Raja Yoga
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- No scanning noise detected (automatic measure over the whole text, not checked by hand)
- Extent:
- ~78,300 words · 372 passages
Cite this work
- APASwami Vivekananda. (n.d.). Raja Yoga. Digital reproduction: SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/swami-vivekananda/raja-yoga
- MLASwami Vivekananda. Raja Yoga. Digital reproduction, SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/swami-vivekananda/raja-yoga.
- ChicagoSwami Vivekananda. Raja Yoga. Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/swami-vivekananda/raja-yoga.
Reference to the edition that SigPhi reproduces: SigPhi is its digital reproduction, not its publisher. The edition's year is not in the metadata (hence "n.d."), and the translator appears only when recorded.
What it is about
Raja Yoga (1896): Patanjali's Yoga Sutras with commentary.
Context and history
The book that brought yoga to the West, and that explains what it was before it became physical exercise: control of the mind, eight limbs, and samadhi at the end. The whole twentieth-century diffusion of yoga starts here.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
experienced certain truths, and these they preach. Thus it is clear that all the religions of the world have been built upon that one universal and adamantine foundation of all our knowledge — direct experience. The teachers all saw God; they all saw their own souls, they saw their eternity, they saw their future, and they saw what they preached. Only INTRODUCTORY there is this difference, that in most of these religions, especially in modern times, a peculiar claim is put before us, and that claim is that these experiences are impossible at the present day; they were only possible with a few men, who were the first founders of the religions that subsequently bore their names. At the present time these experiences have become obsolete, and therefore whe have now to take religion on belief. This I entirely deny. If there has been one case of experience in this world in any particular branch of knowledge it absolutely follows that this experience has been possible millions of times before, and will be repeated eternally. Uniformity is the rigorous law of nature; what once happened can happen always.
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