.
Hariharānanda Āraṇya translated himself this this stotra to English, and in his
translation, he rendered the word viṣṇu as “ruler” and śiva śaṅkara as “almighty
power.”16 Nonetheless, in the mantra of the Kāpil Maṭh tradition it is stated that
Śiva and Viṣṇu, together with Brahmā, as manifestations of Hiraṇyagarbha,
are considered cosmological gods emerging as constituent parts of the cosmic
world as creation takes place. Āraṇya believed that what we experience as the
external world is the extension in gross matter of the mind of another person.
In the Sāṃkhyatattvāloka Āraṇya argues that this is the world created from the
antaḥkaraṇa of Virāṭ Puruṣa, probably another name for Hiraṇyagarbha. Jajne-
swar Ghosh, a disciple of Hariharānanda Āraṇya, summarizes Āraṇya’s view:
The being whose thoughts appear as objects to us is known as Virāṭ Puruṣa,

for he is incomparable greater than ourselves. It is his antaḥkaraṇa, or rather
his ego as going out of itself that composes our world.
(1977: xviii)
Īśvarapraṇidhāna is in the Pātañjalayogaśāstra considered a means to samādhi.

The third stotra, Īśvarapraṇidhānastotram (for a translation of the stotra see
Jacobsen 2012b: 330) is about this meditation on īśvara, the eternally liberated
puruṣa, and the goal of that meditation to become īśvara-like. Īśvara represents
the ideal to be realized in meditation. He is described as always concentrated,
peaceful, devoid of attachment, indifferent, and knowing his self. The stotra states
that one’s body and sense organs exist in īśvara and that īśvara is also seated in
one’s inner self.
The final stotra on īśvara is the Mahāyogeśvarastotram. In this stotra, several
doctrines about īśvara are stated. He is presented as a divine yogin with controlled
mind. The emphasis is on suffering, also worldly pleasure is just poison put into
honey, according to Āraṇya. The compassion of Īśvara means that he is not the
one who creates and maintains suffering. Āraṇya expresses that it is because of
karma that he is being tortured by worldly pleasures and suffering, and he prays
that he may attain peace by meditating on him. He criticizes those who think
of íśvara as father or mother since “no simile can illustrate the sense of highest
devotion that is suitable to the great god” (maheśvarārhaḥ parabhaktibhāvo ya
ātmanaḥ sā hyupamaiva nānyā). He also criticizes people who mistakenly super-
impose on īśvara the act of granting wishes, because īśvara is not performing any
acts. Instead, by meditating on him one can attain the ultimate goal. Verse eight
states that god can not cause salfivic liberation since the dissolution of the mind,
which is the cause of salfivic liberation has to be attained by oneself for giving
permanent results:
kiṃ kāmaye tvannanusampramokṣaṃ nirvartanīyaḥ kila cātmanāsau,

liṅgaṃ na me lāyayasi prabho tvaṃ nātmā ’kṛtaḥ śāśvatiko yataḥ syāt
(H. Āraṇya 2007: 30)
What should I expect of you?

Should I expect liberation from you?
No!
This is to be accomplished
only by oneself.
O God, why do you not cause my mind to be dissolved?
Because if the dissolution of the mind
is not done by myself,
it will not be permanent.
Verse 13 is a prayer for attaining salvific liberation by means of meditation:
praṇidhānāt samāpnomi kaivalyaṃ paramaṃ padam,

anavacchinnakālāt tvaṃ kadādhirājase yatah (H. Āraṇya 2007: 32).
When shall I attain

by means of meditation
the highest seat called kaivalya
where you have been shining
for unlimited time.
Īśvara represents the liberated state, and humans therefore desire to become like
īśvara.
Stotras praising the Sāṃkhyayoga teachings and

the goal of kaivalya
The second theme in the stotras is the longing for salvific liberation and the
realization of the Sāṃkhya tattvas and the yogic goal of samādhi. By reciting
these stotras twice daily, the disciples of the Kāpil Maṭh tradition keep a focus
on kaivalya as the real goal of life. An example of the praising of the teach-
ings of Sāṃkhyayoga is the hymn called “Collection of Four Verses Describ-
ing the Desire for Attaining Salvific Liberation (mokṣa)” (Mumukṣācatuṣkam).
Mumukṣācatuṣkam is illustrative of the way the stotras contrast the Sāṃkhyayoga
philosophy of life as suffering with the gradual gaining control of the mind. The
Mumukṣācatuṣkam is a prayer to attain freedom from confusion, attachment,
and anger; to have the sense capacities withdrawn from external objects; and to
become patient and peaceful. Finally, ignorance is destroyed by knowledge.
Mumukṣācatuṣkam
1. Om, kadā bhaviṣyāmi viśuddhasattvo vitarkaśūnyo gatarāgamanyuḥ,
Mānuṣyadivyair vasubhiś ca yo ’rthas tenāpi hīnaḥ sumanā bhavāmi.
Om.
When shall I get my mind completely purified?
When shall I be free from confusion?
When shall I be free from attachment and anger?
When shall I be free even from that purpose which is served by human and
divine birth and by wealth,
so that I can get my mind completely pacified?
2. saṃgṛhya ceto viṣaye nipāti sadaikatānasmṛtisādhanena,

svāntaṃ prasannañca sadekṣamāṇaḥ kadā sudhīraḥ sumanā bhavāmi.
Oh god.
When shall I be full of patience
with the mind completely peaceful
by having withdrawn my mind
which naturally runs towards worldly objects
by means of remembering you
always, without diversions
and realize my mind is completely happy?
3. arthānnivṛtte karaṇe samaste ānandabhāvaḥ paramo vibhāti,

tatrāvadhānena sukhī kadāham aduḥkhaśokaḥ sumanā bhavāmi.
When shall I be happy

by means of concentration,
because the highest bliss shines when all the sense organs
have been withdrawn from external objects,
and thus shall with a completely peaceful mind,
be totally free from suffering and greed?
4. vivekadṛṣṭyā nihate vimohe nihatya rāgañca samūlaghātam,
nirudhya cittaṃ hyajaniṣyamāṇaṃ tritāpaśūnyaḥ puruṣo bhāvami (H.
Āraṇya 2007: 16–18).
After ignorance is destroyed by discriminative wisdom,

and thereafter having destroyed attachment
including its root cause
and having controlled my mind,
not transforming any more into the form of any worldly objects,
I shall be a person devoid of the threefold suffering.
Samādhiṣaṭkam is a description of the person who practices samādhi (for transla-

tion see Jacobsen 2012b: 335–336). The main means to samādhi is control of the
sense organs to such a degree that worldly objects are not experienced with the
sense organs and to view one’s own mind as an object. Only a saṃnyāsin seems to
be able to attain samādhi, according to this stotra, because, says verse two, only a
saṃnyāsin has given up completely any hope of worldly success:
yena tyaktā na lābhāśā samyagekāntatastathā,

divā vā na sa rātrau vā samādhim adhigacchati (H. Āraṇya 2007: 19)
Such a person
who has not given up hope
of worldly success
properly and completely,
cannot attain samādhi,
whether in the day or by night.
Verse four states that knowledge, silence, and viewing one’s own mind as an
object are the main means to samādhi:
unmūlanaṃ vitarkāṇāṃ vācaḥ sthair yasya bhāvanam,

sadekṣaṇaṃ svacittasya samādher mukhyasādhanam (H. Āraṇya 2007: 20).
The main means to samādhi

is the eradication of all confusion,
stilling the speech organ,
and always viewing one’s own mind
as an object.
The Ātmasvarūpamananam (conception of the self) explains what the self is and
how to realize it. It first explains what the self is not: it is not manas, ahaṃkāra,
and buddhi, which are just internal organs (manobuddyaṃkārabuddhicittāni); it is
not the sense capacities, not the gross elements, and not the five sheaths (kośas).
The self is the highest bliss, witness of all, and the nature of only consciousness
( parānandasakṣī citimātrarūpa). In the self there are no differences between
human beings and gods, or between castes, neither hatred nor attachment. The
first two verses read:
1. om manobuddhyahaṃkāracittāni nātmā na ca śrotranetre rasanādi no

saḥ, pṛthivyādibhūtāni na pañcakoṣāḥ parānandasākṣī citimātrarūpaḥ.
The self is neither will (citta),

nor the mind (manas),
nor the intellect (buddhi)
nor egoity (ahaṃkāra).17
It is neither hearing, nor eye, nor the organ of taste or other sense organs,
neither the five elements,
nor the five sheaths (kośas),
but the self is the highest bliss,
a witness to all
and consciousness only.
2. narāmarādir na ca tatra bhedo na brahmarājanyaviśādayo ’pi,

na dveṣarāgau na ca śokamohau ānandasākṣī citimātrarūpaḥ (H. Āraṇya
2007: 22–23)
In the self, there is no difference between humans and gods,

no difference of the castes
like brāhmaṇa, kṣatriya, and vaiśya,
neither hatred nor attachment,
nor even grief and delusion,
but it is bliss,
witness to all
and consciousness only.
The self is not happiness, but the knower of happiness. It is the absolute knower.
The knowables are the objects of the self. By stopping (nirodha) the I-sense that
I am the body, etc., and developing the pure I-sense that I am consciousness then
the blissful experience of being the nature of only consciousness is revealed to the
person, the Ātmasvarūpamananam proclaims.
Several other stotras express the teachings of salvific liberation. Desire
for mokṣa is the theme of the Saṃvegagītiḥ. One should first give up the
desire for worldly objects, withdraw the mind from the objects, remember
the chain of birth and death, and think about hell. Second, one should remove
the deep-seated root of the ego, which is extremely unsteady and drawn
toward objects, and meditate on the self. Furthermore, one should observe
the yamas and niyamas and focus the mind on the desired object. Overcom-
ing attachment to sense objects offers release from finding oneself in Hell,
and one should then practice samādhi, which is instrumental in dissolving
the disease of saṃsāra. In Saṃvegagītiḥ, the main themes are the fear of end-
ing up in Hell (nirayanipāta, gatiniraya) and how Sāṃkhyayoga and over-
coming the attachment to objects provides protection from suffering. The
term saṃvega refers to becoming aware of the painfulness of saṃsāra and is
used in Yogasūtra 1.21.18 It may also here refer to disgust for saṃsāra, but
is usually taken to refer to the intensity of practice. Vācaspatimiśra in the
Tattvavaiśāradī glosses saṃvega with vairāgya ( passionlessness) (see Śāstrī
1989: 61; Woods 1988: 47).
The Tattvanididhyāsanagāthā praises the teachings of Sāṃkhyayoga and
describes a meditation starting with the material objects and the five gross ele-
ments, and ending with the realization of pure consciousness. First, the person
goes beyond the delusion of sense objects and the external world appears instead
as the five gross elements. Then through detachment the rope of the three guṇas
of happiness (sattva), sorrow (rajas), and delusion (tamas) is cut and appears
undifferentiated. Diversities disappear and the tanmātras are realized. Next, sense
capacities are eliminated. They are said to be like holes in the ego through which
dreadful snakes come and go. The person is bound by a rope in a form of the ego
to the pole in the form of the sense organs and, as a result, the person is affected by
external objects, which causes suffering. The sound OM is stated to be the sym-
bolic name of all the 25 tattvas thus creating correlations between ritual sounds
and philosophical concepts.
The stotra Mānasapūjā, “Mental worship,” is also among those recited every
day. It is a prayer to the highest god ( pareśvara) in which the devotee places him-
self as the offering. In this hymn, the term sadāśiva is used in verse ten:
deho devālayaḥ prokta ātmā devaḥ sadāśivaḥ,

tyajed ajñānanirmālyaṃ so’haṃbhāvena pūjayet
The body is called the temple of god, my ātman is the divine Sadaśiva, and
therefore one should offer one’s worship to him with the notion of “I am that,”
and should give up the flowers offered yesterday in a form of ignorance.
(H. Āraṇya 2007: 41)
The recitation closes with a Samāptipāṭha (“concluding recital”), Ācārya vandanā

(“homage to Hariharānanda Āraṇya”), and Svāmijī vandanā (“homage to Dharma-
megha Āraṇya”). Samāptipāṭha contrasts the suffering and darkness of saṃsāra
caused by ignorance with the light of the lamp in the form of yoga (yogadīpasya
dīptir) that offers liberation from darkness. The light of the lamp of yoga is able to
remove the darkness, and the devotee prays not to be tricked again by the “mirage
of worldly objects” (viṣayamṛgatṛṣṇā) now that he has found a way out of the
darkness – i.e., to remain dedicated to the discipline of Sāṃkhyayoga.
Hariharānanda Āraṇya is paid homage to for his great knowledge, for exemplify-
ing the gaining of liberation according to Sāṃkhyayoga (vimuktidasāṃkhyayoga),
for showing the path leading to mokṣa by neglecting his body, and for being a
shelter for those who come to him for refuge. Dharmamegha Āraṇya is praised for
his discriminative wisdom and purity of mind.
Sanskrit stotras and the formation of identities

