How Vindhyavāsin turned into Vedavyāsa: Vācaspati Miśra’s case for Pātāñjala Yoga

This paper explores the role that Vācaspati Miśra – an influential Indian philosopher from the 10^th century – played in the promotion and canonization of Pātāñjala Yoga in India. Vācaspati Miśra was a polymath, traditionally known by a rare sobriquet sarva-tantra-svatantra (“the one who owns all the systems”) and composed highly influential commentaries and independent treatises on nearly all major Brahmanical philosophical traditions. I argue that Vācaspati’s versatile scholarly activity within the milieu of Mithila, the reputable center of Brahmanical learning, effectively promoted two relatively inconspicuous systems in this period – that of Pātāñjala Yoga and Advaita Vedānta. In the present inquiry, I focus on the former system. Vācaspati composed his Tattvavaiśaradī commentary on the Yogasūtrabhāṣya and identified its author with Vedavyāsa – the mythological compiler of the Vedas and the composer of the Mahābhārata and the Purāṇas. It is not a coincidence that Vācaspati also ascribed the authorship of a fundamental text of another tradition, namely, the Brahmasūtra, to Vedavyāsa. As far as I can tell, these ascriptions have no precedence in the history of the two texts and are meant to enhance their status within the orthodoxy. As the so-called Vedavyāsa’s commentary came to be regarded as the decisive canonical interpretation of the Yoga philosophical school, and as all the following commentaries rely on Vācaspati’s Tattvavaiśaradī, we may consider Vācaspati’s commentarial activity (along, perhaps, with institutional enterprises about which we know nothing) as the turning point in the history of the Yoga philosophy, after which the trio of the Yogasūtra, the Bhāṣya, and Tattvavaiśaradī assumed almost absolute authority within the tradition, with alternative lines of interpretation doomed to oblivion.