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The attempt, however, to take «yoga-sutras» as an instruction and a guide to «mastering yoga» becomes inevitably frustrating since the text -of Patanjali does not explain the technique, while yoga as a method of influencing consciousness should not be considered a distinct branch of Indian culture or a unique achievement of any religious-philosophical school. In the history of the development of the Indian religious-philosophical thought yoga has kept a stable and quite a definite position of its own and has been part of both the orthodox Brahmanic systems recognizing the authority of the vedas, and of non-orthodox systems, which fact is known to us in the first place from written sources of Buddhist schools and teachings. In the functional aspect, the Indian religious-philosophical schools of ancient times and early Middle Ages are characterized by a clearly expressed polymorphism. The school tradition was based, as a rule, upon a combination of dogmatic precepts (a religious doctrine) which set themselves the aim of spiritual transformation of man (emancipation, enlightenment). The tradition also. prescribed the way for attaining such a state — a consequential practice of psychotechnical methods of regulating one's consciousness (yoga). This practice varied from school to school each having a more or less extensive literature of a logical-discourcive nature (treatises and commentaries to them), that is, a literature which set out, in a theoretically demonstrative form, the conceptual perception of the original ideas and experience of consciousness transformation. Samkhya-yoga was no exception in this respect and in would be unjust to look at the author of «yoga-sutra» as the originator of the yoga practice or its only theoretician. As it has been noted by S. Dasgupta, «Patanjali not only collected the different forms of yoga practices, and gleaned the diverse ideas which were or could be associated with the Yoga, but drafted them all in the Samkhya metaphysics, and gave them the form in which they have been handed down to us». Thus the researcher is faced with the following quite important question: what particular written texts make the logically cohesive semantic context which would provide a background for an approach to the problem of historical-philosophical interpretation of Patanjali's «yoga-sutras»? How much useful is Vyasa's commentary in helping to perform this function? Since Patanjali's «yoga-sutras» and Vyasabhasya are distanced from each other by time varying from one to several centuries, this time-lag makes the researcher wonder if the commentator renders correctly the original meaning of Patanjali's text. Is it possible, proceeding from Vyasa's explanations, to establish what exactly the sutras' author meant? — 217 —
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