The Strange Case of T. M. Krishnamacharya
CHAPTER 12
No person on the planet has had a greater impact on contemporary yoga practice than Tirumalai Krishnamacharya. The guru of B.K.S. Iyengar, K. Pattabhi Jois, and T.K.V. Desikachar, Krishnamacharya was the innovator of many if not most of the postures and sequences now taught in yoga centers and studios around the world. Intellectual brilliance, creativity, yogic powers, Sanskrit scholarship, philosophical acumen, pedagogical skills, healing gifts, and spirituality: all of these qualities and achievements have contributed to giving this spare, wiry individual larger than life dimensions. Hundreds of photographs of both the teacher himself and his illustrious pupils and protégés are proof positive of his virtuoso command of postural yoga. With respect to Yoga philosophy, however, the picture is less clear. Nearly all that we know of Krishnamacharya’s philosophical background has come down to us through the filter of five authorized biographical notices—one is tempted to say hagiographies—four of which were written by his son and disciple T.K.V. Desikachar and his grandson Kausthub Desikachar, in 1982, 1997, 1998, and 2005. The picture that emerges from these books is one of a great intellect combined with superhuman powers of body, vision, and insight, and an all-consuming thirst for yogic knowledge—which, as his biographers reiterate ad infinitum, was grounded in an unrivaled mastery of the philosophy of the Yoga Sutra.
As his biographers note, the salient facts of Krishnamacharya’s life are known through eleven pages of autobiographical notes written by him near the end of his life, as well as from their own accounts of his reminiscences and teachings to them. It is therefore curious that these facts have changed with each new biography: what one in fact sees in these books is a process of legacy building, of transforming an innovator of postural yoga into a “universal man” of Yoga. According to these family traditions, Krishnamacharya became an accomplished master of Yoga through his “genealogical bloodline” and three types of training: direct revelation, a conventional academic education, and discipleship under a trans-Himalayan Yoga master.
The scion of an illustrious family of brahmin intellectuals, the young Krishnamacharya received a traditional religious education at the brahmin college of Parakala in Mysore, the greatest center of Shrivaishnava learning in all of south India, where his grandfather was the abbot. Prior even to his formal schooling at Parakala, Krishnamacharya had been initiated into Yoga at age five when his father began to teach him aphorisms from Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra. His father had also revealed to him that he was directly descended from the revered tenth-century yogi Nathamuni, the founder of the Shrivaishnava school. At sixteen, the young Krishnamacharya journeyed alone to Nathamuni’s birthplace. There he fell into a trance state in which he received the entire teaching of a lost Yoga work, the Yoga Rahasya (“Secret Teaching on Yoga”), from Nathamuni himself. This was the beginning of his Yoga quest. In the words of his grandson Kausthub,
When yoga was facing its dark days in the early twentieth century, Krishnamacharya needed support to fulfill his mission and preserve the tradition of yoga…. He also knew that he would need help to revive this great Indian tradition. Knowledge of the Yoga Rahasya would not be enough, he would need a broad base of knowledge to work from … in order to present yoga in a proper and just manner. Hungry to learn, he embarked on a journey—a quest—that would take him all over India.
Krishnamacharya’s intellectual odyssey began two years later in 1906, when he embarked on an extended period of study with renowned traditional pandits and critical scholars in Mysore, as well as in Varanasi and several other ancient centers of learning in north India. He quickly distinguished himself in several branches of Hindu philosophy, collecting titles, teaching certificates, and honors in Vedic Studies, Nyaya, Vedanta, and Mimamsa. Wishing to deepen his knowledge of Yoga philosophy, but unable to find university instruction on the subject in Varanasi, he was taken under the wing of the Yoga master Babu Bhagavan Das, who arranged for him to sit as a “private candidate” for a degree in Samkhya-Yoga philosophy at the nearby Patna University.
Thirsting for a still deeper knowledge of Yoga, Krishnamacharya next traveled to Tibet, where for seven years he was the disciple of a cave-dwelling yogi named Yogeshwara Ramamohana Brahmachari. Shortly after his return, at the request of the Maharaja of Mysore, he took a position as yoga instructor to the royal court. It was here, during his seventeen years at the Mysore Palace’s Yogashala, that Krishnamacharya innovated his renowned program of asana and vinyasa and instructed his illustrious pupils B.K.S. Iyengar and K. Pattabhi Jois. Then after the school was shuttered in the early 1950s, he departed for Chennai, where he had been offered a position at the Vivekananda College. In 1961, his son T.K.V. Desikachar gave up a career in engineering to become his pupil. Studying the Yoga Sutra with him until Krishnamacharya’s death in 1989, Desikachar had a temple erected in his father’s honor, which he continues to maintain together with his son Kausthub and other members of the Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram’s inner circle.
