Patanjali's Meditation Yoga

By: Vyn Bailey

A description of a mental and physical yoga program. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0731806484
• ISBN13: 9780731806485
• Release Date: January 1998
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster (Australia)
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 4.9" x 7.7"

Customer Reviews

In-depth translation by the reader...

I have read several translations of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras and each has their distinctive commentaries. Vyn Bailey's gift is not so much the actual translation and commentary, but that he provided each Sanskrit word with the various ways it can be translated and then highlights which translation that he used. This allows the reader with meditation experience to participate in the translation process and experience nuances that are missed in the "actual" translation. Translations into English often are "smoothed" to fit our syntax and concepts and some subtle meanings are lost. I recommend this book less for the translation and commentary than for the Sanskrit translations for each word - a wonderful gift for people who do not know Sanskrit.

Primer on meditation

I have read several interpretations of Patanjali's Yoga Sutra. After a while this one became the only one I referred to and I sold the other books. I would recommend this to anyone looking for a lucid and unbiased explanation of this key text.Vyn Bailey is a christian priest who studied meditation and advocates meditation for people in any religion. The book therefore deals only with the philosophy and practise of meditation. As such it confines itself to the subset of the aphorisms that deal with meditation, and excludes those that deal with religion. Believe me, this is not a weakness of the book. If you want a primer on meditation, this is it. I believe many other interpretations give too much detail on too many irrelevancies. If you want to learn sankhya philosophy, ayurveda, or about vedanta, Patanjali is not the place to learn it, but to learn meditation, i.e. through experience not description, there is no better source of help. Bailey's version is short but I believe people will learn more than from a cluttered text. Each sutra is given two pages, the sanskrit is provided both in devanagiri and english with an explanation of each root word and the translation given. Then a very clear explanation of what Patanjali was saying. It is obvious that Bailey has a deep undersanding that comes from experience of Yoga and he conveys it in a charming manner.One criticism from the viewpoint of persons who can read sanskrit is that the original script is handwritten in something like a child's not too confident handwriting rather than being printed, but it is not unreadable either. Probably this is Bailey's handwriting. He writes that he started learning it around the age of 70 to read Patanjali in the original, which I thought was pretty amazing.