योगवासिष्ठ — Yoga Vasiṣṭha¶

A verse-by-verse study: the Sanskrit text, word-by-word meanings, an English translation, and pointers for reflection.

What is the Yoga Vasiṣṭha?¶

The Yoga Vasiṣṭha is a dialogue between the sage Vasiṣṭha and the young prince Śrī Rāma. Troubled by the suffering and impermanence of life, Śrī Rāma asks his teacher what is real and how one should live. Vasiṣṭha answers through philosophy and through many stories.

Traditionally attributed to Vālmīki, the full text has about 32,000 verses in six books, called prakaraṇas. Its central teaching is that the world is an appearance in consciousness, and that liberation is possible while living fully in the world.

The Yoga Vasiṣṭha is also a great synthesis. At its core is Advaita Vedānta, the teaching of the Upaniṣads that there is one consciousness appearing as many. Around that core it gathers ideas from Buddhism, Jainism, Kashmir Śaivism, Sāṅkhya and Yoga, and the Bhagavad Gītā, treating them not as rivals but as different names for the one truth. See how the traditions meet, with concrete examples.

Four features set it apart. The commentary on each verse returns to them often.

The Lord as student. In the Bhagavad Gītā the Lord is the Guru, teaching Arjuna. In the Yoga Vasiṣṭha the Lord is the student: Śrī Rāma sits before Vasiṣṭha to learn. Together the two texts show the teaching from both sides.
Questions worth asking. Often we do not even know what to ask. Here Śrī Rāma, still a teenager, asks the questions that matter most — about suffering, time, the mind and the meaning of life. The text teaches how to ask before it teaches the answers.
A synthesis. The text is Advaita Vedānta at its core, yet it weaves in insights from other traditions, such as Jainism, Buddhism and Kashmir Śaivism, into one whole. Examples are given below.
Wisdom lived, not renounced. Śrī Rāma does not take up renunciation. Having awakened, he goes on to live a full householder life, showing that liberation is possible in the midst of duty and the world.

The heart of the teaching¶

Who it is for. The text names its own reader at the start: one who is convinced "I am bound; may I be free" — neither wholly ignorant nor yet a knower (1.2.2). Its starting point is the questions every thoughtful person meets sooner or later: What is this life? Who am I? What should I do? Śrī Rāma's despair in the first book is the "dark night" that makes such a person ready to hear the answer.

The world as appearance. The world is called भ्रम, an appearance, like the blue of the sky: we clearly see the colour, yet there is nothing blue up there (1.3.2). Such an appearance is not removed by endlessly examining it, but by no longer taking it as real — "forgetting it", as that verse says.

Form and substance. A favourite image of the text is gold and the bracelet. "Bracelet" is only a name given to a shape; what is really there is gold. In the same way, every object, event and person is a name and form, and what is really there is consciousness.

Three steps. Read in this light, the teaching moves in three steps: see that the world is an appearance; see that its substance is the mind; and see that the substance of the mind is pure consciousness. This is why the text spends so long on the mind (see Sarga 16): the mind is the doorway between the world and its source.

Diversity remains; separateness goes. Awakening does not erase the variety of the world. Consciousness is infinite and expresses itself in countless forms, like figures that lie uncarved within a single block of stone. What falls away is the sense of things as separate, opposed objects.

Free, and fully alive. The one who awakens does not withdraw. Vasiṣṭha's counsel is to live in the world completely free of sorrow, acting, feeling and responding naturally, but no longer bound. This is the meaning of a जीवन्मुक्त, one liberated while living — and it is the life Śrī Rāma goes on to lead.

These points draw on Swami Venkatesananda's Introduction to the Yoga Vasiṣṭha (Divine Life Society), which is well worth reading in full.

The fruit of study (prayojana)¶

Indian tradition introduces a scripture by four questions, the अनुबन्धचतुष्टय: who is it for (अधिकारी), what is it about (विषय), how does the text relate to its subject (सम्बन्ध), and what fruit does it give (प्रयोजन). The Yoga Vasiṣṭha answers all four in its own words, in its opening sargas.

