Edwin F. Bryant > Quotes

“excessive renunciation in and of itself does not necessarily guarantee that one is freed from the potential reemergence of undesirable saṁskāras.”
― Edwin F. Bryant, The Yoga Sutras of Patañjali: A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary

“Yoga differs from most comparable Western schools of dualism by regarding not just the physical body but also the mind, ego, and all cognitive functions as belonging to the realm of inert matter.”
― Edwin F. Bryant, The Yoga Sutras of Patañjali: A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary

“As has been discussed at length, the Yoga school holds that not only is consciousness, ātman/puruṣa, separate from the objects of consciousness, but the goal of the entire system is precisely for consciousness to be aware of itself as a separable, unchanging entity and thereby be extricated from its enmeshment in the world of objects. It is autonomous and independent. In contrast, liberation in Buddhism, nirvāṇa, is attained precisely when one ceases to identify with consciousness as an eternal, unchanging self and realizes that consciousness depends on objects of consciousness and does not exist without them. Consciousness is not autonomous or independent; it is dependent or interdependent on its objects—the very opposite of the Yoga position. In other words, whereas in Yoga, one must identify with and strive to realize the ātman, in Buddhism, one must cease identifying with or clinging to the notion of and striving for the liberation of an ātman; hence, in philosophical discourse, Buddhism is sometimes referred to as an-ātmavāda the system that does not believe in an ātman. But, argues Vijñānabhikṣu, in order to reject something, there must be two entities: the rejecter and the thing to be rejected. If the notion of ātman becomes the thing to be rejected, who is the rejecter of the notion? Or, as Hariharānanda puts it, if one aspires to liberation by thinking, “Let me be free from misery by suspending the activities of the mind,” there will remain a pure me free from the pangs of misery. The self behind or beyond the mind is the real experiencer of this process. If one denies the ultimate existence of such an agent, then one is faced with the often-marshaled question: For whose sake is liberation sought? In any event, Vyāsa puts forth the position of Yoga in distinction to the Buddhist view: Consciousness, puruṣa, is eternal and immutable, the subject of experience, and liberation involves detaching it from the objects of experience in the form of the evolutes of prakṛti. As an interesting aside, the term for suffering, duḥkha, seems to have been coined by analogy to its opposite, sukha, happiness. Kha refers to the axle of a wagon, and su- is a prefix denoting good (and duḥ-, bad). Thus in its old Indo-Aryan, Vedic usage, sukha denoted a wagon with good axles (that is, a comfortable ride). The Indo-Aryans were tribal cowherders, and one can imagine that comfortable wagons for their travels on the rough, unpaved trails of their day would have been a major factor in their notions of happiness and comfort.”
― Edwin F. Bryant, The Yoga Sutras of Patañjali: A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary

“Wilhelm Rau has compiled the Vedic references to pottery from the oldest strands of the Black Yajurveda and found that although the potter’s wheel was known, it was hand made pottery that was prescribed for the ritual sphere. This suggests to him that “the more primitive technique persisted in the ritual sphere while in secular life more advanced methods of potting had already been adopted.” Should this assumption be correct, “we can pin down the transition from hand-made to wheel-thrown pottery, as far as the Aryans are concerned, (down) to the earlier phases of Vedic times” (Rau 1974, 141).12 Of relevance to this line of argument is a verse from the Taittīrlya Samhitā (4, 5, 4), stating that what is turned on the wheel is Āsuric and what is made without the wheel is godly (e.g., Kuzmina 1983, 21). According to Rau’s philological investigations, the characteristic of this oldest pottery was that it was made of clay mixed with various materials, some of them organic, resulting in porous pots. These pots were poorly-fired and ranged in size from about 0.24 m to 1.0 m in diameter at the opening and from 0.24 m to 0.40 m in height. Furthermore, they showed a lack of plastic decoration and were unpainted (Rau 1974, 142). Of further relevance is the fact that firing was accomplished by the covered baking method between two layers of raw bricks in a simple open pit. In later times this was done with materials producing red color. Rau advises excavators to be “on the lookout for ceramics of this description among their finds” (142).”
― Edwin F. Bryant, The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate

“In short, although the excesses of Aryan ideology in Europe would be hard to surpass, the Indians themselves were not averse to attempting to extract political mileage from the Aryan theme to support their own agendas. Indeed, in about 1920, one Visnu Sakharam Pandit filed an immigration court case in America, claiming to be a European. Since immigration was closed to Asiatics at that time, the ingenious fellow said he could prove that he was a Brahman and therefore a fellow Aryan. The argument was even entertained for a while, until a California court ruled that the Aryan invasion theory was precisely that: just a theory, and therefore not citable as credible proof for immigration purposes.”
― Edwin F. Bryant, The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate

“Moreover, even if for argument’s sake it could be established that the percentage of foreign words in the Rgveda was considerably less than that of later texts, the explanation could well be a sociolinguistic (i.e., cultural) one. Many scholars such as Thieme have drawn attention to the linguistic puritanism of the Vedic texts. These are sacerdotal hymns describing ritualistic techniques that were preserved by a culturally distinct group of specialists who, like any elite, took pains to isolate their speech from common vulgarisms. The Epics and Puranas deal with the real world—tribes, geography, history, intrigue, war, and the religion of the people. Naturally, the vocabulary in these latter texts will be far less conservative and more representative of the language of the street, so to speak. One is not compelled to interpret any possible disparate proportion of non-Aryan words in different genres of texts as proof of a linguistic substratum.”
― Edwin F. Bryant, The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate

“Detached from the external contact [of the senses with their objects] a person finds happiness in the ātman. Such a person, engaged in practicing the yoga of Brahman [the Absolute Truth], experiences eternal happiness. Material pleasures are born from the contact [of the senses with the sense objects]; they have a beginning and an end, and so they are the source of unhappiness. The wise do not delight in them. (V.21–22)”
― Edwin F. Bryant, The Yoga Sutras of Patañjali: A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary

“By cultivating an attitude of friendship toward those who are happy, compassion toward those in distress, joy toward those who are virtuous, and equanimity toward those who are nonvirtuous, lucidity arises in the mind.”
― Edwin F. Bryant, The Yoga Sutras of Patañjali: A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary