Yoga Sutra is beyond theism and Atheism , It’s a scientific discovery gifted by world scholar Patanjali.
First, yoga is not a religion—remember that. Yoga is not Hindu, it is not Mohammedan. Yoga is a pure science just like mathematics, physics or chemistry. Physics is not Christian, physics is not Buddhist. If Christians have discovered the laws of physics, then too physics is not Christian. It is just accidental that Christians have come to discover the laws of physics. But physics remains just a science. Yoga is a science—it is just an accident that Hindus discovered it. It is not Hindu. It is a pure mathematics of the inner being. So a Mohammedan can be a yogi, a Christian can be a yogi, a Jaina, a Buddhist can be a yogi.
Remembering Al-Bīrūnī the Muslim scientist and scholar who translated a commentary on the Yoga Sutra a thousand years ago.
He once said in his works that “ Yoga Sutra is the only subject that gives stepwise approach to study the mystry of ones being scientifically. The basic requirement for student is to have scientific thought process without which it is just another book of rituals. “
Abū Rayḥān Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad Al-Bīrūnī lived and wrote at the time that the Yoga Sutras were hitting their high water mark. There was a period of about four to six hundred years, from about 700-1200, give or take, that lots of people were reading the Yoga Sutras, writing commentaries and referring to it and we can extrapolate from that it really was a widely respected and widely known tradition before its decline, which began around the year 1200.
Alberuni was right in the middle of that period, he lived around the year 1000 and he was this brilliant Muslim who was kidnapped from the court where he was serving as a court scientist and court philosopher, in a country close to the Caspian Sea, way, way west of India. He was kidnapped from there by Mahmoud of Ghazni, the great Muslim empire builder whose power base was in Afghanistan. Mahmoud put Alberuni into his own court, which was a moving court because Mahmoud was always invading places, usually India.
Alberuni spent most of his time in what would be today’s Punjab, in the northwestern part of India. He was there, for about twelve years, during which time he learned Sanskrit, and, because he was himself so interested in astronomy and the hard sciences, the Indian cognates of Muslim astronomy and science. He then wrote a really important work called Indika, which comprises a historical ethnography of India, written in the eleventh century by a very learned and sympathetic scholar.
In Indika, he says that “I with my own hands have translated an Indian work called, the Yoga Sutras.” That statement tantalized people over the centuries because that translation was nowhere to be found. Until, in 1922, when a French Islamicist named Louis Massignon found this lost translation by Alberuni into Arabic, of the Yoga Sutras, scribbled into the margins of another manuscript in an Istanbul archive.
Then, in the 1970s and 1980s, a couple named Schlomo Pines and Tuvia Gelblum, brought out a full English-language translation of Alberuni’s commentary. What Alberuni wrote wasn’t just a commentary, it was actually a paraphrasing of the Yoga Sutras, although it leaves out the entire fourth and book and it jumbles the order of a lot of the verses, but it’s clearly Pantajali’s work. So it gives an interesting window into how the world scientists were understanding the Yoga Sutras in that period.
So in a way, Alberuni was a pioneer for all Yoga Sutras translators, because he was the first, or perhaps the second person to ever translate the Yoga Sutras into a foreign language. (There is another translation found in Java, Indonesia, that dates from about the same time as Alberuni. It was written in old Javanese, and it too, doesn’t have the fourth book in it,). This tells us that the Yoga Sutras was a cosmopolitan work a thousand years ago, that then fell into relative obscurity, and has become a cosmopolitan work once again, but only in the last one hundred years or so.
Yoga Sutras clearly demonstrates the methods to unlearn the false Dogmas of orthodox traditions and malpractices related to a religion through the process of decipline, genuine contemplation by surrendering to self ” and learn the existential law of ones being through relentless practices.
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