There are a number of problems with this biographical sketch, which varies in many of its details from one authorized source to another. Most troubling is the absence of any written proof from Krishnamacharya’s lifetime of any expertise in Yoga philosophy and the Yoga Sutra. Over his five decades of teaching, Krishnamacharya composed four books on yoga and Yoga, two of which during his years at Mysore. The earliest of these, written in the Kannada language, are the recently translated Yoga Makaranda (“Emerald of Yoga,” 1934) and the partially translated Yogasanagalu (“Yoga Postures,” 1941). These two works, written in the decades immediately following Krishnamacharya’s long years of apprenticeship in Varanasi, Patna, Tibet, and elsewhere, offer scant evidence for his biographers’ repeated claims concerning his rigorous training in Yoga philosophy in general and the Yoga Sutra in particular.
Apart from a truncated account of the eight-part practice, mainly devoted to the inner and outer restraints, the Yoga Sutra is conspicuous by its absence from Krishnamacharya’s early works. Virtually no mention is made of the culminating meditative portion of the eight-part practice, and the Yoga Sutra’s broader philosophical system is largely ignored. In the rare cases in which it is discussed, it is misrepresented through the use of terminology utterly foreign to Patanjali or his classical commentators. For example, a statement in the “Emerald” that “Yoga is a state of oneness of jivatma (individual soul) and paramatma (universal soul),” is actually a direct quote from “Yajnavalkya’s Yoga” (1.44), a south Indian work that synthesized Hatha and Tantric Yoga with Qualified Non-dualist Vedanta philosophy. Upon inspection, it becomes clear that the discussion in the “Emerald” of the eight-part practice, as well as the many links it makes between yoga practice and health, were more directly inspired by this latter work than by the Yoga Sutra. Other sources, listed on the first page of the “Emerald,” figure far more prominently here; these include works on Hatha Yoga, south Indian Yoga Upanishads, and several other south Indian titles. Furthermore, as Mark Singleton’s interviews with a number of Krishnamacharya’s pupils from the Mysore Yogashala indicate, none of their master’s teachings from that period dealt with the spiritual or philosophical aspects of Yoga.
How can it be that in spite of his brilliance and extensive training, Krishnamacharya comes across as barely cognizant of the Yoga Sutra that had been the presumed object of his Samkhya-Yoga instruction at Patna University as well as of his seven years of discipleship in Tibet with Ramamohana Brahmachari? In fact, between the popularization of Raja Yoga by Vivekananda in the 1890s and the decades of Krishnamacharya’s apprenticeship, little had changed in the landscape of Yoga philosophy in India. India’s traditional north Indian pandits remained largely unschooled in Yoga philosophy and unaware of the distinctions between the Raja, Hatha, and Tantric Yoga traditions. (Additional proof for this may be found in a work titled Yogank, a special issue on Yoga published in 1935 by the Gita Press, which, closely affiliated with other institutions of traditional learning, was representative of the state of north Indian pandit lore concerning Yoga during those decades.) As we have seen, however, there had been a “Yoga Sutra revival” in south India between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, and its fading memory may have been the impetus behind Krishnamacharya’s interest. In spite of this, Krishnamacharya’s Yoga quest always took him north.
According to all of his biographers, Krishnamacharya first traveled to Varanasi. It was precisely during this early period of his studies that the academic field of Yoga studies had begun to flower in an unprecedented fashion, as Indian and Western scholars entered into a vigorous dialogue in matters of Yoga philosophy. James Haughton Woods had come to Mumbai in 1909, where he and a young P. V. Kane (who would later author the monumental History of Dharmasastra between 1930 and 1962) read the Yoga Sutra together. In his 1914 translation, Woods writes of the assistance he received in Benares from Arthur Venis, the principal of the Government Sanskrit College from 1888 to 1918, in translating a difficult sutra from Patanjali’s work. He also praises the scholarship of Mukunda Shastri Adkar, who published critical editions of works on Vedanta and Mimamsa (but not Yoga) there, as well as other Indian philosophers in Pune and Kashmir. In Bengal, an obscure but learned Samkhya renouncer named Hariharananda Aranya was teaching in Kolkata in the early 1910s: we will return to this remarkable figure at the end of this chapter. In the same decade the great Bengali philosopher Surendranath Dasgupta left Kolkata for Cambridge, where he would later write his dissertation on Yoga. The first tome of his five-volume History of Indian Philosophy, which included a long section on Yoga philosophy, appeared in 1921.
Another formidable scholar of Indian philosophy was Ganganath Jha, who succeeded Venis as principal of the Government Sanskrit College in Varanasi, serving in that role from 1918 to 1924. Twenty years Krishnamacharya’s senior, Jha too was a traditional brahmin who, steeped in the teachings of classical Hindu wisdom, had begun university training at an early age. Jha is notable for having produced an early English translation of the Yoga Sutra together with Vyasa’s commentary, in 1907. Strongly influenced by Nondualist Vedanta thought, he translated the word “yoga” as “communion.” Several years earlier, while still a student himself, Jha had translated Vijnanabhikshu’s “Short Statement” on the Yoga Sutra. Published in 1894, it was noted with approval by Max Müller in his Six Systems.
