Raja yoga means the royal path, and the name distinguishes it from approaches working primarily through the body, through devotion or through analysis. Its authoritative text is Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, and it is a psychology before it is anything else, concerned throughout with the behaviour of the mind and with what can be done about it. Its second sutra supplies the whole aim: yogash chitta vritti nirodhah, yoga is the stilling of the modifications of the mind.
Each term in that definition is load-bearing. Chitta is the mind-stuff, the field in which mental activity occurs. Vritti are the modifications, the waves or patterns that continually arise in it. Nirodha is restraint, cessation, the settling of those movements. The claim is not that thoughts are bad but that the thinker is continually mistaken for the patterns, in the same way that a lake covered in ripples cannot show what lies beneath it. When the movement settles, what was always underneath becomes visible without having to be produced.
What makes it royal is its comprehensiveness rather than its difficulty. Patanjali catalogues the kinds of mental modification, the obstacles that arise, the afflictions that drive them, and the graded means of addressing each, and he does so without requiring the practitioner to adopt a theology. The eight limbs supply the method, and the sequence is followed as an architecture. The higher limbs, particularly sustained dhyana, are where the stilling actually occurs.
Raja yoga is a manual for the mind written by someone who had clearly watched one closely. To see the practice at its centre, explore more of The Living Sanatan Timeline.
Part 92 of 100 — Series II: To the Eternal
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