When did Patanjali live?
Nothing is written about Patanjali’s actual life, although a myth was created 1000 years after he died that he was miraculously virgin born. If indeed there was a historical Patanjali, the best guess is that he lived in the very late Mauryan period (perhaps 100 BCE, or as late as 100 CE. Although raj yoga practices, such as described in the Yoga Sutras, are ancient (Gautama Buddha was such a yoga practitioner living approximately 500 BCE) Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras acted as a compendium of what was a previously an unwritten oral tradition performed not in academia or monasteries but in the wilderness, caves, and forest retreats. Also in the late Mauryan period the Fourth Buddhist Council (held by the Theravadins) was the first to write down the Buddhist Sutras which had been previously relegated to mnemonic/phonetic memorization techniques. they rationale was to preserve the teachings as they feared that the teachings may otherwise have become lost or distorted. So one could speculate tha