Who it is for: one convinced "I am bound; may I be free", neither wholly ignorant nor already a knower (1.2.2).
What it is about: the Self, the one reality "from which all beings appear, in which they abide, and in which they come to rest" (1.1.1).
How it relates to that: it is a means. The text names itself मोक्षोपाय, "the means to liberation" (2.17.6). It does not merely describe freedom; it leads the reader to it, through stories and teaching.
What fruit it gives: the text states this plainly, more than once:
- the one who reflects on it न स भूयोऽभिजायते — is not born again (1.2.3);
- it was asked for so that येनेयं जनता दुःखान्मुच्यते — people may be freed from suffering (1.2.8);
- hearing it, one crosses all delusion, as one crosses the ocean by Rāma's bridge (1.2.10);
- and it calls itself निर्वाणदायिनी — the giver of nirvāṇa (2.17.6).

The main fruit: liberation while living. The highest prayojana is मोक्ष, freedom: the complete end of sorrow and the discovery of the Self as fullness and peace. The Yoga Vasiṣṭha's particular emphasis is that this freedom is to be lived here, in this body and this life, as a जीवन्मुक्त — one liberated while living — and not only after death.

The fruits along the way. Before that final fruit, study brings intermediate fruits, which are also the means to it. A well-known verse of the text (5.92.18), quoted by Vidyāraṇya in his Jīvanmuktiviveka, names three: तत्त्वज्ञानं मनोनाशो वासनाक्षय एव च । मिथः कारणतां गत्वा दुःसाध्यानि स्थितान्यतः ॥ — knowledge of the truth, the dissolving of the mind, and the wearing away of latent tendencies: these three are each other's causes, and so are hard to achieve [one without the others].

Knowledge of the truth (तत्त्वज्ञान): ignorance of one's own nature is removed, and with it the doubts that keep one from resting in it.
Dissolving of the mind (मनोनाश): the mind stops being a restless, separate master and becomes transparent to consciousness (see Sarga 16).
Wearing away of tendencies (वासनाक्षय): the habits that bind are replaced by pure ones, until they fall away (1.3.8–11).

Alongside these, the text gives two practical gifts:

Self-effort in place of fatalism. Vasiṣṭha insists that पौरुष, one's own effort guided by scripture and discernment, is stronger than "fate", which is only the residue of one's past effort. Despair gives way to responsibility (Sargas 4–9 of the Mumukṣu Prakaraṇa).
Equanimity within ordinary life. The teaching was given to a young prince about to take up his duties, not to an ascetic leaving them. Its fruit is visible in how one lives: acting fully, responding naturally, without being broken by hard situations (see the reflection at 1.14.3).

Reading is not yet the fruit. The text promises its fruit not to one who merely reads, but to one who reflects — यो विचारयति प्राज्ञः, "the wise one who inquires" (1.2.3). The fruit ripens through विचार, inquiry: reading slowly, turning each verse over, and testing it against one's own experience. That is why this site gives pointers for reflection rather than a finished commentary.

How the traditions meet¶

The Yoga Vasiṣṭha does not argue against other schools so much as gather them in. Its view is that different traditions have named the one reality in different ways. Some concrete examples:

The one reality under many names. In 5.87.18 the text describes the final state as यच्छून्यवादिनां शून्यं ब्रह्म ब्रह्मविदां वरम् । विज्ञानमात्रं विज्ञानविदां यदमलं पदम् ॥ — that which is the Void for those who teach emptiness, the supreme Brahman for the knowers of Brahman, pure consciousness for those who teach consciousness: that stainless state. "The Void" is the term of the Buddhist Madhyamaka school of Nāgārjuna; "consciousness only" is that of the Buddhist Vijñānavāda (Yogācāra); "Brahman" is that of the Upaniṣads and Vedānta. The verse treats all three as pointing to one place. Elsewhere the Self is also called by the Sāṅkhya name puruṣa.

Buddhism.

