FATHER FIGURE
The
sole access the world has to the Grand Senior—the legend and
progenitor—of
yoga therapy is through the Grand Junior, his
son. You can rest assured that the image T.K.V Desikachar will paint
for you of T.Krishnamacharya will be picture perfect and beyond
the pale of criticism. One of his foreign students holds that over
90 percent of Desikachar's teachings are filial to a fault and loyal
to his father almost up to the hour of his
death in 1989. Even after
his
death the Gordian knot of duty locks father sand son, teacher
and disciple, together.
In Desikachar's scheme of things, the genesis of "yoga therapy"
centered on his father is of far greater import than any conceptual
originality Desikachar might himself have shown through his long
years of rigorous, unflinching apprenticeship. What he teaches today
is in turn as much a
yoga of temporal therapy as it is of prayer
and genuflection to a life-enhancing concept that is eternal.
The teachings of the patriarch are like a generic
raga pradhan—to
be sung or played strictly according to notations, originality limited
only to choice of instrument or timbre of voice. In Krishnamacharya's
arch traditional school of hard spiritual knocks, servitude was
a sign of neither sin nor weakness but of right fully earned respect.
"We were," Desikachar said in an interview, "fifty years apart in
age. His education and background were very different from mine,
but what I remember most is that he always came to my level in working
with me. I am a western-educated person and he was a traditional
teacher".
Tirumalai Krishnamacharya was born on November 18, 1888 in a village
in Mysore, India. Proud of its pedigree of piety, his family traced
its lineage back to the sage Nathamuni, author of Krishnamacharya's
and now Desikachar's Bible, the
Yoga Rahasya. Enrolled at
the clean - slate age of 12 years in Mysore's Brahmatantra Parakala
Mutt and taught the thousands of nuances and niceties of the Vedas,
he took a parallel course at the Royal College of Mysore. At 18,
he sped to Banaras to study Sanskrit, logic and grammar, and returned
to Mysore for the finishing touch.
Krishnamacharya then went on an extended peregrination for a decade:
to North India to study
Samkhya, the India's oldest and most
venerated philosophical system and the roots of the yoga; then,
in 1916, he traveled to the Himalayas and found his teacher, Ramamohan
Brahmachari, who lived near Mansarovar. After seven hard years of
learning the logistics of therapy and healing, he descended once
again to the south to study
ayurveda
and the philosophy of
nyaya. A Vedic school of logic. He
returned to Mysore in 1924 and opened a school of yoga. With the
local
raja, or king, as his prize pupil and cash cow. For
the next 22 years, Krishnamacharya dug in and taught at the school,
and wrote his first book,
Yoga Makarandam (Secrets of Yoga),
at leisure.
It was in 1937 that he and his disciple and associate,
K.
Pattabhi Jois, had their first batch of foreign students. Two
years later, his name had spread wide enough for a French medical
team to make its way to him, intrigued by yoga's claim that it could
help control heartbeat. It was his incontrovertible data that opened
the sluicegates to the West, the hotbed of empiricism and cognitive
proof.
Yoga began to colonize the West.
In time, Krishnamacharya's native inventiveness made him draw up
a template for
yoga as therapy or service industry—a function
familiar to the West.
The foundation of
yoga therapy was laid in 1976, when Desikachar
and father decided to set up the Krishnamacharya
Yoga Mandiram,
literally a hospice of alternatives treatment, in Chennai, India.
Krishnamacharya died in 1989, a centenarian with all faculties intact
and at his beck and call till the last hour, satisfied that his
sagacity would live on in his son, his teachings true to the tiniest
decimal.
FATHER FIGURE
The sole access the world has to the Grand Senior—the legend and progenitor—of yoga therapy is through the Grand Junior, his son. You can rest assured that the image T.K.V Desikachar will paint for you of T.Krishnamacharya will be picture perfect and beyond the pale of criticism. One of his foreign students holds that over 90 percent of Desikachar's teachings are filial to a fault and loyal to his father almost up to the hour of his death in 1989. Even after his death the Gordian knot of duty locks father sand son, teacher and disciple, together.In Desikachar's scheme of things, the genesis of "yoga therapy" centered on his father is of far greater import than any conceptual originality Desikachar might himself have shown through his long years of rigorous, unflinching apprenticeship. What he teaches today is in turn as much a yoga of temporal therapy as it is of prayer and genuflection to a life-enhancing concept that is eternal.
The teachings of the patriarch are like a generic raga pradhan—to be sung or played strictly according to notations, originality limited only to choice of instrument or timbre of voice. In Krishnamacharya's arch traditional school of hard spiritual knocks, servitude was a sign of neither sin nor weakness but of right fully earned respect.
"We were," Desikachar said in an interview, "fifty years apart in age. His education and background were very different from mine, but what I remember most is that he always came to my level in working with me. I am a western-educated person and he was a traditional teacher".
Tirumalai Krishnamacharya was born on November 18, 1888 in a village in Mysore, India. Proud of its pedigree of piety, his family traced its lineage back to the sage Nathamuni, author of Krishnamacharya's and now Desikachar's Bible, the Yoga Rahasya. Enrolled at the clean - slate age of 12 years in Mysore's Brahmatantra Parakala Mutt and taught the thousands of nuances and niceties of the Vedas, he took a parallel course at the Royal College of Mysore. At 18, he sped to Banaras to study Sanskrit, logic and grammar, and returned to Mysore for the finishing touch.
Krishnamacharya then went on an extended peregrination for a decade: to North India to study Samkhya, the India's oldest and most venerated philosophical system and the roots of the yoga; then, in 1916, he traveled to the Himalayas and found his teacher, Ramamohan Brahmachari, who lived near Mansarovar. After seven hard years of learning the logistics of therapy and healing, he descended once again to the south to study ayurveda and the philosophy of nyaya. A Vedic school of logic. He returned to Mysore in 1924 and opened a school of yoga. With the local raja, or king, as his prize pupil and cash cow. For the next 22 years, Krishnamacharya dug in and taught at the school, and wrote his first book, Yoga Makarandam (Secrets of Yoga), at leisure.
It was in 1937 that he and his disciple and associate, K. Pattabhi Jois, had their first batch of foreign students. Two years later, his name had spread wide enough for a French medical team to make its way to him, intrigued by yoga's claim that it could help control heartbeat. It was his incontrovertible data that opened the sluicegates to the West, the hotbed of empiricism and cognitive proof. Yoga began to colonize the West.
In time, Krishnamacharya's native inventiveness made him draw up a template for yoga as therapy or service industry—a function familiar to the West.
The foundation of yoga therapy was laid in 1976, when Desikachar and father decided to set up the Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram, literally a hospice of alternatives treatment, in Chennai, India. Krishnamacharya died in 1989, a centenarian with all faculties intact and at his beck and call till the last hour, satisfied that his sagacity would live on in his son, his teachings true to the tiniest decimal.