Why the Yoga Sutra as a graph

The Yoga Sutra is a collection of aphorisms on the practice and philosophy of Yoga authored by Patanjali. The manuscripts of the text which are left are all coupled with the commentary written by Vyasa; the two text together form the manuscript of the Pātañjalayogaśāstra. To account for the difficult nature of both texts, a rich commentarial literature, which is still being written right now, sprung to better explain them, staring with the Yoga Sutra Vivarana and flourishing during the middle ages. As such the text of the Sutra can be read as a four levelled text: first, the text of Patanjali, second the commentary by Vyasa, third the commentaries which are written on top of both the text of Patanjali and Vyasa. To this it could be added a fourth level: the current accademical literature which is being written on the commentaries, or the modern commentaries which take into account all the medieval commentaries.

While the traditional book form, presenting the sutra and the commentaries is effective in explaining in details the meaning of the aphorism, it has the problem in written form that the commentaries to some Sutra-s (like III.17 or I.25) are akin to small treatises inside the text, and reading it it's easy to lose track of the discourse of the sutra-s itself. Also, while most of the commentaries build on Vyasa, the content of the layer three commentaries wildly varies, and so do the English tranlsations of the text. If one wants to compare commentaries or translations, one is faced with the problem of having to keep track of multiple text at once, again losing sight of the original aphorism.

The present project aims to make all those texts accessible through the graph. The graph also allows to keep track of what the main proposition and the subproposition are. I found also that using the graph is good in creating a memory of where the information are in the text, similarly to what happens when a physical book is read.