Thinkers and teachers

Krishnamacharya

1888 to 1989

Who was Krishnamacharya, and what is truly known of them?

What is known

South Indian scholar and yoga teacher, born in the Chitradurga district of Mysore state. He studied the traditional Sanskrit disciplines at Mysore and Benares, and from 1933 taught yoga at a school in the Jaganmohan Palace at Mysore under the patronage of the Maharaja Krishnaraja Wodeyar IV, giving public demonstrations of postures and writing Yoga Makaranda (1934). The school closed in 1950 and he moved to Madras, where he taught and practised Ayurveda until his death at a hundred. His pupils carried postural yoga across the world: K. Pattabhi Jois, his brother-in-law B. K. S. Iyengar, Indra Devi, and his son T. K. V. Desikachar.

The teaching

Taught from his manuals Yoga Makaranda (1934) and Yogasanagalu, and the Yoga Rahasya as his son set it down.

Yoga whole, in Patanjali's order

Krishnamacharya teaches yoga as Patanjali gave it, eight limbs practised together: the restraints and observances, posture, breath, the drawing in of the senses, concentration, meditation and absorption. The postures are the third limb, and their work is to make the body steady and the breath long, so that breath practice and meditation become possible. The eight limbs are taught in full in the branch called The eight limbs; what is his own is the way he joins body and breath, and the way he fits the practice to each person.

Vinyasa: each movement on a breath

His method is vinyasa, the placing of each movement in its step. A posture is not simply taken and held: it is entered by a set series of movements, held, and left by a set series again, and each step of the series goes with a single inhalation or exhalation. His first manual counts the steps for each posture and marks the step at which the posture itself is held for a number of breaths. The salutation to the sun shows the principle plainly, a round of bows and lifts in which no movement is made without its breath.

The rule that governs the steps is simple. The breath comes in as the body opens and rises, lifting the arms, arching back, coming up; it goes out as the body folds and closes, bending forward, twisting, coming down. The movement follows the breath and is never faster than it.

The long breath and the locks

The breath of practice is drawn through the nose, long, smooth and even, with a soft sound at the throat that lets the student hear its length. As practice grows the breath is lengthened, and the pause after it, but only so far as it stays smooth. With the breath he teaches the three locks, the bandhas: the root lock, drawing up the floor of the pelvis; the abdominal lock, drawing the belly in and up after the out-breath; and the chin lock, lowering the chin toward the chest in seated breath practice.

They come with the tradition's own caution. Holding the breath is learned slowly, beside a teacher, after the postures are steady; it is never forced, never carried to strain or dizziness, and it is left alone by anyone with a heart or blood-pressure condition, or who is pregnant, unless a doctor and a teacher agree.

Counter-posture and sequence

A sequence, for him, is built like a sentence, each part answering the one before. After a strong action the body is brought back by its opposite: a backward bend is answered by a gentle forward one, a strong twist by a straightening. This counter-posture, pratikriyasana, keeps any one action from straining the body. A practice rises toward its strongest posture and comes down from it, and ends in rest before breath practice or sitting.

Fitted to the person

His teaching insists that yoga be fitted to the one who practises: to age, strength, health, work and stage of life. In youth, practice builds, with strong postures and many of them. In the years of family and work it keeps health and steadiness, so that duties can be met. In age it turns inward, toward breath, meditation and devotion. The Yoga Rahasya gives practice for women, in pregnancy among other times, and for the sick, so that yoga belongs to the householder and not only to the renouncer.

For the sick he adapted posture and breath to the person, as a physician of Ayurveda would. The house adds that a practice is not a treatment, and anyone who is ill asks a doctor first.

Practice as worship

Behind all of it stands his faith. Practice begins and ends with prayer, and chanting belongs to the discipline. For him the postures were never the end: they make the body fit for breath, the breath makes the mind fit for meditation, and the stilled mind is offered to God. Patanjali's surrender to the Lord is, for a Sri Vaishnava, surrender to Narayana.

Orders and memberships

A Brahmin of the Sri Vaishnava tradition, in the line of the teacher Ramanuja, and a householder, not a monk. No yoga lineage of his is documented beyond his own account of his teacher.

The legend

That he spent seven and a half years in a cave near Lake Manasarovar in Tibet learning from a teacher named Ramamohana Brahmachari, and that he recovered a lost text, the Yoga Korunta, from a manuscript afterwards eaten by ants. Neither teacher nor text is attested outside his telling. The historian Mark Singleton has shown how much the flowing sequences taught at Mysore share with the gymnastics of the 1930s.

Their works

Yoga MakarandaBook, 1934
His first book, written in Kannada at Mysore under the patronage of the Maharaja. It describes the postures he taught at the palace school, with photographs of him and his pupils, and sets them beside breathing and the older teaching of yoga. It is the earliest written record of the method his pupils later carried abroad.
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YogasanagaluBook, about 1941
A second manual in Kannada, written for the students of the Mysore school. It sorts the postures into grades for beginners and the more advanced, and gives the rules of diet and conduct he asked of a pupil. Historians of modern yoga read it beside Yoga Makaranda to see how his teaching changed in those years.
The date of its first printing is given variously, from 1940 to the middle of that decade.
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Yoga RahasyaTreatise, printed 1998
A Sanskrit work in verse on yoga for the householder, for women and for the sick, which he recited and his son T. K. V. Desikachar translated into English. He said that he received it at sixteen in a vision of the ninth century saint Nathamuni at Alvar Tirunagari. It shows how he wished his teaching to be rooted in his own Sri Vaishnava tradition.
It is ascribed to Nathamuni, and no copy older than Krishnamacharya’s own recitation is known.
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How the house tells a life

This life is told from the record, with what is documented, what is legend and what was forged kept apart. A membership in an order is stated only where documents show it. A person’s chart explains none of their deeds.

The arts it feeds

Yoga, qigong, tai chi Chakras and the breath

Lives near it in time