"Yoga is the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind."
One hundred ninety-six aphorisms in which Patanjali did for meditation what a good API does for a messy protocol: compressed centuries of practice into a clean, ordered interface. The second sutra defines the whole project, yogas chitta vritti nirodha, yoga is the stilling of the mind's fluctuations, and everything after is implementation detail.
The famous part is the eight-limbed path, the Eight Limbs of Yoga: ethics, discipline, posture, breath, withdrawal, concentration, absorption, and finally Samadhi, a dependency chain where each limb builds on the last. This is the systematic backbone of Raja Yoga, the meditative path among the four, and the reason Yoga means something more rigorous here than stretching. Patanjali wrote a spec, and the spec still compiles.
Related
- Books: The shelf
- Eight Limbs of Yoga: The path the sutras define
- Raja Yoga: The royal road these sutras systematize
- Samadhi: The final limb
- Yoga: The practice entire