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Sūtras, Stories and Yoga Philosophy

This book presents a close reading of four Indian narratives from different time
periods (epic, Upaniṣadic, pre-modern and contemporary): Ekalavya’s story
from the Mahābhārata (MBh 1.123.1–39), the story of Prajāpati, Indra and Viro-
cana from the Chāndogya Upaniṣad (CU 8.7.1–8.12.5), the story of Śaṅkara in
the King’s body from the Śaṅkaradigvijaya, and A.R. Murugadoss’s Hindi film
Ghajini (2008), respectively. These stories are thematically juxtaposed with
Pātañjala-yoga, namely Patañjali’s Yogasūtra and its vast commentarial body.
The sūtras reveal hidden philosophical layers. The stories, on the other hand,
contribute to the clarification of “philosophical junctions” in the Yogasūtra.
Through sūtras and stories, the author explores the question of self-identity, with
emphasis on the role of memory and the place of body in identity-formation.
Each of the stories diagnoses the connection between self-identity and (at least a
sense of ) freedom.
Employing cutting-edge methodology, crossing the boundaries of literary
theory, story-telling and philosophical reflection, this book presents fresh inter-
pretations of Indian thought. It is useful to specialists in Asian philosophy and
culture.

Daniel Raveh is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at Tel-Aviv

University, Israel.
Routledge Studies in Asian Religion and Philosophy

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Sūtras, Stories and Yoga
Philosophy
Narrative and transfiguration

Daniel Raveh
First published 2016
by Routledge
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© 2016 Daniel Raveh
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asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
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For Chava Magnes (1915–2015)
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This page intentionally left blank
Contents

Acknowledgments viii
Transliteration ix
List of abbreviations x

Introduction: stories and sūtras 1

1 Truth versus truthfulness in the Mahābhārata story of

Ekalavya 28

2 Is mokṣa pleasant? An alternative discourse on freedom in

the eighth chapter of the Chāndogya-Upaniṣad 59

3 Shankara in the King’s body: knowing by living through 94

4 Memory, forgetting, self-identity: philosophical

inscriptions in A.R. Murugadoss’ Ghajini 122

Bibliography 142
Index 156
Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Daya Krishna, Mukund Lath, Shlomo Biderman, R.S.
Bhatnagar, Jay Garfield, Arindam Chakrabarti, Yashdev Shalya, Bhagat Oinam,
Yohanan Grinshpon, Trichur Rukmani, Bhuvan Chandel, Christopher Chapple,
Gerald Larson, Banwarilal Rao, Agastya Sharma, Yoav Ariel, Galia Patt-Shamir,
Jacob Raz, Bhaskarjit Neog, Murzban Jal, Heeraman Tiwari, Ronie Parciack,
Roy Tzohar, Asha Mukherjee, Bijoy Mukherjee, Udi Halperin, S.P. Gautam,
R.P. Singh, Manidipa Sen, Elise Coquereau, Muzaffar Ali, Neelima Vashishtha,
Francis Arakkal, Christopher Titmuss, Thakur Sudarshan Singh, Gil Ben-Herut,
Devasia M. Antony, Yaron Schorr, Rafi Peled, Achia Anzi, Nir Feinberg, Anha
Osimlak Tsypin, Itamar Ramot, Guy Kaplan, Shaked Eshach, Bhaskar Kowshik,
Samir Jha, Dinkarji and Asha, Shalini Goswami, Anat Hirsch, Sonu Didi, Odje,
Nikku and Pramo, Sallu et al., Kartar S. Pathania, Neerja Lath, Arvind Mayaram,
Abhinav Mayaram, Lia Weiner, Iddo Weiner, S. Reuven and Nicolette, Mikey
Ginguld, Vijay Chaturvedi, Thakur Saab, Randhir Singhji, Rustam Bhai, Chuttu,
Purushotamji, Madan Maharaj, Ganeshji Maharaj, Ramdayal Dassji Maharaj,
Lior Perry, the Danzigers, Ru and Raven, Michal Magnes-Raveh, Chava
Magnes, and Nina.
Special thanks to Dorothea Schaefter, Jillian Morrison, Steve Turrington, Dor
Miller, Doron Peisik, Alex Cherniak, Shea Arieli, Shail Mayaram and Sonia N.
Weiner.
I would also like to acknowledge Ira Landgarten, Aditya Goel of Aditya Pra-
kashan, Motilal Banarsidass, Springer, The Advaita Ashrama, SUNY Press, the
Raqs Media Collective, Hypatya, the MIT Press, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Uni-
versity of Hawaii Press and University of Chicago Press for their kind permis-
sion to quote from works for which they hold the copyright.
Transliteration

