Thirty chapters of instruction, and one passage addressed to the person for whom it is going wrong.
"If a yogi has not perfected himself in yoga, many kinds of things will rise up in the body and try to engage his attention."1
⚑ Not temptation. Not sin. Things rising up in the body — a physical account of a practice failing, and the volume treats it as a maintenance problem rather than a moral one.
And the response is a list of remedies, with no ranking and no single correct answer:
"Some of these disturbances can be repulsed through the process of yoga, some through asana, some through dharana, some through austerities, some through mantras and some through herbs. Some can be countered by meditating on me, chanting my name and doing similar things."1
⚑ Seven options. Yoga, āsana, dhāraṇā, austerity, mantra, herbs, and the name.
⚠ And note where the name sits: last, in the same list, as one option among seven — not above them. The Skandha that ranks the name above the entire apparatus at 11(12) files it here as a remedy alongside posture and plants.
⚠ Two things about that list are worth marking. Herbs sit in it without comment — a pharmacological remedy in a doctrinal chapter, listed between mantras and the divine name. And some… some… some means the volume is not prescribing; it is saying different disturbances answer to different things and you will have to find out which.
"Based on the strength of former practices, he engages in yoga again and is not entangled in the path of karma."1
⚑ Based on the strength of former practices. The work already done is not lost. It is the resource the restart runs on.
⚠ Which is a specific claim, not a reassurance. A practice that failed still deposited something, and that deposit is what makes resumption possible — so the failure did not zero the account, it interrupted it.
Set it against how the Skandha normally talks about difficulty.
11(20): bhakti is a matter of chance, and the man who does not cross the ocean of saṃsāra with the boat, helmsman and wind supplied "is killing himself." 11(21): a person who has fallen cannot fall further, and one "deprived of intelligence" is "as empty as an animal… no more than bellows." 11(14): without the hair standing up and the tears, "how can the consciousness be purified?"
⚑ The Skandha is not gentle about failure, and its usual mode is to state a threshold and let the reader locate themselves against it.
⚠ This passage does something else. It assumes the reader has already failed, describes the failure physically, offers seven remedies without ranking them, and states that the previous work is intact. ⚑ It is the only place in the volume that plans for the practitioner not succeeding.
One attribution in the passage is worth marking, because it locates the authority behind the menu.
"These inauspicious aspects can be gradually destroyed by following the lords of yoga."1
⚑ The lords of yoga — a body of practitioners, plural, unnamed. The remedies are not derived from a principle and not issued as revelation; they are attributed to accumulated practice.
⚠ Which fits the shape of the whole passage. A menu of seven unranked options with no matching rule is what a craft looks like when it is transmitted — you are told what has worked, not what will work.
⚑ And it is the same move the chapter makes with the siddhi dismissal a few chapters earlier, where the demotion is attributed to "those who are engaged in supreme yoga" rather than stated in the first person. ⚠ [n=2 OBSERVED] — on the two occasions this Skandha talks about practical yoga rather than doctrine, it cites practitioners instead of speaking directly.
It stopped working and things are coming up in the body. That is a described condition with a remedy list, not evidence about you.
Seven remedies and no ranking. The text is telling you that matching is the job — that different failures answer to different things and nobody can tell you which in advance.
Herbs are on the list, between mantras and the name, with no apology. Notice that and notice what it says about how the problem is being classified.
You start again on what you already built. The interruption cost you time and did not cost you the deposit, and those are different losses.
The clause is short and it has a structural consequence the volume does not draw.
If former practice carries forward, the practice is cumulative rather than conditional. ⚑ A conditional practice pays out on completion and pays nothing otherwise. A cumulative one deposits at every stage.
⚠ And that sits awkwardly with the Skandha's own strongest claims. At 11(12) the entire apparatus "cannot capture me" and at 11(14) "what is achieved by strong devotion… is not achieved by yoga, samkhya, dharma, studying, austerities or renunciation." ⚑ If those hold, there is nothing for former practice to have deposited — and this clause says there is.