The texts of Hariharānanda and Dharmamegha Āraṇya can be considered the
scripture of the Kāpil Maṭh tradition, and especially the Kāpilāśramiya Pātanjal
Jogdarśan, but the Stotrasaṃgraha has a unique position. The Stotrasaṃgraha
constitutes the most important ritual texts of the Kāpil Maṭh tradition, a large part
of it is repeated twice daily, and it is the only text that the whole community of
followers of Sāṃkhyayoga recites together. Stotra is an important genre in the
Hindu traditions and the recitation of stotras is omnipresent in religious life. Sto-
tras have “a continuous history from the Vedas to modern times” (Raghavan 1969:
ix) and are said to be “the most prolific and popular among the branches of San-
skrit Literature” (Raghavan 1969: x). Jan Gonda notes that stotras are present in
Indian traditions in all languages, classical and modern, and in Hindu, Jain, and
Buddhist traditions (Gonda 1977). In spite of the magnitude of the genre, stotras
have attracted the interest of very few scholars. With respect to research, as well
as Sanskrit poetic theorists, the stotra genre supposedly “is virtually uncharted”
(Bronner 2007: 114). Yigal Bronner defines stotras as “relatively short works in
verse, whose stanzas directly and repeatedly address a divinity in the vocative
case” (Bronner 2007: 114). Bronner remarks that stotras “are typically viewed as
a form of direct communication between devotee and God.” (Bronner 2007: 115,
128).19 On the use of stotras, Jan Gonda noted, “They can serve contemplative
purposes, are chanted either individually or in unison, and are read by priests in
places of worship or by those who circumambulate a shrine” (Gonda 1977: 233).
Gonda also notes that stotras could have been a “powerful means for propagating
religious ideas” (Gonda 1977: 235) while Bronner formulates this as having “mar-
keting advantages” (Bronner 2007: 129). Stotras may have played a role in the
formation of identities and Bronner concludes that, “speakers in stotras address
not just god but also appeal to, instruct, and construct communities of devotees”
(Bronner 2007: 115, 128). Much of this is confirmed in this study of the Kāpil
Maṭh tradition, especially the construction of communities of devotees although
perhaps the “marketing advantages” need to be downplayed. Stotras in the Kāpil
Maṭh tradition serve several purposes. They may elaborate on the objects of medi-
tation as well as on the salvific goals and are useful for contemplative meditation;
they instruct in the teachings; and they contribute to constructing the community
of devotees. The daily repetition may be understood as a ritual that confirms iden-
tity and purpose. Some of the stotras do focus on divine beings, but less in the
form of direct communication and instead as a focus of meditation. They pay hom-
age to the teachers and divinities of Sāṃkhyayoga, who exemplify the ultimate
goal. Stotra recitation becomes a form of meditation, a statement of one’s goals.
The Sāṃkhya philosophical texts are considered by the followers of Kāpil
Maṭh to be too difficult for laypeople to understand but the stotras give laypeople
a feeling of being in contact with the Sanskrit Sāṃkhyayoga texts. The stotra
recitation is a ritual performed by all and in this way, the ritual recitation of stotras
helps to construct a community. The daily repetition gives the notion of a stable
community of followers. The stotras are the words of the founding guru and the
recitation also confirms the devotees’ connection to the guru and to a lineage of
gurus.
The practice of a melodious recitation of Sanskrit Sāṃkhyayoga stotras is
unique to the Kāpil Maṭh tradition. Hariharānanda Āraṇya saw bhakti as an inte-
gral part of Sāṃkhyayoga. He viewed devotion, yoga, and knowledge as com-
prising a unity: “In this terrible stormy ocean of the mortal life there is a boat of
worship of which yoga is the hull, the devotion is the power to drive, and knowl-
edge is the compass,” he wrote (Hariharānanda Āraṇya quoted in B. Āraṇya 2007:
ii). Without these three, the seeker cannot cross the ocean, and Āraṇya added,
“Emotion in the form of devotion, control in the form of yoga, and light in the
form of knowledge, all these three are found to coexist in the seeker traveling to
the blissful state of everlasting peace” (Hariharānanda Āraṇya quoted in Bhāskara
Āraṇya 2007: ii). Āraṇya thus assigned emotion and devotion an important place
in the practice of Sāṃkhyayoga.
All conversations in Kāpil Maṭh between guru and disciples take place in the
Bengali language but the daily practice of recitation of stotras is in the Sanskrit
language. Stotras are, writes Hamsa Stainton, “one of the most prominent ways
through which Sanskrit enters the religious life of modern Hindus” (Stainton
2010: 193). The stotras confirm the importance of the Sanskrit language in the
Kāpil Maṭh tradition and also give the disciples the experience of accessing San-
skrit, which is the original language of the old Sāṃkhya and Yoga textual tradi-
tion. These texts were the basis of Hariharānanda Āraṇya’s teachings, and the
Sanskrit stotras thus build a bridge toward the ancient past. The stotras give the
devotees the experience of mastering Sanskrit texts. As a ritual, the recitation of
the stotras re-actualizes Hariharānanda Āraṇya’s words and teachings, and con-
firms an emotional bond to Sāṃkhyayoga, its teachings, its sacred persons, and
its divinities.
Since Hariharānanda Āraṇya started up a new a tradition of Sāṃkhyayoga, he
did not inherit any Sāṃkhyayoga practice from a living tradition. He certainly
learned from other saṃnyāsins, but for the Sāṃkhyayoga philosophy of medita-
tion of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra he seems to have depended on texts. One dif-
ficulty with the Pātañjalayogaśāstra is that it is a philosophical and theoretical
text, it does not instruct in the details of performing yoga, but mainly in the inter-
pretations of the doctrines of yoga philosophy. The Pātañjalayogaśāstra mentions
many practices, but it does not instruct in detail how to go about doing yoga.
A challenge for the institution was therefore to introduce a practice for laypeople.
Hariharānanda Āraṇya thus introduced a method of bhakti in the form of recita-
tion of Sanskrit Sāṃkhyayoga stotras. A form of Sāṃkhyayoga’s restrained devo-
tional practice of melodious stotra recitation is, in other words, the main yoga
activity of laypeople of the Kāpil Maṭh tradition. The dominant lay practice in
modern yoga, in contrast, is āsanas. But having an inclination for Sāṃkhyayoga
proves that one already has mastered āsanas in a previous life.20
In the next chapter, I will present an aspect of the material religion of living
Sāṃkhyayoga. As mentioned earlier, being a Sāṃkhyayogin in the Kāpil Maṭh
tradition means trying to understand the teachings of Sāṃkhyayoga. However,
the teachings are to a large degree available in texts, which are considered very
difficult, and too complex for most laypeople to fully understand. Consequently,
in the monasteries of the Kāpil Maṭh tradition, art, symbols, and inscriptions func-
tion to convey the doctrines of Sāṃkhyayoga.
Notes
1 Communication with a disciple of Kāpil Maṭh, Madhupur, March 2017.
2 See also Chapter 9 on the material religion of Sāṃkhyayoga.
3 Bhāskara Āraṇya, personal communication, March 2017.
4 He left Kāpil Maṭh in around 2010 after a disagreement.
5 Conversation with Ṛta Prakāś, Madhupur.
6 A disciple of Kāpil Maṭh, Adinath Chatterjee, writing about his guru Dharmamegha
Āraṇya, commented on his relation to the guru that even “a single audience with
Swāmījī helped recharge my internal battery” (Chatterjee 2003: 157). The idea of
recharging a battery illustrates an important aspect of the interdependency in the guru-
disciple relationship.
7 A few of the stotras of the Stotrasaṃgraha (Maheśvaranamaskāraḥ, Īśvarapraṇidh
ānastotram, Mumukṣācatuṣkam, Samādhiṣaṭakam, and Ātmasvarūpamananam) were
translated into English by Hariharānanda Āraṇya, according to Ṛtaprakāś Āraṇya,
“possibly at the specific request of someone who did not know Sanskrit or Bengali” (in
H. Āraṇya 2007: 7).
8 It is not unusual that new lay devotees of Kāpil Maṭh continue their practice of wor-
ship of Śiva or other gods and goddesses in their homes. According to Sāṃkhyayoga,
these gods and goddesses are powerful, but they are also made up of a prakṛti part and
a puruṣa part.
9 This festival was apparently originally celebrated on makara saṃkrānti on January 14,
at the same time as the festival on the Ganga Sagar Island, but was moved to Decem-
ber 21 of convenience for the festival at the Maṭh to coincide with the Christmas vaca-
tion of the devotees.
10 Her house in Madhupur has been preserved and is used by the Maṭh to offer medi-
cal consultancy services (homeopathic, previously also allopathic) a few days every
month. The medical services are performed by volunteer medical professionals who
have come from Durgapur or Kolkata for the purpose.
11 All the translations of stotras in this chapter are by the author.
12 That is, a state in which sattva dominates rajas and tamas.
13 This verse is from Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad 6.23. In the Stotrasaṃgraha the verse is
marked as śruti, but the source is not identified.
14 This verse is from Gurustotra verse 2. In the Stotrasaṃgraha the verse is marked as
smṛti, but the source is not identified.
15 Hṛdayāravinda can also mean the lotus in the heart or the innermost place of the heart.
16 See Āraṇya’s translation of this stotra into English (H. Āraṇya 2007: 8–11).
17 Hariharānanda Āraṇya seems to have used citta here in the meaning of will. His own
English translation of the first pāda is “Ātmā is neither the will, nor intelligence, nor
ahaṃkāra, nor mind” (H. Āraṇya 2007: 22). Another possible translation is “The self
is neither the mind (manas), nor the intellect (buddhi), nor egoity (ahaṃkāra), which
all are internal organs.”
18 For the concept of saṃvega in Buddhism and Yoga, see Acri 2015. Acri suggests that
the use of saṃvega in Pātañjalayogaśāstra indicates an influence from Buddhism. In
Buddhist sources saṃvega refers to a fear that leads to awareness of “the inherent rot-
tenness of the world and so to the adoption of the religious life” (Johnston 1935–36: 32
n4, quoted in Acri 2015: 203).
19 In the article Bronner shows that his suggested definition is too narrow and that at least
some stotras “seem consciously to address a wider audience and serve purposes other
than those sought in a direct communication with the divine” (Bronner 2007: 115).
20 From this point of view, one would expect a much greater interest in Sāṃkhyayoga
meditation in some decades when all those devotees of modern yoga who have devoted
their life to āsana practice will pass away and get reborn.
9 The material religion
of Sāṃkhyayoga
Art and calligraphic decorations (visual art related to writing) are an impor-
tant part of the material religion of Kāpil Maṭh in Madhupur and the Kāpil
Sāṃkhyayogāśram in Sarnath. Their purpose is to beautify the āśrams, to display
and remind the disciples of the Sāṃkhyayoga doctrines and the Sāṃkhyayoga
view of life, and to maintain and develop the Sāṃkhyayoga identity. Art and cal-
ligraphic decorations, together with the layout of the buildings, transform the
monasteries into material manifestations of the Sāṃkhyayoga understanding of
the world.
The current guru of Kāpil Maṭh, Bhāskara Āraṇya, has in the last decades
systematically developed the aesthetic and material dimension of the Maṭh. The
Kāpil Sāṃkhyayogāśram in Sarnath, although of a more recent origin, has had a
similar development and been ornamented with the symbols, concepts, and slo-
gans of Sāṃkhyayoga. The main objects displayed in the visual materials are
Kapila and the gurus of Sāṃkhyayoga, symbols of the inevitability of death and
statements about the unavoidable decay of the body, the ultimate separateness of
the self from this body, and statements and symbols of the Sāṃkhyayoga teach-
ings and doctrines. The decorations reiterate that the self should be understood as
the puruṣa, as pure witness (sakṣin), and as the seer (draṣṭṛ) and as pure “I” sense
(asmitāmātrā).
Kapila is the first knower (ādividvān) and guru of Kāpil Maṭh. According to
Kāpil Maṭh’s teachings, Kapila was the first in this period of creation who real-
ized the goal of Sāṃkhyayoga. In the visual presentations of the gurus in the Kāpil
Mandir in Kāpil Maṭh in Madhupur, paintings or posters of Kapila and the two
deceased gurus are foremost. The pictures of Kapila are placed above the pictures
of Hariharānanda and Dharmamegha Āraṇya to illustrate that Kapila is the first
guru and that the teachings of Hariharānanda and Dharmamegha Āraṇya are based
on the teachings of Kapila. Paintings and posters of these three gurus decorate the
wall above the opening window of the Kāpil cave at which the guru of Kāpil Maṭh
appears when he meets the devotees. These three former gurus and the living guru
represent the guruparamparā (guru lineage) of the Sāṃkhyayoga of Kāpil Maṭh:
Kapila, Hariharānanda Āraṇya, Dharmamegha Āraṇya, and Bhāskara Āraṇya.
The drawing depicts Kapila with long black hair and beard, seated in padmāsana
178 The material religion of Sāṃkhyayoga
in solitude under a tree. Kapila is surrounded by wilderness, with a few animals,
and he sits on the skin of an animal, which is usually interpreted to mean that
he has conquered his animal nature. That he sits alone is important as he does
not represent a guru with a community but is a solitary figure. Kapila is not sur-
rounded by disciples but is meditating in absolute solitude. The deer and the tiger
beside him demonstrate that his peaceful mind creates a peaceful natural environ-
ment in which innate enemies, such as the tiger and the deer, become friends.1 In
the garden of Kāpil Maṭh, there is a large statue of Kapila. It depicts him sitting
in samādhi surrounded by animals to illustrate his peacefulness and his perfection
in non-violence (ahiṃsā), similar to how he is portrayed in the drawings. The
statue of Kapila also points to the peace of samādhi, the goal of Sāṃkhyayoga.
According to the Kāpil Maṭh tradition, Kapila realized the truth of Sāṃkhya in
samādhi; he was thus not only a Sāṃkhyan but also a Sāṃkhyayogin. He believed
that the 25 tattvas can be realized only by yoga. A drawing of Kapila painted on
the outside wall of the Kapila temple at Kāpil Maṭh portrays him not in solitude,
but together with another person. Here he is displayed as a teacher of his disciple
Āsuri. The painting shows the discourse (saṃvāda) between the sage Kapila and
his student Āsuri. According to the Sāṃkhya philosophical tradition, Kapila gave
his teaching to Āsuri and this marked the beginning of the Sāṃkhya paramparā, the
lineage of Sāṃkhya teachers. As already noted earlier, the text Kapilāsurisaṃvāda
found in some Southern manuscripts of the Mahābhārata is an attempt to imag-
ine what this saṃvāda would have been like.2 In Pātañjalayogaśāstra 1.25 it is
explained that Kapila assumed a created mind (nirmāṇacitta) for this purpose.
The Kāpil Maṭh recognizes a nirguṇa god, the formless god of yoga, īśvara
or yogeśvara, who is associated with meditation and the model of the liberated
puruṣa. He is worshipped primarily by the recitation of stotras and in medita-
tion. This god is described in Pātañjalayogaśāstra as puruṣaviśeṣa, a particular
puruṣa that has never been bound to reincarnation. Pātañjalayogaśāstra recom-
mends meditating on the similarity of the puruṣa with this divinity. Since he is
nirguṇa, formless, he is mainly absent in the material religion. However, drawings
in Kāpil Maṭh and Kāpil Sāṃkhyayogāśram of a divine yogi point to this īśvara
of Yoga. In the Kāpil Mandir in the Kāpil Sāṃkhyayogāśram in Sarnath īśvara is
among the five sacred figures honored. Drawings of Yogeśvara (īśvara) are placed
next to the deceased gurus of the Kāpil Maṭh tradition (Hariharānanda and Dhar-
mamegha) and above the deceased guru of Kāpil Sāṃkhyayogāśram (Omprakāś
Āraṇya), and underneath the photo of Omprakāś Āraṇya is Kapila (see Chapter 6,
Figure 6.1). In the Kāpil Āśram in Kurseong south of Darjeeling in north Bengal
a drawing of īśvara is placed between the symbol Om and the drawing of Kapila
(see Figure. 9.1).
In the Kāpil Maṭh and Kāpil Sāṃkhyayogāśram, there is no regular pūjā to stat-
ues of gods, since the main activity is the recitation of stotras and the interaction
with the guru. There is no Brāhmaṇ priest associated with any of the institutions
of the Kāpil Maṭh tradition. A small figurine of Hiraṇyagarbha is found next to
the figurine of Kapila in a little shrine in a room adjacent to the Kāpil Mandir in
The material religion of Sāṃkhyayoga 179
Figure 9.1 Shrine at Kāpil Āśram in Kurseong. On the top is the symbol Om, next is a
drawing of Īśvara and below a drawing of Kapila. Underneath are photos of
Hariharānanda Āraṇya and Dharmamegha Āraṇya and their samādhisthānas.
Below on the right side is Bhāskara Āraṇya and on the left Śaṅkarācārya
Madhupur. In this room are the two representations of Kapila and Hiraṇyagarbha,
but they are not objects of daily worship by the disciples of the Maṭh.
As expected, there is no visual presence of Trilokī Āraṇya in any of the institu-
tions of the Kāpil Maṭh tradition. This guru and the other persons who were men-
tioned in the poem written by Hariharānanda Āraṇya as delineating a Sāṃkhyayoga
lineage, probably fictional, which was analyzed in Chapter 5, are completely
absent in the material religion of the institutions of the Kāpil Maṭh tradition. It is
perhaps more noteworthy that there is also no drawing or statue of Patañjali, the
author of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra. He is also completely absent in the material
religion. This shows that he was not considered the most important figure of Yoga
when the teachings of the Kāpil Maṭh tradition were developed. Like the authors
of the sūtras of the other darśanas ( philosophical systems), Patañjali was mostly
a name. Among the founders, Kapila was an exception, because he was also a
mythological figure associated with divinity and narratives. There are hardly any
narratives associated with Patañjali the author of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra. Also,
in the Kāpil Maṭh tradition, Patañjali was not considered a founding figure. For
Kāpil Maṭh, Hiraṇyagarbha is regarded as a founding figure of yoga and is also
sometimes identified with Kapila.
An important feature of the material religion of Kāpil Maṭh is the artificial cave
in which the guru lives. From the outside, the cave looks like an ordinary building
(see Chapter 3, Figure 3.3). The reason it is called a cave is that it was built for the
purpose of solitude and isolation, for the guru to be able to live in isolation away
from other people similar to the cave dwelling yogis in the Himalayas. The goal
was to be able to live in solitude free from disturbances. This was achieved by
closing the entrance of the building permanently. Solitude is both the means and
the goal of Sāṃkhyayoga. The Kāpil cave symbolizes this. The goal of Sāṃkhya,
isolation of the self, the puruṣa, from materiality, prakṛti, and its products, is
mirrored in the isolation of the guru in the cave. The external cave of stone is
like the body, and the guru living in the cave represents the self ( puruṣa). The
guru is a model of what everyone ideally should do, but the followers of Kāpil
Maṭh are aware that only very few are able to lock themselves in a cave as the
gurus of Kāpil Maṭh have done. The guru’s presence and his willingness to make
the sacrifice of living in the cave help to confirm the truth of the teachings of
Sāṃkhyayoga as a worthy pursuit. The guru in the cave functions as a statement
of faith in the doctrine, a method to realize the isolation of the self, and a symbol
of the teachings as well. One reason for Āraṇya’s isolation in the cave was per-
haps to confirm a connection with the Sāṃkhyayoga teachings of the past and the
orthodoxy of his Sāṃkhyayoga.
A large model of the Ṛddhi Mandir, the imaginary temple of Sāṃkhyayoga
meditation, which was described in Hariharānanda Āraṇya’s fictional autobiogra-
phy, has been built outside the Kāpil cave (see Chapter 3, Figure 3.3). It indicates
perhaps that the cave is to be thought of as in some sense a Ṛddhi Mandir since
the person inside aspire to attain kaivalya, as described in A Unique Travelogue
and in the Sāṃkhyayoga teachings.
In the garden of Kāpil Maṭh behind the Kāpil Mandir and Kāpil cave are the
samādhisthānas of Hariharānanda Āraṇya (see Figure 9.2) and Dharmamegha
Āraṇya. Devotees pay homage to the gurus at their samādhisthānas in the morn-
ing before the stotra recitation. They light incense and stay for a few moments for
short meditations. On the samādhi days of the gurus, there are gatherings around
the samādhisthānas with recitations of stotras.
In the garden of Kāpil Maṭh, next to the samādhisthānas, is a statue of an
orange human figure sitting in meditation (see Figure 9.3). The text written in
Bengali on the front of the figure is about death, which is probably why the figure
is placed next to the samādhisthānas. The text states,
The beautiful body I have is not my ‘Self’. It is full of worms, germs and
other dirty materials and it decays. The ultimate destination of my body is
a burning ghāṭ or a graveyard where it decomposes. My true Self does not
perish. One can realize it in one’s heart and by one’s heart. My real identity
is my Self or pure I-sense.3
Death is the destiny of all, but one’s real self does not die. So the statue is also
meant to comfort people in their dealings with mortality.
Figure 9.2 Samādhisthāna of Hariharānanda Āraṇya

The human skull is an important symbol used in traditions of asceticism in

India, and also in the tradition of Kāpil Maṭh. The skull presents an important
message: that one should reflect on suffering and death as an inevitable fact of life
and prepare oneself for what is ahead by focusing on the unchangeable self that
does not die. On the inside wall of the Kāpil mandirs, both at Kāpil Maṭh in Mad-
hupur and in the Kāpil Sāṃkhyayogāśram in Sarnath, there is a human skull (see
Figure 9.4). Written on a plaque below the skull is a Sanskrit śloka. In Madhupur,
there is also a Bengali and Hindi translation underneath. The śloka reads,
Āsam sukomala suvarṇarucā tvacāhaṃ,

Prāgāvṛto vyavasitaṃ na kim etad artham.
Dṛṣṭvā ’dhunā pariṇatiṃ mama ghorarūpāṃ,
Bhrātavicintaya sanātana-vastutattvam.
I was once covered with a lovely skin and what have I not done to preserve
it! Look at this hard reality and concentrate instead on the eternal realities.
The message of the skull is common to many ascetical movements in South Asia.
In the Sāṃkhyayoga interpretation it means that human beings, and all other liv-
ing beings, are constituted by two fundamental principles: the puruṣa principle
which is pure contentless witness consciousness, eternal and unchanging, and the
Figure 9.3 Orange figure with a text written in Bengali on the front about the inevitability
of death and the immortality of the self
Figure 9.4 The skull with a message about suffering and death and the unchangeable self
that does not die
prakṛti principle which is the material principle consisting of the constantly chang-
ing three guṇas (sattva, rajas, and tamas) that constitute the objects of puruṣa.
The skull points to the teachings of Sāṃkhyayoga that the true identity of human
beings is puruṣa, which is different from the mind and body. The mind and body
are connected to suffering and death but puruṣa is not, since it is different and sep-
arate. Every person has an immortal principle that does not die when the body dies.
The mind and body will die, but the puruṣa is eternal, unchanging, and beyond
death. All that we usually consider ourselves to be, such as a body, gender, age,
nationality, and profession, are in fact not our true identity, but instead belong to
the material principle. In contrast to that is the asmitāmātrā, the “merely I,” the
pure “I” or pure I-sense. A painting illustrating the tattvas decorates Kāpil Maṭh
and serves as a map for the realization of the self, which leads to salvific liberation.
The Sāṃkhyayoga monastery in Sarnath, Kāpil Sāṃkhyayogāśram, was,
as noted earlier, established by the Sāṃkhyayogin and saṃnyāsin Omprakāś
Āraṇya, a disciple of Dharmamegha Āraṇya. Omprakāś Āraṇya, after appar-
ently having stayed for some time as a brahmacārī in Madhupur, returned to
the Sarnath and Varanasi area where he attracted disciples and taught them
the Sāṃkhyayoga tradition of Hariharānanda Āraṇya and Dharmamegha
Āraṇya. The monastery Kāpil Sāṃkhyayogāśram was built in the same design
as Kāpil Maṭh in Madhupur, a recognizably traditional Kāpil Maṭh style. The
red-brown color is the same and it has a similar material culture. The inside
of the mandir is decorated with a window which opens up from a cave, and
in the Kāpil Mandir there are paintings illustrating the tattvas, drawings of
the gurus, and a skull like the one in Kāpil Maṭh in Madhupur. In addition,
on one of the walls in the outer courtyard of the áśram is another skull, and
painted beneath the skull is the same text as in Kāpil Maṭh in Madhupur, in
Sanskrit with a Hindi translation. The text states that the person to whom the
skull belongs did everything he could to preserve his body, but that he nev-
ertheless died and that his example should teach us that we therefore should
concentrate on the eternal realities and not waste time on the body. The eternal
realities refer to the eternal unchanging witness consciousness (draṣṭṛ). We
should identify with this principle and not the mind-body complex. At the
Kāpil Sāṃkhyayogāśram, additional text is painted beneath the skull. This
text can be considered a summary of the teachings of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra
as understood by the Kāpil Maṭh tradition. These are based on the Yogasūtra
2.16, 2.17, 2.25, and 2.26, which are called the heya, heyahetu, hana, and
hanopāya. The text painted on the wall reads:
heya – duḥkha – heyaṃ duḥkham anāgatam

(Yogasūtra 2.16)
heya hetu – duḥkha kā kārṇa – draṣṭṛ-dṛśyayoḥ saṃyogo heyahetuḥ

(Yogasūtra 2.17)
hana – duḥkha nāś – tad abhāvāt saṃyogābhāvo hānaṃ taddṛśeḥ kaivalya

(Yogasūtra 2.25)
hanopāya – duḥkha nāśopāya – vivekakhyātir aviplavā hānopāyaḥ
(Yogasūtra 2.26)
In the English translation the text of the four quoted sūtras states:
Future pain (duḥkham anāgatam) can be avoided (heyaṃ).

