Speaker
Description
In pre-modern South Asia, the authorship of the oldest surviving commentary on Patañjali’s Yoga Sutra, the so-called Yogabhāṣya (c. 400 CE), was variously ascribed to Patañjali himself, Vindhyavāsin, or Vyāsa. While there is a broad scholarly consensus that the authorship ascription to Vyāsa is ahistorical, scholars like J. Bronkhorst, G. Larson, and myself depicted the hypothesis of Vindhyavāsin’s authorship as a viable or even preferable alternative to that of the bhāṣya being Patañjali’s own commentary. Other historians of Indian philosophy, like E. Frauwallner and P. Chakravarti, took a different stance. Based on their analysis of historical sources and the surviving fragmentary accounts of Vindhyavāsin’s philosophy, they argued that Vindhyavāsin was a predecessor of the author of the Yogabhāṣya and not the author himself. In the present talk, I will re-examine the available sources and previous scholarship to improve our knowledge of the exact position of Vindhyavāsin in the history of Sāṅkhya and Yoga and contribute new arguments for solving the authorship problem of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra (i.e., the Yoga Sutra together with the Yogabhāṣya).
