S4E2 Transnational Anglophone Yoga

This episode focuses on modern, transnational, anglophone yoga, which has tended to emphasize the practice of asana over certain other techniques that were central to the Hatha tradition: e.g. shatkarmani, mudra, and etc. This emphasis is fueled by the influence of European systems of physical education, and the revival of the physical culture movement in India that they helped to spawn. T. Krishnamacharya (the Father of Modern Yoga) is a key influence on modern practice. His tenure at the Mysore palace was a time of great experimentation with regard to Yogasana, and his vision made its way to the west through many famous students. His imperative that Yoga is to be taught via an appropriate adaptation strategy relative to time, place, and culture remains a guiding principle here at the shala. (Vini-yoga)

Listen to the podcast episode, then add your comments and questions below. Matt will be glad to answer you!

Episode Transcript

Please be kind, the transcript is AI generated.

Welcome everyone. Let's make a short recap of the last episode, last time we looked at a very influential figure, Swami Vivekananda, as being one of the keys in influencing yoga's emergence in the west and how we understand what it means. We noticed some interesting things about Vivekananda life. We saw that his political and spiritual leanings both show a strong influence from the forces that came with British colonialism to India. And you could see that, for instance, in what would really be Greek notions of rationality and how important rationality is a central organizer of information and determining what is real. Vivekananda very much appreciated this, and was educated in a system that exalted this kind of rationality, so it got associated right strongly with what what yoga is, and even more than that, what real yoga is.

And then we also saw that through his association with the Brahmo Samaj that he shows an influence from more Universalist interpretations of the Christian doctrine.

So

Vivekananda left us a legacy, really of polarization, really kind of like a value system that distinguishes between kinds of yoga that are oriented more toward his definition of Raja Yoga. Remember, which is the superior, scientific, rational, rationally dominant yoga, and then those systems that are oriented more toward the gross physical in which case we're talking about the Hatha yogas. And remember that Vivekananda described them as having inferior spiritual goals, specifically in relation to the value that they gave to the physical body.

I think we still see these kinds of value systems, the judgments between more meditatively or contemplative oriented things, and what are supposed to be more gross, physical things. I still think we see that value system at work in our culture.

For instance, when we see quote, gym yoga being disparaged as unspiritual, or we hear slogans in the media like, quote, unquote, it's not about the asana,

though there's still some some of this at work, I think, in our culture, and it's important to see that and know that. Remember,

one of the scholars we mentioned said that prior to modern times, there was always a physical element to systems of yoga, and the distinctions between the physical and the meditative and so on may not have been nearly as strong as they are today.

This episode, we're moving a little further toward modern yoga, more toward our time in history, to talk about a key figure, another major influence in what came down to us and what we're practicing.

This man is often called the father of modern yoga, and his name is Tirumala Krishnamacharya.

We want to talk a little bit, a very tiny bit about Krishnamacharya is life and his influence and the the specific time period that he worked in Mysore in particular. But before we do that, to call him the father of modern yoga, we need to more clearly identify the yoga that we are now talking about that we have come forward into the early or late 19th century.

Let me give you a quote from James mallison, whose book, the roots of yoga is a really excellent source for much of this material. Quote, the yoga whose roots we are identifying is that which prevailed in India on the eve of colonialism, ie, the late 18th century, although certainly not without its variations and exceptions. By this time, there is a pervasive trans sectarian consensus throughout India as to what constitutes yoga in practice. One of the reasons for this is the rise to predominance of the techniques of Hatha Yoga, which held a virtual hegemony across a wide range of religious traditions, including the Brahmanical traditions in the pre colonial period.

So when we when we talk about modern yoga, we are in the late 18th century, early 19th century, and notice that by this time, there is a quote, pervasive, transectarian consensus. And so there's a sense in the society about what yoga is, what constitutes it, and how it's practiced and so on, in relation to what everyone is doing. Well, that is a is a thing that had stabilized at this time,

and it is the, the nearest ancestor for sure, of what it is that we're doing. Notice also that, in spite of Vivekananda suspicions of those quote, unquote physical

dominated systems. What we see one of the reasons for this trans sectarian consensus is the rise to predominance of the techniques of hatha yoga. And so Hatha continued to exert an influence, and at least something of it became part of this trans sectarian consensus that was done across a wide swath of people.

