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Vyāsa (Yoga-bhāṣya commentator)

Vyāsa (Yoga-bhāṣya commentator)

400 CE

c. 4th–5th c. CE for the Yoga-bhāṣya (often c. 350–450 CE); DISTINCT from the legendary Mahābhārata Vyāsa — the shared name is traditional

The Yoga-bhāṣya (Vyāsa-bhāṣya) is the foundational commentary on Patañjali's Yoga-sūtra and the lens through which the classical Yoga system has been read for centuries. Tradition ascribes it to 'Vyāsa,' but this is an honorific shared with the legendary arranger of the Vedas and author of the Mahābhārata — and the Yoga commentator is a separate, historically obscure individual, conventionally dated to roughly the 4th–5th c. CE. Some recent scholarship (Maas) argues the Yoga-sūtra and its bhāṣya may even be a single composite work (the Pātañjalayogaśāstra) by one author, which would further blur the 'Vyāsa' attribution. Nothing of this commentator's biography is recoverable.

The world in their lifetime

Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Vyāsa (Yoga-bhāṣya commentator)’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.

Works(1)