यग — Construing the Scattered: Syntactic Connection in Śāstric Texts

Yoga, the third device in Kauṭilya's list, is the construing of words into a sentence (vākya-yojanā). The three authorities illustrate it at three different levels. Kauṭilya's example is a single compound, "the world consists of the four varṇas and āśramas", in which one numeral must be joined with two nouns. Suśruta's is a verse in which the participle "prepared" stands in the third quarter but belongs with "one should drink the oil" in the first: words far apart must be brought together. Cakrapāṇi's is the five-membered argument of Nyāya, whose thesis, reason, example, application and conclusion must be joined into one proof that "the embryo is born of the mother". This article quotes the three definitions, shows that they describe one operation at the levels of the word-group, the sentence and the argument, and tests it against the theory of sentence meaning in Mīmāṃsā and Nyāya — expectancy (ākāṅkṣā), compatibility (yogyatā) and proximity (sannidhi). Three objections are argued through: that yoga is merely grammar, that Cakrapāṇi's example belongs to logic not to the text, and that joining distant words violates the requirement of proximity. The modern counterparts are syntactic and dependency parsing, the reconstruction of arguments scattered through a text, and the integration of dispersed evidence. Series: तन्त्रयुक्तिविमर्शः · Tantrayukti Studies, TY-2026/04. Loci: AŚ 15.1.8–9; Su. Utt. 65.9. Online version: https://sanskritmanthan.in/a/ty-04-yoga