Whenever I use a term or quote a phrase, sūtra or paragraph in Sanskrit, they are
transliterated into English (or Roman) letters. I follow the standard transliteration
as (roughly) the following:

a as in cut
ā as in car
i as in sit
ī as in sweet
u as in full
ū as in pool
ṛ pronounced ri as in rich
ṇ as in under or unreal
ñ as in inch or angel (both ṇ and ñ are different
from n as in and or ant)
c pronounced as ch as in chain
ś pronounced as sh as in sheep
ṣ pronounced as sh as in shy
Abbreviations

BG Bhagavadgītā
BSbh Brahmasūtra Śāṅkara bhāṣya (Śaṅkara’s commentary)
BU Bṛhadāraṇyaka-Upaniṣad
BUbh Bṛhadāraṇyaka-Upaniṣad Śāṅkara bhāṣya (Śaṅkara’s
commentary)
CU Chāndogya-Upaniṣad
CUbh Chāndogya-Upaniṣad Śāṅkara bhāṣya (Śaṅkara’s
commentary)
Gītā Bhagavadgītā
KCB Krishnachandra Bhattacharyya
MBh Mahābhārata
MU Māṇḍūkya-Upaniṣad
PBS Pandit Badrinath Shukla
SDV Śaṅkaradigvijaya
SK Īśvarakṛṣṇa’s Sāṃkhyakārikā
TV Vācaspatimiśra’s Tattvavaiśāradī
Up-Sā Śaṅkara’s Upadeśa-Sāhasrī
YS Patañjali’s Yogasūtra
YSb Vyāsa’s Yogasūtra-bhāṣya
YSbV Yogasūtra-bhāṣya-vivaraṇa
YV Vijñānabhikṣu’s Yogavārttika
Introduction
Stories and sūtras

