THE CONFLICT OF VOLUNTARISM AND DUALISM
IN THE YOGASOTRA (Or How to Get "Mukti" from Metaphysics) YOGASUTRA SCHOLARSHIP Jwala Prasad (1930) and J. W. Hauer (1931) were among the first to discredit the Sanskrit commentaries on the Yogasatra (YS) as anachronistic and "theory laden", as reading into the terse stltras the polemical concerns of their own much later times. Paul Deussen (1920), Surendranath Dasgupta (1922), and Otto Strauss (1925) had already questioned the unity of the work. Thus with the readings of the commentators seen as oversystematic, the two central questions of interpretation became the nature of the YS's unity and the alignment of the stltras with ancient yogist movements presumably expressed there.
Then appeared the monumental studies of Mircea Eliade (1954) and of Hauer (1958), portraying the history of yogist movements from the Vedic era through the time of the YS's composition to recent Tantrism. With the exception of Hauer's emphasis on the practices of non-br~hmanic "Vrfityas" as yoga-precursors, the two scholars draw similar pictures of the development of yoga. However they differ markedly on the question of the YS's unity. Hauer discerns five distinct texts, four of which he thinks reflect distinct schools of yogic practice, with the fifth as a late polemical accretion. The texts he says were edited into one piece, though he provides no clear motive for the editor's eclecticism. Eliade finds the unity of the YS to derive from mystical foundations, reading the work as the record of an extraordinary experience presumed to result from yoga-practice. In a later work (1962), he concedes that the text "may have been revised by many hands to adapt it to new 'philosophical situations'. "1 But despite the concession of possible recastings, Eliade's reading is highly unitarian. He believes that the YS reflects a long tradition of reconfirmed yogic experience, whether or not a single person is its author.
Subsequent scholarship has tended to follow Eliade. Adolf Janft6ek (1959)