Robert singleton goes on to say that really what is most striking about the kind of transnational Hatha Yoga that that we really got and do is the degree to which it departs from the model outlined in the original text.

The most prominent departure really is the primacy accorded to Asana as a system of health, fitness and well being, and the relegation or elimination of other key aspects, such as shot, Karmani, mudra and even pranayama, though, maybe to a lesser extent. Well, singleton singles out this unique focus on the physicality of modern yoga, not just that there is a physical aspect of it, but that that the physical aspect of what had been called Hatha is now placed in the context of fitness and well being, and we don't. And therefore certain techniques come to us that that didn't necessarily make it otherwise

we don't see, for instance, shut car money, that's what's mentioned here. Those are the purification practices that we talked about in season three, in the episode on in the episodes on Siddha based techniques, deep purification techniques. Those don't tend to come Mudra is less

prominent, although there are definitely some schools of people who see its importance.

What we see in transnational modern Hatha Yoga, therefore, is a great primacy accorded to Asana as a system of health, fitness and well being. Asana has many other deep, profound purposes in addition to the effects it has on fitness and well being. But that's kind of the way that that this came to us.

Singleton goes on to say, in relation to Asana, and it's being geared toward fitness and well being. Quote, while it's going too far to say that modern postural yoga has no relationship to asana practice within the Indian tradition, this relationship is one of radical innovation and experimentation. It is the result of adaptation to new discourses of the body that resulted from India's encounter with modernity. That's Robert singleton from his book yoga body, the history of modern posture practice. So he says that it would we'd be going too far to say modern yoga has no relationship to the asana practices within the Indian tradition. And I think that's true. The city based practices do exhibit postures and done somewhat in the way right that we would do them now, depending on which which style you're doing, but we don't see those postures having the same goals. I think that's the main thing that's being pointed out here. Number two,

this focus of postural yoga, in the area of fitness and well being, is a result of

an attitude of radical innovation and experimentation, something going around in the air at the time in the

In in the late

18th, early 19th centuries.

This radical space of experimentation is centered around the body, of course,

and I think that means that we should pause here for just a second and go back throughout the series to remind ourselves that this.

A discourse of experimentation and change that centered around the value or non value of the body, is something that we have spoken of continuously, right since we began even to talk about the Vedic sacrifice. And so this evolving body discourse, we could start with the Upanishad, for instance. And remember, in the Upanishad, the body became the oblation. The body became the liquid that is poured into the fire in that moment of tiaga, where something is lost for good, it's the body that becomes the seed of the sacrifice. And the body still has the characteristic there, in some sense, as Soma, the the liquid piece, because it's the oblation.

This rise in status, remember, produced medical advancements, and also mystical

meditation in a certain way that was centered, in a sense, around the body itself, because it's the seed of the sacrifice.

If, if we say, well, what about the Buddha? Remember that for the Buddha, the body is simply a phenomenon composed of what he called the Five heaps. It is impermanent, and it is devoid of any separate cell sense, and so the body itself is not given particular prominence. Right in the Buddha, he takes a distant in a certain way, attitude towards it. Doesn't say that it's not necessary, doesn't judge it, but says it's best not to be this. Have be the area where

attention is focused in in the way that it is in Hatha Yoga, for instance,

if we come forward to potentially, it's very simple. If you read him as a strict San the body exists as a result of misidentification. Because I am misidentified. The whole world exists. And so the body exists also. This body that I know to be the locus of myself is not the locus of myself. For potentially,

when we come to sit a practice,

we're still dealing strongly with a set of techniques that center around physicality in a certain way. And remember that for the Hatha yogis and the Siddhas, they're doing the the yoga of the pot, the Kumba. And so the body is the vessel that is to be transformed and transmuted into something that will defy death,

a very exalted view with extremely austere and imaginative practices designed to meet those ends.

