Yoga has been receiving a lot of attention, within the country and outside, these days. subject that has caught the fancy of many. Information media It appears to be the one almost without exception give it prominence. Magazines and Sunday editions carry diagrams and pictures of yogic postures with phase-wise description. Seminars, discourses, study classes and conferences on some aspect or other of yoga are held frequently. Yoga missions, institutes specialising in yoga, besides short term camps have sprung up everywhere. Yogis, Maharshis, Yogacharyas, Yogamathas, Ma-yogasaktis and a host of others are in the field to impart instruction in yoga, yogasana, meditation, transcendental meditation and the like. There is no dearth of those who receive instruction in these various phases of yoga either. Governments, central as well as state, have been persuaded to offer grants and other encouragements for studies and researches on yoga. Moves are afoot to institute Yoga Universities.
Not a bit of this yoga fever has anything to do with the real yoga propounded by Patanjali, the originator of the system, notwithstanding frequent use of his name. What is written on yoga does not help one understand yoga as described by its proponent. Rather, they set forth as yoga what is not yoga. Things that have no bearing on yoga are dealt with at great length as its integral parts, leaving out its essential elements as 'hard to understand and difficult to explain' regardless of the appropriate language used by its propounder to explain clearly every technical term introduced in the text.
Any one is free to think or write on any subject including the topic of the different systems of Indian philosophy, but his view cannot be put down as the final in respect of any of the systems, in supercession of the established stand of the originator of that system. If one disagrees with the originator's stand, one has the freedom to put down one's view as a new thought on the topic, as had been done by the originators of the different Indian thoughts. Kanada, Kapila, Gotama, Patanjali, Jaimini and Badarayana, all directed their thoughts on one and the same subject, viz., origin of the world and its destiny. Their thoughts developed on different lines resulting in different systems, not one system. Sankhya, Vaisesika, Vedanta etc, are not the subjects of their thoughts; they are the outcome of their thinking on the one topic mentioned above. There is no bar to new thoughts on that topic, nor is there any restriction to the number of systems.
Thoughts of originators of Indian philosophical systems came down to us in the form of aphorisms. These were elaborated in super and other commentaries by their followers. It is not that aphorisms are unintelligible without these explanatory works. Had it been so, all branches of knowledge in aphoristic form would have disappeared long before commentaries were composed, considering the long gap of time between them. And all commentaries cannot be considered as unmixed blessing. They make their own additions and modifications to the original thoughts and, to that extent, are departures from the original.
Two types of commentaries are generally met with in Sanskrit literature, one, ordinary, known as Vyākhyāna, explanatory in character, commonly employed to explain literary works, and the other, super commentary, called Bhasya, which, besides interpreting the text, introduces additions and modifications, true to its definition.
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