(Yogasūtra 2.16)
The contact (saṃyogo) between the seer (draṣṭṛ – i.e., puruṣa) and the seen
(dṛśya – i.e., citta or prakṛti) is the cause of that which is to be avoided
(heyahetuḥ).
(Yogasūtra 2.17)
When there is absence of ignorance (tad abhāvāt), there is absence of contact

(saṃyogābhāvo), which means abandonment – i.e., the realization of salvific
liberation (hānaṃ taddṛśoḥ kaivalya).
(Yogasūtra 2.25)
The means to abandonment (hānopāya) is unshaking discriminative knowl-

edge (vivekakhyātir aviplavā).
(Yogasūtra 2.26)
In other words, the sūtras are interpreted to state what is to be relinquished,

the cause of what is to be relinquished, the destruction of what is to be relin-
quished, and the means to dispose of it: the state of suffering, the cause of suf-
fering, kaivalya as the liberation from suffering, and the means for the escape
from suffering. These four noble truths of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra have
obvious resemblances to the four noble truths of suffering formulated in early
Buddhism. Since the Kāpil Sāṃkhyayogāśram is in Sarnath, an important
Buddhist site, highlighting the four noble truths of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra
might be a way to remind disciples and visitors of this similarity, and that,
according to the tradition of Kāpil Maṭh, the Buddha was a follower of the
Sāṃkhyayoga teaching of Kapila, and that it was Kapila who originally for-
mulated these four noble truths.4
The Kāpil Sāṃkhyayogāśram in Sarnath has made more use of words and slo-
gans in their decorations than Kāpil Maṭh of Madhupur and is richly decorated
with statements of the Sāṃkhyayoga teachings. Over one of the two entrances
to the āśram is a black figure in meditation decorated with the text nāsmi, na
me, nāham (“I am not [consciousness], [consciousness] does not belong to me,
the ‘I’ is not [conscious]”), which is a quotation from Sāṃkhyakārikā 64. This
is the salvific knowledge of Sāṃkhya and the result of the analysis of the tattvas
(tattvābhyāsāt), as stated in the Sāṃkhyakārikā:
Evam tattvābhāsān nāsmi na me nāham ity apariśeṣam,

Aviparyayād viśuddhaṃ kevalam utpadyate jñānam.
(Sāṃkhyakārikā 64)
As we saw in Chapter 7, according to Āraṇya, na me means “I do not need anything”
or “I do not possess anything,” nāham means “I am not even this body and the
senses,” and nāsmi means “I in its purest sense, i.e. puruṣa, is not even the knower
of the subtlest experiences” (H. Āraṇya 2005a: 152). The words on the black fig-
ure probably have this intended meaning. Under the figure on top of the gate is
written the mantra used by the movement, ādividuṣe kapilāya namaḥ, “Homage
to Kapila who was the first knower.” Beneath the mantra is the much-used verse
from the Mahābhārata 12.304.2, nāsti sāṃkhyasamam jñānam, nāsti yogasamaṃ
balam. Below the verse from the Mahābhārata it is stated sākṣī = dṛṣṭā = puruṣa,
which points out that the witness and the seer is the puruṣa principle. On the door
itself, it says Sāṃkhyayoga and śānta-brahmavidyā.
The other entrance of Kāpil Sāṃkhyayogāśram is a tall structure that also dis-
plays statements that illustrate the teachings. The uppermost part is decorated with
a few arrows that point upward. On top is written śanti, peace, which is brought
about by vivek, discrimination between the eternal unchanging consciousness
principle and the material principle, which is motivated by discarding the three
types of suffering (tritāpa): adhyātmika duḥkha on the left side, adhibhautika
duḥkha in the middle, and adhidaivika duḥkha on the right. Underneath are the
wheels of avidyā (ignorance), sṛṣti cakra (wheel of creation), and the wheel of
saṃsāra, rebirth, which is a circle with six members: raga (desire), dveṣa (hate),
dharma (right), adharma (wrong), sukha (happiness), and duḥkha (suffering).
Beneath the wheels is a lotus with the word sṛṣṭi written in it. Below that, just
above the gate, is the Kapila mantra. To the left of the gate is a text that pays
homage to Āsuri, the disciple of Kapila, maharṣi āsuraye namaḥ, and underneath
the text is the Kāpil Maṭh tradition’s favorite quote from the Mahābhārata, nāsti
sāṃkhyasamam jñānam, nāsti yogasamam balam. On the right-hand side are the
words maharṣi pañcaśikhāya namaḥ, which commemorate Pañcaśikha, who was
the disciple of Āsuri. On the side of the gate itself is some information about
Hariharānanda Āraṇya and Dharmamegha Āraṇya. Kapila, Āsuri, Pañcaśikha,
Hariharānanda Āraṇya, and Dharmamegha Āraṇya are here promoted as the
guruparamparā of Sāṃkhyayoga.
One structure inside the Kāpil Sāṃkhyayogāśram is called dhyāna mandir,
“meditation temple.” This is a platform for mediation. Decorative words present
the teachings of Sāṃkhyayoga. Inside the meditation temple it says, in Hindi,
meiṅ śānti huṃ, “I am peaceful,” which expresses the reward of meditation, the
state of mind of one who has attained kaivalya. There are six steps up to the
meditation seat. The inscriptions on them describe the way toward kaivalya.
On the bottom step, the eight limbs of yoga from the Pātañjalayogaśāstra are
written in a circle, starting with yama and niyama. The next two limbs are part
of the circle, but not visible since they are part of the circle not seen from the
front; it is quite notable that these are āsana and prāṇāyāma, the two limbs that
dominate modern yoga, but which are of little importance in Sāṃkhyayoga.
Then come pratyāhāra, dhāraṇā, dhyāna, and samādhi, which are the limbs of
the eightfold yoga related to meditation. Above them is written paravairāgya
(highest renounciation), above that the word vivekakhyāti (discriminative
knowledge), and above that sākṣī, draṣṭā, and puruṣa, which are synonyms
(witness, seer, consciousness), names used for contentless consciousness. The
calligraphic decorations of the dhyāna mandir state the means and goals of
Sāṃkhyayoga.
Another calligraphic decoration in the Kāpil Sāṃkhyayogāśram is a quotation
from the Śāntiparvan of the Mahābhārata, which reads,
Jñānaṃ mahad yad dhi mahatsu rājan, vedeṣu sāṃkhyeṣu tathaiva yoge;
yaccāpi dṛṣṭaṃ vividhaṃ purāṇaṃ, sāṃkhyāgataṃ tan nikhilaṃ narendra.
(Mahābhārata 12.290.103)
Oh king, the great knowledge found in Vedas, in Sāṃkhyas5 and in Yoga,

which is manifold and ancient, is included in Sāṃkhya.
This quotation from Mahābhārata is understood to connect Sāṃkhya both to the

Vedas and to Yoga. The Mahābhārata here states that Sāṃkhya is the highest
knowledge “on which other views rely” (Brockington 1999: 485). The verse illus-
trates that historically Vedic orthodoxy and Yoga were “integrated into” Sāṃkhya
and that Sāṃkhya was “the meeting place of all kinds of traditions and as the most
effective way to salvation” (Schreiner 1999: 767).
Calligraphy began in South Asia with Aśoka’s edicts (the reign of Aśoka was
from 268 to 231 BCE). They expressed Buddhist teachings. I am not aware of
any ancient calligraphic decorations to document the existence of any Sāṃkhya/
Sāṃkhyayoga monastic institutions in ancient India, and the philosophical texts
do not give evidence of flourishing Sāṃkhya monastic communities. However,
the philosophical texts show that there were some scholars interested in and some
individual followers of the Sāṃkhya and Sāṃkhyayoga textual tradition. The cal-
ligraphic decorations of the monasteries of the Sāṃkhyayoga institution of Kāpil
Maṭh and Kāpil Sāṃkhyayogāśram represent perhaps something new in the history
of Sāṃkhyayoga. Here calligraphy is used to make the buildings of monasteries
into embodiments of the Sāṃkhyayoga teachings. The buildings become material
manifestations of the Sāṃkhyayoga teachings of the inevitability of suffering and
death, of the dualism of puruṣa and prakṛti, of the salvific path, of the Sāṃkhyayoga
method of combining samādhi with viveka (discernment), and of the guidance
of Sāṃkhyayoga gurus. The monastic buildings and enclosures themselves have
become texts that summarize the teachings. The emphasis on the nirguṇa nature
of the īśvara of Sāṃkhyayoga promotes textual expressions. Īśvara has no form.
Kapila, however, was an embodied being, and the gurus and Sāṃkhyayoga ascet-
ics personify the ideals and the salvific knowledge of Sāṃkhyayoga, as does
Kapila, and like Kapila they prove, for the devotees, that the attainment of the
salvific knowledge is a real possibility and, therefore, that one’s own practice
leads, little by little, through many rebirths, toward the ultimate goal. The belief in
vāsanās and saṃskāras assumes that no effort is lost. The lay devotees are on the
same path as the Sāṃkhyayoga saṃnyāsins, but need to advance further and will
become saṃnyāsins in some future lives. The material religion of Sāṃkhyayoga
gives expression to these teachings and provides a small Sāṃkhyayoga cosmos
for the followers of Sāṃkhyayoga. For the followers who visit at the monasteries
for a few days, for this time period the world outside becomes of less significance.
Being surrounded by the material religion of Sāṃkhyayoga, monks and disciples
can feel one hundred percent Sāṃkhyayogins for the period of time that they visit
or stay there.
Notes
1 According to the teaching of Sāṃkhyayoga and as is stated in the Yogasūtra 2.35, when
a yogin is perfect in the practice of ahiṃsā, his surroundings also become peaceful. All
beings in his presence cease to be hostile, including animals that have a predator-prey
relationship.
2 See Jacobsen 2008.
3 English translation as provided by a member of the Maṭh.
4 That it was Kapila who originally formulated these four noble truths about suffering is
stated by Āditya Prakāś Āraṇya, a saṃnyāsin in the Kāpil Maṭh tradition:
The first wise and great sage, lord Kapil, said, “As a Physician sees the four essen-
tial elements: the disease, its cause, its cure and the medicines thereof; similarly
the seeker, desirous of salvation sees the existence of sorrow, the cause of sorrow,
the cessation of sorrow and the way which leads to the cessation of sorrow” (A. P.
Āraṇya 1996: 139).
5 The meaning of sāṃkhyeṣu is unclear. Peter Schreiner suggests that perhaps the
plural sāṃkhyeṣu could refer to “enumerations,” “classifications, categorizations”
(Schreiner 1999: 766).
10 The Kāpil Maṭh tradition and
modern scholarship on Yoga
Kāpil Maṭh was influenced by some of the same cultural developments in Bengal
that led to the emergence of modern Yoga, but Kāpil Maṭh’s influence on this
emergence was limited. A remarkable number of religious movements appeared
in Bengal in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; some aimed at reli-
gious reform, others orthodox and traditionalist, and some promoted yoga. Many
of them were influenced by the dramatic cultural changes of the period. Three
types of movements in modern Bengal have been distinguished (Ray 1965). First,
movements that had an impact on the whole of Bengali society: few were mass
movements, probably only the Brāhmo Samāj and the Rāmakṛṣṇa Mission. Sec-
ond, religious organizations that had followers from a large section of society:
Bhārat Sevāśrama Saṅgha is example of this type. Third, disciples that gathered
around a guru and founded an āśrama. These disciples followed his teachings, but
no attempt was made to give the āśrama a strict organizational form. Ray notes,
“the number of such Gurus in Bengal is enormous. Hardly a village is seen that
does not contain one or two Gurus” (Ray 1965: iii). Hariharānanda Āraṇya pro-
moted a form of Sāṃkhyayoga orthodoxy and traditionalism that did not attract
a large number of followers, but nevertheless was institutionalized in an āśrama
organization. The Kāpil Maṭh tradition fits between the second and the third of
Ray’s types of movements. It is better organized than the third type, but also did
not have followers from a large section of society. The organization originated
with some disciples that gathered around a guru who enclosed himself in an arti-
ficial cave. The guru’s confinement gave the tradition an organizational form, and
the institutionalization of the daily recitation of stotras gave it communal articula-
tion. The unbroken line of gurus, also enclosed in the cave, has enabled the tradi-
tion to survive.
One influence of the Kāpil Maṭh tradition has been on the modern scholar-
ship of Sāṃkhya and Sāṃkhyayoga in India. Some of its disciples have become
Sāṃkhya and Sāṃkhyayoga scholars, and it has also given some of the scholars
on Sāṃkhya and Sāṃkhyayoga an institutional belonging.1 Hariharānanda Āraṇya
recognized that the Pātañjalayogaśāstra taught Sāṃkhya philosophy (H. Āranya
1981, 1988a [1911]). Mallinson and Singleton have noted that “By the eighteenth
century haṭha and Pātañjala yoga were seen as one and the same, and haṭha’s
rise to orthodox acceptance had been cemented by the compilation of a corpus of
190 Kāpil Maṭh and modern scholarship on Yoga
Upanishads (later referred to as the Yoga Upanishads) that borrowed wholesale
from the texts of haṭhayoga” (Mallinson and Singleton 2017: xx–xxi). Āraṇya
was able to separate Pātañjala yoga (Sāṃkhyayoga) from Haṭhayoga and Vedānta,
with which it had become joined. As we have seen in the previous chapters, in the
nineteenth century, there had been an emerging fascination with Sāṃkhya and
Sāṃkhyayoga, and Hariharānanda Āraṇya’s Kāpil Maṭh tradition was part of this
fascination, which separated Yoga philosophy from haṭha yoga and attempted
to relate the Yoga teaching of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra to an original Sāṃkhya
context. Still, one of the scholar disciples of Kāpil Maṭh, Deepti Dutta, notes
this “co-relation between Sāṃkhya and Yoga is rarely grasped” (Dutta 2001: 2).
This lack of understanding of the relationship between Sāṃkhya and Yoga still
means, she thinks, that “currently Yoga has evoked enormous interest, Sāṃkhya
is in oblivion as before” (Dutta 2001: 2). That Āraṇya was able to create a living
tradition of yoga based on Sāṃkhya, but that Sāṃkhya nevertheless supposedly
remains as obscure as before, indicates that the impact of the Kāpil Maṭh tradition
has been quite limited.
A striking number of the leading religious figures of late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century Bengal were interested in various aspects of yoga,2 and par-
allel with this religious interest in yoga, a scholarly interest, especially in the
philosophical aspect of yoga, developed among academicians in Bengal.3 One of
the foremost of these Bengali academicians with an interest in Yoga philosophy
in the early twentieth century was perhaps the great Indian historian of philoso-
phy Surendranath Dasgupta (1887–1952). He focused mainly on Sāṃkhya and
Sāṃkhyayoga in his early work and published three books on these philosophical
systems, and seems to have promoted the view that the yoga of Sāṃkhya was
the only yoga worthy of scholarly consideration. His magnum opus was his book
in five volumes A History of Indian Philosophy (Surendranath Dasgupta 1922–
1955). Dasgupta does not seem to have had any association with Kāpil Maṭh, but
Surama Dasgupta (Surama Mitra, 1907–1998), who was Dasgupta’s second wife
(however, since Dasgupta never lawfully divorced his first wife Himani, the mar-
riage was never legal) was guided by Kāpil Maṭh and she spent the last years of
her life in the Maṭh as a disciple. She consulted Hariharānanda Āraṇya about her
choices in life. Surama Dasgupta wrote about Surendranath Dasgupta in “A Mem-
oir” in volume five of Dasgupta’s A History of Indian Philosophy (Surama Das-
gupta 1955: v–xii) and the book An Ever-Expanding Quest of Life and Knowledge
(Surama Dasgupta 1971). In these texts, she writes about Surendranath Dasgup-
ta’s ability in performing various yogic postures and that he frequently passed into
samādhi as early as from childhood:
In his early years, between five and eight, while he did not know any Sanskrit,
he showed certain remarkable gifts of answering philosophical and religious
questions in a very easy and spontaneous manner. He could demonstrate the
various Yogic postures (āsanas); and used to pass easily into trance states,
while looking at the river Ganges or listening to some Kirtan song. He was
visited by hundreds of learned men and pious saints at his father’s residence at
Kāpil Maṭh and modern scholarship on Yoga 191
Kalighat and was styled “Khoka Bhagawan” (Child God). Mention may par-
ticularly be made of Srimat Bijay, Krishna Goswami, Prabhu Jagat Bandhu
and Sivanarayan Paramhansa. He was sometimes taken to the Theosophical
Society, Calcutta, where a big audience used to assemble, and the boy was put
on the table and questioned on religious and theological matters. The answers
that he gave were published in the Bengali and English newspapers along
with the questions. Some of these are still preserved.
(Surama Dasgupta 1955: iii)
The quote illustrates the great interest in yoga in Kolkata in the early 1890s. That
Surendranath Dasgupta in the early 1890s could demonstrate the various yogic
postures (āsanas) for an audience is also interesting considering that he was from
a family “particularly known for its great tradition of Sanskrit learning and cul-
ture” (Surama Dasgupta 1955: v). His great-grandfather ran a Sanskrit institution
known as Kavīndra College, which continued up until 1947. The school taught
Kavya, Grammar, Nyāya, Vedānta, and Āyurveda. The absence of Sāṃkhya and
Yoga is noteworthy. Surendranath Dasgupta’s books on Sāṃkhya and Yoga were
The Study of Patanjali (written in 1914, published 1920), Yoga as Philosophy and
Religion (Surendranath Dasgupta 1970 [1924]), and Yoga Philosophy in Relation
to Other Systems of Indian Thought (Surendranath Dasgupta 1930). Surama Das-
gupta does not speculate on why he chose to focus on these two philosophical sys-
tems in particular. Surendranath Dasgupta experienced an enthusiasm for yoga at
the Theosophical Society in Kolkata, but he might also have gained an interest in
Sāṃkhyayoga because of the growing general appeal of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra
due to Vivekānanda’s book on Rāja-yoga and the emergence of modern yoga. In
the “preface” to The Study of Patanjali he writes, “This is my earliest attempt on
Indian philosophy” (Surendranath Dasgupta 1920: i). He gives no explanation or
justification for the choice of subject of the study, which was also the subject of
his dissertation at Calcutta University. The book starts with the statement that the
relationship between mind and matter is a main subject of philosophy and moves
directly to the Sāṃkhya Pātañjala (which is the term he uses for Sāṃkhyayoga)
doctrines. A notable feature of the book is the many references to the views of
Western philosophers such as Kant, Plato, and Aristotle. The book refers in par-
ticular to the views of Vācaspatimiśra and he quotes frequently from the Sanskrit
texts, but does not seem to refer to any contemporary persons from Bengal or to
any texts in Bengali. He refers to Sūtrārthabodhinī of Nārāyaṇa Tīrtha (Suren-
dranath Dasgupta 1920: 92), who lived from 1600–1690 and wrote three works
on Yoga (Larson and Bhattacharya 2008: 334). In an essay on Indian philosophy,
based on a presidential address at a conference in 1928, Surendranath Dasgupta
wrote,
One great difficulty that lies in the way of the study of Indian Philosophy
is to be found in the fact that all the old living traditions of Indian Philoso-
phy are now lost almost for centuries so that a study of Indian Philosophy,
whether in the Paṇḍitic circle or in the Anglicised circle, is bound largely to
be philological. . . . The scholars in the Paṇḍitic circle also are only carrying
on their work in a stereotyped fashion not for the intrinsic interest of philoso-
phy and religion but merely as a learned occupation or for a living.
(Surendranath Dasgupta 1941: 210–211)
Dasgupta seems not to have known about any Sāṃkhyayogins outside of the
Paṇḍitic and the Anglicized circles. He wrote in the same essay, “The time when
people took to Indian philosophy out of religious motives has almost passed
away” (Surendranath Dasgupta 1941: 223). He seemed unaware that Āraṇya,
by restarting Sāṃkhyayoga, had created a third circle in addition to the Paṇḍitic
circle or the Anglicized circle, to use the terms of Dasgupta. Dasgupta appears
to have always considered Sāṃkhyayoga as something of the past, and not as
a living philosophy.4 He seems unaware of Hariharānanda Āraṇya, or uninter-
ested. Surama Dasgupta writes about Surendranath that “one of the peculiar traits
of Dasgupta was that he seldom wished to learn anything from others” (Surama
Dasgupta 1955: vi).
Surama Dasgupta met Hariharānanda Āraṇya in Madhupur just after she had
become a student at Presidency College, Calcutta, probably between 1924 and
1926. It was after Hariharānanda Āraṇya had advised her to do so, that she enrolled
under Dasgupta for research in Indian philosophy. Surama Dasgupta writes that as
a student she had come under the influence of nationalism. She thought that she
had to do something both for India and for attaining a meaningful purpose in life
and this made her perplexed. Which should she choose? Should she engage fully
in the nationalist struggle or should she continue with her studies? (Surama Das-
gupta 1971: 31). At that time, she met Hariharānanda Āraṇya. She writes about
meeting a yogi in Madhupur, but without naming him:
I met a Yogi in Madhupur at this time. I explained my difficulties to him.