If we make our way to Vivekananda, remember that he criticized the Hatha yogis as having techniques that only concern themselves with the body living a long time, and that that's an inferior

spiritual goal for someone who is a serious aspirant, because impermanence is too real. Body identification has other problems that come with it, and so on and so forth.

You can see that modern practice

inherits some of this stuff

in the sense that the body is given prominence. Now,

giving it prominence, giving asana and the body prominence in the in the area of health and fitness, is not exactly saying that it's the seed of the sacrifice, like the Upanishad said,

not exactly saying that it is like clothing that will be shed life after life, and it does not touch the self in any significant way. Like the Gita said, it's not exactly the same thing, but there's a tradition of being allowed to exalt the body and put it in a place that is, is very important. We we inherit that in a sense. And now Asana, primarily according to Singleton, is looked at it in terms of health and fitness, a component of a of a larger routine in some way that aims at those ends.

Now, knowing that the discourse on the body has been something that's been prevalent throughout the whole time, we can land ourselves in India at the time that modern practice, as we know it, is really being put together by people like Krishna Acharya. It's

important. To understand that from the late 19th century

to the 1930s for instance, a huge surge of interest in Physical Culture swept over most of Europe, and this this sense that the body was some.

Very important. We need to take care of it. We need to stay in shape. We need to maximize our health for higher ends and so on. This happened in Europe

in the late 19th century, in the 1930s now that's important, because it made its way that same surge of interest made its way to India via the British occupation.

Now the British are very different people than the Indian people, different in stature and size and and many, many ways. And so the Brits brought an enthusiasm for a certain body type that probably should be labeled as Greek in a in a certain way where the Olympics started, and where the games happened all the time, and the where the perfectly proportioned,

you know, human form is repeated and shown in sculpture, you know, in many variations. So the Brits brought this enthusiasm for physical culture with a certain body type in mind, and that prejudice toward a certain body type as being the one that's beautiful and the one that's valuable,

in combination with their position as rulers,

generated something that singleton says is a very common stereotype of the Indian Male as effeminate. And so you have these big, hulking British guys, and they, they think they're thinking of Hercules, and they're so on and so forth. And this is the ideal body type. And then they come to the country, and, you know, they rule the country, and of course, they go, Well, gosh, these people are not like that. And so they, you know, they're they're effeminate. So that stereotype has made its way into the culture in certain ways and and, according to Singleton, began to affect the the especially male psyche, right of India.

Here's something that singleton says about this time, the swell of Indian physical culture was to some extent, nationally motivated and highly organized campaigns of militant physical resistance to colonial rule were commonly run out of gymnasiums and Physical Culture clubs. And so the Indian population, a certain portion of the Indian population, bought into the physical culture movement, and

also, in some sense, bought into the the body type and physical ID, Physical Culture ideas there I said, were Greek in origin. They bought into these things because gymnasiums began to pop up and they became very popular and Physical Culture clubs based around certain activities, certain kinds of gymnastics, or certain or wrestling, or other things began to pop up, and that that interest that Indians are now showing in physical culture is a form of resistance right to colonial rule. And so it is the case singleton really shows this in a fascinating way, that the gymnasiums were places where resistance was centered, and that sometimes gymnasiums were raided and people were arrested there and and things like that. And so this mixture of of physical fervor and political resistance is important to see as a sort of the germinating ground for a lot of modern yoga as we know it

now,

with the British came several form, several highly developed physical system forms, many of which were calisthenics, body weight oriented. In other words, many of which were

gymnastics oriented. And there were several kinds of gymnastics that were very, very, very important. There were also experimental systems of physical fitness that had been created by Europeans that came

uh, Ling, l, I N G as a form of gymnastics that had come with them. There was a very famous strong man whose last name is Sandow, who whose system made it to India. In that in this fervor, the YMCA also came to India and had a major influence, evidently, in the culture. And all of this led to a creation or revival of the idea that India itself had indigenous forms of exercise that were distinct from, though often borrowing from, also these imported systems and so again, just pointing out the mixture of many, many influences now we see that in response to the sophisticated physical systems that came that the Indian population

began to search for something from its own identity, something that was indigenous and unique to India, that was on par and possibly even better, but single.

