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Part 4 of the commentary to sutra 3.4 of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali,

translated and with commentary by Vasyl Vernyhora


   3.4. Three (traya, that is, dharana, dhyana and samadhi) all taken together/completed (ekatra) [give (allow one to gain the ability to receive)] clairvoyance insight (saṁyama) [into the essence of any object].

    

   A version of the origin of the word "samyama" from Buddhism

   In the Yoga Sutras, samyama is synonymous with what the Buddha called vipassanā (in Pali; "vipaśyanā" in Sanskrit, literally "insight") in the Pali Canon, that is, clairvoyant insight into the essence of things. For the Buddha in the Pali Canon, vipassana insight is not a separate psychotechnique or psychopractice, but simply the application of new supercognitive abilities acquired through training in three-hour samadhi/shamatha and its many hours of daily practice over many years. Vipashyana is used for the "applied" purpose of acquiring prajna-wisdom, as it is a universal clairvoyant method for obtaining virtually any information and knowledge.

   Nowadays, the term saṃyama (saṃ-yama) is translated from Sanskrit as "holding together", "binding", "gathering" or "unifying".

   At the same time, as was already shown in subchapter 3.3 of my book "Meditation in raja yoga, Buddhism and according to neurophysiology: A practical guide", the term "samyama" itself is most likely an adapted or distorted name of the ninth stage of the Noble Tenfold (not to be confused with the Eightfold) Path of Buddhism—saṃjāna ("correct knowledge") in Buddhist hybrid Sanskrit, sammāñāṇa ("correct knowledge") in Pali and samyag-jñāna ("correct knowledge") in modern Sanskrit.

   The mutual substitution of the letters "j" and "y", "b" and "v", and "n" and "m" occurs in various words borrowed from Sanskrit by Indian languages. One such example is the origin of the name of the Indian Jogi caste, which arose from the substitution of the letter "y" for "j" due to a distorted pronunciation of the Sanskrit loanword "yogi", meaning yogi. Even today, members of this caste are referred to not only by "jogi", but also by "yogi", "jugi", "nath", and other names, leaving no doubt as to the origin of this word.

   It should be noted that Buddhist hybrid Sanskrit is a derivative of Sanskrit, as are many Indian languages, including, for example, Hindi. Buddhist hybrid Sanskrit developed in the fourth century, when the teachings of Yoga and Buddhism were most closely intertwined. In most cases where Buddhist hybrid Sanskrit differs from Sanskrit, it is closer to or identical to Pali.

   Even Sanskrit itself has undergone significant changes since the time of the Vedas. However, the modern version of Buddhist hybrid Sanskrit that has come down to us does not reflect all the changes this version of the language underwent throughout its history of development as Buddhists adopted Sanskrit texts, including yogic ones. And this process worked in both directions: Indian yogis also actively studied Buddhist teachings and adopted Buddhist practices.

   Orientalist Yevgeny Torchinov gave the following description of Buddhist mahasiddhas like Milarepa: "In the images of the mahasiddhas (Naropa, Tilopa, Marpa, and others), there is much that is grotesque, foolish, and sometimes shocking, reminiscent of the average person with his common notions of holiness and piety. These were, above all, practitioners, yogis who were interested in the rapid achievement of a religious goal, and not in the scholastic subtleties of the interpretation of the Dharma (Buddhism) and the endless discussions about them in monastic centers, which became an end in themselves… Without dogmatic prejudices, they freely communicated with fellow Hindu yogis who, like them, disdained the restrictions of Brahmanic orthodoxy, which led to an unlimited exchange of ideas and methods of yogic practice".

   The process of borrowing words from other languages and changing their spellings and meanings within a single language occurs quite rapidly in any language. For example, Shakespeare's English is extremely unfamiliar and even incomprehensible to modern native English speakers, even though English has remained the language of communication for the majority of England's fairly large population for the past four centuries.

   Thus, not only the place on the path of practice, but even the name of samyama somehow coincides with the place on the path of practice in the Noble Tenfold Path of Buddhism that corresponds to vipashyana. However, in Buddhism, the ninth stage denotes the result obtained through the application of vipashyana, while in the Yoga Sutras, samyama signifies the actual application of new supercognitive abilities, that is, the application of vipashyana.

   It should be noted separately that by no means of reasoning, while remaining in one’s development at the level of the mind-manas, it is impossible to achieve those miraculous results that are described in more than thirty sutras of the third chapter of the Yoga Sutras when describing the application of samyam in relation to certain goals and objects.

   It is important to note that, in the context of the tenfold version of the Buddhist Noble Path, the performance of saṃjāna/sammāñāṇa/samyagjñāna becomes possible only after the complete mastery of samadhi/shamatha, just as the performance of samyama becomes possible only after the complete mastery of the psychotechnique of samadhi. At the same time, in the Yoga Sutras they did not single out samyama as a separate, ninth stage of yoga, just as they did not place it simultaneously with samadhi on the eighth stage of the eightfold yoga in sutra 2.29. This is because samadhi is what must be practiced for the development of superconsciousness, while samyama is merely the result of such a completed practice (and therefore cannot be placed on the same stage as samadhi), since samyama is performed by the superconscious as naturally, easily, and quickly as the ordinary mind (manas) naturally and habitually thinks.

   Interestingly, even in the expanded tenfold version of the Buddhist path, vipashyana still finds no place. It's particularly telling that the result of vipashyana—"right knowledge"—is included in the expanded version of the path, but vipashyana itself is absent. If vipashyana were a separate psychotechnique that needed to be practiced separately, then—in the tenfold version of the path, at least—it should have been present as a separate step, hypothetically located between the steps of "right samadhi" and "right knowledge". But it's not there, just as it's not in the eightfold version of the path.

   This inevitably indicates that vipashyana is not a psychotechnique or psychopractice from the perspective of the Buddha's teachings and early Buddhism, which demonstrated its greatest effectiveness in the entire 2,500-year history of Buddhism, if we evaluate it by the number of arhats and bodhisattvas that emerged during its various periods. Vipashyana is simply a new ability, a natural result of a full-fledged shamatha practice, and not some kind of psychotechnique or practice requiring a specific methodology. The absence of vipashyana even in the expanded tenfold version of the path, which includes stages both before and after samadhi, inevitably indicates that, from the Buddha's perspective, a specific, separate psychotechnique or psychopractice called "vipashyana" simply did not exist. Vipashyana, in the form of clairvoyant insight, is as natural a property of the superconscious as the ability of the mind (manas) to think. All this applies equally to samyama.

     The full version of the book "The True Practical Essence of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali" with a translation of all 196 sutras of the Yoga Sutras with commentaries on all important and/or complex sutras: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0G6GT6M8B.