The power of narrative

Stories can be very powerful.1 The following chapters are dedicated to four such
stories, two classical, one pre-modern, and one contemporary: Ekalavya’s story
from the Mahābhārata (MBh 1.123.1–39), the story of Prajāpati, Indra and Viro-
cana from the Chāndogya Upaniṣad (CU 8.7.1–8.12.5), the story of Shankara in
the King’s body from the Śaṅkaradigvijaya2 and finally, the storyline of A.R.
Murugadoss’ Hindi film Ghajini (2008).
My initial task in this Introduction is to justify the juxtaposition of these four
stories, each effective in its own way, each belonging to a different textual
milieu, the film to an altogether different medium, era and language. What is the
rationale behind such fusion? Why not focus exclusively on one of these genres,
be it the epic lore, the Upaniṣadic corpus, the hagiographies dedicated to
Śaṅkara, or contemporary Hindi cinema?
This book stands on the crossroad of “the art inspired by god’s laughter” (as
Milan Kundera calls the European novel, an articulation which I extend as to
include the narratives discussed here) and “the art of the conceptual” (as Daya
Krishna refers to philosophical enquiry).3 The idea is to highlight the mutual
contribution of these two disciplines to one another. I take issue with those who
see the narrative as merely paving the way or drawing the listener/reader’s atten-
tion to a philosophical position, to which the narrative is supposedly just a
gateway. On the contrary, my contention is that storytelling and philosophy are
closely interconnected. Each of the chapters of the book is designed to sub-
stantiate this contention, and each of the four texts to be unpacked here is a case-
study of a different kind, through which the intimacy between narrative and
philosophical argument is to be spotlighted.
With regard to philosophy embedded in narrative, the focus, in the following
chapters, is on yoga philosophy. I use the term yoga in a double sense. First,
broadly speaking, yoga is the vehicle of mokṣa, or “ultimate freedom.” For me,
all four narratives to be explored here are “yoga narratives,” sharing the common
horizon of mokṣa. The term mokṣa occurs only in one of them (in the story of
Shankara in the King’s body); however, I argue that the ideal of mokṣa accom-
panies all four, even the film Ghajini. Each of these narratives has its own say
2 Introduction
about freedom and its means. Second, I use the term yoga in yet another, more
specific sense, as referring to Pātañjala-yoga, namely to Patañjali’s Yogasūtra,
composed sometime around the second or third centuries ce, and its vast com-
mentarial body. I will introduce Patañjali and his commentators as we move on,
and highlight philosophical junctions of this famous treatise. My objective, in
the subsequent chapters, is to amplify yogic overtones in the narratives under
discussion, by reading them with constant reference to the Yogasūtra. Patañjali’s
text, or more precisely relevant sūtras, or aphorisms, in the text, are used as a
mirror, through which the narratives are examined. Why the Yogasūtra? Why
not any other “yoga text” (and there are numerous texts which fall under this
broad category)? My contention is that despite the fact that a lot has been written
on the Yogasūtra, both traditionally and contemporarily, there is still much “to
be done” philosophically with this intriguing text, especially along the concep-
tual trail of self, identity and freedom.
What about the historical context? Is it not too associative to juxtapose dif-
ferent texts, across genres and eras, especially the scandalous chutnification of a
contemporary cinematic text with Sanskrit texts of yore? As I was asking myself
this fundamental question, I came upon Vācaspatimiśra’s (Patañjali’s ninth- or
tenth-century commentator) gloss of Yogasūtra (YS) 2.30.4 He interprets the
concept of satya (truth, truthfulness) vis-à-vis the famous Mahābhārata episode
of Droṇa’s death. Not only does he connect sūtra and epic, but he even refers to
a story closely related to the story of Ekalavya, to be discussed in Chapter 1 (see
the chapter by chapter synopsis below). In other words, my project is in tune
with Vācaspatimiśra’s method. Like him, I connect epic and sūtra, in order to
decipher the notion of satya. Does it mean that Vācaspatimiśra’s work is associa-
tive? Associations can be a useful working-tool. They reveal a creative, even if
not necessarily linear, link between different components, in this case, between
different texts. “Two drinks,” Daya Krishna writes in his paper “Thinking Crea-
tively about the Creative Act” (1999),

if taken separately, will not have much effect on someone. Gin and dry ver-
mouth are the obvious examples. But if one mixes them in a certain propor-
tion, one gets a very strong drink, called a “dry martini.” The same happens
to be the case with language. Single, isolated words may not have much
effect, but a master brings them together and there is a sudden explosion of
new meaning. This happens in the conceptual realm also. Two concepts are
brought together and suddenly a new thought emerges.5

