The Seba library treats Purua in 8 passages, across 3 authors (including Bryant, Edwin F., Zimmer, Heinrich, Aurobindo, Sri).
Puruṣa Term favored by the Yoga school to refer to the innermost conscious self, loosely equivalent to the soul in Western Graeco-Abrahamic traditions.
Bryant provides the Yoga school's canonical glossary definition of puruṣa as the innermost conscious self, distinguishing it from cognate Western concepts while anchoring it within Patañjalian technical vocabulary.
, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary, 2009thesis
The two principles—prakṛti (composed of the guṇas) and puruṣa (the collectivity of irradiant but inactive life-monads)—are accepted as eternal and real on the basis of the fact that in all acts and theories of knowledge a distinction exists between subject and object.
Zimmer establishes the foundational Sāṅkhya dualism in which puruṣa, as a collectivity of passive luminous life-monads, is ontologically paired with and epistemically irreducible to prakṛti.
, Philosophies of India, 1951thesis
one should meditate on the puruṣa, which is autonomous (kevalam; II.25), a spotless lotus, eternal, infinite, pure, unblemished, immovable, existent, indivisible, beyond decay and death, everlasting, immutable, the lord and imperishable Brahman.
Bryant transmits a Mahābhārata passage that elaborates puruṣa's meditative attributes as the autonomous, imperishable, infinite self, identified here with Brahman in a theistic register of the Yoga tradition.
, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary, 2009thesis
The Purusha enters into cosmic manifestation for the variations of his infinite existence, for knowledge, action and enjoyment; the gnosis brings the fullness of spiritual knowledge and it will found on that the divine action.
Aurobindo reframes puruṣa not as a passive witness but as an active principle that purposefully enters cosmic manifestation, with gnostic realization restoring its freedom to enjoy perfected Prakṛti.
, The Synthesis of Yoga, 1948thesis
the yogī desires to free puruṣa from the body. So how, questions Vyāsa, could a yogī engage in intimate contact with the bodies of others, which might be all the more unclean?
Bryant, via Vyāsa, presents the yogic practice of śauca as motivated by the aspiration to liberate puruṣa from bodily entanglement, illustrating how ethical discipline is grounded in the Sāṅkhya-Yoga ontology of the self.
, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary, 2009supporting
the term Īśvara is used for this highest puruṣa. XV.18 emphasizes again that this supreme self is higher than both kṣara and akṣara puruṣas, and XV.19 that one who knows this supreme self to be Kṛṣṇa knows all that there is to know.
Bryant traces the Bhagavad Gītā's hierarchical taxonomy of puruṣas, showing how Īśvara is constituted as a supreme puruṣa ontologically superior to both mutable and immutable individual puruṣas.
, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary, 2009supporting
He is a puruṣa, his color is that of a dark cloud, and he bears on his chest the mark of śrīvatsa. He wears a forest garland, and his four arms bear the conch, discus, club, and lotus flower.
Bryant presents a Bhāgavata Purāṇa passage in which Īśvara as supreme puruṣa is given iconographic embodiment, illustrating how the abstract metaphysical concept is transposed into devotional visualization practice.
, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary, 2009supporting
Vijñānabhikṣu stresses that the world in its essence—prakṛti—is real and eternal, and therefore the evolutes from this matrix, the world, are also in this sense real, albeit temporary and constantly changing.
Bryant uses Vijñānabhikṣu's defense of prakṛti's reality to contextualise the Yoga school's dualistic ontology against which puruṣa's distinct nature is defined, implicitly reinforcing the puruṣa-prakṛti opposition.
, The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary, 2009aside