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350
INTRODUCTION
of the said work, which should add to its merit rather than detract from it in any way. Again it would hardly be correct to say even today, that the methods of divination have lost their charm, when we actually see representatives of all classes of people running after the palmists, astrologers, spiritualists and various other fortune-tellers and diviners and when the list of their patrons include the elite of the society. When thus the main plank of disproportionateness in the theory of interpolation has slipped the whole structure of the supposed interpolation falls to the ground. Further the simplest test to find out whether a particular portion of a work is interpolated or not is to remove the suspected portion from the work and see whether the remaining work has completeness and whether the unity of theme remains intact. Had the said test been applied, it would have been immediately found out that out of the eight well-known parts of Yoga only Yama, Niyama and Asana remain, while the remaining five are taken off, as they are treated in chs. V to XI of Yogaśāstra. Nobody would ever imagine that the great author of Yogasāstra while writing on Yoga dealt only with the three preliminary parts and said nothing regarding the remaining five important parts of Yoga. This conclusively proves, that Mr. Patel's theory of interpolation in Yogaśāstra by some overzealous pupil is really a myth.
Besides the allegation of want of proportion Mr. Patel speaks about repetition in Yogasästra because the author of Yogaśāstra describes Dhāraṇā in v. 7, ch. VI, having described Dhāraṇā of breath in ch. V, vy. 27 to 35. The simple answer is that in ch. V he deals with Dhāraņā as a part of Prāņāyāma, where control of breath is the principal element and the object to be achieved is the fixing of the mind. In v. 7 ch. VI he merely mentions various parts of the body for the exercise of Dhāraṇā, which are not mentioned in ch. V. In Dhāranā mentioned in ch. VI, the fixing of the mind is the principal element and the control of breath is secondary, and the object to be achieved is Dhyāna, the details of which are described
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