By the 1920s, Jha had also published extensively on the Upanishads as well as on Mimamsa and Nyaya philosophy. As such, he would have been an ideal Varanasi mentor for Krishnamacharya. So it is that Krishnamacharya’s biographers describe the intimate relationship that developed between Jha and Krishnamacharya during their master’s Varanasi years. Recognizing the potential of the young south Indian prodigy, Jha took a special interest in his destitute young protégé, helping him to win a scholarship and eventually taking him on as a private tutor for his son Amarnath. It was also Jha, we are told, who later directed Krishnamacharya to depart for Tibet to meet Ramamohana Brahmachari, “who would be able to teach him all he wanted to know about yoga,”1 and Jha who commended Krishnamacharya to the British viceroy in Shimla, from whom he would eventually receive the documents he needed to travel to Tibet.
The obvious question this narrative poses is why Krishnamacharya would have chosen to leave for Patna and Tibet to enhance his knowledge of Yoga philosophy when one of the greatest Indian scholars on the subject was his Varanasi friend and mentor Ganganath Jha? But this question hides the deeper question of when, exactly, all of this was supposed to have taken place. The four family biographies, as well as a recent relatively circumspect 2010 biography by A. G. and Ganesh Mohan, all present divergent chronologies. According to his personal reminiscences, Krishnamacharya either visited Varanasi once and stayed for over a decade, or visited twice, returning to Mysore between visits. According to a brochure he had self-published in the 1960s, he was in Tibet between 1911 and 1918. The Mohans situate Krishnamacharya’s Varanasi years between 1906 and 1911, followed by seven years in Tibet and a brief return visit to Varanasi in 1918. The 1982 Desikachar biographical notice simply quotes his father as saying that “he studied with a Brahmin near Mount Kailash, after all his education in Benares, Allahabad and Calcutta.”2 The 1997, 1998, and 2005 Desikachar biographies place him in Varanasi between 1906 and 1909, and then again between 1914 and 1915 (or 1914 and 1917, followed by seven years in Tibet).
None of these dates permits an encounter of any sort—let alone a strong bond of friendship to have developed—between Krishnamacharya and Jha at any time between 1906 and 1918. The reason is simple. Jha was, from 1902 to 1918, professor of Sanskrit at Muir College in Allahabad and did not arrive in Varanasi until 1918, when he succeeded Venis as principal of the Government Sanskrit College. In their later biographies, the Desikachars leave an opening for a possible meeting between the two men by evoking a third brief visit to Varanasi in 1922, followed by a series of advanced degrees quickly earned over the following two years, in Kolkata, Allahabad, Varanasi, Vadodara, and Nabadwip. However, the deep friendship and personal relationship that would have preceded this visit and Krishnamacharya’s seven years in Tibet is controverted by Krishnamacharya’s own 1960s account. It is also chronologically impossible.
Who, then, was Krishnamacharya’s Varanasi mentor? The most likely answer may be found on an undated “Certificate of Commendation” reproduced in Kausthub Desikachar’s 2005 biography. That certificate, presented to him by the “celebrated pandits of Benares,” lists the names and titles of thirteen traditional scholars, most of who were also university professors. Many of these scholars’ areas of expertise are also indicated on the certificate—and it is striking to note that while four were specialists of grammar and three of Nyaya, with one each specializing in philosophy, astrology, literature, and so forth, none is listed as a specialist in Yoga philosophy. One of the scholars named on this list was Muralidhara Jha, whose official title was “Vice Principal of Government Sanskrit Queen’s College.” This would have been the person misidentified as Ganganath Jha in the biographies. Had Krishnamacharya come to Varanasi a few years later and actually studied with Ganganath Jha—or if he had studied with Jha’s predecessor Arthur Venis and met James Haughton Woods there during the 1910s—his early understanding of Yoga philosophy would have been far more sophisticated and his “Emerald” a more rounded work. Manifestly, this was not the case.
Another chronological problem in Krishnamacharya’s academic itinerary concerns Patna University, where he is said to have taken an examination in Samkhya-Yoga philosophy from an unnamed scholar: Patna University was not founded until 1917, and its first examinations not held until 1918. Krishnamacharya could therefore not have studied there before departing for Tibet, and it makes no sense that he would have bothered to sit for a degree in Yoga philosophy at a second-tier university after completing seven years of training with a Himalayan Yoga master.
