Reading recommendations
Here we would like to discuss some important texts and recommend further reading.
Basically, the relevant texts on yoga are a good 2000 years or more old and usually written in Sanskrit. They tend to be quite incomprehensible. because the vision of yoga is utterly different from our ordinary mode of thinking.
Ideally, you should find a teacher who understands Yoga with a practice background measured in decades rather than years, is able to translate Sanskrit AND can explain well. This combination is very hard to find.
There is an unmanageable number of translations and comments in printed form, which vary greatly in quality. No written translation and commentary is sufficient for understanding. One must ultimately venture into the original Sanskrit text to understand their meaning.
We can heartily recommend this research. It's an applied philosophy that is fun and transformative. Yoga is about first dissolving accustomed patterns of movement, thought and behavior, so confusion when studying these texts has its rightful place. A great portion of humor and frustration tolerance is crucial.
A good translation needs:
- a word-for-word translation
- a grammatical analysis of the sanskrit
- a compound translation for each tenet or verse.
- (at most) short and precise explanations
IMPORTANT NOTE: I can only recommend using translations with a grammatical analysis.
If this is missing, the translation is actually useless. After a thorough examination of the original
Sanskrit of the Yoga Sutra and Bhagavad Gita, serious shortcomings in all translations become obvious
and explain why they are so confusing.
NOTE #2: As long as you still need explanations: please turn up the "bullshit sensor". Yoga
Sutra in particular is composed with crystal clarity and is coherent.
If something is incomprehensible, sounds confused or overly complicated: stop reading or listening.
From experience I can say: (Only) dealing with bad translations and comments is frustrating and harmful. For many it is impossible for years to get convoluted concepts out of their heads and to recognize what is obvious in the original text.
2022, Grisha
Rule of thumb: the longer a comment, the higher the probability of gibberish, which only distracts from the original text.
Patañjali: Yogasutra
The approx. 2000 year "Guide to Yoga" is one of the absolute references on the subject of yoga.
In 4 chapters and only 195 brief tenets, yoga is defined and the essence of the main goals, paths and
obstacles
are described.
The jungle of meanings of these extremely brief teaching verses can only be penetrated after thorough
study.
On the one hand, good comments are essential for getting closer to this text.
on the other hand is
any understanding based on it is also an obstacle at the same time, as it is about experiencing yoga and
not
understanding it.The intellectual understanding of the Yogasutra must be continuously questioned,
redefined and
finally completely let go until an intuitive, non-static understanding arises beyond words.
The word is not "the thing in itself"!
Yoga Sutra invites you to meditate on the process of knowledge itself.
| Title | Translator / Commentator | language | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Grischa's translation of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali | Grischa Steffin (2025) |
Sanskrit-Englishh |
Improved in content compared to Chapple's book - and above all, available! Clear grammatical analysis and more. |
| The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali | Christopher Chapple Yogi Ananda Viraj |
English |
Forget all the others! I no longer use any other translation. Grammatic analysis is a must. Once you approach the original text with this help, you will notice that it is almost impossible to understand the text without it. My recommendation is to avoid reading comments altogether. If you must, understand that they are usually rather misleading and distracting from the text. Pure translations are useless if they are not based on experience or (strictly) logical conclusions that can be derived from them. |
| The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali on Concentration of Mind | Fernando Tola Carmen Dragonetti |
English |
Grischa's personal favourite! An excellent piece of work with detailed justification for the translations used The only downside: only the first chapter was translated and unfortunately this wonderful
Argentinian
team of authors did not write a sequel. Be sure to order so that this pearl will continue to be presented! |
| Yogasutra Sanskrit/ English | Reinhard Palm | German |
Finally an excellent German translation, translated straight from Sanskrit. Very good explanations (grammatically and in terms of content) for how Palm chose his wording. A must-have, and very cheap too! Unfortunately, the highly interesting theater director and scholar passed away a few years ago, a great loss, we would have liked to have studied so many more Sanskrit translations from him! |
| Yoga Philosophy of Patañjali | Svami Hariharānanda Aranya | English |
A "must see" for any Yogasutra scholar who makes clear the complexity of the task of understanding this text. The book includes
Vysas Yogabhaśya (age unknown) is generally considered to be the oldest known, most important, almost irrefutable interpretation of the Yogasutra. But this one is also difficult to understand on its own, so there are other contemporary ones and here too there are large deviations in the translation and commentary. There are various authors who have translated Yogabhaśya into English using this method and integrated it as a starting point in their own commentary. |
| Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: With the Exposition of Vyasa | Veda Bharati | English |
A synthesis of approaches from the previous two books. Rooted in Vyāsa’s commentary, it also provides a detailed comparative analysis of various other significant interpretations. A monumental work for advanced learners — covering only the first chapter, while the second chapter was analyzed in a separate, hard-to-find publication. Sadly, Bharati did not complete chapter three and four before he passed away in 2015. Anyhow, hyper-technical and therefore only useful if you regard Yoga as a theory. |
| The Science Of Yoga | I K.Taimni | English | A very interesting comment, quite cheap. |
| The roots of the Yoga: The Classical Sayings of Patanjali | Deshpande Translated by Bettina Bäumer |
German |
A fairly good commentary by P.Y. Deshpande translated from English to German by Bettina
Bäumer.
|
| The Yoga Sutra | Sriram | German |
A very popular comment. It seems almost as if the text was not really translated from Sanskrit but just Sriram's opinion about hearsay. E.g. the central term citta is translated as "the meaning self". This is very far-fetched and misleading: Cit can be thought of as a verb form of "consciousness" introduce (the corresponding verb is missing in German). Citta is the passive past participle of cit, roughly "that which has become conscious". One can provisionally conceptualize consciousness with a concept of "self" get in touch. However, it remains completely unclear how the essentially neutral concept of awareness in connection with "opinion" can be brought. There are many nice-sounding but imprecise commentaries on this, some of which have little to do with the original text and describe contemporary (yoga) platitudes rather than penetrating the nature of the sutra. Too bad. |
| Yoga Sutra Translation (PDF Download) | Chip Hartranft | English | Very well done Buddhist influenced translation. The clear word-for-word translation can be downloaded free of charge. His comment can be ordered, but I haven't checked it out yet. |
Bhagavad Gita
Bhagavad Gita
By far the most helpful, clearest and most comprehensible translation that I know.
- Very important: the detailed grammatical word-for-word analysis.
- Few explanations (very good, since yoga texts should not be commented on or even explained by translators without decades of practical experience)