Who was Patañjali?

What we know

Very little, and all of it comes from texts. The name Patañjali is attached to the Yoga Sutras: the chapter endings of the Sanskrit edition call the work pātañjala yogaśāstra, the treatise on yoga of Patañjali. No biography from his own time survives. We do not know where he lived, whom he taught, or whether he wrote every sutra himself.

What scholars can do is date the work from the inside. Philipp A. Maas, who produced the first critical edition of its first chapter, argues that sutras and commentary were written together as one book and places it between about 325 and 425 CE:

• Not before: the text answers idealist positions corresponding to the Buddhist Vijñānavāda of Vasubandhu, who probably lived between 320 and 400 CE.
• Not after: by the beginning of the seventh century, the work was widely accepted as the authoritative exposition of yoga, which takes time.

Other scholars keep the traditional view of an older sutra text and a later commentary by a separate author, Vyāsa. Maas notes that the oldest unambiguous evidence for that separation is a fourteenth-century doxography, about a thousand years after the work.

The tradition of three Patañjalis

By the eleventh century, Indian scholars widely spoke of a single Patañjali who had purified three things: speech by grammar, the body by medicine, and the mind by yoga.

• Grammar: the Mahābhāṣya, the "great commentary" on Pāṇini's grammar, is by a Patañjali who lived around 150 BCE.
• Medicine: some sources credit a Patañjali with work on the Carakasaṃhitā, the classic of Āyurveda; no such ancient medical work of his is known.
• Yoga: the Yoga Sutras.

The clearest witness is King Bhoja of Dhār, who wrote a commentary on the Yoga Sutras, the Rājamārtaṇḍa, around 1040 CE. Having himself written on grammar, on yoga and on medicine, he compares himself to Patañjali in one of his opening stanzas:

शब्दानामनुशासनं विदधता पातञ्जले कुर्वता वृत्तिं राजमृगाङ्कसंज्ञमपि च व्यातन्वता वैद्यके । वाक्चेतोवपुषां मलः फणभृतां भर्त्रेव येनोद्धृतस्तस्य श्रीरणरङ्गमल्लनृपतेर्वाचो जयन्त्युज्ज्वलाः ॥

śabdānām anuśāsanaṃ vidadhatā pātañjale kurvatā vṛttiṃ rājamṛgāṅkasaṃjñam api ca vyātanvatā vaidyake | vāk-ceto-vapuṣāṃ malaḥ phaṇabhṛtāṃ bhartreva yenoddhṛtas tasya śrī-raṇaraṅgamalla-nṛpater vāco jayanty ujjvalāḥ ||

By laying down the rules of words, by writing a commentary on Patañjali's work, and by composing in medicine the book called Rājamṛgāṅka, he removed, like the lord of serpents, the impurity of speech, mind and body: radiant and victorious are the words of the glorious king Raṇaraṅgamalla.

The Bengali commentator Cakrapāṇidatta, in the same century, refers to the same threefold authorship at the start of his commentary on the Carakasaṃhitā.

Many schools today open class with an invocation in the same spirit, beginning yogena cittasya padena vācāṃ, "by yoga of the mind, by grammar of speech…". We have not found a reliable source for its origin, so we do not reproduce it as a quotation here.

What historians conclude. Maas is direct: this tradition "cannot reflect historical truth". The grammarian of about 150 BCE cannot have written a text that argues against a Buddhist school that did not yet exist, and linguists have noted differences of language between the two works. The tradition is precious as a sign of how India honoured Patañjali; it is not a biography.

The serpent Ananta

Equally widespread was the belief that Patañjali was an incarnation of Ananta, also called Śeṣa, the divine serpent of infinity on whom Viṣṇu rests. The Sanskrit edition of the Yoga Sutras with Vyāsa's commentary opens, before the first sutra, with a stanza to the "lord of serpents":

देवोऽहीशः स वोऽव्यात्सितविमलतनुर्योगदो योगयुक्तः ॥

devo 'hīśaḥ sa vo 'vyāt sita-vimala-tanur yogado yogayuktaḥ ||

May that god, the lord of serpents, protect you: his body white and spotless, giver of yoga, himself steeped in yoga.

This stanza belongs to the printed tradition, not necessarily to the original work: Maas traces a benedictory stanza identifying Patañjali with Ananta to a commentary by a certain Śaṅkara on the Prāṇapaṇita, itself a commentary on the grammatical Mahābhāṣya, from which it was transferred to the head of a version of the Yoga Sutras in Bengal after the beginning of the twelfth century. Scholars disagree on where the myth was born: South India for Madhav Deshpande, Kashmir for Ashok Aklujkar.

Why it matters for your practice

• Read the text, not the legend. What Patañjali left is 195 sutras; their authority comes from what they teach, not from a biography. Start with sutra 1.2.
• Respect the tradition as tradition. When a teacher chants an invocation to Patañjali, it honours a lineage of study. You can join it fully while knowing what historians say.
• Patañjali did not teach a posture system. His yoga is a discipline of the mind; posture is one limb among eight, defined in three words (2.46). See the eight limbs and raja yoga.

To read him, in Sanskrit and in translation, see the Yoga Sutras in PDF.

Questions people ask

Sources

1. Philipp A. Maas, A Concise Historiography of Classical Yoga Philosophy, in E. Franco (ed.), Periodization and Historiography of Indian Philosophy, Vienna 2013 (pre-print, Zenodo, CC BY 4.0) checked October 17, 2026
2. Patañjali, Yogasūtra with Vyāsa's Yogabhāṣya, Sanskrit text, opening stanza and colophons (GRETIL) checked October 17, 2026
3. Patañjali, Vyākaraṇa-Mahābhāṣya, Sanskrit text (GRETIL, University of Göttingen) checked October 17, 2026
4. James Haughton Woods, The Yoga-System of Patañjali, Harvard Oriental Series 17 (1914), introduction on authorship, Internet Archive checked October 17, 2026

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