He said that the immediately important was not necessarily the most worthy
object of achievement. For instance, he said, “If a man gets hurt in the street,
you give him water to drink, perhaps some preliminary first-aid; but he will
need efficient medical help for his recovery. The doctors who would be able
to help him are those who have gone through years of training at the Medi-
cal College. The passers-by who try to help him cannot do much to this end.
So also, though the primary need of the country is to be helped economi-
cally with food and employment, there is also the need to help it with greater
knowledge and thinking. Man does not live by bread alone, he has other
needs. A people, a nation, can grow stronger not only through physical nour-
ishment, but it needs intellectual progress. So those who will keep the torch
of knowledge burning so that the nation can be intellectually and morally a
superior people will be fulfilling a worthwhile purpose.”
(Surama Dasgupta 1971: 31–32)
Surama Dasgupta writes that, with the help of the guru in Madhupur, she “realized
that we could serve our country better by following our ideals in our own way”
and she devoted herself to “researches into the great cultural and philosophical lit-
erature of our country thereby trying to understand our motherland and her intel-
lectual wealth better” (Surama Dasgupta 1971: 32). She realized that
India sent the message of freedom long ago. It discovered that freedom
means freedom from the bondage of one’s own lower nature. It is not
enough to be free in a political or economic sense. True freedom lies in
discovery of the self. This can be achieved through knowledge, wisdom
and moral strength.
(Surama Dasgupta 1971: 32–33)
This attitude, which she had learned after speaking with Hariharānanda Āraṇya,
she brought to her studies with Surendranath Dasgupta. She told him that she
did not merely wish to know, but that she “wished to be, to become, to grow”
(Surama Dasgupta 1971: 33). Dasgupta, on hearing this from Surama, said, “This
is the first time that anybody has said that to me. I shall try to guide you” (Surama
Dasgupta 1971: 33). It seems that she had adopted from Āraṇya in Madhupur
the ideas of philosophy as not only knowledge but also the transformation of the
human being, and had presented this to Dasgupta. After this, Surendranath started
to help Surama. We see from this episode that Āraṇya’s spiritual advice about pur-
suing spiritual knowledge became decisive for her choice. She calls Surendranath
Dasgupta her husband and guru, but as an elderly widow, she lived for several
years as a lay disciple in Kāpil Maṭh in Madhupur. So although there does not
seem at the outset to be any connection between Surendranath Dasgupta’s inter-
est in Sāṃkhyayoga and Hariharānanda Āraṇya, there was a connection between
Surama Dasgupta and Āraṇya. In the 1977 University of Calcutta edition of the
Yoga Philosophy of Patañjali (the English translation of Kāpilāśramiya Pātañjal
Jogdarśan) two essays by Surama Dasgupta were included: one on tapas and one
on Indian philosophy and Yoga psychology (Surama Dasgupta 1981a: 445–448,
1981b: 449–456).
Both Āraṇya’s and Surendranath Dasgupta’s Sāṃkhyayoga interpretations were
founded on the philosophical Yoga textual tradition, especially the Vyāsabhāṣya and
the Tattvavaiśāradī. In that sense both Āraṇya and Dasgupta built their interpreta-
tions on the same texts, but one became a saṃnyāsin and the other an academic.
The philosophy of Kāpil Maṭh is quite close, but in no way identical, to Dasgupta’s
academic Sāṃkhyayoga, which was based on the analysis of the Sanskrit textual tra-
dition of Sāṃkhya and Sāṃkhyayoga. Hariharānanda’s Sāṃkhyayoga comes from
the same textual tradition as Surendranath Dasgupta’s, that is, the classical Sanskrit
texts of the Sāṃkhya and Yoga schools and the Orientalist scholarship of the time.
One main difference between Hariharānanda Āraṇya and Surendranath Dasgupta
was that Āraṇya made Sāṃkhyayoga the foundation of the saṃnyāsin way of life
while Dasgupta pursued an academic career. Because of this difference in lifestyle,
since saṃnyāsin is a religious institution, and because of his duties as guru and spir-
itual advisor, Āraṇya’s understanding was much more influenced by religious experi-
ences, expectations, and considerations.
The most important scholars on Sāṃkhya and Sāṃkhyayoga in twentieth-
century India who had taken initiation as disciples of Kāpil Maṭh, in addition to
Surama Dasgupta, were probably Anima Sen Gupta, Ram Shankar Bhattacharya,
Deepti Dutta, and Jajneswar Ghosh. They all had PhDs or university positions
(Ram Shankar Bhattacharya had a PhD from Agra University (Larson and Bhat-
tacharya 2008: 15) and a research position for a period at Sampūrṇānand Sanskrit
University in Varanasi, Anima Sen Gupta at Patna University, Deepti Dutta at
Delhi University, Surama Dasgupta at Lucknow University, and Jajneswar Ghosh
at Ananda Mohan College, Mymensingh, a college that was affiliated with Cal-
cutta University until 1947), and they published a substantial number of books on
Sāṃkhya and Yoga. Their work constitutes, so to speak, an academic branch of
Kāpil Maṭh. All were disciples of the Maṭh. They all wrote mainly on Sāṃkhya
and Yoga philosophy. Anima Sen Gupta published a number of books on the his-
tory and philosophy of Sāṃkhya (Sen Gupta 1959, 1964, 1973, 1982). Jajneswar
Ghosh published a volume on Yoga and one on Sāṃkhya (1930, 1933), translated
and edited Hariharānanda Āraṇya’s The Sāṃkhya Sūtra of Pañcaśikha and Other
Ancient Sages. Surama Dasgupta wrote about philosophy (Surama Dasgupta
1960), and was very much involved in the scholarship of Surendranath Dasgupta.
Ram Shankar Bhattacharya published a large number of studies on Sāṃkhya and
Yoga, and in the field of Purāṇic studies, as well as many editions of Sāṃkhya
and Sāṃkhyayoga texts. He was also the co-editor with Gerald Larson of both
the Sāṃkhya and the Yoga volumes of the Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies
(Larson and Bhattacharya 1987, 2008). Deepti Dutta wrote a book on the his-
tory of Sāṃkhya, which was published by Kāpil Maṭh. Most of them have also
contributed essays or translations to many of the books published by Kāpil Maṭh.
Anima Sen Gupta’s writing of Sāṃkhya is scholarly, interested in finding the
stages of development of Sāṃkhya. In her first book The Evolution of the Sam-
khya School of Thought, she writes that she met Surendranath Dasgupta just a few
months before his death in Lucknow and that Dasgupta gave her “the necessary
inspiration and encouragement to produce this work” (Sen Gupta 1959: ii). She
does not mention anyone at Kāpil Maṭh in this book. Surama Dasgupta was her
PhD advisor and connected her to Kāpil Maṭh. When Anima Sen Gupta died, she
bequeathed a property she owned in Bengal to Kāpil Maṭh. The property was sold
and was used to build the beautiful library and office building at the Maṭh. Her
work attempted to identify an authentic Sāṃkhya tradition and especially its early
development. This attempt involved identifying instances when the term sāṃkhya
is used in texts to refer to the technical Sāṃkhya system of philosophy and when
the term sāṃkhya is used to refer only to a method such as in the Bhagavadgītā.
Anima Sen Gupta thinks Sāṃkhya philosophy started with the teachings of
the Upaniṣads and was first theistic and then developed into the atheism of the
Sāṃkhyakārikā. She distinguishes three stages of development: 1) a theistic and
monistic stage, which develops in the Upaniṣads, Mahābhārata, Bhagavadgītā,
Purāṇas, and the Bhāgavatapurāṇa and Vaiṣṇava literature; 2) the atheistic and
semi-dualistic teachings of Caraka Saṃhitā and Pañcaśikha; and 3) an atheistic
and dualistic stage represented by Ārāḍa Kālāma, Īśvarakṛṣṇa, and the author of
the Sāṃkhyasūtra. She shows no interest in Yoga in this book. She did publish
some essays on the concept of yoga in the Bhāgavadgītā and in Vivekānanda, but
these essays do not display any direct contact with Kāpil Maṭh. On the contrary,
she seems to have been a follower of Vivekānanda.5 However, in her last book,
Classical Sāṃkhya: A Critical Study, her interest has changed to Sāṃkhyayoga.
The “prelude” is a presentation of the method and truth of Sāṃkhyayoga, and
here she writes that she is a follower of the Sāṃkhyayoga system. In the “prel-
ude,” she also quotes the slogan of Kāpil Maṭh nāsti sāṃkhyasamaṃ jñānam,
nāsti yogasamaṃ balam (Sen Gupta 1982: xvi). In the “prelude” she writes,
“The Sāṃkhya and the yoga constitute one comprehensive system of philosophy
and religion and these two are inseparable.” She explains that one first has to
know the constitutive principles and understand that the “soul is a real being.”
This knowledge “inspires him to meditate on the tattvas for their direct experi-
ence” and attain the “illuminating state of his real being” (Sen Gupta 1982: xii).
The sages of ancient India realized through direct experience, she writes, that
the “entire phenomenal creation is getting lighted by the ever-shining luminosity
of this principle.” She writes further,
This light that is shining beyond the world is the original light of all beings.
This light is to be seen and experienced by a man in the deep recesses of his
inner being. The Sāṃkhya-yoga system has shown man the proper way of
discovering and realizing this supreme light in him by means of self-analysis,
self-correction, concentration, meditation, etc.
(Sen Gupta 1982: xiii)
The way is described as difficult. The mind becomes steady as impurities are
removed and with “the noble emotions of love, friendship, compassion . . . the
aspirant begins to experience more and more of that absolute peace which ema-
nates from the soul” (Sen Gupta 1982: xiii). Peace and serenity now grows, and
“when the mind loses its power and becomes dead, one gets a direct experience
of the light of the soul which constitutes its real essence” (Sen Gupta 1982: xiv).
To stop the mind, argues Sen Gupta, “is to stop the manifestation of the not-self,”
but “the self-revealing light which makes effective the manifestation of the not-
self, is not blown out” (Sen Gupta 1982: xiii). “When the mind becomes com-
pletely inoperative” consciousness “shines in its purity and lustre,” which is a
“bursting forth of the Infinite and Eternal Light” (Sen Gupta 1982: xiv). “What
is completely arrested is the knowledge of the not-self; pure consciousness is
ever shining” (Sen Gupta 1982: xv), she reiterates. She concludes, “The Spiritual
knowledge and discipline, advocated by the Sāṃkhya-yoga enables a man to have
a deep and profound realisation of this Supreme Principle of his life, which is
called Puruṣa or the atman [sic]” (Sen Gupta 1982: xv). Sen Gupta argues that
the analytical techniques of the West give persons freedom from the oppression
of repressed desires and complexes, and provide more freedom in normal worldly
life, and help to avoid maladjustment, but they cannot give guidance on how to
attain the principle of pure consciousness that is behind our worldly experiences.
This can only be discovered by Yoga, which is beyond Western analytical theory
and the techniques of Western psychology. She continues,
Every man who will accept the truth promulgated by the Sāṃkhya philoso-
phy and who will also lead a life of detachment, and moral purification as
enjoined by the Yoga practice, will surely reach the state of final enlighten-
ment and lasting peace.
(Sen Gupta 1982: xv–xvi)
In her book, she does support and present the interpretations of Yoga by
Hariharānanda Āraṇya and Kāpil Maṭh. In the discussion of “The Problem of the
Existence of God” she writes,
Swami Hariharananda, (the founder of Kapila Maṭh and a profound exponent

of the Sāṃkhya-yoga philosophy) has very aptly explained, why an eternal
God as the creator of the world has not been admitted in this system.
(Sen Gupta 1982: 161)6
According to Yogasūtra 1.23, god is a particular kind of puruṣa, unique in that he

is forever liberated, but not a creator god.
In the opinion of Swami Hariharananda, the existence of such an eternally

free soul is logically justifiable. If worldly souls involved in the worldly-life
from beginningless time are supposed to be existent then an eternal soul, free
from beginningless time, can also have justification for existence. That free
and world-bound souls are existent from beginningless time is the view both
of the Sāṃkhya and the yoga, according to the founder of the Kapila Math.
(Sen Gupta 1982: 161)
She supports Āraṇya’s interpretation of a divine creator in a limited sense in Yoga

and writes,
According to Swami Hariharananda, however, the Sāṃkhya-yoga philoso-

phy believes in the existence of a Being, perfected by yoga in his previous
birth (qualified God). He is the creator in the limited sense. He creates from
pre-existent materials, He is called Hiraṇyagarbha. He is a yogin who suc-
ceeded in reaching the stage of Sasmita Samādhi in his previous birth, as a
result of which he has become omniscient and omnipotent in his present birth
as Saguna Īśvara (qualified God). It is from his resolution that a particular
creation gets manifested.
(Sen Gupta 1982: 163)
She explains Āraṇya’s teachings of Saguṇa and Nirguṇa Īśvara:
Sāṃkhya-yoga according to Swami Hariharananda has admitted both Saguna

Īśvara and Nirguna Īśvara. Nirguna Īśvara is nirguna as it is not under the
influence of the three gunas. This God is external to individual souls. Saguna
Īśvara on the other hand is an individual soul that attained perfections through
asmita Samādhi in the previous birth. It is because of the admission of such
produced gods that the Sāṃkhya-yoga philosophy has given a dignified status
to man, every man is supposed to carry within him the potency of godliness.
If this potency can be actualized, then he can become a Saguna Īśvara, pos-
sessing lordly powers. He can then transcend this stage and attain liberation
which is nothing but the realisation of himself as [. . .] consciousness-principle,
devoid of any relation to anything else. Ever-free God on the other hand,
becomes an ideal in our spiritual efforts to attain divinity and purity like
Him. . . . By loving God, the yogin also changes into that form and becomes
calm, serene and pure.
(Sen Gupta 1982: 167–168)
The objections against God in Yoga raised by Śaṅkara, “can we do away with
easily” if we follow Hariharānanda’s interpretation, concludes Anima Sen Gupta.
Swami Hariharananda has proved cogently that God is not a single and ulti-
mate category in yoga. He is a combination of both puruṣa and prakṛti. He has
been described in the yoga-philosophy as eternally free. The eternally free
principle is that being, who possesses from eternity, a citta endowed with dis-
criminative knowledge. Since God is always the possessor of discriminative
knowledge, his citta is a merged one. God is not therefore a third category in
the yoga besides puruṣa and prakṛti. Swami has also shown that God has not
been recognized in the yoga either as a creator of the world or as the giver of
fruits of actions to the living persons.
(Sen Gupta 1982: 168)
God also creates a mind (nirmaņacitta), argues Sen Gupta, and “with its help
imparts knowledge and other necessary instructions to human beings with a view
to bringing them on the right path of living” (Sen Gupta 1982: 169). She does not
identify any human manifestations of this nirmaņa citta.
Her presentation of Sāṃkhya in this book is close to Āraṇya’s. The book is as
much about Sāṃkhyayoga as it is about Sāṃkhya. It is in particular the “prelude”
and the last chapter, “The Problem of the Existence of God,” that display the influ-
ence of the tradition of Hariharānanda Āraṇya and Kāpil Maṭh. Āraṇya’s views
appear in the description of the way toward salvific liberation and in the presen-
tation of the Sāṃkhyayoga views on the saguṇa and nirguṇa īśvaras. Nirguṇa
īśvara is the puruṣaviśeṣa and saguṇa īśvara is Hiraṇyagarbha, and they are
understood in terms of the salvific goal of Sāṃkhyayoga of eternal peace.
The Sāṃkhyayoga paṇḍit Ram Shankar Bhattacharya’s association with Kāpil
Maṭh was described previously in Chapter 2. His contributions to the study and
interpretation of Sāṃkhya and Sāṃkhyayoga could be the subject for a separate
study.7 Gerald Larson notes that Bhattacharya was the author of more than 30
books of editions, translations, and critical studies in Sanskrit, Bengali, Hindi, and
English, and his most important studies deal with Sāṃkhya and Sāṃkhyayoga
(Larson 2008: 15–16). Bhattacharya also published a large number of articles.
Here I will only give one example of how his interpretations possibly were shaped
by the Kāpil Maṭh tradition. He attempted in his scholarly writings to defend an
important assumption of Kāpil Maṭh, that the Yogasūtra existed at the time of
Buddha, that Buddha’s yoga teachers were Sāṃkhyayogins, and that Buddha’s
teachings were based on Sāṃkhya. One problem with this view that needed to be
considered was that, if the Yogasūtra existed at the time of Buddha and was the
basis for his teachings, why did Buddha not refer to the Yogasūtra? Bhattacharya
assumed that the Yogasūtra was well known by Buddha, and he tried to give some
possible reasons for the absence of references to it in the texts about the Bud-
dha (Bhattacharya 1985: 126–130). Bhattacharya gives a number of arguments
to defend this view. The most important reason is that Buddha was in agreement
with the Yogasūtra and “the yogic point of view” (Bhattacharya 1985: 127), and
therefore did not want to disprove it, and thus it was never mentioned among the
views Buddha refuted. Also, according to Bhattacharya, since no first-rate phi-
losopher approached Buddha for a solution to “higher philosophical problems”
(Bhattacharya 1985: 128), the Buddha “found no occasion to refer to works simi-
lar to the YS [Yogasūtra]” (Bhattacharya 1985: 128). Also, “Buddha’s refutation
of īśvara has no concern with Yogic īśvara,” but was “directed to the popular
īśvara” (Bhattacharya 1985: 129). And, finally, his concluding argument:
As Patañjali’s work was too well known in Buddha’s time, the followers of
Buddha thought it necessary to remove his name from Buddha’s sayings so
that Buddha could be described as the original thinker of the Yoga doctrine
he preached.
Bhattacharya also rejected the belief that any of the sūtras of Chapter 4 of the
Yogasūtra refuted Buddhist views or views held by anti-Patañjali schools, but
believed the sūtras were “for dispelling natural doubts” (Bhattacharya 1985: 39).
These arguments bear the mark of defending a statement of faith that “the Bud-
dha’s teachings seem to have been based on the YS [Yogasūtra]” (Bhattacharya
1985: 126) – i.e., that the Buddha was a follower of Sāṃkhyayoga – a view that
has little support in the current scholarship, but which is a central doctrine in the
Sāṃkhyayoga tradition of Kāpil Maṭh.8
Dr. Deepti Dutta, who has been Reader at the Department of Philosophy in
Miranda House College, University of Delhi, has also presented a history of
the development of Sāṃkhya in association with Kāpil Maṭh. She writes that
her desire to do research on Sāṃkhya came from her acquaintance with Kāpil
Maṭh, “where Sāṃkhya-Yoga is followed as a living tradition” (Dutta 2001: ix).
There, she writes, the spiritual discourses of Dharmamegha and the writings of
Hariharānanda Āraṇya opened for her “a treasure house of India’s ancient spir-
itual wisdom” (Dutta 2001: ix). She continues,
A close study of Sāṃkhya-Yoga, particularly as it is taught by

Sāṃkhyayogāchārya Swami Hariharānanda through his prolific writings in
Sanskrit and Bengali opens for me the praxis of a Universal Religion which
can be universally adapted but realized at the individual level.
(Dutta 2001: 1)
At the universities, she notes, Sāṃkhya is usually thought of as the pūrvapakṣa