In the preface to his 1934 “Emerald,” Krishnamacharya evokes the “Yoga Sastra in accordance with the prescribed canons of Pranayama,” and later in the same work he speaks of the “700 asanas he learned from Ramamohan Brahmacari (who knew 7000).”3 Then, in T.K.V. Desikachar’s 1982 account of his father’s life, in which mention is first made of Mount Kailash, we are also told that Krishnamacharya “was instructed in the use of asana and pranayama for people with sickness by this great yogi.”4 Later accounts introduce additional details, details that seemingly take on a life of their own. Some speak of a lost five-thousand-year-old treatise titled Yoga Kuruntam, which combined the teachings of the Yoga Sutra with those of a Vedic sage named Vamana Rishi. Krishnamacharya would have learned this work by heart from Brahmachari before discovering a printed version of it in Kolkata, which he transcribed and taught verbatim to Pattabhi Jois before the work was eaten by ants and lost forever. Not until his 1998 biography, however, does Desikachar speak of the Yoga Sutra as a component of Brahmachari’s teachings to Krishnamacharya:
From Sri Ramamohan my father not only learned Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras by heart, but he also learned to chant them with an exactness of pronunciation, tone, and inflection that echoed as nearly as possible their first utterance thousands of years earlier.5
The rote memorization and chanting of the Yoga Sutra becomes an increasingly prominent theme in the Desikachars’ later biographical sketches. By 1961, they tell us, Krishnamacharya had begun to combine chanting with postural practice, always adjusting the number of verses to match the time the student should hold the pose. This was the way he initiated his son into yoga, beginning each lesson with postures and chanting of the Yoga Sutra. In his 1982 book, Desikachar writes that he had, over the previous twenty-one years, read through the entire Yoga Sutra with Krishnamacharya seven times, noting that “he can play with the Sanskrit words like a good flute player can play the flute,”6 and correlating his father’s skill in chanting to his traditional brahmanic training in Vedic chant.
While his biographers repeatedly stress the depth of Krishnamacharya’s personal teachings on Yoga Sutra philosophy during his Chennai years from 1961 to the end of his life—teachings that featured exhaustive referencing of the classical commentaries and rigorous glossing of Patanjali’s Sanskrit—none of his later writings show any evidence of progress beyond the superficial and inaccurate treatment of the subject found in his 1935 and 1941 works. A Sanskrit-language poem titled the Yoganjalisaram (“Essential Benediction of Yoga”), composed by Krishnamacharya in his nineties and published posthumously in 1995, contains no salient references to the Yoga Sutra. The “Secret Teaching”—Nathamuni’s lost work on Yoga as it had been revealed to the sixteen-year-old Krishnamacharya in 1904, and which Krishnamacharya had purportedly taught to Desikachar between 1963 and 1965—was posthumously published with an English translation by his son in 1998. However, in a 1991 interview, Desikachar denied that the “Secret Teaching” was anything other than a collection of verses on yoga and related subjects composed by Krishnamacharya himself. Its focus on the healing powers of yoga practice bear the stamp of his father’s signature approach, but its few vague references to the Yoga Sutra are, once again, of little interest.
In spite of his biographers’ considerable efforts, Krishnamacharya’s sole verifiable legacy with respect to the Yoga Sutra is limited to two areas of practice. The first, which links a sound body to a sound mind and presents the Yoga Sutra as a manual for a healthy lifestyle, follows a trend introduced by Vivekananda and expanded upon by nearly every yoga guru of the past hundred years. As his son and grandson repeatedly insist in their biographies, Krishnamacharya was a great healer whose powers were grounded in his unrivaled understanding of the Yoga Sutra. That legacy forms the core of the Krishnamacharya Healing and Yoga Foundation’s therapeutic services, as well as of the well-produced program of online instruction on the Yoga Sutra produced by A. G. and Indra Mohan, which is presented under the banner of Svastha Yoga, the “Yoga of Health.” There, a wide range of tutorials on the Yoga Sutra as a guide for a healthy, happy life features detailed analyses of individual sutras from philosophical, psychological, and physiological standpoints. This, the “medicalization” of Yoga philosophy, has also been embraced by a department within the Government of India’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, in whose 2006 report we read that
Yoga is primarily a way of life propounded by Patanjali in a systematic form. It consists of eight components…. These steps in the practice of Yoga have potential for improvement of social and personal behavior, improvement of physical health by encouraging better circulation of oxygenated blood in the body, restraining the sense organs and thereby inducing tranquility and serenity of mind. The practice of Yoga prevents psychosomatic disorders/diseases and improves individual resistance and ability to endure stressful situations.7
Krishnamacharya’s most unique contribution to modern applications of the Yoga Sutra lies, however, in the practice of chanting, of accurately reproducing the sounds of the sutras as grounding for postural practice. That an orthodox brahmin should have innovated such a practice is understandable: the accurate chanting of the Veda was central to the traditional education he had received at Parakala. The rationale for Vedic chanting may be found in the Sanskrit term used to denote divine revelation: shruti, “that which was heard” by the ancient Vedic seers, has been communicated orally down the ages to the present day through just this sort of transmission. This is what makes Krishnamacharya’s apprenticeship at the feet of Ramamohana Brahmachari—the mysterious sage from a land that time forgot beyond the highest mountains in the world—so essential to his legacy. As the last authentic yogi on the planet, Brahmachari’s transmission of the Yoga Sutra “with an exactness of pronunciation, tone, and inflection that echoed as nearly as possible their first utterance thousands of years earlier,” made Krishnamacharya modern man’s sole link to Patanjali’s ancient revelation. This also explains his insistence on precise chanting with his son and disciple: without it, that line of transmission would have been severed for all time. And so Yoga Sutra chanting has become an integral part of the yoga training offered by Desikachar, Iyengar, and several of their pupils and pupils’ pupils—and many are their recordings of hauntingly beautiful chanted renditions of Patanjali’s work, in perfect Sanskrit.