Daya Krishna reports that the “mixture” of words and concepts in his “philo-
sophical laboratory” results in a “sudden explosion” of new meanings and new
thoughts. My hope is that the textual mixture, or fusion, offered here proves not
less potent, or intoxicating, than Daya Krishna’s “philosophical experiments.”
Patañjali’s technical, synoptic style of writing, characteristic of the sūtra
genre in general, invites “narrative interpretation.” The narrative provides the
“how” of a philosophical stance. It creates a world in which abstract notions can
 Introduction 3
be experimented with. Patañjali’s commentators (as in the case of Vācaspatimiśra
above) often take the challenge, and supplement his “naked text” with narrative
insight.6 However it is not merely the narrative that “works for” the philosophi-
cal argument, but also the argument for the narrative. By using a philosophical
looking-glass, a perceptive reader/listener can cut through the surface of the nar-
rative, and reach layers of meaning otherwise too subtle to be palpable.
Most unexpected in the narrative quartet to be discussed in the following
chapters is the film Ghajini. Why a film, and “even worse,” a Bollywood masālā
movie? I argue that Bollywood cinema is the present-day avatar of the classical
epic. It is “epic cinema” corresponding with classical narratives, especially from
the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa. Developed in Europe in the late nineteenth
century, the cinematic medium found an extremely fertile soil in India. The first
ever full-length Indian motion picture is Raja Harishchandra (1913), a Marathi
silent-film, directed and produced by the legendary Dadasaheb Phalke. As the
title indicates, the film draws on the famous story of Hariścandra, which occurs
in the Mahābhārata, as also in the Purāṇic literature. But this is just a symbolic
indication of the umbilical cord which connects Indian film and epic from the
very beginning. For me, this intimate connection is not just about the fact that
films retelling the epics are constantly made in the industry. More essentially, it
is about the act of participation in the authorship of these open-ended tradition-
texts,7 by filmmakers and audience alike. Of this participation born of the con-
viction that the text is both anādi (beginning-less) and ananta (never-ending),
A.K. Ramanujan famously writes that,

no telling [of the epics] is mere retelling – and the story has no closure,
although it may be enclosed in a text. In India and in Southeast Asia, no one
ever reads the Rāmāyaṇa or the Mahābhārata for the first time. The stories
are there, always already.8

Another epic feature of contemporary cinema, and I think primarily of the Hindi
film, has to do with its correspondence with classical Indian aesthetics, mostly
the emotion-centered aesthetics of rasa. This fascinating correspondence, or dia-
logue across eras, deserves a discussion of its own. I will touch it very briefly in
Chapter 4, with reference to the film Ghajini.
Finally and most importantly, I argue that the mahā-questions, the ever-
burning questions of Indian philosophy, investigated with narrative tools in the
classical epics, are revisited and reworked in contemporary cinema.
In “The Task of the Translator” (1923), the translator’s note appended to his
German translation of Charles Baudelaire’s Tableaux Parisiens, Walter Ben-
jamin raises an impossible question: “Is translation meant for readers who do not
understand the original?”9 It is an impossible question, since we are used to
thinking of translation as intended exactly for those who are unacquainted with
the original. This non-acquaintance is supposed to be the incentive behind every
translation. But Benjamin challenges this common approach, and suggests that
the translation works not (just) for “remote readers,” but (primarily) for the sake
4 Introduction
of the original text itself. “By virtue of its translatability,” Benjamin writes, “the
original is closely connected with the translation. [. . .] We may call this connec-
tion a natural one, or more specifically, a vital connection.”10 This is to say that
there is a family-relation between source and translation. The source “lives” in
the translation, like parent in her offspring. In Indian terms, translation can be
seen as punar-janma, rebirth of the source-text. Benjamin himself comments that
“the idea of life and afterlife in works of art should be regarded with entirely
unmetaphorical objectivity.”11
Along similar lines, with direct reference to contemporary Hindi cinema,
Wendy Doniger writes that “In India, film has proved an extraordinarily rich and
nourishing medium in which to grow, anew, the collective fantasies that are
enshrined in Hindu myths.”12 Doniger x-rays Subhash Ghai’s cult movie Karz
(1980a), and is fascinated by “mythic resonances,” especially with regard to
female figures in the film, representing different aspects of goddess Kālī. She
focuses on the idol of a mare-headed goddess, that “died out by the medieval
period and is no longer a living Hindu image,”13 but which nevertheless appears
at a crucial moment of the film. Whether the image was chosen knowingly, in
accordance with the old myth, or unknowingly, owing to its aesthetic unique-
ness, Doniger’s bottom-line is that “old archetypes never die. They just lurk
quietly in the background of the sets of Hindi films.”14
My own contention (to be justified in the forthcoming discussion of the film
Ghajini) is that this is also the case with the cardinal questions of Indian philo-
sophy, and primarily the question of self-identity. Old questions never die; they
just lurk quietly between the lines of Hindi films.
I am yet to answer the initial question of this Introduction: Why these stories?
From an endless number of stimulating stories, many containing “yoga threads”
and inviting philosophical discussion, why did I choose these four?
Surprising as their grouping together might seem at a first glance, the stories
assembled here create an interesting whole. Each of them works with the con-
cepts of self, identity, body, memory/forgetting and freedom, in its own way.
The interlacement of body and self, despite the almost axiomatic disjunction, in
Indian philosophy, between self in the ātmanic sense of the word and body, is of
special interest. In three of the stories (the Upaniṣadic story is the exception),
bodily transfiguration is the climax of the narrative. Ekalavya of the
Mahābhārata story cuts off his thumb, the digit of identity. Shankara of the hag-
iographic episode takes a new body, the body of king, even if just temporarily.
And in Ghajini, the protagonist’s tattoos, in his case identity carved in skin, are
brutally erased by the villain, his hideous other. Each of these instances is an act
of unexpected revealment, in which the body plays a key role; not just as the
means of disclosure, facilitating of a sense of beyondness, but as an indispensi-
ble piece in the revealed mosaic of selfhood. In two of the stories, the Upaniṣadic
and the hagiographic, the bodyself conveys a measure of freedom that does not
exclude the worldly and corporeal. It is an enticing alternative to the prevalent
conception of disengagement as freedom; an alternative which corresponds with
Chapter 3 of the Yogasūtra, the siddhi (“yogic powers”) and body chapter,
 Introduction 5
usually underread and overshadowed by the ideal of kaivalya, pertaining to
freedom rooted in disengagement. This is to imply that the four stories to be dis-
cussed here correspond, through the above-mentioned concepts, from self-
identity to freedom, not just with one another, but also with Patañjali’s
Yogasūtra. My present project is to read the stories with Patañjali and his
commentators.
The stories to be discussed here are effective. They stay with you. They
invite, almost demand close reflection. However, there is something “coinciden-
tal” in the literary-philosophical ensemble presented here. I use the word coinci-
dence, as in Rada Iveković’s paper “Coincidence of Comparison” (2000). Here
she writes that,

