tato ‘ṇimādi-prādurbhāvaḥ kāya-sampat tad-dharmānabhighātaś ca
tataḥ aṇima-ādi-prādurbhāvaḥ kāya-sampad tad-dharma-anabhighātaḥ ca
“From that, the arising of the power of minuteness, etc., health of the body, and non-harm from its essential nature.”

Tataḥ, “from that,” says Patañjali, referring back to III.45, where he described attention to the physical world and its subtle layers and to bhūta-jaya, “attunement with the elements.” From such attention and attunement comes a power of insight, a resilience of the body, and a protection against the vicissitudes of life.

All three of these attributes are related to citta (consciousness, mind) expanding, penetrating, flowing through the physical world.

Commentators generally agree that aṇima-ādi-prādurbhāvaḥ, “the arising of the power of minuteness, and so on,” refers to the eight mystical powers cited in various classical texts. They would have been well known to Patañjali’s audience. They are transformative powers of citta:

1. aṇiman – to be minute
2. mahiman – to be large
3. gariman – to be heavy
4. laghiman – to be light
5. prāpti – to touch distant objects
6. prākāmya – to accomplish
7. vaśitva – to command
8. īśatva – to overcome

In the Core of the Yoga Sūtras, written later than Light on the Yoga Sūtras, B.K.S. Iyengar shifts his interpretation of III.46. He says that the supernatural powers are covered elsewhere in Pada Three, and that here, aṇiman, minuteness, refers to citta’s expanded ability to flow toward the atomic structure of things, to penetrate the underlying matrix of the physical world. Dr. Ramamurti Mishra, likewise, sees III.46 as describing the yogi’s realization of the dynamic and ever-changing aspect of nature.

The second attribute that Patañjali lists in III.46 is kāya-sampad. Kāya is “body” and sampad (from sam-, “together,” + pad, “to fall”) is success, accomplishment, blessing. Kāya-sampad is generally translated as “perfection of the body,” but I have steered away from this, for various reasons. Sampad does carry a sense of fulfillment of potential, and so I translate it as “health.” Patañjali explores kāya-sampad further in III.47.

Finally, Patañjali describes tad-dharma-anabhighātaḥ, non-harm from the body’s essential nature. This attribute alone is beautiful and paradoxical. Deep awareness of the physical world reveals, as Dr. Mishra says, its essential flux. To live in an embodied way is to experience one’s vulnerability, one’s own growth and decline. The great commentator Vyāsa claims that fire will not burn nor water wet the yogi. Winds do not sweep the yogi away. Even if one reads this as metaphorical, a statement of the mind’s non-disturbance, it is exorbitant.

Patañjali begins Pada Three by describing the transformations (pariṇāma) of consciousness (III.11-16). Citta is empowered through transformation, and in a yogic sense, these transformations are related to the release of constraints on citta, the removal of calcified patterns that limit possibility.

Today’s sūtra is all about possibility. The possibility to become minute, to be big! To be alive in the world in an embodied way. And, somehow, to be unharmed.

As I consider the marvels of Pada Three and transformation that Patanjali promises, I do wonder at the limits of what I find myself able to grapple with. We are in an acceleration of dire happenings–weather events and social upheavals, both the rise of right-wing authoritarianism and a growing resistance movement. In some ways, my consciousness has become adaptable, can flow toward both minuteness and greatness. But it falters at how much is changing and so fast.

For this reason, I was happy to read The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, by the novelist Amitav Ghosh. He looks, with a great deal of compassion, to the collective failure to address the climate crisis. We suffer, he says, from a “great derangement,” and he is curious about it. He looks, especially, at his own beloved field, the world of literary fiction:

It comes as a surprise–a shock, really–to look back upon that period of surging carbon emissions [the 1980s and onward] and recognize that very few (and I do not exempt myself from this) of the literary minds of that intensely engagé period were alive to the archaic voice whose rumblings, once familiar, had now become inaudible to humanity: that of the earth and its atmosphere. (p. 124)

Vast changes are happening on the earth, and yet we do not seem to be listening. Ghosh describes how the form of the modern novel itself has played a role, valorizing the story of individual conscience rather than collective unfolding, centering human awareness and dismissal of non-human events. Nature, as envisioned by 19th century novels, was depicted as regular and orderly. The exceptional, the catastrophic, was considered outside the realm of serious narrative. In contrast, the great epics of India are full of awareness of non-human agency; the Hebrew bible depicts God as encountered through natural events, awesome and terrible as they may be.

What about the climate crisis is “unthinkable”? This is a great question. If the practice of yoga frees the citta to flow to the atomic substructure of things (as B.K.S. Iyengar describes), then can we as yogis stop assuming that nature is regular and orderly? Can we know ourselves to be in the midst of catastrophe?

Ghosh, like others I have written about in these pages, believes imagination has a role to play in freeing the consciousness:

To imagine other forms of human existence is exactly the challenge that is posed by the climate crisis: for if there is any one thing that global warming has made perfectly clear it is that to think about the world only as it is amounts to a formula for collective suicide.

–Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (p. 128)

How important it is, he seems to say, that we let fiction be fiction, not the narrative of what we already know but the opening to what may be. In other words, transformation.

—–

“The yogi can reduce himself to the size of an atom, or expand. He can become light or heavy. He can pierce rocks, have access to everything and master everything.” -B.K.S. Iyengar, Light on the Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali, commentary on III.46

“The qualities of matter and energy are indestructible. According to the Sāṃkhya Yoga system, there is no creation and no destruction. The total energy of the universe remains the same. This is the eternal law of conservation of matter and energy. When atoms, elements, molecules, and compounds are integrated, an object is manifested. When they are disintegrated, the object goes into involution.” — Ramamurti S. Mishra, M.D., The Textbook of Yoga Psychology, commentary on III.46

“The five forms of elements, namely gross, subtle or fine, form, conjunction and means have their own characteristics. Studying their purposes and ways of utilizing them to achieve integration brings unity. Focused, concentrated examination of their structural relationships and function reveals their true character–being changeable, mutable and made up of the insubstantial matrix of nature. …The ātman is free from the contents of the elements and their sub-atomic structures.” –B.K.S. Iyengar, Core of the Yoga Sūtras, pp. 99-100

Questions:
• Have you gained physical ability since beginning yoga practice? Do you feel your weight, size, power, material nature any differently?
• Have you become more attuned to the non-human world?
• Have you suffered physical loss from illness or aging? How have you navigated that? Has it changed your sense of the purpose of practice?
• Life brings essential challenges. It brings upheavals. How do you face catastrophe?