(the view of the opponent) “to more popular Vedānta: its ground and force seem
to be lost. The basic truth about Yoga that it is grafted on Sāṃkhya metaphysic is
totally ignored” (Dutta 2001: ix). In other words, Sāṃkhya is “more criticised than
understood” and that Sāṃkhya is “the basic presupposition of Yoga” is neglected.
That is to say, the main project of Kāpil Maṭh, which is to convince the world that
the foundation of Yoga is Sāṃkhya, is still unfulfilled.
The Kāpil Maṭh version of yoga, which combined textual scholarship on
Sāṃkhya and Sāṃkhyayoga with Sāṃkhyayoga saṃnyāsin practice, did impress
some Western scholars who noted of its “authentic” (meaning traditional, little
influenced by the West, and in contrast to modern) understanding of the textual
tradition. A Western Indologist, Karel Werner, in his review of Jajneswar Ghosh’s
A Study of Yoga, wrote that this book when it was published in 1933 was probably
the first book promoting Yoga which had an acceptable academic standard. Wer-
ner’s review of the second revised edition, published in 1977, reads,
When the book was first published in 1933 it must have been one of the first
if not the first book arguing the case for Yoga which reached an acceptable
academic standard in handling its sources and in over-all presentation.
(Werner 1980: 100)
Werner notes in his review that Ghosh “was under the influence and guidance
of Sw. Hariharānanda Āraṇya.” That Ghosh’s book arguing the case for Yoga
was considered of acceptable academic standard is a tribute to Ghosh, but also to
Āraṇya, and it shows the textual foundation of Hariharānanda’s yoga. Ghosh starts
the book by stating: “For whatever is valuable in the present volume, I am indebted
to Sāṃkhya-Yogācāryya [sic] Srīmat Swāmī Hariharānanda Āraṇya and to his
excellent disciple, Srīmat Swāmī Dharmameghaprakāśa Āraṇya” (Ghosh 1977:
vii). Werner notes that the educated layman studying Yoga will find in Ghosh’s
book “indications of that philosophy’s depth and breadth which is normally miss-
ing in current popular Yoga literature” (Werner 1980: 100). It is probably because
the Yoga tradition of Āraṇya has a strong connection to the Indological interests
and academic material and the Sanskrit textual tradition that it is approved of by
Werner as the correct way of writing about yoga. Ghosh’s yoga is close to classical
Sāṃkhyayoga, which was not practiced in colonial India before it was restarted by
Āraṇya. The words “current popular Yoga literature” in Werner’s review possibly
refer to what we can call “modern yoga,” which by the 1930s had become a mix-
ture of occultism, Theosophy, Vedānta, body building, nature cure, and so on (see
Alter 2004, 2007; De Michelis 2004, 2008; Singleton 2008, 2010, 2013; Sjoman
1999; White 2014). Kāpil Maṭh did not belong to that strain of “Modern yoga”
but was an attempt to restart Sāṃkhyayoga as a form of orthodoxy based on the
knowledge of Sanskrit, admiration for ancient Indian philosophy, and the lifestyle
of a renunciant. Jajneswar Ghosh mainly refers to the classical Sanskrit sources
Vyāsabhāṣya, Sāṃkhyakārikā, Tattvavaiśāradī, Yogavārttika, and the texts of
Hariharānanda Āraṇya. There is no reference in Ghosh’s book to figures and con-
cepts associated with modern yoga. Werner’s words about the book by Ghosh can
be understood as a comment on how successful the restart of Sāṃkhyayoga by
Āraṇya had been in terms of orthodoxy. It was recognized as such by the Indolo-
gist! Ghosh indeed uses the term “orthodox yogī” in his book (1977 1933: 53), by
which he means yogins who follow the classical Sanskrit sources Vyāsabhāṣya,
Sāṃkhyakārikā, Tattvavaiśāradī, and Yogavārttika. Ghosh also wrote a book on
Sāṃkhya, Sāṃkhya and Modern Thought, in which he stated,
My object was . . . to convince my readers that old ideals and outlooks were
not necessarily obsolete as they might be trusted to correct that narrowness
of vision which is inseparable from complete absorption in present concerns
and troubles.
(Ghosh 1930 [1977]: ii)
This is in agreement with the view of Kāpil Maṭh, that classical Sāṃkhya is rel-
evant for our times.
But how did Ghosh understand “doing” Sāṃkhyayoga? The last chapter of A
Study of Yoga is called “The Discipline of Yoga” and contains discussions on prac-
tice. One interesting question is whether he sees the yogin only as a renunciant,
or if his yoga is also meant for laypersons, lay yogins, which is a mark of modern
yoga. But for Ghosh the proper yogin seems to be only the renunciant, because
he writes, “The yogi sees farther than we do in such matters [regarding the two
related principles of consciousness and change] because he has purged his mind
of interests and preoccupations” (Ghosh 1933 [1977]: 263). The description of the
yogin and his practice in the text is to a large degree based on the Vyāsabhāṣya.
It is based on the studying of texts, and the teachings of Hariharānanda Āraṇya
are based on those same texts, in addition to his Sāṃkhyayoga practice. The
description is of the ideals and the teachings about the realization of these ide-
als according to the philosophy of Yoga of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra. Ghosh
does operate with the concept of the yogin as one who practices the Yoga of the
Pātañjalayogaśāstra. But this is the new bhadralok yogin and the newness of this
yogin went unrecognized in the review by Werner, who seems to have read this
book as a text that is finally about “authentic yoga.” Scholarship on philosophical
yoga texts had given rise to a new type of “yoga orthodoxy,” and Werner’s review
of Jajneswar Ghosh’s book on Yoga reveals the points where the new orthodox
yoga of Hariharānanda Āraṇya and Kāpil Maṭh meet with the Indological scholar-
ship on classical Sāṃkhya and Yoga.
Many studies on modern yoga have elaborated on its popular forms as being
mixtures of occultism, Theosophy, Vedānta, gymnastics, body building, nature
cure, and so on. These are mainly absent in the yoga tradition of Hariharānanda
Āraṇya and Kāpil Maṭh. However, the new orthodox yoga of Hariharānanda
Āraṇya and Kāpil Maṭh is also a form of modern yoga in the sense that it was a
product of the renewed interest in yoga in nineteenth-century Bengal, especially
in the Pātañjalayogaśāstra, but it has instead meeting points with other aspects of
modernity, such as the new puritan culture of the Bengali bhadraloks and the new
Orientalist scholarship on Sāṃkhya and Yoga.
Notes
1 In this chapter, I include only scholars who are disciples of the Kāpil Maṭh tradition in
Madhupur and have received initiation (dikṣā) by one of the gurus.
2 Some of those who attained Pan-Indian or international fame and recognition were
Vivekānanda, Aurobindo, Paramahaṃsa Yogānanda, Praṇavānanda, and Anirvan.
3 Valdina (2013) has documented the increased interest in the Yogasūtra among Bengali
paṇḍits from the 1880s and 1890s.
4 See his letter written to Surama Dasgupta in 1936 in the collection of letters from Suren-
dranath Dasgupta published by Surama Dasgupta in 1971. See, especially, pp. 123–
124. Here he considered Sāṃkhyayoga only as an ancient philosophy, and not a living
tradition.
5 She writes, “To realize the oneness of all souls through disinterested service to human-
ity is what Swamiji [Vivekānanda] has called practical Vedānta. This practical Vedānta,
indeed, is the only form in which the teachings of Śaṅkara can be moulded without con-
tradiction, so as to become a world-religion, the saving knowledge of humanity for ages
to come” (Sen Gupta 1964: 142).
6 The idiosyncratic use of diacritics in Sen Gupta 1982 has been left unchanged in the
quotations from the book.
7 For a short review of Bhattacharya’s contributions, see “In Memoriam: Ram Shankar
Bhattacharya (1927–1996)” in Larson and Bhattacharya 2008: 13–16.
8 In his A History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature, Max Müller raised the matter of Buddha
and Kapila: “If both were omniscient, how could there be difference of opinion between
the two?” ( p. 102; quoted in Müller 1899: 415). The Kāpil Maṭh tradition has solved the
question by arguing that Buddha’s teachings were identical to Kapila’s.
Conclusion
The categories of thought of much of the Hindu tradition come from Sāṃkhya.
However, at the time of Hariharānanda Āraṇya, before he restarted it, the Sāṃkhya
system was hardly a living philosophical tradition and there was no monastic insti-
tution of Sāṃkhyayoga saṃnyāsins centered on Pātañjalayogaśāstra. Sāṃkhya
and Sāṃkhyayoga were mainly textual and historical realities. Āraṇya understood
the importance of Sāṃkhya in the Hindu tradition and that it was the founda-
tion of the Yoga system of religious thought of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra, and he
tried to make Sāṃkhya and Sāṃkhyayoga the basis for his life as a Sāṃkhyayoga
saṃnyāsin. For persons who encountered Āraṇya and were used to thinking of
Sāṃkhya as a system of philosophy of historical interest only, running into a
saṃnyāsin belonging to Sāṃkhyayoga was probably somewhat surprising. J.
N. Farquahar, who met Āraṇya in Calcutta in 1912, believed Āraṇya was the
last ascetic of a long lineage of Sāṃkhya saṃnyāsins on the verge of extinc-
tion. Āraṇya had understood that the Yoga philosophy of Pātañjalayogaśāstra
was originally a school of Sāṃkhya, and that it was quite different from Vedānta
philosophy and Haṭhayoga practices with which the text had become assimilated
at least from the seventeenth century. He restarted this tradition on his own and
on the basis of Sāṃkhya and Sāṃkhyayoga texts. Āraṇya became a saṃnyāsin
who attempted to follow the Pātañjalayogaśāstra, and he tried to create a new
Sāṃkhyayoga orthodoxy founded on this and other texts of Sāṃkhya philosophy.
Āraṇya’s Sanskrit and Bengali texts on Sāṃkhyayoga can be understood as an
attempt to re-establish a “classical tradition” of Sāṃkhyayoga. He based his life
on Sāṃkhyayoga and made it available as a living tradition to other saṃnyāsins
and to laypeople. Āraṇya had an excellent grasp of Sanskrit and composed
Sāṃkhyayoga philosophical texts in this language. His use of Sanskrit helped to
make it possible to imagine his texts in continuity with the ancient Sāṃkhyayoga
traditions. His practice as a cave dweller and his fondness for a solitary lifestyle
also provided the institution of Kāpil Maṭh with a key feature of an imagined ortho-
dox Sāṃkhyayoga. The still prevailing belief about yogins (Hausner 2007; White
2014) was that real yogins stayed in solitude in caves in the Himalayas. Āraṇya
also composed a number of Sanskrit stotras, a traditional form of Sanskrit poetry
that had continued to be cultivated into the twentieth century. This combination
of Sanskrit textual practice, cave dwelling, and a love for solitude contributed to
Conclusion 203
Āraṇya’s status as a traditional Sāṃkhyayogin, and probably made it possible for
some to misunderstand his identity and claim that he represented the ancient past
and was the last in a continuous lineage of teachers, representing an oral tradition
of teachers going back to a bygone era (Farquahar 1920; White 2014). However,
there was no such continuous lineage. The Sāṃkhya traditions have probably
been revived several times in Indian history and Hariharānanda Āraṇya most
likely represents such a revival in the late nineteenth century. As I have argued
in this book, there is no reliable description of a continuous Sāṃkhya tradition as
a spiritual practice in Indian history or of a continuous Sāṃkhyayoga tradition.
The practitioners of Sāṃkhya and Sāṃkhyayoga were probably always quite few.
There were most likely no large ancient Sāṃkhya and Sāṃkhyayoga institutions
comparable to the Buddhist or Jain monastic establishments. The Sāṃkhyayoga
of Kāpil Maṭh might not, therefore, be the first revival of Sāṃkhyayoga in the
history of the Hindu traditions. In that sense, the Sāṃkhyayoga of Kāpil Maṭh
can be considered traditional. Āraṇya’s unique vision was the attempt to restart
the ancient philosophy of Sāṃkhyayoga by focusing on, in his view, the same
goal and worldview as in the ancient tradition. This focus contrasts with many
traditions of modern yoga. These traditions have increasingly focused on benefits
in the here and now, such as freedom from stress and disease, with less emphasis
on the teaching of karma and rebirth and the goal of salvific liberation. Āraṇya’s
focus on the life of a saṃnyāsin following the Pātañjalayogaśāstra as a text of
Sāṃkhyayoga, with an emphasis on karma, samādhi and kaivalya, was probably
unique. He was most likely the only Sāṃkhyayoga saṃnyāsin of his time fol-
lowing the Pātañjalayogaśāstra until he gained a few devoted followers. The
attempt to revive the ancient philosophy of the Upaniṣads, as interpreted by
Advaita Vedānta, had dominated the so-called Hindu Renaissance, the religious
reform movements of the Bengali bhadraloks. Āraṇya understood the importance
of Sāṃkhya and Sāṃkhyayoga in ancient India, and made an attempt to restart
this philosophy as the oldest and “real” philosophy of ancient India based on
knowledge of texts. The teachings of Sāṃkhya and Sāṃkhyayoga are about the
ultimate aloneness of the self, and are quite opposite to the teachings of Advaita
Vedānta that state all beings share the same self. This merging of all beings into
the same self makes little sense for a person who is fond of solitude and aloneness
and is looking for freedom not only from the material world but also from other
human beings.
Kāpil Maṭh and persons associated with the Maṭh did create a new beginning of
Sāṃkhyayoga. By combining textual work with renunciant and monastic practice,
it managed to re-establish the ancient textual tradition of Sāṃkhyayoga as the
foundation of a living monastic practice. In particular, by means of his lifestyle as
a renunciant and his fondness for solitude, and the use of the Sanskrit language,
Āraṇya came to be understood as a representation of the “classical” Sāṃkhyayoga
tradition. It is significant, as was noted earlier, that in the volumes of the Encyclo-
pedia of Indian Philosophies dealing with Sāṃkhya and Yoga, only summaries of
texts written by Hariharānanda Āraṇya in Sanskrit are included (Śivoktayogayuktiḥ,
Paribhaktisūtra, Yogakārikā, Bhāsvatī, and Sāṃkhyatattvāloka) and not his
204 Conclusion
Bengali magnum opus Kāpilāśramiya Pātañjal Jogdarśan (Larson and Bhat-
tacharya 1987, 2008). This is probably because the Sanskrit language was thought
to provide a continuation with the “classical” philosophical tradition while texts
written in the vernaculars were thought to lack the quality of being “classical.”
However, increasing references in Āraṇya’s later Bengali texts to Western phi-
losophers and scientists show that the relationship of the institution was not only
with “classical” traditions but also with contemporary academic and research
environments. It was this educational environment Āraṇya renounced in order
to practice Sāṃkhyayoga as a saṃnyāsin. The mixture of classical and modern
is intriguing. In the medieval period, in the texts from the sixteenth century, the
yoga of the Yogasūtra had become united with Haṭhayoga (Mallinson 2014) and,
in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, become unified with Vedānta in
texts such as the Yogacintāmaṇi.1 At a time when interpretations of the Yogasūtra
had become much influenced by Haṭhayoga and Vedānta, and had also started to
become influenced by Western Esotericism (see De Michelis 2004), the Kāpil
Maṭh institution was able to recover the original Sāṃkhyayoga interpretation of the
Yogasūtra and give it institutional embodiment. Āraṇya argued that Sāṃkhya and
Sāṃkhyayoga was the philosophy of India, underlying both Hindu and Buddhist
traditions, and preserved in the Pātañjalayogaśāstra. Sāṃkhya and Sāṃkhyayoga
was the original solution to the problem of suffering (duḥkha) and needed to be
rediscovered and revitalized. Kapila’s teachings should be made available to those
whose saṃskāras made them gravitate toward the message of the Sāṃkhyayoga
of solitude and kaivalya due to their yoga practice in previous lives. Āraṇya was
quite aware that Sāṃkhyayoga appeals to a relatively small number of people.
The world can be known in two ways according to Sāṃkhyayoga, as bhoga,
which is associated with karma, and as apavarga, knowledge that leads to salvific
liberation, kaivalya. Most people in the world are involved with bhoga and do not
seek kaivalya. For Āraṇya, yoga is primarily for those few who seek to attain this
ultimate goal. The path to kaivalya is comprised of restraint, concentration, and
knowledge, and the institution of saṃnyāsa. The emphasis on yoga in the Kāpil
Maṭh tradition is on yama, niyama, and samādhi, and the salvific knowledge real-
ized in samādhi. Āsana and prāṇāyāma are little emphasized, but a few short texts
elaborate also on these features of yoga. Āsana, however, means sitting comfort-
ably on the floor in padmāsana and prāṇāyāma focusing on the breath as a way
of calming the mind.
Sāṃkhya was considered the oldest of the Indian philosophies, but the mantra
of the Kāpil Maṭh tradition, Om ādividuṣe kapilāya namaḥ, “Homage to Kapila,
the first knower,” was not an ancient mantra. It was invented by Hariharānanda
Āraṇya between 1900 and 1910, as Sāṃkhyayoga was adapted to the contempo-
rary context. It was invented, according to an editorial footnote in an essay written
by Hariharānanda Āraṇya, possibly because Āraṇya was “looking for a suitable
prelude to the set of hymns which he had composed (and published) for daily
recitation of aspirants” (see H. Āraṇya 2005b: 4n). Āraṇya had access to the core
texts of Sāṃkhya and Sāṃkhyayoga, which were his main sources. He seems to
have learned yoga theory from these texts, and probably also meditation practices,
Conclusion 205
and possibly also from college education and other ascetics, although he does not
seem to refer to other ascetics in his descriptions of meditation practices. But as a
saṃnyāsin he must have exchanged views on spiritual practices and experiences
with other ascetics he met on his travels and probably incorporated some of these
into his own practice. He was interested in Buddhism and understood Buddhism
to be based on the teachings of Kapila – that is, on Sāṃkhya and Sāṃkhyayoga –
and seems also to have been influenced by Buddhist texts. He does not mention in
his texts, as far as I have been able to discern in the texts I have read, meeting any
Buddhist monk. Āraṇya exemplifies the ancient ideal of the renunciant living out-
side of society found in Jainism and Early Buddhism, and promoted in Hindu texts
such as the Saṃnyāsa Upaniṣads and the Dharmaśāstra literature. But in his own
time, Āraṇya represented a new type of yogin, as has been argued in this book,
the upper-class and caste yogin who had modern education, tried to connect to the
ancient philosophical tradition of Yoga darśana and, at the same time, distanced
himself from most of the contemporary yoga phenomena. Orientalist scholars had
revitalized the knowledge of this ancient tradition and Theosophists and others
had created a greater interest in it. This new bhadralok yogin distanced himself
from much that was associated with the contemporary yogins and their yoga prac-
tices, which represented different and mistaken traditions of yoga, according to
Āraṇya. The ancient philosophical tradition of Sāṃkhyayoga represented the real
yoga. However, since Sāṃkhyayoga was not associated with any living tradition
of yogins and no living tradition of Sāṃkhyayogins that Hariharānanda could
learn from was available, this real yoga had to be learned through texts, the key
texts being the Pātañjalayogaśāstra and the Tattvavaiśāradī. On the other hand,
his disciples could receive oral instructions from him. He made Sāṃkhyayoga
a possible option for Hindu saṃnyāsins and Sāṃkhyayoga a living monastic
practice.
Āraṇya learned Sāṃkhyayoga from books by experimenting with its yoga
instructions while living in isolation in a cave, but he probably never encountered
another Sāṃkhyayogin except his own disciples. In his fictional autobiography
A Unique Travelogue, a few contemporary persons who met the book’s narra-
tor, the ascetic Śivadhyān, were introduced but none of them were identified as
Sāṃkhyayogins. Āraṇya might have encountered followers of Kapila since the
ascetics of the Mahānirvāṇī Akhāṛā worship Kapila as their guru and Kapila is
the main divinity worshiped at the Gaṅgā Sāgar festival on the island of Sagar,
south of Kolkata. The person who initiated him into saṃnyāsin might possibly
have been a Kapila worshiper, but his identity is not known, the only known fact
about him is that he was completely silent and that the meeting lasted only a few
hours.
Kāpil Maṭh promotes the dualistic vision of Sāṃkhyayoga. What we usu-
ally experience as the unity of consciousness, mind, and body are really based
on the coming together of two separate principles, the principle of conscious-
ness ( puruṣa) and the principle of matter ( prakṛti). Hariharānanda Āraṇya tried
to restart the yoga of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra as it was practiced before the
medieval period. When Āraṇya became a saṃnyāsin, there was an emerging
206 Conclusion
interest among intellectuals in the Sāṃkhyayoga texts as part of the growing
interest in ancient India and ancient Indian intellectual traditions, as well as the
institution of saṃnyāsa. Āraṇya, however, does not seem to have been satis-
fied with mere intellectualism but was interested in Sāṃkhyayoga as a spiritual
practice, testing it as self-experience. It is difficult to know what came first,
Āraṇya’s encounter with Sāṃkhyayoga teachings or his longing for the life as a
saṃnyāsin. But the Sāṃkhyayoga teachings provided him with a possible spir-
itual practice, and solitude offered him the opportunity to test this as a spiritual
practice (sādhanā).
Āraṇya’s project has a modern dimension to it. It is an attempt to purify the tra-
ditions of yoga and promote the Yogasūtra’s original Sāṃkhyayoga philosophical
framework and to recover the institution of saṃnyāsa. His project has similarities
to the bhadralok project of the purification of Hinduism and celebration of the
saṃnyāsin, and the Orientalist project of glorifying India’s ancient past and its
philosophy. The Pātañjalayogaśāstra tradition that Āraṇya promoted made avail-
able a tradition of Hinduism that emphasized individualism, rationalism, a reli-
gious practice independent of Brāhmaṇ priests, and a scripture free of rituals. The
new forms of orthodoxy adopted and assimilated new elements. The orthodox
dimension of Āraṇya’s yoga, however, meant that the institution of saṃnyāsin and
the goal of kaivalya were included, and the emphasis on saṃskāras and vāsanās,
and karma and rebirth as keys for analyzing the human being, were taken into
consideration as well. Āraṇya was not interested in, as were the modernists, of
making the goals of yoga easily accessible. Quite the opposite, he emphasized
the difficulty of yoga and the attainment of the goals of yoga as only possible
for saṃnyāsins. His main interest seems to have been to present the true yoga
of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra as Sāṃkhyayoga, and to counter those yogins and
saṃnyāsins who he thought did not represent the perceived greatness of the yoga
traditions of ancient India and the institution of saṃnyāsin, or those who did not
understand the yoga traditions correctly. He was convinced that those yogins who
were inclined toward samādhi had perfected āsana and prāṇāyāma in their previ-
ous lives and they should now only practice the yoga of samādhi as promoted in
the Pātañjalayogaśāstra.
In the introduction, I quoted from J. N. Farquahar’s An Outline of the Religious
Literature of India. The author reported that he had met a Sāṃkhya saṃnyāsin
in Kolkata and wrote that, “as late as 1912,” a learned Sāṃkhya saṃnyāsin was
alive and teaching in Kolkata (Farquahar 1920: 289). By using the phrase “as
late as 1912,” I argued that Farquahar seemed to imply that Āraṇya came from
a larger premodern tradition that was thought to be on the verge of dying out,
and that Āraṇya was one of the few or the only one left. However, I have seen
Farquahar’s sentence quoted also in the publications of Kāpil Maṭh, but here,
intriguingly, some mistakes in the quotation have been made. Ram Shankar Bhat-
tacharya in the preface to the second edition of Yoga Philosophy of Patañjali
(1977 edition, see Bhattacharya 1981: xviii) and reprinted in the later editions
(H. Āraṇya 1981), T. S. Mukherjee, in a short essay on Hariharānanda Āraṇya,
and Adinath Chatterjee in the Preface of the fourth edition of Yoga Philosophy of
Conclusion 207
Patañjali (Chatterjee 2000: xix)2 all state that J. N. Farquahar, in his book “The
Religious Quest of India,” wrote,
Sāṃkhya Sannyāsins are [now] so rare that it is of interest to know that, as

