The Yoga Sutras in PDF, free and legal

The editions you can download legally

All the English translations above were published before 1931 and are in the public domain in the United States. Elsewhere, public-domain status depends on the date of the translator's death: check your country's rules before reprinting. The GRETIL files are under a Creative Commons non-commercial licence: free to read, print and study.

Which one to choose

• You want the real classical reading: Woods. Dense and literal, but it gives the commentary that every Indian teacher has read with the sutras.
• You want a quick, inspiring read: Johnston. Remember that it is an "interpretation", as its title page says, not a literal translation.
• You want the historical classic: Vivekananda's Raja Yoga, highly influential in the West, with a free rendering of the sutras.
• You want to check the Sanskrit: GRETIL, nothing else. Every quotation on this site is checked against it.

What these PDFs do not give you

Old scans are hard to read on a phone, use pre-modern spellings (Vâchaspati, Patanjali without diacritics), and none gives the three things a modern practitioner needs most:

1. The Devanāgarī and a standard transliteration (IAST) side by side, to pronounce the sutra correctly.
2. A word-by-word gloss, to see which words belong to Patañjali and which to the translator.
3. A plan to practise the text, not only to read it.

Recent translations that do this are copyrighted; free PDFs of them online are not legitimate.

Our edition

The Yoga Sutras of Patañjali, Sutra by Sutra is our own edition, written for Yogide:

• all 195 sutras, each in Devanāgarī and IAST, checked against the GRETIL text;
• a word-by-word gloss and our own translation, not adapted from any modern published version;
• a short commentary grounded in Vyāsa's Yogabhāṣya;
• an introduction on Patañjali, the date of the text and the ten ideas you need before reading;
• a twelve-week study and practice plan built on the sutras, a one-page recap of the whole text, a glossary and the list of editions.

You can read real pages and a free extract on the book page before buying. To start without buying, the free pages on this site walk through the text: the Yoga Sutras, Samādhi-pāda, Sādhana-pāda, Vibhūti-pāda, Kaivalya-pāda and sutra 1.2 word by word.

If you also study the Gita, the Hatha Yoga Pradipika and the mantras, the sacred texts pack groups four of our editions:

Questions people ask

Sources

1. Patañjali, Yogasūtra, Sanskrit text, ed. Āgāśe 1904, digitised by Philipp A. Maas (GRETIL, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) checked October 17, 2026
2. Patañjali, Yogasūtra with Vyāsa's Yogabhāṣya, Sanskrit text (GRETIL) checked October 17, 2026
3. James Haughton Woods, The Yoga-System of Patañjali, Harvard Oriental Series 17 (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1914), Internet Archive checked October 17, 2026
4. The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, the Book of the Spiritual Man, an interpretation by Charles Johnston, Project Gutenberg checked October 17, 2026
5. Charles Johnston, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (New York, Quarterly Book Department, 1912), Internet Archive checked October 17, 2026
6. Manilal Nabhubhai Dvivedi, The Yoga-Sutra of Patanjali (Bombay Theosophical Publication Fund, preface dated 9 June 1890), Internet Archive checked October 17, 2026
7. Rāma Prasāda, Patanjali's Yoga Sutras with the Commentary of Vyâsa and the Gloss of Vâchaspati Miśra (1912), Internet Archive checked October 17, 2026
8. Swami Vivekananda, Raja-Yoga (first published 1896), Complete Works vol. 1, Wikisource checked October 17, 2026

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