Who was Patanjali?
Patanjali was a yogi who lived in Northern India approximately two thousand years ago as a practitioner of ancient mountain yoga Nothing definitive is known about his life, albeit some grammarians speculate that he was the same person as the grammarian, also named Patanjali who lived in in the mid second century BCE. and who wrote a celebrated commentary (Mahabhasya) on Panini’s classic on Sanskrit Grammar. Such unsupported speculation helps grammarians justify their mechanistic etymological and philological interpretations of the Yoga Sutras. Although there existed nothing known about the Yogi, Patanjali, for a thousand years after composing his yoga compendium, all of a sudden (miraculously) during the bhakti era in India a myth was composed lauding his magical virgin birth and many supernatural feats. Hence nearly 1000 years after Patanjali wrote the Yoga Sutras, Patanjali started being worshipped as a Hindu saint. Although Patanjali certainly deserves great praise, we feat him and
