MDNIY holds five-day national workshop on Yoga Sutra's Vibhuti Pada

The Morarji Desai National Institute of Yoga (MDNIY) in New Delhi, an autonomous institute under the Ministry of Ayush, on Monday, October 26, 2026 began a five-day national workshop on the Vibhuti Pada of Patanjali's Yoga Sutra, studied through the classical commentary known as the Vyasa Bhashya. The workshop runs from October 26 to October 30, 2026. Prof. Krishna Kant Sharma, formerly of the Department of Vedic Philosophy at Banaras Hindu University's faculty of Sanskrit Vidya Dharma Vigyan, is the subject expert, and MDNIY director Dr Jyoti Keswani addressed the opening.

Most people meet yoga as a set of postures and breathing exercises. The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali, a compact text of short aphorisms, is the classical source that defines yoga far more widely, as a discipline of the mind. The text is divided into four chapters, or padas. The Vibhuti Pada is the third. According to the text, it deals with the inner practices of concentration, meditation and absorption, which together it calls samyama, and with the extraordinary powers, or vibhutis, that tradition says can arise from them. The text itself also cautions practitioners against becoming attached to such powers.

The Vyasa Bhashya is the oldest surviving commentary on the Yoga Sutra and is traditionally attributed to the sage Vyasa. Studying the sutras through it is the classical way of reading them, because the aphorisms are so brief that their meaning depends heavily on commentary. A workshop built around this commentary is aimed at teachers, students and researchers who want to understand what the source text says, rather than at beginners learning postures.

For Ayush institutions, this kind of training matters because yoga teaching has grown into a large profession in India and abroad, while the depth of teachers' grounding in the classical texts varies widely. Workshops by a national institute help set a reference point for how the philosophy is taught. It is important to keep belief and evidence apart: the Vibhuti Pada describes meditative states and powers as tradition understands them. Modern research on yoga and meditation studies measurable effects such as stress, sleep or blood pressure, and does not test the claims about powers described in the text.

Short-term: Participants get five days of structured study of the third chapter of the Yoga Sutra with a classical commentary, under a subject expert from the Vedic philosophy tradition.

Long-term: Regular text-based workshops by MDNIY can strengthen the philosophical training of yoga teachers and researchers, supporting more accurate teaching of yoga's classical foundations in India and abroad.

Who is affected: Yoga teachers and trainees, students of Indian philosophy and Sanskrit, researchers in yoga studies, and Ayush institutions that train yoga professionals.

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