Documents that those systems that they claimed were indigenous often includes British influence, and I think that perfectly describes what we are doing today, a mixture of many of these things, plus indigenous things right from India.

So remember, in this flurry of mixture and nationalism and colonialism, the search for identity, what was going on in the gyms started to be called Yoga.

Now, how does Krishnamacharya

fit into all this? I'm going to give a cliff note version of his life. There are many books out there written about him, many, I say there's probably four or five many written by his family, some by his students. And I think that if we were strict about our scholarship, most of that stuff would be called hagiography, and that means put together by devotees of a certain person in order to present that person's life, and especially make it appear a certain way.

There is some historical controversy about the things that are claimed about Krishnamacharya is life, according to David Gordon white, that's too much to go into. Specifically, it doesn't really impact whether he's the father of modern yoga or not. And so I'm going to give the standard story, which may or may not be hagiography, but these are the bullet points of of who this person was and how he sort of came to be the one that we're talking about in a certain way.

So his initiation into philosophical yoga began at age five, when his father started to teach him aphorisms from the yoga sutra.

It was during this early time in his life that he was told by his father that he was directly descended from one of the great yogis named not the moon, founder of the Vaishnava school, from which Krishna mare eventually graduated. And so he is, evidently, he's a bra he's born into the Brahmin class, and he is directly descended from one of the great yogis in the Vaishnava lineage.

At 16,

the young Krishna traveled to not the moon's birthplace, and was said to have fallen into a swoon during which he received the full teaching of a lost text called the yoga Rahasya in 1906

he embarked on a traditional course of study with teachers from Mysore, Varanasi and other great centers of Hindu learning. He distinguished himself in Vedic studies, Nyaya and Vedanta. And so we have

number one, the receiving of a text in a swoon

called the yoga Rahasya. And I believe you can get his offering or his translation of what it is that he said that he received.

And then after this time, at 16, we see that he embarks on a traditional course of study, and he distinguishes himself and and a vast array I learned of areas.

So he was evidently very hungry for learning, naturally by disposition. And so after he finished his education in places like Varanasi. He landed in Tibet under the wing of a cave dwelling master named yoga ramamohan Brahmacharya. And the story is, is that he studied Ayurveda and hatha yoga with the master and his family for seven years. And at the end of that seven years, some point or other,

yoga spar Rama Hana Brahmacharya said, It's time for you to go. And the story we learned is, is that that the yogi said, The time for the yogi in the cave is over. You need to go down into the world and take your learning and be of assistance and keep yoga alive, and so on and so forth

and so

after he left Tibet,

I think he worked for a time as a coffee farmer,

or worked on a coffee plantation. I think I read at some point and had a sort of regular life as a Brahmin, and

eventually married, and, you know, did the the normal thing, and he eventually landed a position in the Mysore Palace.

I heard that the.

Position came as a result of his use of ayurvedic remedies to help some of the royalty there with something like type two diabetes, someone got, got a lot better, and they the person who was helped, realized that this was a person of great learning and and obviously had talents. And so Christian Bucha was hired to work at the Mysore palace, and he taught there for 17 years.

So it was here at the Mysore palace that he elaborated his renowned series of asana and pranayama, generally called Ashtanga vinyasa yoga. And he taught this to several very important students, namely BKs Iyengar, who is the founder of iyengar yoga, and Kate patavi Joyce, who went on to teach astanga vinyasa yoga. These two especially went on to travel in Europe and America and to teach those styles, and inside both of those styles, this alignment heavy, deeply, precise, younger form of practice that's that's generally dominant in stillness, and this flowing, very vigorous, amazing series that patavi Joyce brought, of which there are supposed to be five, I think, of increasing difficulty. Those styles are the the seeds of most of the modern forms of posture practice that that you see today

now.

