[Advaita-l] Patanjali Yoga Sutra. I.3

[Vidyasankar Sundaresan]

Dear Sri Bhadraiah,

Thanks for reminding of a long forgotten discussion.

I want to point out only one thing, which will undercut all this
speculation. drashTuH (or if you want, adrashTuH) is nothing
more than the genitive case singular of drashTA (or adrashTA).

The root word is drashTR, which takes different case endings
just like the word pitR in most cases. There is no such thing
as "drashTu himself" because drashTu is not an independent
noun in its own right.

That there is no oral recitation tradition of the yogasUtra-s
akin to veda recitation means nothing. There is no recitation
tradition with udAtta, anudAtta and svarita specifications for
any of the purANas or the rAmAyaNa or the mahAbhArata, but
people still learn these texts by heart and recite them without
having lost the actual text for centuries. In a similar way, in
every century, there have been pundits who could recite the
yogasUtra-s without looking at a book. One should not throw
out the traditionally handed wording of a text because of some
highly speculative reconstruction. All the other conclusions and
discussion based on such a reconstruction is just a house of
cards built on a sandy dune.

Regards,
Vidyasankar

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