The first limb · Yoga Sūtra 2.30–2.39
The five yamas
The yamas are the first of the eight limbs of Patañjali's yoga — five restraints that come before a single posture or breath. Sūtra 2.30 names them: ahiṃsā, satya, asteya, brahmacharya, aparigraha. Sūtra 2.31 calls them the great vow, mahāvratam, because they are not conditioned by birth, place, time, or circumstance. There is no one they don't apply to and no situation that suspends them.
They are usually translated as prohibitions — don't harm, don't lie, don't steal — but each is named as an absence, the way aparigraha is. The claim is that harming, lying, taking, dissipating, and grasping are additions: habits laid over something that functions better without them. The practice is subtraction. And the five are one system — each one, pressed far enough, turns into the others.
FIRST YAMA
अहिंसाahiṃsā — non-harming
The first yama, and by the traditional commentaries the root of the other four — satya, asteya, brahmacharya, and aparigraha are read as elaborations of it. Hiṃsā is not only violence done; it is the wish to harm, in act, word, or thought. Ahiṃsā is the absence of that wish, which is a stricter standard than good behavior. You can go a whole day without hurting anyone and fail at it hourly in your head.
It includes the harm you direct at yourself — the running commentary you would never tolerate from another person. A practice that is punishing is already outside it.
Yoga Sūtra 2.35
When ahiṃsā is established, hostility is given up in one's presence.
In this practice · Gate IV is ahiṃsā turned inward: a grudge is harm rehearsed daily, and the retold story with no villain in it (day 27) is the non-harming version of your own history.
SECOND YAMA
सत्यsatya — truthfulness
Sat is 'what is'; satya is alignment with it — in speech, and before speech, in what you allow yourself to know. The commentaries subordinate it to ahiṃsā: a truth aimed to wound is hiṃsā wearing satya's clothes, and silence is sometimes the truthful option. What satya rules out is the small daily manufacturing — the manufactured excuse, the flattering recollection, the calendar that records what you meant to do.
Most untruth is not lying to others. It is the version of events kept because the accurate one would require something of you.
Yoga Sūtra 2.36
When satya is established, action and its fruit follow the word.
In this practice · The honest calendar (day 8) and the ledger read as inventory rather than story (day 22) are satya practices — accuracy first, comfort second.
THIRD YAMA
अस्तेयasteya — non-stealing
Steya is theft; asteya is its absence — and the texts mean more than property. Anything taken that was not given is inside it: a person's time held by your lateness, attention claimed by your interruption, credit absorbed for work that was shared, the answer taken from someone who needed to reach it themselves.
It has a mirror that is easy to miss: allowing what you need to be taken from you, endlessly, is not generosity. A yes given from reflex steals from whoever your time was already owed to — including you.
Yoga Sūtra 2.37
When asteya is established, all jewels present themselves.
In this practice · Gate II practices the mirror — say one no (day 9) — and Gate III the plain form: working without the byline (day 17) is refusing to take credit that can be left with its owner.
FOURTH YAMA
ब्रह्मचर्यbrahmacharya — right use of vitality
Literally 'conduct toward brahman' — for renunciates it meant celibacy, and some traditions still read it that way. The householder's reading, which the Sūtras' own commentators allow, is the disciplined use of vital energy: not spending yourself in every direction at once. Desire, attention, and effort are treated as one finite current that can be pooled or dissipated.
Its modern opposite is not lust but leakage — forty tabs, four conversations, the phone reached for eleven times an hour. Nothing wrong is being done; the current is simply being ground to nothing.
Yoga Sūtra 2.38
When brahmacharya is established, vitality — vīrya — is gained.
In this practice · One thing at a time (day 12), the empty hour (day 11), and arriving with empty hands (day 14) are brahmacharya in household form: the current gathered instead of spent.
FIFTH YAMA
अपरिग्रहaparigraha — non-grasping
The fifth yama, and the subject of this whole site. Parigraha is grasping on all sides — the reflex of accumulation applied to objects, hours, outcomes, stories, and finally to the self-image doing the accumulating. Aparigraha is the absence of the reflex, not the absence of things: the measure is whether the hand is open, not how much is in it.
It is the quietest of the five and, by Patañjali's accounting, the one with the strangest reward — not virtue but understanding. Set down what you are holding and you can finally see what your life has actually been.
Yoga Sūtra 2.39
When aparigraha becomes steady, understanding of the how and why of one's own existence arises.
In this practice · All thirty-five days. The five gates walk it from the easiest grip — things — to the hardest, the self.
A short shelf
Five books, in case a word on a screen isn’t enough. None of them is required; any of them outranks this site.
The Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali — Edwin F. Bryant
The full text with the classical commentaries, in readable English. The place to check anything this site claims about the Sūtras.
Yoga: Discipline of Freedom — Barbara Stoler Miller
A spare, literary translation of the Sūtras. Short enough to read in an evening and keep in a bag.
The Bhagavad Gita — Eknath Easwaran
A plain translation of the Gītā with patient introductions to each chapter. Chapter 2, verse 47 is Gate III's seed.
The Heart of Yoga — T.K.V. Desikachar
The eight limbs applied to an ordinary householder life, by a teacher who spent his life doing exactly that.
The Yamas & Niyamas — Deborah Adele
The most direct lay introduction to the ten ethical practices. Warmer in tone than this site; useful precisely for that.