the possible coincidences between Western and Indian forms of thought are
sketched out in the unpredictable crossroads implied by respective heritages
with entirely different pasts and irreducible future destinations. [. . .] The
very act of comparison is not a neutral operation. Neutral comparison does
not exist. [. . .] Heritages do not follow us in a continuous line. And we
“inherit” or are inherited where we least suspect. So, will we allow our-
selves those cross-fertilizations, connections, contiguities, chances, those
encounters which arise in the midstream of the problems that philosophers
pose here and there?15

Iveković speaks of the “coincidence of comparison” between India and the West,
across histories and heritages, as a non-linear, ahistoric, philosophic operation. I
wish to adopt her “coincidence of comparison” method for my own intra-tradition
project. My selection of stories is not neutral or transparent. It is subjective and
contingent. But as Iveković rightly implies, the neutral and the objective are ghosts
of the past. Non-linearity has its “price” and its “fruits,” but such is also the case
with linearity, historicity and adherence to the strict boundaries of the context. On
the one hand, the four narratives to be discussed in the following chapters are taken
“out of context.” On the other hand, together they create a new context, in which
Ekalavya and Indra, Shankara and Sanjay Singhania (the protagonist of Ghajini)
share a philosophical meta-narrative across genres and eras.
The forthcoming four-course meal could have been prepared with other lit-
erary ingredients. At the same time, each of these ingredients is “open” to other
readings, and can be used differently by other philosophy-chefs. Nevertheless,
my hope is that the present “coincidence” allows “those cross-fertilizations, con-
nections, contiguities, chances, and encounters,” of which Iveković speaks.

