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

[Vidyasankar Sundaresan]

> Date: Wed, 31 Mar 2010 21:13:57 -0400
> Subject: Re: [Advaita-l] Patanjali Yoga Sutra. I.3
> 
> Dear Sri Vidyasankar, 
> 
> My apologies for not reading the word adraSTu as one of the possibilities quoted in one of your posts in the Indology list, where you copied a paragraph of sanskrit commentary. Another apology for failing to read adraSTu as non-seer or non-observer, because anyway Brahman is a non-seer, one who does not see anything else as other than itself. 
> 

> My contention is now reduced to tradition not taking the svarita seriously, which IMO is the only correct reading, otherwise there would be no yoga even an incremental variety. 
> 


Dear Bhadraiah garu,

 

You are resurrecting a discussion from very long ago and
my long-term smRti is not something very great!


I can, however, confidently assert that I never conveyed
"adrashTu" as a possibility at all, in any discussion of the
yoga-sUtra. The root word is drashTR (like pitR, kartR etc),
which becomes drashTA in nominative (prathamA vibhakti)
and drashTuH in the ablative and genitive (pancamI and
shashThI) singular. The visarga "H" at the end of drashTuH
changes to the "s" sound because of the next word -
svarUpe (tadAdrashTus-svarUpe'vasthAnam). The ' symbol
here stands for avagraha - a lost a-kAra in sandhi (svarUpe
+ avasthAnam = svarUpe'vasthAnam).

That the yoga system talks of the drashTA, not adrashTA,
is clear from a later sUtra - drashTA dRSi-mAtraS Suddho'pi
pratyayAnupaSyaH). There is no word prior to drashTA in
this sUtra, so there is no scope here for thinking that it
could possibly be adrashTA instead.

As for lack of svarita or otherwise, yogasUtra is not Sruti,
and was never memorized the way the veda continues to
be. So there is no fixed rule with which to apply udAtta,
anudAtta and svarita to its constituent words. As such,
tradition cannot be faulted for not taking seriously a thing
that never was in the first place. As there are three
negatives in that last sentence, let me stop here!

 

Vidyasankar
 		 	   		  
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