Edwin Bryant

In 2007 Bryant completed a translation of the Yoga Sutras and their traditional commentaries. The translation was published in 2009 by North Point Press as The Yoga Sūtras of Patañjali (with Insights from the Traditional Commentators). In his article History Repeats Itself (Yoga Journal, Nov 2001), the author adds that "Our modern world, more than any other epoch in human history, has universalized and idolized consumerism - the indulgence of the senses of the mind - as the highest goal of life." In yoga, that creates unwanted influences, where "Our vrittis, the turbulences of the mind born from desire, are out of control." Control and elimination of vrittis comprise significant portion of yoga practices and observances (yama and niyama) that culminates with nirodha, an arrested state of mind capable of one-pointedness. Otherwise, if unwanted vrittis are allowed to predominate, "We risk missing the whole point of the practice".

Bryant is the author of The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture (Oxford University Press, 2001).

Discussing theistic overtones in Yoga Sutras of Patanjali and the practice of ishvara-pranidhana (commitment or surrender to God), David Gordon White points out in his The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali - A Biography, "Edwin Bryant, who, in his recent splendid commentary on the Yoga Sutra, notes that Vijanabhikshu considered ishvara-pranidhana to refer to the practice of devotion to Krishna, the Lord of the Bhagavat Gita. Bryant clearly aligns himself with this interpretation of the term, reading ishvara-pranidhana as submission to a personal god and asserting that most yogis over the past two millennia have been associated with devotional sects." Similar view is expressed by a commentator of Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (1999), Baba Hari Dass, "Ishvara pranidhana (surrender to God) is a method of the devotional path (Bhakti Yoga)". Due to its ultimate intensity, this practice is considered to be a fast-track to Samadhi (super-consciousness).

Edwin Bryant received his Ph.D in Indic languages and Cultures from Columbia University in 1997 with a dissertation on the "Indigenous Aryans Debate". He taught Hinduism at Harvard University for three years, and is presently professor of Religions of India at Rutgers University where he teaches courses on Hindu philosophy and religion. He has received numerous fellowships.

In a review, Sanskrit linguist Stephanie W. Jamison likened the effort of the volume to calls to "teach the controversy" by the proponents of Intelligent Design. She states that the Indo-Aryan controversy is a "manufactured one" with a non-scholarly, religio-nationalistic attack on scholarly consensus and the editors (Bryant and Patton) have unwittingly provided it a gloss of intellectual legitimacy. The editors are not linguists, she contends, and they have accepted patently weak or false linguistic arguments. So their apparently even-handed assessment lacks merit and cannot be regarded as objective scholarship. Historian Sudeshna Guha concurs, saying that Bryant does not probe into the epistemology of evidence and hence perceives the opposing viewpoints unproblematic. On the contrary, she holds that the timing and renewed vigour of the indigenist arguments during the 1990s demonstrates unscholarly opportunism. Fosse and Deshpande's contributions to the volume provide a critical analysis of the historiography and the nationalist and colonial agendas behind it. She also holds Bryant's desire to present what he calls the views of "Indian scholars" for "reconstructing the religious and cultural history of their own country" as misleading because it patently ignores the views of historians of India who have done so since the beginning of the twentieth century.