In spite of this, there is scant evidence or documentation anywhere in the classical commentarial literature or the historical record to indicate that chanting was ever a component of apprenticeship in the Yoga Sutra. While some scholars maintain that Patanjali’s work may have been memorized and recited in earlier times—by teachers, disciples, or both—this is entirely speculative. To begin, the Yoga Sutra is not the Veda. Unlike the Vedas, which have no author and which were directly revealed to the ancient seers, the Yoga Sutra’s author was a human being. In traditional brahmanic education, only shruti is learned by heart, through rote memorization and chanting: without such a precedent, there is no justification for chanting any other sort of work, either sacred or secular.
Perhaps because he was aware of this, T.K.V. Desikachar provided an original and quite compelling rationale for chanting. In his 1998 biography of his father, he makes a number of statements about chanting the Yoga Sutra in accompaniment to or independent of postural practice. As he puts it, chanting, which is as natural and instinctive as the flow of breath, can be used to heal the body, mind, and soul. Here the power of chanting derives not from the meaning of the sutras but rather from a sound quality unique to Sanskrit, “the unique spiritual language of mankind.”8 Chanting can only be learned from a teacher, and Desikachar’s teacher was both his father and guru, the person who gave him life as well as the promise of release from suffering existence. By his own admission, his own chanting drove his mother crazy at first, but gradually, “over the years of study I realized that in chanting I was gradually acquiring my father’s voice, sounding more like him all the time. Chanting truly entered the rhythms of life, and my teaching.”9 Most important, however, was the link to the past that oral transmission afforded him:
When I chanted with my father, I was bound to him and his teachings in a unique fashion, just as in his chanting he was once again linked to his own teacher—and so it stretches back through many centuries of teachers and students, the unbroken line of the parampara [lineage]. In our tradition, when we chant, we unite with God, who gave us the language, the practices of Yoga and the wisdom of the Vedas.10
Then, in a most interesting move, Desikachar identifies the primordial teacher of all teachers (including of Patanjali) with Ishvara, the Master of Yoga whose identity has been interpreted in so many ways over the centuries:
As Patanjali relates, God as Ishvara dwells within each of us, and our personal conduit is through the purusha, the indwelling eternal Perceiver. The purusha, however, perceives only through the mind … In the Yoga system, the mind is considered located in the heart region. This might have something to do with the tradition of learning through sound—the chanting voice of the teacher.11
In other words, the medium is the message. There is no need to understand the Yoga Sutra analytically; rather, it is sufficient to become a tuning fork for its sound structure, which is nothing other than the voice of the original teacher of Yoga, the God of Yoga himself. This was the voice that Patanjali would have heard, which would have enabled him to compose the Yoga Sutra. Desikachar’s is an ingenious position, which posthumously absolves his teacher of any need to clearly explain the meaning of the Yoga Sutra—something he appears never to have done, in writing at least. It also fits well with the ongoing fetishization of the Yoga Sutra by the current yoga subculture, since it allows for the Yoga Sutra to be venerated without being understood.
Although neither Krishnamacharya nor Desikachar have made any mention of it, Vyasa’s commentary on sutra 2.1 intimates that he might well have agreed with them. The sutra in question reads: “Practical yoga involves ascetic practice (tapas), study (svadhyaya) and dedication to the Master of Yoga (isvara-pranidhana).” According to Michel Angot, it is the second term in this list, which others have read to mean “self-analysis,” that Vyasa interpreted in an altogether unique way. Whereas the meaning of svadhyaya was, in orthodox Vedic interpretation, the personal recitation of the Veda by a brahmin, Vyasa interpreted the term to mean “the repetition of the syllables named pranava (that is, the mantra OM), or of other purifying [texts] or else the study of texts on the subject of release.” As Angot argues, the “purifying text” that Vyasa had in mind could not have been anything other than the Yoga Sutra, which Vyasa viewed as a teaching originally revealed by a divine Ishvara and only later compiled by the human Patanjali (even if, in his commentary on 1.25, Vyasa identifies Ishvara with the teacher Kapila). Other critical scholars, such as David Carpenter and Stuart Sarbacker, have similarly argued that Yoga Sutra recitation and memorization were intended as practical complements to meditation. Even if, however, one grants that Angot’s reading of Vyasa’s commentary is a valid one, it nevertheless remains that simply chanting OM or any other Vedic mantra would be fully as effective as reciting the verses of the Yoga Sutra. Interestingly, Desikachar relates that in his teachings Krishnamacharya had identified svadhyaya with postural practice, the very “opening” he needed to link the Yoga Sutra to the practice of which he was the undisputed modern master. Many contemporary yoga gurus, led by Iyengar and Pattabhi Jois, have made similar assertions, affirming that the entire eight-part practice is intrinsic to, or flows directly from, postural practice.