Krishna taught other important people Indra Devi is often called the First Lady of yoga. Ag Mohan, who is still alive, Sri Vasa, Rama, Swami,

T tkv desikachar, his son. So it goes on and on. And those people taught many of the of the people that that we, who are my age, ended up studying, especially if when we began to think about how the techniques need to be adapted to specific individuals, because that's a hallmark of the Krishnamachari tradition. This, this, this tendency to adapt the yoga to the individual and not the other way around.

So eventually, the school at Mysore was closed, and at that point, Krishnamacharya moved to a place called Chennai, where he had been offered a position at the Vivekananda College,

and his early career in Mysore, where he was teaching many of those young boys like Iyengar and and patavi Joyce at that time, that particular time in his career, is is an expression of this, this this radical discourse around the body in the role of health and fitness. He was a part of this in a certain way. I want to go much more deeply into that. But let me just say that after he left my source, his teaching continued to evolve. He is He. He went on to basically teach a system of therapy and adaptation that that is very sophisticated and now deeply intertwined with the yoga sutra. And chanting of the yoga sutra in certain postures, very sophisticated Pranayamas. It's, it's the basis of most of of what we do here at the Shala when it comes to therapy. So we want to focus, because we're talking about modern yoga writ large and this physical culture movement, we want to focus a little bit more on this time at the Mysore palace and what it was like this time of radical experimentation and new dialog around the body. And so to do that, we have to talk about the Maharaja Krishna, Raja Woodyard, the fourth who is the royal personage in Mysore at this time when Krishna is at the palace.

Here's something that

Krishna Raja, Woody are the fourth said, to give you an idea a little bit about what he was like,

for our own sakes, for the sake of the world in general, and for the sake of the youth of Mysore in particular, I wish you all possible success in your endeavors to give direction to a civilization that has lost its way, and I suggest that the signposts are to be found in the simple truths that lie at the base of all religions and their application by the aid of the great discoveries of science to the needs of the present day. This is part of his opening address to the 1937

YMCA World Conference, and it's quoted from Robert Singleton's book. Notice here the spirit of.

Of the kind of rationality and trust in science that Vivekananda displayed when he spoke in the West. The Maharaja of Mysore is very much a well educated modern man like Vivekananda and knew the benefits and values of science. Notice specifically what he says about how we are to give direction to this civilization. This would be his own, and he's talking about that has lost its way, not only India, but probably speaking of the world and many of its troubles also,

he suggests that the sign posts that are the answers to this problem lie at the base of all religions and their application. And so the deepest part of it is a religious problem,

and those religions need to be applied by the aid of the great discoveries of science. And so the mixing of the cultures is well underway. And we can see that here the people at the top, in this case, the Maharaja of Mysore, very much interested in these influences, right, that have come from the west

Mysore at that time, was considered a kind of pan Indian hub of physical culture, revivalism. And so in Mysore in particular, the gymnasium movement was strong. And the Maharaja was a patron, actually, to one of the gyms that we'll be talking about. And so he was a patron, not only, therefore, to Krishnamacharya and this project of yoga that was going on, he was also a patron to one of the most important fitness celebrities in India at the time. This man's name is k, v, a year, and he lived from 1897

to 1980 pretty good, long life. Maybe his methods were good. He was a bodybuilder. If you Google KVI air, you'll be able to find pictures of him

posing in the way that modern body builders do

so. I air was the most recognized fitness celebrity in India in the first half of the 20th century.

Here's what singleton says, Although most exclusively remembered as a bodybuilder, I air was an avid promoter of hatha yoga exercise as part of a larger, highly aestheticized physical regime based on Western models. And so he had his own system, and he called the the practices of Hatha Yoga, which were a part of that system, the Indian specialty his system was, according to singleton quote, a self conscious marriage of body building and yoga, which he called, again, the Indian specialty. Its aim was the creation of something that, a year conceived of as, quote, the ideal man. What's that like? You might ask someone who has the symmetry and strength of a Sandow and so he's admiring this British strong man that I mentioned just earlier,

but also not just that, someone who has the immunity to disease afforded By Hatha Yoga. So we'll lift weights

and do calisthenics for our muscles, but we need to have this Banda pranayama, mudra based thing in order to, to quote, unquote, work out our immune system, so that we have a particular kind of resilience. That you can see the mixture right that's going on at this time. This is kind of the flavor of what's happening

now. Krishna Macharia

was part of the mix at the Mysore palace, and in Mysore on the scene at the time because he taught at the palace. He was an important figure in the community, and

what he was technically entrusted with at the palace was popularizing the practice of yoga, and the system he developed to fulfill this mandate, really is the origin of much of today's Asana based practice.

