1.       The Purpose of Yoga: Liberation

In recent years, especially in the West, Yoga has increasingly been reduced to practising postures/asanas and practitioners in general are quite oblivious to the fact that Yoga is an important philosophical system whose aim is to achieve mokṣa (moksha/liberation) for the practitioner.

Patañjali, the author of the key texts of Yoga, the Yoga Sutras, who is considered to have lived in the 3rd century BCE, hardly talks about the āsanas. He is recognised as the first person to have brought all the yogic concepts, that had been scattered around since 2500BCE, in a structured framework, which presented the Yoga philosophy in the Yoga Sutras. Patañjali’s emphasis is on Yoga as a philosophical system only, that could help one attain moksha. Vyāsa, the first commentator of the Yoga Sutras, who probably lived around 5th century CE, mentions a few āsanas but doesn't focus on them much.

While Indian philosophy has the concepts of ego and a ‘sense-of-I’, which act for selfish gains in the world (samsara), the aim is to transcend the ego state and realize one’s true Self – the atman, which has a permanent nature. The worldly life is discounted when compared to the state of moksha and every system has a set of rules as to how to reach this state of liberation.