early [late] as 1912, a learned Sāṃkhya-yati named Hariharānanda was alive
and teaching in Calcutta.
(Bhattacharya 1981: xviii; Chatterjee 2000: xviii–ix;
Mukherjee 2001: 38)
The words in brackets are the words from Farquahar’s original statement, which
are missing from Bhattacharya’s, Mukherjee’s and Chatterjee’s quotations. They
have erased the word “now,” deleted the word “late,” and instead inserted “early,”
thus altering the meaning of the statement. In Farquahar’s statement, the words
“as late as” present Āraṇya as coming from an old tradition that was on the verge
of dying out. In Bhattacharya’s and Mukherjee’s quotations of Farquahar, on the
other hand, their use of the words “as early as” rather than “as late,” makes Āraṇya
appear instead as an early representative of a new and emerging Sāṃkhyayoga
tradition. “As early as” refers probably furthermore to the remarkable twentieth-
century yoga revival. Āraṇya is one of the earliest in this modern revival of yoga.
From the way they have changed the quotation, it is discernible that the yoga
teachings of Āraṇya and the institution of Kāpil Maṭh represent for the follow-
ers a modern Sāṃkhyayoga tradition, now almost 100 years old. It emerged as a
response to the search for a puritanical and ascetic Hindu philosophy influenced
by the glorification of the ideal of the saṃnyāsin and ancient Indian philosophy
that characterized the so-called Bengali renaissance or the New Hinduism, or
what we now recognize as early modern Hinduism, and represents an early repre-
sentative of the yoga revival.
Āraṇya was probably a product of that same interest in yoga in Bengal that led
to the printing of several editions of the Yogasūtra in Sanskrit and the translation
of the text into different languages in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
Sanskrit editions that included the Vyāsabhāṣya and the Tattvavaiśāradī were also
printed and among those who bought Sanskrit books was Hariharānanda Āraṇya.
An intellectual and religious revival had a vision of India as a great ancient civi-
lization, the ideals of which could be re-enacted in the contemporary world, and
this revival had also generated a new interest in the ancient Indian philosophical
traditions of Sāṃkhya and Sāṃkhyayoga. It led to new interpretations but also to
new forms of orthodoxy. The teachings of modern yoga often claim to be derived
from or to follow the Yogasūtra but often without recognizing the teachings of the
text as a school of Sāṃkhya – i.e., Sāṃkhyayoga – and typically not naming it
as such. The yoga tradition of Hariharānanda Āraṇya and Kāpil Maṭh, however,
is named Sāṃkhyayoga and builds on the Sāṃkhyayoga philosophy promoted in
the Pātañjalayogaśāstra. When classifying yoga movements of the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries, we also need to include this new orthodox Sāṃkhyayoga
as one of the forms of yoga in modern Hinduism. This inclusion may bring about
greater awareness of Sāṃkhyayoga as the philosophy of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra.
208 Conclusion
Notes
1 Mallinson writes, “The period of composition of the hathayogic corpus came at a time
when the Śaiva Age was reaching its end and Vedānta was becoming the dominant par-
adigm of scholarly religious thought. Haṭhayoga’s partiality for Vedāntic non-duality
would by then have raised few sectarian hackles” (Mallinson 2014: 238).
2 The preface is reprinted in the third edition, pp. xvii – xviii. Adinath Chatterjee, in
his preface to Hariharānanda Āranya Yoga Philosophy of Patañjali with Bhāsvatī (H.
Āranya 2000), writes that Bhattacharya had “aptly quoted a statement of J. N. Farqua-
har” and repeats the quote from Bhattacharya (Chatterjee 2000: xviii).
Appendix
Some publications of the Kāpil
Maṭh tradition
Books, booklets, and articles of the gurus and disciples of Kāpil Maṭh have come
in several editions and in many languages (Bengali, Sanskrit, Hindi, and English).
Followers of the Maṭh have done all translations. Different editions of the same
book may contain revisions and editorial changes, and translations of texts may
involve interpretations that are dissimilar from those intended by the author. This
reflects that Kāpil Maṭh is a living tradition, though a very small one in terms of
followers, and that it is still developing. In new editions and in translations, mem-
bers of the Maṭh may have added notes or removed material. In the “Preface to the
Second Edition” of the University of Calcutta’s edition of the Yoga Philosophy of
Patañjali, which is an English translation of the Bengali Kāpilāśramīya Pātañjal
Jogdarśan (“The Yoga Philosophy of Patañjali of the Kāpilāśram”), Ram Shankar
Bhattacharya, the prominent Sāṃkhyayoga scholar who was based in Vārāṇasī
and who was a disciple of Kāpil Maṭh, noted that the English edition “does not
contain a number of passages of the original work dealing with esoteric Yoga prac-
tices, which have been left out by the translator for obvious reasons” (Bhattacharya
1981: xvii). What Bhattacharya means by “obvious reasons” is unclear, since all
these passages were included in the Bengali edition and were thus not esoteric but
available to anyone who could read Bengali. Perhaps he had non-Hindus in mind
and assumed non-Hindus would not know Bengali. Bhattacharya translated that
same text into Hindi, which has been published by Motilal Banarsidass, and with a
reprint edition in 2017 (Bhattacharya 2017), containing corrections and additions
by the Kāpil Maṭh.1 It would perhaps be a worthy task to identify these supposed
passages on “esoteric Yoga practices” in the Bengali (and the Hindi?) editions.
On the other hand, when I confronted Bhāskara Āraṇya, the current head of Kāpil
Maṭh, with this statement from Bhattacharya, he denied that there were passages
in the Bengali edition that had not been included in the English translation.2
An example of a reprint of an article that is not identical to the original but is
a revised edition is Hariharānanda Āraṇya’s “Preface to the Dharmapadam,” the
preface to his translation of the Pāli text Dhammapada into Sanskrit. This preface
was originally printed in English in the Bengali edition, one of the few texts by
Hariharānanda Āraṇya originally published in English, and it was kept in English
in the Hindi translation of the Dhammapada as well (H. Āraṇya 1996: i; H Āraṇya
210 Appendix
1988b: 0.10). In an English-language book compilation of translated essays, let-
ters, and miscellaneous writings, the Progressive and Practical Sāṃkhyayoga,
published by Kāpil Maṭh in 2003, the essay is reprinted, together with a number of
other texts. In the second paragraph of the first page of the article, nine lines have
been deleted. The paragraph starts with the statement, “The doctrine of nirvāṇa is
very little understood by modern scholars.” The next nine lines of the paragraph,
which have been deleted, read as follows:
Dr. Rajendralal Mitra in speaking about Nirvana says, “I had made long
extracts in illustration of how it is at one time made equivalent to eternal – a
primordial cæca, or the abode of eternal bliss, or exemption from transmigra-
tion; and at another time a positive nothing or nihility; but as I find I would
be, after all, in the same predicament as honest Cicero, when he said, ‘though
I have translated the Timæus of Plato, I do not understand it.” (Lalita Vistara,
p. 31).
(H. Āraṇya 2003: 18)
After this Āraṇya adds, “Even Bhikṣus and Sannyāsins of the present under-
stand very little about it, and very few among them strive for its attainment.”
The person who edited the volume, Adinath Chatterjee, might have thought that
the reference to nineteenth-century Indian Indologist Rājendralāla Mitra had lit-
tle relevance these days, as most English readers would not know about him,
although he had been famous in Bengal, or Bhāskara Āraṇya might have thought
so and decided to delete the lines. However, no explanation is given. The deleted
lines do perhaps carry some significance since Rājendralāla Mitra (1822–1891)
was a leading Bengali intellectual in his time. He was the first leading Indologist
of Indian origin, the first Indian president of the Asiatic Society, a main figure
of the so-called Indian Renaissance, a translator of the textual tradition of Yoga
philosophy, and a prominent intellectual in Kolkata.3 The text shows Āraṇya
in an intellectual exchange with him, and the deletion hides this connection of
Āraṇya to Indology in nineteenth-century Kolkata. To de-emphasize or hide this
connection was perhaps the reason for its deletion, or the connection were just
considered irrelevant. Āraṇya very rarely quoted or referred to contemporary
Indian scholars, but he seems to have been very aware of Rājendralāla Mitra
Indological writings.
In this book, no systematic attempt has been made to compare the Ben-
gali, Sanskrit, Hindi, and English editions with regards to deletions and addi-
tions. The main objective of this study is not to investigate how editions differ,
although that may be a worthy study that could reveal changes over time. In this
appendix, I present some bibliographical information of the published texts of
the Kāpil Maṭh. The published texts of the Kāpil Maṭh tradition have involved
a large number of people: authors, editors, and translators, all of whom were
members of the Maṭh. The most prolific writer of the gurus was Hariharānanda
Āraṇya. It is his person, writings, and yoga practice that make up the founda-
tion of Kāpil Maṭh.
Appendix 211
Texts published by gurus and disciples of Kāpil Maṭh
Hariharānanda Āraṇya’s writings are voluminous. His texts were written in San-
skrit and Bengali, and a few pages in English. The Sanskrit and Bengali texts
have been translated into English and Hindi. He published books and a large
number of essays and shorter texts, which have appeared in various publications
of the Kāpil Maṭh. Many of these essays and shorter texts have been reprinted
and translated in collections and appendixes of books, but mostly without biblio-
graphic information about when and where they were originally printed. An exact
chronological bibliography is not available.4 Some basic information is as fol-
lows: The same year as Hariharānanda Āraṇya became a wandering saṃnyāsin,
in 1892 (B. Āraṇya 2003: xii), his first text “Śivoktayogayuktiḥ,” composed in
Sanskrit ślokas, was published (H. Āraṇya 2006b). The book Yogakārikā (H.
Āraṇya 2008b) was also apparently written in 1892, according to the information
provided in the “foreword” by Dharmamegha Āraṇya (D. Āraṇya 2008: iii). The
Yogakārikā consists of a kārikā text on the Yoga darśana with a Sanskrit commen-
tary. It was published in 1910. Sāṃkhyatattvāloka, an independent Sanskrit text
on Sāṃkhya, was published in 1903, according to information provided by Kāpil
Maṭh. The Sanskrit text Sāṃkhya-sūtras of Pañcaśikha was published with an
English translation in 1934. The most used edition of these two texts is the 1936
publication, edited by Jajneswar Ghosh and with a foreword by Gopinath Kaviraj,
which was republished by Motilal Banarsidass in 1977 (H. Āraṇya 1977a, 1977b).
Apūrba bhramaṇbṛttānta (A Unique Travelogue), the Bengali fictional autobi-
ography, was published under the pseudonym Śivadhyāna Brahmacārī in 1907,
English translation in 2001 (H. Āraṇya 2001, 2006a). The Kāpilāśramīya Pātañjal
Jogdarśan commentary on the Pātañjalayogaśāstra in Bengali was published in
1911. The book contains the Sanskrit text of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra with a trans-
lation into Bengali accompanied by a detailed in Bengali commentary (H. Āraṇya
1988a). The Kāpilāśramīya Pātañjal Jogdarśan was translated into Hindi the first
time in 1953 and published by Lucknow University, translated into English by
P. N. Mukherjee, and published by the University of Calcutta in 1963 as Yoga
Philosophy of Patañjali (H. Āraṇya 1981) The same book was published in the
United States by the State University of New York Press in 1983. The Sanskrit
commentary text on the Pātañjalayogaśāstra, the Bhāsvati was published in 1933
by Kāpil Maṭh and in Varanasi in 1934 by Chaukhambha Sanskrit Sansthan. In the
1934 edition, it was printed in a book that included several classical commentar-
ies on the Pātañjalayogaśāstra, the Tattvavaiśāradī by Vācaspatimiśra, Pātañjala
Rahasya by Rāghavānanda Sārasvatī, and the Yogavārtika of Vijñānabhikṣu (see
Śāstrī 1989). Bhāsvatī was translated by Adinath Chatterjee and Deepti Dutta and
included in an edition of Yoga Philosophy of Patañjali with Bhāsvatī published
by the University of Calcutta in 2000 (H. Āraṇya 2000: 409–632; for a summary
of the philosophical arguments of the text see Larson and Bhattacharya 2008:
379–396). The Bengali Saral Sāṃkhyajog (Easy Sāṃkhyayoga), a summary
of Sāṃkhyayoga, was published in 1914 (H. Āraṇya 1977c). The Sanskrit text
Paribhaktisūtra with the Lalitā commentary was published in 1925 or earlier.
212 Appendix
An English translation is available in Hariharānanda Āraṇya, Divine Hymns and
Supreme Devotional Aphorisms, pp. 53–93 (Kāpil Maṭh 2007; for a summary of
the text, see Larson and Bhattacharya 2008: 369–372). Hariharānanda Āraṇya
composed hymns in Sanskrit, collected in Stotrasaṃgraha, which has been trans-
lated into English and Hindi. The English translation was, according to the Eng-
lish edition published by Kāpil Maṭh, carried out by Avijit Dutt, but some of the
hymns were already translated by Hariharānanda Āraṇya himself (H. Āraṇya
2007: v). Those hymns were printed in the English edition, both with Āraṇya’s
original translation and the new one by Avijit Dutt. Karmatattva, a Bengali text
that Bhāskara Āraṇya calls Hariharānanda Āraṇya’s “last major work” (B. Āraṇya
2008: vi), was published in 1931 (English translation H. Āraṇya 2008b). The
Sāṃkhya Catechism, which consists of excerpts from the texts of Hariharānanda
Āraṇya translated into English by Vivekaprakāśa Brahmacārī, a monk and disciple
of Hariharānanda Āraṇya, was published in 1935 (Brahmacārī 1935; H. Āraṇya
2014). It marked an important attempt to reach the English-speaking world. In
Hariharānanda Āraṇya’s two-page Sanskrit text, “Vararatnamālā” (“A Garland of
the Best of the Jewels”), Āraṇya wrote that Buddha was the foremost of the noble
followers of Sāṃkhya (mahānubhāvasāṃkhyeṣu śākyamuniḥ), and Āraṇya’s con-
viction that the Buddha was a follower of the teaching of Sāṃkhya led him to
translate two Buddhist texts: the Dhammapada (from Pāli to Sanskrit) published
in 1905 (H. Āraṇya 1988b) and the Bodhicaryāvatāra (from Sanskrit to Bengali)
published in 1918 (H. Āraṇya 1998). Some books of Hariharānanda Āraṇya have
been printed in selections of essays and some exist in several editions such as
the Srutisāra (“Essence of the Śruti”), found in Hindi translation, and a shorter
Saṃkṣiptaśrutisāra (“Condensed Essence of the Śruti”), found in English trans-
lation (H. Āraṇya 2007: 97–121). The text contains excerpts from the Vedas in
Sanskrit and in translation. A number of essays and shorter texts of Hariharānanda
Āraṇya have been published in Bengali, Hindi, and English editions. Most easily
accessible in English are those collected in the books Progressive and Practical
Sāṃkhya-Yoga ( published by Kāpil Maṭh in 2003), Sāṃkhya Across the Millen-
niums ( published by Kāpil Maṭh in 2005), and The Doctrine of Karma ( published
by Kāpil Maṭh in 2008), and those found in the appendixes in Yoga Philosophy of
Patañjali with Bhāsvatī ( published by the University of Calcutta in 2000) and in
other editions and texts.
The writings of Dharmamegha Āraṇya have been collected in three books.
Śānti-lipi (Letters of Peace) was published in Bengali in 1938 and translated into
English in 1989 as Epistles of a Sāṃkhyayogin. This book consists of letters writ-
ten by Dharmamegha Āraṇya to his disciples. The book Jog-Sopān was based on
notes written in 1908 when Dharmamegha spent his summer and autumn vaca-
tions in the Kāpil Āśram in Triveṇī, where Hariharānanda Āraṇya resided while
working on his Bengali translation of and commentary on the Yogasūtra and the
Yogabhāṣya (D. Āraṇya 1980; see also O. Āraṇya, “Nivedana” in Yogasopāna,
Hindi translation, n.d. and B. Āraṇya 2003: xii). The third book, Iti Śuśruma,
contains speeches and instructions recorded on tape or in the forms of notes by
followers. It was published after the death of Dharmamegha in 1985 and was
Appendix 213
translated from Bengali into English in 2003 as So Have We Heard. These texts
show great insights into the spiritual practice of the Sāṃkhyayoga teaching.
Texts by other monks of the Kāpil Maṭh tradition include books by Aditya
Prakāś Āraṇya and texts by Bhāskara Āraṇya and Omprakāś Āraṇya. Aditya
Prakāś Āraṇya, a monk in the Kāpil Maṭh tradition, stayed in periods at the Maṭh
and wrote books such as Amṛtavāṇī va sādhan-path, translated into Hindi by
Omprakāś Āraṇya (A. P. Āraṇya n.d.), and an English book called Samkhyayoga
tattva published in 1996 (A. P. Āraṇya 1996). Kāpilārām “Guhā” published both
books. In the dedication (samarpaṇ) of the book Amṛtavāṇī va sādhanapath, the
author writes that he is a disciple of Dharmamegha Āraṇya. A text by the first
lay disciple of Hariharānanda Āraṇya, Binay Krishna Mukhopadhyay, was first
published in Bengali in 1925 as Dharm Paricay and translated into English in
2001 as Way to Eternal Peace (Mukhopadhyay 2001). Bhāskara Āraṇya has writ-
ten prefaces to a number of the publications of Kāpil Maṭh. Omprakāś Āraṇya
has translated most of the writings of Hariharānanda Āraṇya and Dharmamegha
Āraṇya into Hindi and a few other books such as the volumes by Aditya Prakāś
Āraṇya and Binay Krishna Mukhopadhyay. In all, more than 25 translations were
published by the monastic institutions led by Omprakāś Āraṇya, first Kāpilārām,
and later Sāṃkhyayogāśram, situated in the Varanasi/Sarnath area. Kāpil Maṭh
also publishes a journal in Bengali called Sāṃkhyāyan, which appears irregularly,
which also contains articles mainly in Bengali and a few in English written by the
gurus and disciples of Kāpil Maṭh.
Texts by scholars on Sāṃkhyayoga who have been disciples of the Kāpil Maṭh
tradition include those of Ram Shankar Bhattacharya, Surama Dasgupta, Jajne-
swar Ghosh, Anima Sen Gupta, and Deepti Dutta. This tradition of Kāpil Maṭh lay
disciple scholarship was dealt with in Chapter 10.
Notes
1 Information provided by Bhāskara Āraṇya, interview March 2017.
2 Personal communication with Bhāskara Āraṇya at Kāpil Maṭh, March 2016. However
Ayon Maharaj notes ”It should be noted that Mukherji’s translation of PJD is often unre-
liable, as it omits many phrases and even whole sentences from the original Bengali
text” (Maharaj 2013: 58).
3 There are a number of biographical writings on Rājendralāla Mitra. See Iyengar 1991:
95–109.
4 Asoke Chattopadhyay is a disciple of Kāpil Maṭh and has translated some of
Hariharānanda Āraṇya’s texts. He is the son of Adinath Chatterjee, who is a main trans-
lator of Hariharānanda Āraṇya’s texts into English. Asoke Chattopadhyay wrote in an
e-mail to me, “I have told the Secretary of Kapil Math that there should be a catalogue
of all H. Aranya’s writings. He said that it is yet to be done” (Asoke Chattopadhyay,
personal communication, 14.8.2016). Ram Shankar Bhattacharya in the preface to the
second edition of the Hindi translation of Pātañjal Yogadarśan, enumerates 21 publica-
tions of Hariharānanda Āraṇya (Bhattacharya 2017: xii–xiii).
Glossary
abhyāsa practice
ācārya a specialist in the field of one or more of the śāstras
āgama reliable testimony
ahaṃkāra ego
ahiṃsā non-injury
anāhatanāda unstruck sound
anumāṇa inference
apavarga liberation from rebirth
asaṃprajñātasamādhi concentration without content
āsana posture
āśaya karmic trace
asmitāmātrā pure I-sense
āśrama monastery, dwelling place for ascetics
ātman self
avasthā condition
avidyā ignorance
bhadralok a socially privileged and consciously superior group in
colonial Bengal
bhoga experience of pleasure and pain
bhūmi one of the five stages of awareness (kṣipta, mūḍha,
vikṣipta, ekāgra and niruddha)
buddhi intellect, pure I-sense
citta mental organ, mind
darśana a Brāhmaṇical systems of religious thought
dhāraṇā fixation
dharmamegha a final stage of samādhi
dharmin substratum
dhyāna meditation
draṣṭṛ seer, witness, subject
dṛśya seen, witnessed, object
durgāpūjā a main festival in Bengal, celebrates goddess Durgā
duḥkha suffering
ekāgra one-pointed, a stage of awareness
grahaṇa internal or external sense
Glossary 215
grahitṛ the receiver, empirical self
grāhya object knowable by the senses
guhā cave
guṇas three constituents of prakṛti: sattva, rajas and tamas
hṛdaya heart
hṛdayapuṇḍarīka the innermost part of the heart, heart lotus
īśvara a god, a particular puruṣa ( puruṣaviśeṣa), which has
never been bound, but not an additional principle
(tattva)
īśvarapraṇidhāna devotion to īśvara, a method of concentration that
leads to salvific liberation
japa repetition of mantra
jñāna discernment, knowledge
jñānendriyas the five sense capacities
jīvanmukta person liberated while still alive
jīvanmukti the state of being liberated while still alive
kaivalya salvific liberation, isolation, aloneness
karmāśaya karmic trace
karmendriyas five action capacities
kleśa affliction
kṣipta distracted, a stage of awareness
kuṭi hut
liṅgaśarīra the subtle body that transmigrates at death according
to Sāṃkhya
mahābhūtas five gross elements
manas mind
mandir temple
maṭh monastery, dwelling place for ascetics
mauna silence, silent
mokṣa release from rebirth following from the realization of
the separateness of puruṣa
mūḍha sluggish, a stage of awareness
mūrti statue of a divinity or sacred person used for pūjā
nidrā dreamless sleep, one of the activities of normal
awareness
nirguṇa without qualities
nirodha cessation
niruddha suppressed, a stage of awareness
nirvicāra the state of being absorbed, when related to empirical
awareness without notions
nirvitarka the state of being absorbed, when related to empirical
awareness without words
niyama observance, purifications
paṇḍit traditional specialist in Sanskrit language and Sanskrit
traditions of knowledge
paravairāgya highest renounciation
216 Glossary
pariṇāma change, transformation
prajñā knowledge
prakṛti material principle
pramāṇa means of valid knowledge, one of the activities of nor-
mal awareness
prāṇāyāma control of the breath
pratyakṣa perception
pūjā ritual worship of divinities and sacred persons
puruṣa self, principle of pure consciousness
rajas energy, one of the three guṇas
ṛtambarā prajñā truth-bearing insight
saguṇa with qualities
sākṣin witness consciousness
samādhi concentration
samāpatti engrossment of the mind on the object of meditation
saṃnyāsin ascetic
saṃprajñātasamādhi concentration with content
saṃvega awareness of the painfulness of saṃsāra
śāstras Sanskrit textual traditions of knowledge
sattva clarity, lightness, one of the three guṇas
savicāra the state of being absorbed, when related to pure con-
templation with notions
savitarka the state of being absorbed, when related to empirical
awareness involving words
smṛti memory, one of the activities of normal awareness
stotra Sanskrit devotional composition meant to be sung or
recited
tamas darkness, one of the three guṇas
tanmātras the five subtle elements
tattva principle, in Sāṃkhya reality is constituted by 25
tattvas
vairāgya dispassion
vāsanā imprint, impression
vikalpa verbal construction, one of the activities of normal
awareness
vikṣipta partially distracted, a stage of awareness
viparyaya error, one of the activities of normal awareness
viveka discernment
vivekakhyāti discriminative knowledge
vṛttis the five activities of normal awareness ( pramāṇa,
viparyaya, vikalpa, nidrā and smṛti)
yama restraint, ethical rule
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Index
ācārya 11 and cave dwelling 29, 33, 127 – 128