Singleton says this Krishna Acharya system is a synthesis of several extant methods of physical training that prior to this period would have fallen well outside any definition, any definition of yoga at the time.

Okay, and so that's an interesting thing to note, that what I air was doing probably wouldn't have been called Yoga writ large. But also, the yoga that the yogi was teaching was composed of several things. It was being called Yoga, but the things it was made out of, like certain extent, methods of physical training prior to that period, those would not have been called Yoga.

Now it's fascinating to go a little further here, and to know that it is

said that Krishna Acharya and I air KV a year knew one another, and we know they both shared the patronage of the Maharaj of Mysore. If I didn't say it earlier, the Maharaj was one of the sponsors of a year's gym, which was just down the street from the palace, where Krishna taught his Asana classes. And evidently they both had, you know, competed for the hot times in certain ways. Who would go where, when, because people were interested in both things. Now here's what

singleton says about their relationship. Quote, KV Ayers son, KV Karna, in fact, stated to me that I air and Krishna would occasionally meet and that I air as a nationally admired Physical Culture celebrity and favorite of the Maharaja would offer the yoga teacher advice on his classes at the palace that's quoted from Singleton's book. And so

evidently, the two masters traded ideas about how to develop people and how to put things, certain things together, depending on what the goals were, and to talk about what was important, and to just basically share knowledge. They shared the same patron, and so it's very probable here. Well, according to I your son, they they knew one another, but it would, it would make sense that they would be friendly to one another because they had the same patron. So by the time Christian Bucha had taken the position of yoga teacher at the palace,

the palace housed exercise rooms fitted with gymnastic type equipment. His classes are identified in palace records as physical culture or exercise, and those classes competed with the body building classes offered at a modern gymnasium just a stone's throw away from the palace.

So there's a a kind of

summation,

so we can see that

what we got originated

in part indigenous Indian

practices and philosophies and part European ideas about physical culture and its Place in an overall system of values that include health and fitness, but also spiritual values. Because, you know, the YMCA is the young men's Christian Association. So it wasn't just they were trying to get everybody into shape. They had this idea that body and mind and spirit all need to be equally cared for and cultivated in order for something like optimal functioning, and that sounds very familiar, even in yoga circles today. And so we have east and west mixed together around really sophisticated physical techniques and philosophies. We have political resistance focusing around physical culture in the gymnasiums, we have Krishna Acharya being hired to be a spokesperson for yoga and to revive it in the culture. But we see that his classes at the at the palace are listed as exercise and so on and so forth. The Maharaj is is the benefactor of all this, and is very much on board with the YMCA. So

we have a mongrel,

still amazing system that has, depending on where you study, it, acquired really, really deep physical sophistication, and how practices are put together, and proportions of movement and stillness, and whether alignment is taught or whether it's not, and how much activity and how much passivity, it's really evolved into an amazing thing in the hands of someone who's very experienced.

We have to be careful about identifying it, what we're doing as ancient, for instance, or or anything else like that, to think very carefully about the mixture of these things, the influence of the British and so on. And also think very carefully about what our context is when we're applying these techniques or we're practicing these things, and what our goals are in relation to those. Remember, I've spoken about yoga in general up until this.

Point as being essentially about enlightenment or awakening. Now we see that what is being called Yoga in the modern world is just a part of a fitness

well being routine, which I'm not down on. I'm not dogging. But notice the change, the subtle change in context that's come because I think it's important not to forget this awakening piece.

