Bhattacharyya-Vṛtti: K.C. Bhattacharyya's Commentary on the Yogasūtra

This chapter focuses on K.C. Bhattacharyya’s (KCB’s) “Studies in Yoga Philosophy” (SYP), introducing it as a commentary of the Yogasūtra, which Raveh refers to as Bhattacharyya-Vṛtti. KCB reads the Yogasūtra as part of his broader freedom project which covers the spheres of knowing, willing, and feeling. In SYP, he delves into the sphere of willing, which for him is the heart of the difference between Sāṃkhya and Yoga and the soul of Pātañjala-yoga, that is, the Yogasūtra and its commentarial body. Raveh works in two parallel axes. On the one hand, he reads chapter 1 of the Yogasūtra, verses 18–23, with KCB’s commentary. On the other hand, he follows KCB’s discussion of memory and its place (and finally annulment) throughout the stages of meditation; the relationship between knowledge and willing in the Yogasūtra; the centrality of the concept of vairāgya – detachment – depicted by KCB as “the condition of all yoga”; Īśvara-Praṇidhāna, which KCB describes as “a kind of intellectual love of God”, hence as belonging to the rubric of knowledge (not feeling), and constituting an alternative – in tune with KCB’s own notion of alternation – to willing as the essence of yoga; and finally, the siddhis, that is, the yogic powers expounded in chapter 3 of Patañjali’s treatise, which KCB depicts as the epitome of what willing can achieve, but which are nevertheless acquired just to be renounced, along the lines of vairāgya again, as “the willing not to will”.