Chapter by chapter synopsis

Chapter 1
The epic story of Ekalavya introduces a model of truthfulness (embodied by
Ekalavya, the protagonist), which takes issue with the conventional model of
6 Introduction
truth as correspondence (between utterance and fact, word and world). As
against truth as correspondence, which depends on outer data, truthfulness works
as an inner-compass, by which one “navigates” in the world. It is (almost) a
synonym of integrity, with moral nuances to be expounded here in detail. Both
notions, truth and truthfulness, are indicated in the story under discussion by the
single Sanskrit term satya.
The story corresponds with three of Patañjali’s moral precepts (the yamas,
expounded in Chapter 2 of the Yogasūtra), namely satya (truth, truthfulness),
ahiṃsā (non-violence), and asteya (non-theft). Patañjali’s commentators from
Vyāsa onwards point at the interconnectedness of ahiṃsā and satya, non-
violence and truthfulness. But the Mahābhārata, our story included, is full of
violence. I therefore explore the possibility of replacing the concept/precept
of ahiṃsā, as the counterpart of truthfulness, with the more pragmatic notion of
ānṛśaṃsya, which I read as ahiṃsā adapted to the world and the worldly.
Vācaspatimiśra interprets the notion of satya through the famous Mahābhārata
episode of Droṇa’s death, closely related to our story. Reading Droṇa’s death
episode in light of Ekalavya’s story, I argue that it is Droṇa’s adherence to the
narrow model of truth as correspondence, and blindness to truthfulness which
transcends the binary of truth and falsity, that brings about his destruction. The
question of theft, apropos asteya (non-theft) as a yogic precept, is discussed with
reference the dramatic guru-dakṣiṇā (teacher’s fees) that Droṇa demands from
Ekalavya. Here I argue that in the name of truth (as correspondence), truthful-
ness measured by non-harmfulness (ahiṃsā, ānṛśaṃsya) is violated and forsaken.
Another significant feature of Ekalavya’s story is the body. It is Ekalavya’s
painful “final cut,” both physically and symbolically, which reveals a sense of
selfhood so far hidden from the eye. The body works here as site of transforma-
tion, disclosing selfhood and allowing freedom that extends from the social to
the metaphysical.

Chapter 2
The Upaniṣadic story of Prajāpati, Indra and Virocana, discussed in Chapter 2,
offers an unconventional take on the notion of freedom, vis-à-vis, again, the
question of self and identity. The twist is that if mokṣa, “ultimate freedom,” is
usually portrayed via-negativa, as no-duḥkha (non-suffering), or as an existential
position transcending both duḥkha and sukha (suffering and joy); if mokṣa is
conveyed in classic literature again and again as beyondness interwoven with a
transformed vision of oneself as no longer a saṃsārin (belonging to the world),
but instead, as a trans-biological, trans-social, trans-mental, even trans-
psychological, in fact trans-everything selfhood; then the present narrative cul-
minates in freedom which is celebrated “positively,” i.e., joyfully, playfully, in
worldly terms. One could argue that it is not a “mokṣa narrative,” but rather a
narrative prescribing the path to a certain brahma-loka, an (actual? metaphoric?)
heavenly abode, “where necessity is minimized and freedom is maximized,” as
Daya Krishna once put it. For Śaṅkara, the famous commentator of the text and
 Introduction 7
an authoritative traditional voice, the story – just like the preceding stories of the
Chāndogya-Upaniṣad – is about ātmavidyā, or ātman-knowledge, or knowledge
pertaining to self, which for him is the very essence of mokṣa. For me, whether
it is mokṣa or brahma-loka, the story is about the interconnection of selfhood
and freedom, since even the ideal of brahma-loka is full of freedom, even if not
of the “negative,” “trans-everything” type, but quite the contrary. With reference
to “positive” and “negative” types of freedom, I discuss Martin Buber’s analysis
of our Upaniṣadic story in his I and Thou (1937), a hardly visited section of this
well-known essay.
Another salient aspect of the story is the place and role of the body in the
selfhood-freedom narrative formulated here. I am not sure that the position con-
veyed in the story is that of a flat distinction between self and body, as the text is
often read following Śaṅkara. In this respect, I discuss Pandit Badrinath Shukla’s
thought-provoking paper “Dehātmavāda or the Body as Soul: Exploration of a
Possibility within Nyāya Thought” (1988).
The last passages of the story convey a picture of “positive freedom” full of
body. They sit well with the siddhis of Chapter 3 of the Yogasūtra. These extra-
ordinary “yogic powers” evoke a sense of omnipotence as freedom, thus setting
an alternative to the ideal of kaivalya, i.e., disengagement as freedom. Another
correspondence between the Upaniṣadic story and Pātañjala-yoga, to be dis-
cussed here, is about dreaming and dreamless-sleep, in the context of the search
for self.