⚠ The volume does not reconcile them and none is constructed here. ⚑ What can be said is that the restart clause is the one place the Skandha treats effort as accumulating, and that every other statement about the apparatus treats it as insufficient rather than as partial.
And the same chapter, a few lines on, withdraws the body-cultivation the remedies might have been used for:
"Some persevering people keep their body fit and maintain their youth by using different kinds of techniques. They engage in yoga for siddhis. However, those who are accomplished do not have any respect for these efforts and regard them as useless."2
⚑ So the remedies are for getting the practice running again — and not for the body they run through. The chapter permits āsana and herbs to clear an obstruction and denies that a fit body is worth anything.
⚠ Held as printed. The instrument is licensed for one purpose and refused for another, in one chapter, which is the Skandha's disposal habit operating at close range.
The strongest support is the repetition of some. Six clauses of some… some… some is a deliberate refusal to prescribe, and it is the only place in the Skandha that declines to rank its own remedies.
A second support. Based on the strength of former practices is causal. The former practice is named as the thing enabling the resumption, not merely as something that once happened.
The tension, preserved. ⚑ Effort accumulates here and is insufficient everywhere else in the same Skandha. Held as printed.
A second tension. ⚠ Herbs appear twice in the Eleventh Skandha — here as a remedy and at 11(15) as one of four routes to the siddhis — and in neither place does the volume say anything about what they are or whether using them is proper.
Open question. ⚑ Not entangled in the path of karma. ⚠ Does that mean the restarted practice generates no karma, or that the practitioner is not bound by the failure? The clause is ambiguous as printed and the volume does not disambiguate it in the range read.
Set against The Volume Ranks Devotion Highest and Then Says You Cannot Choose It, the two are the Skandha's two accounts of what a practitioner can control. ⚑ There the decisive variable is chance and the failure to cross is called self-murder. Here failure is a described condition with a remedy list and a preserved deposit.
Against He Sets Out All Eighteen Powers in Full and Then Calls Them a Waste of Time, the two pages divide the volume's technical material on yoga and share its shape: specify, then withdraw.
Against The Volume Forbids the Thing It Does Most, both sit in 11(28) — ⚑ a chapter that opens by dissolving the distinction between good and bad and closes with a practical maintenance manual.
Against A Ruined Old Man's Whole Argument, the two are the volume's pair on lateness. There, a muhūrta is enough. Here, what you did before is not lost. ⚑ Neither is a consolation about effort in general; both are specific claims about a remainder.
Behavioral Plasticity — behaviour is not fixed by a single setting. Capacity acquired under one set of conditions persists and can be re-expressed when conditions change, which is why a lapsed pattern re-establishes faster than it was first built.
Based on the strength of former practices, he engages in yoga again is that claim, made about a discipline rather than a behaviour. ⚑ The volume is asserting retained capacity across an interruption, and using it to license resumption rather than restart.
⚑ What neither field gives alone: plasticity explains why relapse is not erasure, and this volume has no other place to put that. Its dominant register is threshold — hair standing up or not, tears or not, crossed the ocean or "killing himself." ⚠ Thresholds have no memory. ⚑ A retained-capacity clause is incompatible with a pure threshold account, and the Skandha runs both without noticing.
⚠ Which suggests where to look rather than what to conclude. A text this committed to thresholds includes one clause about accumulation, addressed specifically to somebody who has already failed — ⚑ and it is the only pastoral sentence in thirty chapters of instruction.
⚠ A second handshake was considered and cut. The disposal-clause material is a genuine neighbour and is carried on the page's own body via the body-cultivation withdrawal; a second connection would restate it.
Sharpest implication. The one passage in the Skandha addressed to a practitioner for whom it is not working describes the failure physically — things will rise up in the body — offers seven unranked remedies including herbs, and ends: based on the strength of former practices, he engages in yoga again and is not entangled in the path of karma. In a Skandha whose usual register is a threshold you have crossed or not, this is the only clause that says the previous work is still there.
Generative questions.