Craving as the root of suffering. The Buddha's second noble truth names craving (Sanskrit तृष्णा, Pāli taṇhā) as the cause of suffering. Śrī Rāma devotes a whole sarga to it (Sarga 17) and calls the giving up of longing "the healing mantra" (1.17.43).
Nirvāṇa as blowing out. The image of craving vanishing "like the flame of a lamp blown out" (1.15.13) is the literal sense of the word nirvāṇa, and the sixth book itself is called the Nirvāṇa Prakaraṇa.
The world as mind. "The mind is the cause of all things; while it exists, the three worlds exist" (1.16.25). This is very close to the Yogācāra teaching that the world is "mind only", and it becomes the central theme of the Utpatti Prakaraṇa.
Reason over authority. "A reasoned statement should be accepted even from a child; anything else should be cast aside like straw, even if Brahmā said it" (2.18.3). The Buddha gave the Kālāmas the same advice: test a teaching for yourself rather than accept it on tradition or the teacher's standing.
Noble friendship. Of the four "gatekeepers of liberation" — calm, inquiry, contentment and the company of the good (2.11.59) — the last is praised as helping above all (Sarga 16). The Buddha called noble friendship (kalyāṇamittatā) "the whole of the holy life".
Momentariness. The text constantly calls things क्षणभङ्गुर, "breaking in a moment" — a key Buddhist idea — as when life itself is called "fragile as a drop of water at a leaf's tip" (1.14.1).

Jainism.

The Jina as a model. At 1.15.8 Śrī Rāma says नाहं रामो न मे वाञ्छा भावेषु न च मे मनः । शान्त आसितुमिच्छामि स्वात्मनीव जिनो यथा ॥ — I am not Rāma… like a Jina in his own Self, I wish to rest in peace. The Jina, "the conqueror" of the passions, is the liberated teacher of Jainism; here he is the model for Rāma himself.
Meditation on the body. Sarga 18 dwells on the impurity and impermanence of the body, a practice shared by Jaina (aśuci-bhāvanā) and Buddhist traditions to loosen attachment. The Yoga Vasiṣṭha completes it with the Vedāntic insight "I am not the body" (1.18.53).
The kevalin. The liberated state is called केवलीभाव, "being alone" — the Self without a second (2.2.12). Jainism calls its liberated knower the kevalin and his omniscience kevala-jñāna: the same word for the same summit.
One's own effort. The Jaina path leaves no room for an outside power that decides one's fate; the soul binds and frees itself. Vasiṣṭha's teaching on effort (Sargas 4–9) is close in spirit to Mahāvīra's "O man, you are your own friend".

Kashmir Śaivism.

Origin. Modern scholarship traces the text to Kashmir. Its earlier form, the Mokṣopāya — the name the text gives itself in 2.17.6, "The Means to Liberation" — is dated by Walter Slaje to tenth-century Kashmir, and was later reworked, with ideas from the Śaiva Trika school, into the Yoga Vasiṣṭha read today.
Spanda, the vibration of consciousness. Kashmir Śaivism teaches that consciousness is not inert but has an inner pulse, spanda, through which the world appears and disappears. The Yoga Vasiṣṭha uses the same language: the world is the स्पन्द, the vibration, of consciousness, as waves are the movement of water.
Worship of Śiva as consciousness. In the Nirvāṇa Prakaraṇa, Vasiṣṭha recounts how Śiva himself taught him the true deva-pūjā: the God to be worshipped is consciousness, and the real worship is knowing it, not offerings of flowers.

Sāṅkhya and Yoga.

Sāṅkhya terms. The names puruṣa (the Self) and prakṛti (nature, with its three guṇas) are used freely, but reinterpreted: nature is identified with ignorance (avidyā), not treated as a second reality.
Yogic practice. The stories of Bhuśuṇḍa and of Queen Cūḍālā describe breath-control (prāṇāyāma) and yogic powers, and the text teaches a ladder of seven stages of knowledge (sapta-bhūmikā), from the first longing for truth (शुभेच्छा) and inquiry (विचारणा) to the "fourth" (तुर्यगा), the state beyond waking, dream and sleep.

The Gītā and the way of action.

Effort over fate. In the Mumukṣu Prakaraṇa Vasiṣṭha insists that human effort (पौरुष) shapes one's life, and that "fate" is only one's own past effort (2.6.1). When Śrī Rāma protests that his old tendencies drive him and he is helpless, he uses the very word, कृपण, with which Arjuna confesses his helplessness in the Gītā (2.7); Vasiṣṭha answers, as Kṛṣṇa does, with a call to act — "do as you choose" (2.7.20; compare Gītā 18.63).
Arjuna's story. In the Nirvāṇa Prakaraṇa Vasiṣṭha tells Śrī Rāma how Kṛṣṇa will one day teach Arjuna on the battlefield — the teaching of the Bhagavad Gītā retold inside the Yoga Vasiṣṭha. The Lord who is the student here is shown, in another age, as the teacher.