A certain number of the mysteries concerning Krishnamacharya’s legacy with respect to the Yoga Sutra and Yoga philosophy are dispelled in a Sanskrit- and Tamil-language work titled the Yogavalli (“Vine of Yoga”), a teaching his biographers describe as their teacher’s most exhaustive commentary on the Yoga Sutra, which he would have dictated to an inner circle of students during the final years of his life. The first volume of the work, which comprises an analysis of the first chapter of the Yoga Sutra, was compiled in 1988; the three remaining projected volumes have yet to appear. The “Vine” is a remarkable work, a highly erudite commentary in the ancient commentarial tradition. Intended for the sole use of “insiders”—advanced students enrolled in instruction with the Desikachars and other teachers at the Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram in Chennai—it also offers an account of Krishnamacharya’s relationship to Yoga philosophy without the cloying sanctimony that characterizes his English-language biographies.
The final pages of the Sanskrit introduction to the “Vine” are most revealing. To begin, the text is presented not as a work by Krishnamacharya, but rather by “the Krishnamacharyans of the Malanka [sic] caste living in Madras city.”12 Absent are narratives of chanting in Tibet, of years of academic study in Varanasi and beyond, or of the reception of lost scriptures in a trance. In their place are broad references to the perfected Siddhas of the various Yoga lineages, and an apprenticeship in Yoga undertaken during a Himalayan sojourn. However, the most interesting discussion here concerns the tenth-century Nathamuni’s “Secret Teaching.” After relating how this teaching had been lost in transmission, the “Vine” then asks, “How is it that the [present] authors … are able to quote its words?”13 The answer that is given goes straight to the heart of the Yoga Sutra, which it quotes: “Knowledge of the past and future arises from perfect discipline of the three transformations of thought” (3.16); and “through direct perception of the cognitive process, one has knowledge of the thoughts of others” (3.19). This is the way of Patanjali’s true yogi, whose supernatural powers (which the authors of the “Vine” here say they themselves possess) enabled Krishnamacharya to retrieve lost teachings without recourse to trances, chanting, or university training. In the end, this explanation is far more satisfying and faithful to Patanjali’s teachings than the fractured accounts of Krishnamacharya’s life his English-language biographies offer. One can only surmise that like the many culture brokers who have preceded them, these authors have been tailoring their message to the sensibilities of their Western audience, and so have preferred to present their guru as a genius and a healer rather than as a true yogi as defined by the Yoga Sutra.
This claim of direct access to the past through yogic powers also aligns with positions taken a century earlier by the Theosophists and members of the Brahmo Samaj, who valued the direct revelation received through individual experience, intuition, and introspection over transmission through institutional channels. This comes at a price, however, since it undercuts the importance of the Shrivaishnava lineage that Krishnamacharya’s biographers so emphasize. If Krishnamacharya was a direct descendant of Nathamuni, then his guru-disciple lineage ran through Ramanuja, the third Shrivaishnava guru and the greatest star in the Vaishnava philosophical galaxy. It is significant that in their 2011 biography of Krishnamacharya, the Mohans assert that the object of the “Vine” was to interpret the Yoga Sutra from the standpoint of the Qualified Nondualist school. To this end, they quote the “Secret Teaching” (1.6–7) as stating that
the practices of Qualified Non-Dualism are based entirely on devotion. Therefore … the practice of Patanjali’s yoga should also be done only with devotion. Thus Patanjali’s eightfold practice is itself called bhakti yoga, or the yoga of devotion, in this context.14
Curiously, T.K.V. Desikachar’s 1999 text and translation of these same verses from the “Secret Teaching” diverge greatly from the preceding quotation and contain no mention whatsoever of Qualified Nondualism. As we have seen, Ramanuja rejected direct yogic perception as a valid source of knowledge of God or the absolute, which, as he argued, could only be found through scripture. And because Ramanuja’s writings have defined Shrivaishnava orthodoxy for nearly a thousand years, claims to Krishnamacharya’s special revelation would therefore be rendered null and void.
