Book Review – Yoga Journal; June, 2007
THE UNADORNED THREAD OF YOGA: The Yoga-Sutra of Patanjali in English,
compiled by Salvatore Zambito. Foreword by Swami Veda Bharati.
The Yoga-Sutras Institute Press; www.yogasutras.net
When you study a Sanskrit text like Patanjali's Yoga Sutra, you're forced to rely, for the most part, on an English translation. Unfortunately, most of the Sutra's Sanskrit words can't be directly translated into English. As a result, rendered manuscripts seem somewhat flat relative to Patanjali's original passages. One solution is to compare several translations so that the text's fuller meaning is gradually revealed through different interpretations. The problem is, you can end up flipping tediously back and forth through a tall stack of books.
Fortunately, Salvatore Zambito, a yoga teacher since 1968 from Washington State, has devised an almost perfect solution to this dilemma. In this, his first book, he has collected a dozen translations of the sutras, or threads of knowledge, published between 1890 and 1995. The translators' commentaries that usually accompany the sutras in other volumes have been eliminated, thus making the sutras "unadorned."
In Zambito's collection, each sutra includes the original Sanskrit with its English transliteration and the breakdown of the individual Sanskrit words into their constituent elements, followed by 12 English interpretations. For example, sutra I.2, which defines yoga as citta-vrtti-nirodha, has several interpretations, including citta as "thinking principle" or "consciousness"; vrtti as "thought-waves" or "activities"; nirodha as "cessation," "quieting," "suppression," or "subjugation."
The translations are as diverse as the scholars who wrote them: Georg Feuerstein, Vyaas Houston, and Swami Veda Bharati (formerly Pandit Arya), who wrote the foreword to the book; distinguished swamis Vivekananda and Satchidananda; Theosophist sympathizers Alice A. Bailey and M.N. Dvivedi. Along with its informative essays in the appendixes, this book is an essential reference for serious Yoga Sutra students. Let's hope that volume 2, with translations made since 1995, is coming soon. RICHARD ROSEN