What holds all this together is Advaita Vedānta: one consciousness appearing as many, and freedom as knowing this while still living and acting in the world. The other traditions are not borrowed to be refuted, but welcomed as partial views of that one truth.

Purpose of this site¶

The Yoga Vasiṣṭha is one of the great works of Indian thought, yet it is far less read than the Bhagavad Gītā. Complete translations are old and hard to find; the well-known modern versions are abridgements that do not show the Sanskrit. This site exists so that anyone, anywhere, can study the text itself, verse by verse, freely.

It aims to:

Keep the Sanskrit in view. Every verse is given in Devanagari with its words in prose order and their meanings, so the translation can be checked word by word, and a reader can slowly learn to read the original.
Read the text as scripture. The pointers for reflection connect each verse to the Bhagavad Gītā and the Upaniṣads, quoted in Sanskrit, so that the Lord as student can be read beside the Lord as teacher. Where they shed light, Buddhist and Jaina teachings are added too — the Buddha's discourses, Śāntideva's Bodhicaryāvatāra (The Way of the Bodhisattva), and the Jaina sūtras — in keeping with the text's own synthesis.
Invite reflection, not replace it. The pointers for reflection are not a finished commentary. They open doors: a key word to dwell on, a link to another verse, a question the verse raises, a parallel in the Gītā or the Upaniṣads. The reflection itself is left to the reader, because this text is meant to be contemplated, not only read.
Make every verse reachable. Each verse has its own link, everything is searchable, and it works on any device, so a single verse can be shared with a friend or a study group.
Stay open. The work is freely licensed, so it may be shared, quoted, corrected and built upon.
Support study as practice. The text itself teaches that freedom comes through विचार, inquiry. Reading slowly, word by word, is a form of that inquiry (स्वाध्याय).

How it is made. The word-by-word meanings, translations and pointers are drafted from the Sanskrit with AI assistance and reviewed for accuracy. Mistakes are still possible, especially in long compounds; corrections are welcome through the repository's issues on GitHub.

How to use this site¶

Read in order. The text builds on itself, so start at Sarga 1 and go on from there. Use the menu to move between prakaraṇas and sargas, and the links at the foot of each page to go to the next or previous sarga. Each prakaraṇa's page lists its sargas with a one-line summary, and each sarga opens with a short box giving its outline.

Each verse has four parts:

The Sanskrit verse in Devanagari, with its reference: Prakaraṇa.Sarga.Verse, so 1.2.5 is the fifth verse of the second sarga of the first prakaraṇa.
Word by word. The verse's words rearranged into prose order (anvaya), each followed by its meaning in brackets. Compounds are split with hyphens, and words added to complete the sense are shown in square brackets.
Translation. A plain English rendering of the whole verse, made from the Sanskrit.
Pointers for Reflection. Key words, connections with other verses, and parallels in the Bhagavad Gītā and the Upaniṣads — and, where relevant, in Buddhist and Jaina texts — quoted in the original with an English rendering. They are starting points for your own reflection, not a final word.

Search and find. Use the search box at the top to find any English or Sanskrit word. Key Sanskrit terms are rendered the same way throughout; the Glossary lists them with a link to the verse where each first appears.

Share a verse. At the end of every verse are two buttons. Share this verse sends the verse, its translation and a link that opens the page at that verse: on a phone it opens your share menu (WhatsApp, Messages, email and so on); on a computer it copies them, ready to paste anywhere. Copy link copies just the link to that verse.

About the text. The Sanskrit follows the commonly printed text. Where it has an obvious misprint, the verse is corrected and a Reading note says what was changed; where a reading is uncertain, it is left as printed and flagged. The few verses missing from the online source are marked where they belong.

Start reading — Sarga 1

The six prakaraṇas¶

	Prakaraṇa	Theme
1	वैराग्य — Vairāgya	Dispassion: Śrī Rāma's despair at the nature of life
2	मुमुक्षु — Mumukṣu	The seeker: the nature of one who longs for liberation
3	उत्पत्ति — Utpatti	Origination: how the world arises in the mind
4	स्थिति — Sthiti	Existence: how the world is sustained
5	उपशम — Upaśama	Quiescence: the stilling of the mind
6	निर्वाण — Nirvāṇa	Liberation: the state of the awakened one

License¶

The Sanskrit text is in the public domain. The word meanings, translations and commentary on this site are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0: you may share and adapt them, with credit, under the same license.