Samskara occupies a pivotal position in the depth-psychological reading of Indian thought, functioning simultaneously as a technical term from Yoga-Sāṃkhya metaphysics and as a concept with immediate clinical resonance for Western-inflected practitioners. Across the corpus, the term traverses at least three distinct registers. In Patañjali’s Yoga Sūtras as read by Bryant, saṃskāras are the latent impressions deposited upon the citta by every act, thought, and sensory encounter; they accumulate across lifetimes, motivate karmic trajectories, and form the very substrate that nirodha-practice must counter. Bryant’s commentary reveals an internal Yoga mechanics whereby restraining saṃskāras are cultivated to suppress outgoing ones, making the term central to samādhi theory. Easwaran translates this classical framework into an explicitly psychophysiological idiom: saṃskāras are grooves or channels worn into the mind-body complex by habitual emotion, rendering them nearly neurological in their determinism yet ultimately reversible through meditation, mantra, and deliberate counter-behavior. His repeated hydraulic metaphors — channels, sluices, Grand Canals — render the classical concept legible to audiences trained in Western behavioral psychology. Brazier’s glossary entry treats samskara as a Buddhist-adjacent term (‘mental formation’), connecting it loosely to the Pāli saṅkhāra. The corpus thus displays a productive tension between the rigorous Sāṃkhya-Yoga ontology of impression-accumulation and a broadly humanistic therapeutic reformulation, with karma, citta, and vāsanā as the key co-concepts.