David Gordon White

“in the end, I found that the proportions obtain­ing in Colebrooke (British Orientalist, d. 1837)’s 1818 donation to the India Office Library generally held up. Out of a total of some twenty thousand manuscripts listed in these catalogs on Yoga, Nyaya­ Vaisheshika, and Vedanta philoso­phy, a mere 260 were Yoga Sutra manuscripts (in­cluding commentaries), with only thirty­ five dating from before 1823 ; 513 were manuscripts on Hatha or Tantric Yoga, manuscripts of works attributed to Ya­jnavalkya, or of the Yoga Vasistha; 9,032 were Nyaya manuscripts, and 10,320 were Vedanta manuscripts.
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What does this quantitative analysis tell us ? For every manuscript on Yoga philosophy proper (excluding Hatha and Tantric Yoga) held in major Indian manu­script libraries and archives, there exist some forty Ve­danta manuscripts and nearly as many Nyaya­ Vaisheshika manuscripts. Manuscripts of the Yoga Sutra and its commentaries account for only one­ third of all manuscripts on Yoga philosophy, the other two­ thirds being devoted mainly to Hatha and Tantric Yoga. But it is the figure of 1.27 percent that stands out in highest relief, because it tells us that after the late sixteenth century virtually no one was copying the Yoga Sutra because no one was commissioning Yoga Sutra manuscripts, and no one was commissioning Yoga Sutra manuscripts because no one was interested in reading the Yoga Sutra. Some have argued that instruction in the Yoga Sutra was based on rote memorization or chanting : this is the position of Krishnam­acharya’s biographers as well as of a number of critical scholars. But this is pure speculation, undercut by the nineteenth­ century observations of James Ballantyne, Dayananda Saraswati, Rajendralal Mitra, Friedrich Max Müller, and others. There is no explicit record, in either the commentarial tradition itself or in the sa­cred or secular literatures of the past two thousand years, of adherents of the Yoga school memorizing, chanting, or claiming an oral transmission for their traditions.
Given these data, we may conclude that Cole­brooke’s laconic, if not hostile, treatment of the Yoga Sutra undoubtedly stemmed from the fact that by his time, Patanjali’s system had become an empty signifier, with no traditional schoolmen to expound or defend it and no formal or informal outlets of instruction in its teachings. It had become a moribund tradition, an object of universal indifference. The Yoga Sutra had for all intents and purposes been lost until Colebrooke found it.”
― David Gordon White, The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali: A Biography