On Hearing a Yogi’s Talk: Āgamapramāṇa, Language, and Mind in the Pātañjalayoga

Abstract

The current study aims to clarify the meaning, the epistemic construction, and the pragmatics of the term āgama occurring in Pātañjalayogaśāstra I.7 and its commentaries. Since āgama is a linguistic construction, this paper is also a contribution to the inquiry into the philosophy of language of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra. The inclusion of linguistic-philosophical arguments corroborates the Pātañjalayoga system of philosophy as a śāstra text and its logical and epistemological paradigm. The structure of the present work is as follows: a first part strictly dealing with textual sources, and a second where the content of textual sources is discussed. Relying on the early literature ranging from the Pātañjalayogaśāstra (c. 400 CE) to the Pātañjalayogasūtravṛtti of Nāgeśa Bhaṭṭa (PYV, half of 17th—half of 18th cent. CE), to āgama can be accorded two principal meanings: as a generic verbal testimony, and as authoritative verbal teachings. Grounded on the evaluated textual material, the second part of this essay presents a hypothesis aiming at the understanding of verbal testimony: in the Pātañjalayogaśāstra, āgama exhibits an epistemological, linguistic and psychological construction. In fact, as an epistemic theory of verbal testimony āgama functions following three main vectors being: (a) epistemological source and instance of valid cognition, namely a pramāṇa, (b) linguistically structured, āgama exhibits a propositional structure (vākya); and (c) a mental episode, placing āgama as one among the different mental events (cittavṛtti) described in the Pātañjalayogaśāstra.