Chapter 3
The hagiographic story of Shankara in the King’s body, discussed in Chapter 3,
is again about self-identity and freedom. Śaṅkara is usually dated to around the
eighth century ce. A series of hagiographies, dedicated to his alleged life-story
and working as a “narrative commentary” to his philosophical writings, was
composed from the fourteenth century onwards. Most famous of these is the
Śaṅkaradigvijaya (drawing on and summarizing previous hagiographies), dated
to the late seventeenth, or even the beginning of the eighteenth century. I focus
on just one episode from this pre-modern text, in which Shankara, the prot-
agonist (to be distinguished from Śaṅkara the philosopher), leaves his body to
enter the body of a king who just died. This captivating story (consisting of sus-
pense, humor, and even implicit erotica) raises questions about identity and iden-
tification, embodiment and disembodiment, borders and border-crossing,
knowledge of body and body of knowledge. In my discussion, I visit a parallel
Mahābhārata story, the Śāntiparvan episode about Sulabhā, the bhikṣukī (female
wandering ascetic), who enters with her intellect (buddhi) king Janaka’s intel-
lect. This “penetrative” act, and the conversation which follows, remind us that
gender and sexuality are also to be taken into consideration with reference to the
question of self and identity. Another feature that the story about Shankara in the
king’s body amplifies is that of memory, or in fact the interplay of memory and
forgetting as the double-edged scalpel with which one’s identity is carved.
8 Introduction
The hagiographic episode further provides me with the opportunity to search
for the body in Patañjali’s not-exactly body-centered text, despite its con-
temporary reputation. It is merely in Chapter 3 of the Yogasūtra, the siddhi-
chapter, that the body is projected not as obstacle (upasarga), or appendage
(upajana), to be overcome or discarded, but as a source of omnipotence, hence of
freedom. Here the ambivalence between siddhi and kaivalya as inverted con-
cepts of freedom, conveying worldmaking versus introversive withdrawal, resur-
faces. In the very same chapter, Patañjali speaks of the yogic capacity (siddhi) of
entering someone else’s body (YS 3.39) and mind (YS 3.19). I look into these
sūtras with the hagiographic episode in mind, and back to the hagiographic
episode with Patañjali in mind.

