Patañjali
200 BC-200 AD · Hindu Darshanas · Prominent
Patanjali compiled the Yoga Sutras, the root text of the classical Yoga school. Yoga is the stilling of the mind's churning, says its second line. Eight stages run from ethical rules through posture and breath control to deep absorption, and end in kaivalya, where the watching self, purusa, stands loose from nature altogether. He turned the dualism of the Samkhya school into a practical program of liberation.
Signature
The position Patanjali is most identified with in the Profiler:
- Truth
- leans Objective
- Ethics Basis
- Virtue
Positions on the 9 axes the sources answer
- Mind
- leans Beyond Brain (75 on a 0–100 scale from Brain Only to Beyond Brain)
- Universals
- mildly leans Realism (38 on a 0–100 scale from Realism to Nominalism)
- Identity
- leans Unchanging (25 on a 0–100 scale from Unchanging to Changing)
- Meaning
- leans Inherent (75 on a 0–100 scale from Constructed to Inherent)
- Nature of Reality
- mildly between Unity and Multiplicity (45 on a 0–100 scale from Unity to Multiplicity)
- Ground of Being
- leans Transcendence (75 on a 0–100 scale from Immanence to Transcendence)
- Truth
- leans Objective (75 on a 0–100 scale from Subjective to Objective)
- Opposition
- leans Concurrence (75 on a 0–100 scale from Sublation to Concurrence)
- Conviction
- leans Certain (75 on a 0–100 scale from Uncertain to Certain)
11 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or Patanjali refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Theology
- Henotheism
What is your position on the existence and nature of God or gods? - Highest Good
- Freedom
What is the highest good? - Good and Evil
- Karmic Balance
What is the fundamental nature of good and evil? - End of Things
- Final Liberation
What is the ultimate end of all things? - Knowledge
- Intuition
What is the ultimate foundation of knowledge? - Ethics Basis
- Virtue
What is the ultimate basis of ethics? - Agency
- Karmic Causation / Radical Freedom / Libertarian Free Will
What is the nature of human agency and freedom? - Beginning of Things
- Cyclical Recurrence
What is the origin of reality? - Death
- Reincarnation / Karmic Cycle
What happens at death? - Human Nature
- Other
What is human nature?