I cannot leave Krishnamacharya’s legacy behind without returning to the place of Tibet—that Shangri-la of many an Orientalist fever dream—in the Krishnamacharya epic. All of Krishnamacharya’s biographers locate Krishnamacharya’s Yoga master Ramamohana Brahmachari in a cave on the shore of Lake Manasarovar or at the foot of Mount Kailash in Tibet. Yet by Krishnamacharya’s own account, in his 1934 “Emerald,” his teacher, “who has mastered seven thousand asanas,” was not in Tibet, but rather “in Nepal, living in Muktinarayanakshetram.”15 He makes the same statement in the original preface to the “Emerald,” which was recently discovered in the Mysore Palace archives by Norman Sjoman: “In later years, [the author] had an opportunity of being trained in Yoga Sastra in accordance with the prescribed canons of Pranayama and the several vinyasas by Sri Ramamohan Brahmacari Guru Maharaj of Mukta Narayan Ksetra (Banks of the Gandaki).”16
Muktinarayana (also known as Muktinath) is the name of an important Vaishnava shrine situated in northern Nepal, more than two hundred miles away as the crow flies from the Tibetan Mount Kailash. It is difficult to imagine how Krishnamacharya could have made this trek over some of the most rugged terrain in the world. In fact, if we are to follow the 1997 and 2005 Desikachar biographies, Krishnamacharya’s trek to Tibet was far more arduous than this. Both accounts underscore the personal relationship he enjoyed with the British viceroy in Shimla. With letters of introduction from Ganganath Jha, he would have met the viceroy and subsequently healed him of a diabetic condition through yoga. “The Viceroy was happy to make arrangements for Krishnamacharya to cross the Himalayas out of India, across Nepal and into Tibet. The expenses of the journey were covered by the British Government.”17 This journey, from Shimla to Tibet via Muktinarayana in Nepal, is said to have taken twenty-one days and covered 211 miles. A glance at a map of the region shows that such an itinerary makes no sense whatsoever, unless traveling from New York to Chicago via Los Angeles makes sense. It would have lengthened his trek by over four hundred miles.
But there is more. Both biographies twice state that the viceroy requested that Krishnamacharya return to Shimla “once every three months,”18 so that he could continue with his Yoga study. Let us assume for the sake of argument that after his maiden journey, Krishnamacharya walked directly from Shimla to Tibet, a journey of only four hundred miles, in twenty-one days. If, during those “seven years” in Tibet, he had to be back in Shimla once every three months, then he would have had very little time to spend with either his guru Ramamohana Brahmachari or his pupil the viceroy—perhaps two weeks with each, followed by six weeks of walking and recovery. Further complicating his task would have been relations between British India, China, and Tibet in 1911, which Krishnamacharya himself identifies as the year of his first journey there. In 1903, the British had invaded Tibet, forcing an “Anglo-Tibetan Agreement” upon Lhasa in 1904. In 1910, the Chinese riposted, with their own military invasion of Lhasa. For the next four years, British subjects were virtually prohibited from entering into western Tibet (where Mount Kailash is located), whether as representatives of the government, trade officials, or “unofficial” British explorers. In other words, any sort of official visa or letter of transit such as Krishnamacharya may have been provided by the viceroy in Shimla would have been worthless. Now, it is true that Chinese power collapsed in central Tibet in 1912, such that after 1914 the whole issue was more or less forgotten for two decades. Therefore, if, as his late biographies have it, he did not leave for Tibet until 1917, then such a journey might have been “politically” possible, but still highly implausible.
In his 2011 article, Fernando Pagès Ruiz notes that Krishnamacharya was a “shrewd card player.” So was James Bond, albeit not before the 1950s. Closer to the young Krishnamacharya’s time, an English author used India and Tibet as the setting for a tale of another secret agent. This was Rudyard Kipling, whose 1901 novel Kim featured an Indian waif (Kim), a Shimla-based British spymaster, a spy (Lurgan Sahib, code-named E23) who put on the guise of a yogi to pass incognito, and a Tibetan holy man. Kim’s training in Shimla, which prepared him to be an operative in the “Great Game,” involved rote memorization (of objects, in the “Jewel Game” or “Kim’s Game”). Now let us suppose for a moment that Krishnamacharya’s viceroy in Shimla was a spymaster, and his frequent journeys from India to Tibet in the guise of a yogi were conducted to carry memorized intelligence back from an agent posing as a holy man in Tibet. The symmetry is compelling and the plot no less implausible than the Just So stories of Krishnamacharya’s biographies. Truth is stranger than fiction, but where is the truth in all of this? The mind boggles.
Tirumalai Krishnamacharya was a remarkably complex figure, a larger than life yogi in a diminutive body whose legacy in some way extends to nearly every one of the tens of millions of contemporary practitioners who take to their yoga mats on a daily basis. Even if, as one of his biographers has written, several details of his life “lie shrouded in myth,” and even if the chronologies he and his biographers have proposed have enough holes in them to fill the Albert Hall, one cannot deny Krishnamacharya’s pivotal role in the history of modern understandings of the Yoga Sutra. It is my belief that Krishnamacharya did eventually train his massive intellect upon the Yoga Sutra, and that the highly sophisticated “Vine” did originate with him—but that he did not come to Patanjali’s work until relatively late in life, during his Chennai years; that is, at about the same time as his former pupil (and prime contender in terms of legacy) B.K.S. Iyengar. I seriously doubt, however, that he was ever the Frodo Baggins of modern Yoga that his biographers have made him out to be.