Chapter 4
A.R. Murugadoss’ film Ghajini sharpens the discussion of memory, forgetting
and self-identity. It is a “translation,” or “transcreation” of Christopher Nolan’s
film Memento (2000). Both films depict a protagonist who suffers from a post-
traumatic memory-failure. But if in Nolan’s film he is thus doomed to a futile
struggle for self-identity, Murugadoss’ film offers an interesting twist. Nolan
draws on the conventional model of self-identity, based on sequentiality and
maintained by memory. According to this model, broken memory necessarily
means broken identity. But Murugadoss draws on an alternative model, based on
the Upaniṣadic notion of the ātman, or the Sāṃkhya-Yoga notion of puruṣa.
Both notions (despite the difference between them) refer to selfhood beyond
time and temporality, which does not depend on memory, and which according
to Patañjali (in YS 1.2, 1.6 and 1.11 together, and YS 1.43), can only shine forth
when memory is stopped (as part of the stoppage, nirodha, of the “movements of
the mind”), or emptied, or “purified” of its contents. The protagonist’s pathology
in my reading of Murugadoss’ film transforms into a rare occasion for disclosure
of selfhood, which is otherwise concealed behind one’s memory-based persona.
This cinematic portrayal of selfhood falling out of time and sequentiality corres-
ponds with Patañjali’s intriguing discussion of the interplay between sequence
(krama) and moment (kṣaṇa). The term kṣaṇa in his formulation pertains both to
the atomic units that the kramic, sequential chain of worldliness is made of, and
to an Archimedean point beyond time as becoming, which transcends this linear
chain, and which the yoga-practitioner is eager to reveal. Patañjali refers to the
stoppage of the time-bound sequence, which is another name for the worldly
aspect of one’s existence, as kaivalya, or “freedom.” It is freedom not just from
time as sequentiality, but moreover, primarily, from self-identity measured in
time and based on sequentiality.
Another interesting feature of Murugadoss’ Ghajini, as also of Nolan’s
Memento is the body. It is used (I think of the protagonist’s tattoos) as altern-
ative site of memory, an “external” data-storage as it were, through which the
memory-based persona can be maintained despite the protagonist’s dysfunc-
tional “mind memory.” In this respect, I contemplate the notion of “body
 Introduction 9
memory.” But the crux of Ghajini, at least for me, is the erasure scene, in which
the protagonist’s tattoos, memory carved on skin, are erased. Such a scene could
not have occurred in Nolan’s film, since “total erasure,” according to the model
of self-identity with which he works, means total destruction of self. However in
the present case, in the Patañjali-like Murugadoss, this erasure, or nirodha,
finally discloses the “naked” puruṣa-like selfhood, beneath or beyond body and
mind, thus allowing the protagonist a sense of mokṣa-like freedom, and provid-
ing the spectators with the inevitable Bollywood happy-ending.
The initial texts that I work with are:

1 the Poona edition of the Mahābhārata, edited by V.S. Sukthankar and S.K.
Belvalkar, Vol. 1, Part 2 (Ādiparvan) and Vol. 13, Part 1 (Śāntiparvan-
Rājadharma), Pune: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1933 and 1961;
2 Ten Principal Upaniṣads with Śāṅkarabhāṣya, Works of Śaṅkarācārya in
original Sanskrit, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2007;
3 Śrīśaṅkaradigvijayaḥ, edited by Sri Shivprasad Dwivedi, Varanasi:
Caukhambā Vidyābhavan, 2012;
4 Ghajini, written and directed by A.R. Murugadoss, produced by Tagore
Madhu and Madhu Mantena, Big Home Video DVD, 2009;
5 Patañjali’s Yogasūtra and Vyāsa’s Yogasūtra-bhāṣya in Swami Hariha-
rananda Aranya, Yoga Philosophy of Patañjali, University of Calcutta,
Kolkata, 2012.

Pātañjala-yoga
Since I aim to read the stories introduced above vis-à-vis Pātañjala-yoga, I
should provide a short introductory sketch of the Yogasūtra and its commentarial
body. It is not a comprehensive synopsis of the Yogasūtra, but more of a “quick
journey” through the text, with necessary philosophical “stops.” So much has
already been written on the text, and yet Daya Krishna refers to the Yogasūtra as
“undeciphered,”16 and moreover argues that “One cannot understand any work,
unless one ceases to see it as a finished product.”17 The following lines are there-
fore an exercise in presenting the Yogasūtra as “undeciphered” in Daya Krish-
na’s sense of the word, that is, as a textual occasion for raising questions, not
necessarily providing answers.
The Yogasūtra is extremely short and synoptic. A lot is said in just a few
words. It consists of four chapters, with not more than a 190-something sūtras,
or aphorisms. Why “something”? Because there are different recensions of the
text, to the extent that different editors, compilers and copiers are not of one
mind with regard to several sūtras, which according to some belong to the mūla-
text, namely to Patañjali, and for others are in fact commentary-material which
found its way into the “original text.”18
Chapter 1 of the Yogasūtra opens with a straightforward definition of yoga as
citta-vṛtti-nirodhaḥ, “yoga is stoppage of mental activity” (YS 1.2). There is still
a lot to be said. What does this “stoppage” (nirodha) exactly mean, and how
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