Patanjali

Patanjali is the name attached to the Yoga Sutras, the foundational text of classical (raja) yoga. Almost nothing is known of him as a historical person, and the dating of the Yoga Sutras is genuinely debated: scholarly estimates range from roughly the 2nd century BCE to about the 4th century CE, with many Indologists favouring the early centuries around the turn of the era.

(A grammarian of the same name is sometimes, but doubtfully, identified with him.) Whatever its exact origin, the text gathers and orders an older meditative inheritance into a concise, systematic manual built on the philosophical framework of Samkhya.

Patanjali’s importance to the mind-power lineage is foundational. The Yoga Sutras define yoga as “the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind” and lay out the ashtanga, the eight limbs, a graded discipline running from ethical restraints through posture and breath-control to concentration, meditation, and absorption (samadhi).

The text also describes samyama, the combined, sustained application of concentration, meditation, and absorption upon a single object, which it says yields siddhis or extraordinary powers, an explicit ancient claim that disciplined inner focus produces effects in the field of experience.

This map of mind-training, the priority of stilling and one-pointedness, and the linkage of focused consciousness to unusual capacities, became a primary source-stream feeding both Eastern practice and the Western fascination with the “powers” of mind.