Here it is useful to compare these reconstructions of Krishnamacharya’s life with that of Hariharananda Aranya, his elder by twenty years. The son of a wealthy Kolkata landowner, Aranya, after a few years of college training in Sanskrit, “chanced upon a copy of an ancient text on Samkhya-Yoga in a library. It resulted in his … taking the vow of a sannyasin (renouncer)”19 and withdrawing, in 1892, to the caves of the Barabar Hills in what is now the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand. There he spent six years in contemplation on the twenty-five principles of Samkhya, eventually “gain[ing] mastery over his mind, which is Yoga.” It may have been during these years that he received instruction from Swami Triloki Aranya, who, as he claimed, belonged to a lineage extending back to Patanjali himself. After a decade of wandering, he returned in the early 1910s to Kolkata, where, in addition to giving instruction in Samkhya and Yoga philosophy, he published a Bengali-language commentary on the Yoga Sutra in 1911. Titled the Bhasvati (“Dawning Sun”), it was the first commentary since Bhoja’s eleventh-century “Royal Sun” to fully respect and argue for the philosophical principles of Samkhya-Yoga enshrined in Patanjali’s work. Following which, Aranya returned to the Barabar Caves, where he gathered a small following of disciples who, at his request, sealed him into a cave in 1926. He would remain there, receiving food and giving teachings through a window in the cave, until his death in 1947. Over the years, the “Dawning Sun” has become a classic, going into several editions in Hindi as well as English. Truly a master-work, it and Aranya’s many other Bengali-and Sanskrit-language publications are the products of the great mind of an authentic scholar-practitioner.
The scion of an illustrious family: Desikachar 1997, 34; Desikachar 2005, 31.
When yoga was facing its dark days: Desikachar 2005, 32–33, 35.
collecting titles, teaching certificates, and honors: Desikachar 2005, 52–55, 65–66, 69.
he took a position as yoga instructor: Desikachar 2005, 86; Ruiz 2001.
“Yoga is a state of oneness: Ranganatha 2007, 31.
Furthermore, as Mark Singleton’s interviews: Singleton 2010, 196–97.
little had changed: Farquhar (1920) 1967b, 289.
Additional proof for this may be found in a work titled Yogank: on the Gita Press’s history and mission, see its official website, found at http://www.gitapress.org/GP_intro.htm.
James Haughton Woods had come to Mumbai: Kane 1977, 1392.
assistance he received in Benares from Arthur Venis: Woods 1914, xii.
learned Samkhya renouncer: Farquhar (1920) 1967b, 289.
Strongly influenced by Nondualist Vedanta thought: Jha 1934, ix.
Published in 1894: Max Müller 1899, 416.
the intimate relationship that developed: Desikachar 2005, 53–54, 56; Mohan and Mohan 2011, 2–3.
According to a brochure: Mohan and Mohan 2011, 8.
The 1982 Desikachar biographical notice: Desikachar 1982, 8.
Jha was, from 1902 to 1918: Upadhyaya 1983, part 2, p. 162.
Patna University was not founded: http://www.patnauniversity.ac.in/hist6.html.
In the preface: Sjoman 1996, 51; Ranganathan and Ranganathan 2007, 25.
a lost five-thousand-year-old treatise: Desikachar 1997, 23, 27; Singleton 2010, 184–86; Ruiz 2011.
From Sri Ramamohan: Desikachar and Cravens 1998, 43.
However, in a 1991 interview: Mohan and Mohan 2011, 137; Singleton 2010, 185.
Krishnamacharya was a great healer: Desikachar 1982, 30; Desikachar and Cravens 1998, 123.
Krishnamacharya Healing and Yoga Foundation’s therapeutic services: http://www.svastha.net/yogasutras-online/.
Yoga is primarily a way of life: Alter 2007, 177.
T.K.V. Desikachar provided an original: Desikachar and Cravens 1998, 158–59.
When I chanted with my father: Desikachar and Cravens 1998, 160.
As Patanjali relates: Desikachar and Cravens 1998, 106.
According to Michel Angot: Angot 2009, 25–26, 126; King 1999, 73; Sarbacker 2005, 103.
Interestingly, Desikachar relates: Desikachar 1982, 34.
Many contemporary yoga gurus: Bühnemann 2007, 22–23; Jacobsen 2008, 152; Iyengar 1989, 8.
which he would have dictated to an inner circle: Desikachar 1997, 91.
“the Krishnamacharyas of the Malanka [sic] caste: Yogavalli 1988, 22.
the tenth-century Nathamuni’s “Secret Teaching”: Yogavalli 1988, 26–27.
the practices of Qualified Non-Dualism: Mohan and Mohan 2011, 135.
not in Tibet, but rather “in Nepal: Ranganathan and Ranganathan 2007, 25; Sjoman 1996, 51 and 66n61.
the British viceroy in Shimla: Desikachar 1997, 25; Desikachar 2005, 48.
In 1903, the British had invaded Tibet: Lamb 1986, 256–73.
after 1914 the whole issue: Lamb 1986, 278.
a “shrewd card player”: Ruiz 2011.
several details of his life “lie shrouded in myth”: Ruiz 2011.
at about the same time as his former pupil: Syman 2010, 238.
“chanced upon a copy: biography of Hariharananda Aranya, found at the “Kapil Math” website: www.samkhyayoga-darshana.com.