ādividuṣe kapilāya namaḥ 30, 82, 161, comparison with Vivekānanda 65 – 67
186, 204 and dating of the Yogasūtra 47 – 49
ahaṃkāra 13, 15, 73, 98, 122, 130, 134, enigmatic figure of the early history of
136, 170, 171 modern yoga 1
ahiṃsā 24, 48, 90, 106 – 107, 155, 160, and extraordinary powers 112 – 115
178, 188n1 focus on vāsanās and saṃskāras 63
aloneness, doctrine of 66, 116, 126 – 128, following the strict discipline of the
157, 159, 203 saṃnyāsin 3, 71
apavarga 92, 106, 122, 204; see also and Hiraṇyagarbha 94 – 97
salvific liberation and the guruparamparā of
Apūrba bhramaṇbṛttānta (A Unique Sāṃkhyayoga 177, 178, 179
Travelogue) 33 – 34, 56, 73, 74, and the ideal yogin 106 – 108
139 – 146, 180 initiated by a yogin who had taken a
Āraṇya, Āditya Prakāś 188n4 vow of silence 73
Āraṇya, Bhāskara 32, 34, 72, 73, 157, 158, insistence on traditional correctness
162, 177 3, 67
Āraṇya, Dharmamegha 30 – 32 and īśvara 101 – 103, 196 – 197
and cave dwelling 34, 124 and jīvanmukti 116 – 117
and Epistles of a Sāṃkhyayogin 24 and kaivalya 99 – 103
guru of Ram Shankar Bhattacharya and Kapila 4, 36 – 38, 48, 82
26 – 27 karma theory of 103 – 104
and the guruparamparā of Kāpil Maṭh meditation instruction of 128 – 146
177, 186 and meditation on the heart 101 – 103,
memorial day of 29, 162 109, 110, 111, 112, 159
on the relationship between Sāṃkhya memorial day of 29
and Yoga 33 mentioned by J. N. Farquahar 2, 69,
samādhisthāna of 180 206 – 207
and solitude 127 and modern science 57, 119 – 122
writings of 125 most important work of 26
yoga as defined by 129 and nivṛtti dharma 48 – 49
and Yogeśvara 159 personal inclination for solitude of 3
Āraṇya, Hariharānanda and prāṇāyāma 93, 109 – 110
and Apūrba bhramaṇbṛttānta 56, and relationship between the subject and
139 – 146 object 105 – 106
and āsanas 92, 108 – 109 and samādhi 97 – 99
and Bhagavadgītā 3, 117 – 118 samādhisthāna of 180, 181
and bhakti 117 – 119 Sāṃkhyayoga of 20 – 21
and Buddhism 41, 47, 48, 116, 205 Sāṃkhyayoga orthodoxy of 81, 189, 200
Index 229
and saṃyama 110 – 112 cessation of identifying oneself with
and solitude 33 – 34 104, 131, 132, 148, 180
sources of his yoga teaching 69 – 86 citta different from 113 – 114
stotras of 147, 160 – 175 controlling the 12, 77
unique vision to restart the philosophy and health 21
of Sāṃkhyayoga of 203 an inanimate object 159
and views of contemporary yoga and mind can be detached from 132
yogins 55 – 56 mortality of 149 – 151, 159, 177,
and the Vyāsabhāṣya 47, 91 – 117 180, 184
wanted to establish a purified tradition motionlessness of 89, 134, 136, 137
of yoga 33 postures 19, 92, 98, 108 – 109, 129, 159
writings of 55, 88 – 122, 124, 128 – 146 puruṣa different from 184
and the Yogasūtra 60, 6, 91 – 117, 159 and space (ākāśa) 114
Āraṇya, Omprakāś 32, 86n8, 125, subtle 15, 115, 133
146 – 153, 178, 184 suspending all movements of 103, 149
Āraṇya, Trilokī 7, 72 – 73, 74, 82, 86n1, book printing 81
86n6, 163, 179 brahman 90, 91, 102, 117, 137, 138
ārṣa dharma 48, 96, 123n5 Brāhmo Samāj 49, 58, 61 – 62, 75, 96, 189
ārṣaism 48, 123n5 Bronkhorst, Johannes 16, 18, 22n12, 42
Arthaśāstra 16 Bronner, Yigal 173, 176n19
Ārya Samāj 69, 96 Broomfield, J. H. 28
asamprajñāta 14, 98 – 99, 101, 102, 108 Buddha 7, 40 – 46, 49, 51n14, 117, 163,
āsana/āsan 19, 75, 90, 91, 92, 108 – 109, 165, 185, 198, 201n8
127, 132, 147, 149, 151, 152, 153, Buddhacarita 42, 44
159, 160, 175, 186, 190, 191, buddhi
204, 206 and attainment of lokas (cosmic
asmitā 102, 103, 134, 158, 197 regions) 113
asmitākleśa 92 – 93 calming of 152
asmitāmātrā 96, 98, 131, 158, 177, 184 difference between puruṣa and 93, 99,
Āsuri 4, 34, 36, 37, 161, 163, 164, 100, 135, 152
178, 186 emancipation of 92
autobiography 74 – 75 emergence of 94
fictional 8, 79, 113, 125, 146, 180, 205 the highest state of 115
avidyā 48, 73, 74, 89, 92, 156, 186; see identification of with puruṣa 92
also ignorance knowledge of 101, 135
purification of 152
Ballantyne, J. R. 58, 59, 64 realization of 105 – 106, 134 – 135,
bhadralok 7, 8, 28, 39, 40, 47, 49, 56, 148 – 149, 151, 152
60 – 64, 67, 70, 71, 78, 84, 203 saṃyama on 111
“bhadralok yogin” 52 – 68, 91, 96, 200, similarity of puruṣa and 13, 153
205 and viveka 100
Bhagavadgītā 3, 12, 19, 117, 118, 194, 195 buddhisattva 25, 102, 152
Bhāgavatapurāṇa 37, 194 Buddhism 14 – 15, 25, 40 – 50, 78, 116, 117,
bhakti 57, 65, 77, 88, 96, 117 – 119, 160, 121, 127, 139 – 140, 185, 198, 205
161, 174
Bhāsvatī 72, 93, 203 calligraphic decorations 184 – 187
Bhattacharya, Ram Shankar 23 – 27, 64, cave 1, 3, 28, 33 – 34, 56, 66, 69, 71,
194, 197, 206 127 – 128, 136, 141, 142, 180, 184,
Bhāvanī 88 – 91 189, 202
bhoga 92, 105, 122, 204 celibacy 63, 107 – 108, 141
Bhūtādi 95 Chatterjee, Adinath 79, 175n6, 206
body Chattopadhyaya, Bankim Chandra 45 – 46,
and āsana see postures 49 – 50, 63
230 Index
citta 15, 20, 110, 113, 135, 148, 152, 170, guṇa 21n4, 99, 112, 122, 135, 139, 143,
171, 175n17, 197 148, 158, 164, 172, 184; see also
cittavṛttinirodha 13, 14, 25 rajas; sattva; tamas
cittavṛttis, 14, 16, 152; see also vṛtti guru 2, 33 – 34, 67, 72 – 73, 75, 77, 155,
Clark, Matthew 57 180
Colebrooke, Henry Thomas 42, 51n15, guruparamparā 72 – 73, 74, 79, 163,
59, 64 177, 189
cosmic regions 97, 111, 112, 113
criticism of contemporary yoga and Halbfass, William 22n7, 40
yogins 3 – 4, 33, 52 – 55, 56, 76, 79, Haridās Yogi 144
83, 90, 142 Hatcher, Brian 67
Haṭhayoga 19, 20, 36, 50n1, 54, 60,
darśana (philosophical system) 11, 16, 34, 68n3, 70, 91, 92, 109, 114, 189 – 190,
45, 82, 179 202, 204
darśana (right view) 106 Hausner, Sondra 123n8, 156
daśanāmī 37, 57, 74, 155 – 156 heart 101 – 103, 109, 110, 111, 112, 123n8,
Dasgupta, Surama 190 – 193 130, 138, 167, 180
Dasgupta, Surendranath 9, 17, 55, innermost part of 101, 102
190 – 191, 193 lamp like object within 112
De Michelis, Elizabeth 65 light in 130
death/dying 149 – 151, 180 limitless luminous sky within the 159
devotion 117 – 119; see also bhakti luminous figure inside the 102,
Dhammapada 41, 48 115, 159
dhāraṇā 101, 108, 110, 132 hell 90, 121, 151, 171, 172
dhyāna 14, 89, 90, 91, 98, 111, 112, 132, Himalayas 69, 74, 75, 78, 202
139, 153, 159, 160, 186 Hiraṇyagarbha 40, 94 – 97, 120, 134, 141,
dhyāna mandir 186 – 187 167, 178, 179, 196
Dodson, Michael S. 87n14 Howrah 1, 71
draṣṭṛ/draṣtā 108, 148, 149, 151, 152, 167, hṛdaya 101, 111; see also heart
184 – 185 hṛdayapuṇḍarīka 101; see also innermost
dṛśya 12, 89, 108, 152, 184 – 185 part of the heart
dualism 4, 12, 47, 105, 108, 152, 187
duḥkha 13, 15, 20, 24, 122, 127, 159, ignorance 73, 74, 104, 105, 116, 130, 156,
184 – 185, 186, 204; see also suffering 162, 170, 172, 185, 186; see also
Dutta, Deepti 190, 194. 198 – 199 avidyā
indriya 133, 134
Epistles of a Sāṃkhyayogin, 24 inner light 130, 137, 159, 195
ethicization of the renunciant institution 56 meditation on 102, 137, 159
I-sense 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 105, 111,
false mendicants 55, 56, 75, 78, 79, 91 134, 135, 136, 137, 139, 145, 146,
Farquahar, J. N. 2, 202, 203, 206 – 207 158, 171, 180, 184
food 79, 107, 108, 141 īśvara 4, 15, 20, 33, 40, 96, 101 – 102,
four noble truths 93, 184 – 185, 188n4 115, 117 – 118, 138, 146, 159, 161,
Fuller, Jason 63 – 64, 67 162 – 168, 178, 179, 187, 196 – 197
nirguṇa 97, 102, 178, 187, 196 – 197
Garbe, Richard 41, 43 – 44 saguṇa 96, 102, 134, 196 – 197
Ghosh, Jajneswar 85, 167, 194, 199 – 200 īśvarapraṇidhāna 101, 102, 108, 110,
Gonda, Jan 173 163, 167
grahaṇa (instrument) 98, 99, 101, 103,
110, 112 Jacobi, Hermann 44
grahitṛ (receiver) 98, 99, 101, 103 japa/jap 109, 137, 151
grāhya (the object) 98, 99, 101, 102, jīvanmukta 117
110, 112 jīvanmukti 116 – 117
gross element see mahābhūta jñānayoga 129 – 131
Index 231
kaivalya 33, 47, 56, 66, 99, 103, 106, 108, Karmatattva 57, 88, 93, 119 – 122
113, 118 – 119, 135, 151 – 153, 204; Kaṭhopaniṣad 49, 76, 97, 118, 129
see also salvific liberation Kaviraj, Gopinath 85
Kālāma, Ārāḍa 42, 44, 194 kayastha 57, 68n6, 71
Kāpil Āśram in Kurseong 178, 179 Keith, A. Berriedale 45
Kāpil Āśram in Triveni 30, 71, 123n2 Kopf, David 61 – 62
Kāpil cave 29, 30 – 32, 34, 177, 180
Kāpil Maṭh in Madhupur 27 – 35, 71, 157 Lanman, Charles Rockwell 44 – 45
cave dwelling at 71, 127 – 128 Larson, Gerald James 80, 194, 197
material religion of 82, 179 – 184 lived religion 5, 27, 35n3
and peace 155
recitation of stotras in 160 – 174 Maas, Philipp 17 – 18, 21n5
silence at 155 Madhupur 1, 28, 29, 32, 71, 86, 157,
and solitude 156 – 157, 159 192, 193
Kāpil Maṭh tradition Mahābhārata 12, 19, 29, 37, 49, 186, 187
aspired to be a tradition of “proper” mahābhūta 13, 133, 144 – 145
yoga 3 mahat tattva 148; see also buddhi
based on the Pātañjalayogaśāstra Majumdār, Haridās 127
21, 207 Mallinson, James 15, 19, 50n1, 53,
created a new beginning of 189 – 190
Sāṃkhyayoga 203 mantra 29, 30, 51n18, 82, 88, 90, 91,
the doctrine of aloneness of 126 – 128 102, 130, 137, 151 – 152, 162, 167,
the doctrine of suffering of 159 – 160 186, 204
first guru of 82 material religion of Sāṃkhyayoga 9,
guru enclosed in a cave unique feature 177 – 188
of 3 mauna 130, 156; see also silence
guruparamparā of 147 McDaniel, June 57 – 58
main doctrine of 97 mind; see also citta
mantra of 82 arrested state of 104, 106
material religion of 177 – 188 as sensitive as the surface of an
meaning of yoga in 128 – 135, 153 eye-ball 24
meditation instructions of 124 – 153 and bhoga 106
minor role of Patañjali in 4 bringing to the state of calm and
and modern scholarship on Yoga bliss 102
189 – 201 constructed 96, 101
performing Sāṃkhyayoga as a layperson cosmic 120
in the 157 – 173 created from prakṛti 101
relation to older traditions of detached from the body 113 – 114, 132
Sāṃkhyayoga 69 – 86 and devotion 117 – 119
responded to discourses of the colonial dissolution of 159, 163, 168, 195
and missionary powers 25 divine 95
textual tradition of 88 – 122 extraordinary powers as disturbances
Kāpil Sāṃkhyayogāśram in Sarnath 32, of 115
125, 146, 147, 161, 177, 178, 181, first product of prakṛti 94 – 95
184 – 187 fixing on the heart 101, 110 – 111
Kapila 4, 7, 17, 18, 22n13, 29, 33, 36 – 51, impurity of 66, 128, 138
66, 73, 82, 89, 96, 164, 177 – 178, and karma 128 – 129
179, 186, 187, 204, 205 and karmāśaya 104
Kāpilāśramīya Pātañjal Jogdarśan 1, 20, luminescence of 137 – 138, 159
26, 71, 88, 93 – 117, 173, 193, 204 merge with the mind of Īśvara 102, 159
Kapilāsurisaṃvāda 37, 178 in the state of mokṣa 20, 100, 104,
karma 20, 24, 101, 103 – 104, 119 – 122, 116 – 117
167 – 168, 203, 204 and omniscience 115
karmaśaya 24, 93, 104, 121 one-pointed 77, 99, 143, 144 – 145
232 Index
and prāṇāyāma 93, 102, 109 – 110, 159 Kāpil Maṭh tradition based on 21, 34
purification of 13, 100, 116, 128, studied in solitude in a cave 1, 5, 79 – 81
169, 195 and Yoga as a textual tradition 17 – 20
and realization of the buddhi 135, 136 and Yogakārikā 91 – 93
and samādhi 97 – 99, 132, 143, 153, 170 and Kāpilāśramiya Pātañjal Jogdarśan
stopping the fluctuations of 98, 99, 104, 93 – 117
128, 129, 139, 150, 153, 159, 160 Patañjali 4, 32, 36, 70, 152, 165, 179
the sum total of the vṛttis 128 peace/peaceful 138, 149, 151, 155, 186, 195
three states of 99 prajñā 48, 90, 91, 103, 112
and vāsanās 104 prakṛti 12 – 13, 14, 89, 94, 97, 100, 101,
misery, cessation of 74, 98, 106, 159, 160 106, 108, 116, 120, 121, 122, 124,
Mitra, Rājendralāla 41, 46 – 47, 58, 59, 127, 132, 135, 139, 146, 157, 158,
60 – 61, 79, 84 184, 187, 197, 205
mokṣa 74, 79, 126, 171 – 172; see also prāṇa 101, 110, 122
kaivalya prāṇāyāma 73, 77, 89, 93, 102, 108,
Müller, Max 45 – 46, 82 – 83 109 – 110, 114, 132, 138, 149, 152,
mūrtis 30, 40, 96 153, 159, 186, 204, 206
pratyāhāra 73, 89, 110, 153
Nāth yogins 36, 50n1, 53 pravṛtti dharma 48
nationalism 58, 61, 67, 192 pseudo-Puruṣa 111
nirmāṇacitta 96, 114, 117, 178, 197 puruṣa
nirodha 14, 15, 94, 100, 135, 171 beyond time and outside of history 63
nivṛtti dharma 48 and buddhi 111, 115, 135, 153
niyama 21, 89 – 90, 91, 106, 108, 110, 153, discrimination of prakṛti and 100
160, 171, 186, 204 independent principle 12, 20
non-violence 89, 178; see also ahiṃsā illuminer of buddhi 99
isolation of 156
Olivelle, Patrick 22n7, 42 and isolation of the guru in a cave
O’Malley, L. S. S. 28 33, 180
omnipotence 115, 135 and īśvara 20, 40, 101, 167, 178, 196,
omniscience 100, 115, 134, 135, 144 197; see also puruṣaviśeṣa
Orientalists 82, 205 and mokṣa 21, 106, 157
“orthodox yogi” 200 and objects (dṛśya) 12, 98, 184 – 185
orthodoxy 33, 39, 81, 82, 90, 119, 123n4, proof of the existence of 160
206, 207 realization of 13, 14, 16, 99, 100, 103,
new Sāṃkhyayoga 66, 67, 82, 180, 189, 105 – 106, 111, 131 – 132, 135, 136,
199, 200, 202, 207 149, 153, 158
renunciation necessary for the
padmāsana 21, 149 realization of 136
Pañcaśikha 84 – 85, 165, 186 separateness of 13, 15, 16, 66, 184
paṇḍit 39 – 40, 59 – 60 and withdrawal from the world 127
Paramābhaktisūtra 117 – 119 witness consciousness 152, 156, 158
paravairāgya 119 puruṣakāra (human effort) 121, 126
Pātañjalayogaśāstra puruṣaviśeṣa 97, 118, 178, 197
absence of yogins following 58 pūrvasiddha 95, 96
based on Sāṃkhya philosophy 4
building a lineage on 82 Rāja Yoga 40, 66
Buddhist influence on 14 – 15, 41, 42 rajas 13, 21n4, 27, 99, 112, 135, 172, 184
foundation text of Yoga 13 Rājayoga 59, 65, 66
four noble truths of 184 – 185 Rāmakṛṣṇa Paramahaṃsa 62, 63
growing interest in 63, 79 Rāmaputra, Udraka 42
Hariharānanda Āraṇya a follower of 2, Ṛddhi mandir 78, 139 – 146, 180
36, 72, 81, 202, 203 renunciation 3, 12, 20, 21, 33, 48, 56, 77,
an integrated part of Sāṃkhya 17, 189, 79, 90, 98, 108, 135, 136, 138, 139,
202, 206 141, 142
Index 233
restart of an ancient tradition 63, 84, 94, sāṃkhya, meaning of the term 11 – 12, 194
119, 199, 200, 202, 203, 205 Sāṃkhya Catechism 24 – 26, 71, 119
Sāṃkhya Pātañjala/Sāṃkhya of Patañjali
Sadāśiv/sadāśiva 148, 154n11, 172 17, 191
ṣaḍdarśanas 64, 82 Sāṃkhyakārikā 15, 16, 21n5, 92, 131,
sādhak 73, 150, 156 185, 194
sādhu 19, 156 Sāṃkhyasūtra 37, 43, 195
Sādhu Mā 29, 162 Sāṃkhyatattvāloka 85, 167
salvific liberation: see also apavarga; sāṃkhyayoga, meaning of the term 11
kaivalya; mokṣa saṃnyāsa 81
attained by practicing only dhāraṇā, saṃnyāsin 3, 21, 47, 54, 56, 65, 67, 70, 72,
dhyāna, and samādhi 90, 91 74, 76, 79, 84, 90, 193, 204, 206, 207
and bhakti 119 samprajñāta 98, 101, 102, 108, 145
and buddhi 152 saṃskāras 24, 63, 67, 93, 101, 103, 104,
and cessation of objects of 118, 121, 126, 138, 187, 204, 206
knowledge 106 saṃyama 110 – 112
devotion to īśvara and 15 Śaṅkara 16, 18, 37, 156, 179, 197
and the fourfold truths about Sarasvatī, Dayānanda 69
suffering 93 Sarnath 32, 125, 146, 177, 184, 185
and Kapila 4, 33, 34, 41 – 42, 44 sattva 13, 21n4, 109, 112, 135, 139, 143,
realization of the separateness of puruṣa 166, 172, 184
and prakṛti 13 Schrader, F. Otto 42 – 43
and renunciation 136 science 53 – 54, 55, 61, 105, 119 – 122
and solitude 2, 34 self 89 – 90, 170 – 171, 177, 180, 184,
and samādhi 93, 116, 135, 152, 204 193, 195
and Sāṃkhya categories 99 – 103 Sen, Amiya P. 62, 66
and Sāṃkhyayoga stotras 168 – 171, 173 Sen Gupta, Anima 30, 194 – 197
and tattvas 13, 99 – 103, 184. 185 Sen, Keśab Candra (Keshub Chandra Sen)
yoga the method for attaining 48, 56, 47, 58 – 59, 62, 65
89 – 90, 204 silence 73, 107, 124, 129, 130, 136,
samādhi 138, 155
as proper yoga 48 Singleton, Mark 15, 19, 53, 59, 68n3,
definition of 132 189 – 190
different kinds of 98 Sinha, Nandalal 17, 84 – 85
distinguished from other forms of Śiva 88 – 91, 162
reduction of restlessness 99 Śivadhyān 56, 73, 75 – 78, 139 – 146
and extraordinary powers 112 – 115 Śivoktayogayuktiḥ 88 – 91
fruits of 98 Sjoman, N. E. 94
goal of yoga practice 12, 14, 20, 116, skull 181, 183, 184
152, 153, 168 smṛti 77, 100, 136, 138
and īśvara 108, 141 – 142 social engagement, condemnation of 56
and Kapila 178 social reform, attitude to 62, 67
knowledge attained in 135, 139, 204 solitude: see also aloneness
main theme of H. Āraṇya’s texts as a practice of proper yogins 3, 21,
97 – 99, 116 202, 203
methods to attain 99 – 103, 143 – 146 as an ultimate value in Sāṃkhyayoga
only means to the realization of the 33 – 34, 128, 138, 180, 204
puruṣa principle 97 and āsana 159 – 160
practice of 90 in a cave 2, 5, 34, 53, 124, 180
and prāṇāyāma 93 institutionalization of the human desire
and renunciation 170 for 157
and salvific liberation 91 and Kapila 178
and tattvas 132, 134 major theme in Sāṃkhyayoga 33,
and vāsanās 97 81, 116
samādhisthāna 8, 160, 162, 179, 180, 181 method to realize the salvific goal 127
234 Index
necessity 77 Vyāsabhāṣya 47, 64 – 65, 80, 91; see also
praised in the Hindu traditions Pātañjalayogaśāstra
156, 157
sought by Hariharānanda Āraṇya 2, 3, Ward, William 59
67, 71, 82, 127, 128, 136, 203 Weber, Albrect 43
Stainton, Hamsa 174 Werner, Karel 199 – 200
Stcherbatsky, Theodore 42 Wezler, Albrecht 21n5
stotras 8, 72, 147, 159, 160 – 174, White, David 52 – 53, 69, 70, 86n1
202 Wilson, Horace Hayman 41
Stotrasaṃgraha 147, 160, 161, 162 – 173 Winternitz, Maurice 44
suffering (duḥkha) 13, 15, 24, 105, 106, witness consciousness 12, 13, 63, 124,
127, 167, 169 127, 148, 149, 151, 152, 153, 156,
158, 181, 184
tamas 12, 13, 27, 99, 112, 135, 139, 172 Woods, John Haughton 86 – 87n10
tanmātra 12, 13, 95, 99, 100, 133 – 134,
144, 145, 172 yama 21, 89 – 90, 91, 106, 108, 110, 153,
tapas 19, 46, 108 160, 171, 186, 204
tattvas 13, 21n4, 112, 118, 131 – 135, 139, yoga, the term 12, 16, 22n7
143, 144 – 146 yoga powers 52, 55, 93, 108, 112 – 115,
Tattvavaiśāradī 5, 17, 18, 64, 72, 80, 81, 141
82, 86 – 87n10, 94, 172, 193, 200, Yoga system of religious thought
205, 207 13 – 17, 34
tattva dṛṣṭi 112 Yogakārikā 84, 91 – 93
Theosophists, 66, 82 Yogasūtra
time 149 absence of paṇḍits specializing in 69
truthfulness 89, 107 and the dualism of Sāṃkhya 4, 13
and ”bhadralok yogin” 57
Udāsina, Bālarāma 80, 81, 87n10 and the Bhāṣya 64 – 65
union 4, 12, 66, 105, 157, 160 and Buddhism 13 – 14, 48 – 49, 198
Upaniṣads 49, 90, 91, 96, 117, 194, 203 dating of 41, 47, 198
division of 93
Vācaspatimiśra 5, 18, 21, 64, 72, 80, 81, elevation of 40, 58 – 60, 66
92, 94, 172, 191 and Hariharānanda Āraṇya 79 – 81
vairāgya 14, 73, 95, 96, 136, 156, 164, Kāpilāśramīya Pātañjal Jogdarśan and
165, 172 93 – 117
vāsanās 14, 20, 24, 63, 67, 89, 90, 91, 93, meditation vocabulary of 14 – 15, 48
97, 104, 116, 121, 125, 187, 206 revival of 19 – 20, 70, 72, 79
Vasu, Śriśa Chandra 53 – 55, 58, 68n3 and the Sāṃkhyapravacana 18, 60
Vedānta 49, 65, 66, 67, 83, 91, 203 and Sāṃkhyayoga 46, 64, 65, 204,
vibhūti 93 206, 207
Virāṭ Puruṣa 167 summary of the teaching of 184 – 185
viveka/vivek 138, 186 translations of 57 – 60, 64 – 65, 94
vivekakhyāti 13, 101, 112, 186 and Vivekānanda 26, 59, 66
Vivekānanda 5, 26, 38 – 39, 40, 47, 57, 58, and “Yoga practice” 52
65 – 67, 68n5, 71 Yogakārikā and 91 – 93
Vivekaprakāśa Brahmacārī 25 Yogeśvara 123n9, 159, 161, 178; see also
vṛtti 94, 104, 113, 117, 128, 132, 152 īśvara
Vyāsa 165 Yogic postures see āsana

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Yoga in Modern Hinduism

The Sāṃkhyayoga institution of Kāpil Maṭh is a religious organization with a

Knut A. Jacobsen is professor in the study of religions at the University of Ber-

1 Hindu Selves in a Modern World

2 Parsis in India and the Diaspora

3 South Asian Religions on Display

4 Rethinking Religion in India

5 Health and Religious Rituals in South Asia

6 Time, History and the Religious Imaginary in South Asia

7 Cross-disciplinary Perspectives on a Contested Buddhist Site

8 Yoga in Modern Hinduism

1 Sāṃkhya, Yoga, and Sāṃkhyayoga 11

2 Encounters with a living Sāṃkhyayoga tradition 23

3 Kapila as the originator of Yoga 36

4 The rebirth of Yoga and the emergence of the bhadralok yogin 52

5 Gurus, book printing, and the Sāṃkhyayoga lineage 69

6 The textual tradition of the Kāpil Maṭh institution 88

7 Sāṃkhyayoga meditation instructions of

8 Monastic life and recitation of Sanskrit stotras 155

9 The material religion of Sāṃkhyayoga 177

10 The Kāpil Maṭh tradition and modern scholarship on Yoga 189

Appendix: Some publications of the Kāpil Maṭh tradition 209

The religious institution explored in this book is a small tradition of followers of

The terms sāṃkhya and yoga

The Sāṃkhya system of religious thought

The Yoga system of religious thought

The Pātañjalayogaśāstra was not included in Sinha’s volume. Not because

Pātañjalayogaśāstra and Yoga as a textual tradition

Hariharānanda Āraṇya’s Sāṃkhyayoga

The Sāṃkhyayoga teaching is here summed up in the concepts, mokṣa, citta,

Experiences of pleasure and pain give rise to corresponding latencies. Thus

And Bhattacharya concluded the essay by stating,

Together we can work to re-establish the Sāṃkhya doctrine in the mod-

Encountering the Sāṃkhyayoga institutions

a socially privileged and consciously superior group, economically depend-

Wherever Hariharānanda Āraṇya and disciples of Kāpil Maṭh established

Figure 3.1 Statue of Kapila in the garden of Kāpil Maṭh in Madhupur

The system of Vyāsa is of course the Sāṃkhyayoga of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra,

Absence of paṇḍits interested in Sāṃkhya and Yoga

Presenting the Buddha as a follower of Kapila

Sāṃkhya is the philosophy of the Purāṇas to such an extent that it is com-

Jacobi traced the 12 elements of the pratītyasamutpāda to the Sāṃkhya theory of

There is abundant evidence, both in Hindu and Buddhist works of unques-

The understanding of Sāṃkhyayoga of Hariharānanda Āraṇya is closer to Mitra’s

Compared to the works of leading scholiasts, the Bháshya appears to be the

It is by proper Yoga or Samādhi (absolute mental concentration) and com-

Āraṇya quoted Mahābhārata 12.290.103–104,21 which proclaims, he thinks, that

In like manner, the lofty spirit of Buddhism is based on Sāṃkhya principles.

Plurality of yogas and yogins

In India many understand by the word Yogi, those hideous specimens of

by their bigotry and ignorance have proved a great stumbling-block to the

Looking on the disgusting spectacle of the ash-besmeared and lazy beggar,

The elevation of the Yogasūtra

Bhadraloks, the reconstruction of “authentic” religion and

waged a relentless struggle to denude Hinduism of its “excesses” at the same

Kopf emphasizes faith in science and in reason as an important influence of

The new bhadralok yogin

Sāṃkhyayoga, according to Bhattacharya, was not associated with any persons.

Yogasūtra with and without the Bhāṣya

Is Āraṇya’s Yoga modern?

Such Vedāntic interpretations of a Sāṃkhyayoga text must have been a source of

You know how intensely difficult it is to attain salvation through concentra-

His work, however, in the various philosophical traditions is highly regarded

1 Sāṃkhya, Yoga, and Sāṃkhyayoga 11

2 Encounters with a living Sāṃkhyayoga tradition 23

3 Kapila as the originator of Yoga 36

4 The rebirth of Yoga and the emergence of the bhadralok yogin 52

5 Gurus, book printing, and the Sāṃkhyayoga lineage 69

6 The textual tradition of the Kāpil Maṭh institution 88

8 Monastic life and recitation of Sanskrit stotras 155

9 The material religion of Sāṃkhyayoga 177

10 The Kāpil Maṭh tradition and modern scholarship on Yoga 189

Appendix: Some publications of the Kāpil Maṭh tradition 209

Figure 3.1 Statue of Kapila in the garden of Kāpil Maṭh in Madhupur

Na ca śakto ’pi padārthaviparyāsāṃ karoti, kasmād, anyasya yatrakāmāva

Figure 7.2 Participants in Omprakāś Āraṇya’s instructed Sāṃkhyayoga meditations in

Figure 8.1 Bhāskara Āraṇya meeting devotees in the opening of the cave