Now, like I said, Krishna taught and and developed this sophisticated system that was just described for 17 years before he went on to Chennai, and he continued to evolve, and he continued to to break new ground, as far as I can see,

though, after Krishna left Mysore in the early 1950s

his methods continued to evolve, and he continued to adapt right to different circumstances and different kinds of people, and this notion of adapting the yoga to the individual becomes a central part of what we learned was Vinny yoga. V i n i yoga. I don't know if it's still called that anymore. There may be, you know, copyright disputes or trademark disputes that have happened, you know, since this time. But Vinnie Yoga is a term that comes from the third chapter in the yoga sutra, and it means yoga adapted to the individual. And I think that's extremely important. This sophistication originates and emerges from this period of experimentation that Christian Acharya, in part, is responsible for.

It. It's telling that his teaching changed over time, that he continued to adapt. And you can see this in the style of his later disciples in Chennai, such as his son, tkv desikachar and senior student, ag Mohan, it bears little resemblance to the arduous, aerobic kinds of sequences that were taught by patavi Joyce. And patabi Joyce always said, I just teach you know what my guru taught me. And so he felt that he was carrying on the essence of what he saw. But Krishna Bucha tended to continue a pattern of growth and integration and and I would say, sophistication throughout his life, and that that legacy is definitely what we identify with here at the Shiloh this, this notion of adaptation as being the essence of what it is that a yoga teacher will be involved in.

Now I wanted to read you something that I read, and this is from Singleton's book,

yoga body, and it really touched me when I read it. And I want this also to be considered

part of Krishna legacy and a comment on yoga as finding an appropriate adaptation relative to a context that needs to be respected and an individual right that's in that context.

So

it said that Krishna Bucha was asked by a reporter about other countries and the fact that that they're not from India, and therefore is the are the systems of things that they do? Does that count as yoga? Or do you have to be from India to do it? Or, you know, something like that. And here's his response to that question. Quote,

you should know that God has created an appropriate system of educational activity for the geographical condition, the quality of the air and the vegetation of the country. It is not true that the physical exercises practiced by such people are not in conformity with our yoga system. We don't know what they were practicing in the past, but at present, all of you should know for sure that they are practicing the same yoga sadhana as us. And so here we see that he's a Vaishnavite God has created an appropriate system of educational activity for the geographical condition, the quality of the air, the vegetation of the country, and so on. So people who are oriented toward understanding practice in relation to those contexts, all of that counts. As far as the master speaking here says as yoga. And this notion is the notion that we carried forward from the from the influence of Krishnamacharya, and this is how we tend to approach things. Here. We're very interested in who people are,

what their environment is like,

what their relations are like, and so on, and we see if it's possible that the yoga can somehow fit the uniqueness of this situation.

So let's make a summary. I.

By the late 18th century, early 19th century, there is a transectarian consensus about what constitutes yoga,

and this consensus is reached in part because of the widespread implementation of the techniques of Hatha Yoga. So physicality steps to the fore, not for the same goals as the traditional Hatha yogas, the Siddhas, but still stepping to the forefront.

Now, modern practice, as we saw, has tended to emphasize the practice of Asana over certain other techniques that were central to the Hatha tradition, like the purification practices, the shot car, money, the mudra and so on.

This emphasis is also fueled by the influence of European systems of physical education and the revival of the Physical Culture movement in India that those European systems helped to spawn and so that that fervor for physical fitness from Europe, made its way to India and began to move in the culture and become mixed with everything that eventually became part of what we're doing. Also

Tirumala Krishnamacharya, often called the father of modern yoga, is a key influence on modern styles of practice. His tenure at the Mysore Palace was a time of great experimentation with regard to the practice of yoga asana. And his vision at the time made its way to the rest through many famous students, b, k, s, Iyengar, patavi Joyce,

his imperative that yoga is to be adapted to the individual and not the other way around, and that there is therefore an appropriate adaptation strategy relative to time, place and culture remains a guiding principle in people who identify with his lineage, and let me just say, a key and central principle here at The Shala. In fact, we still call it Vinnie yoga. So I hope this has been interesting and helpful in some way, and kind of seeing the influences that that are still being embodied in our culture today, and the complex mixture of spirituality and world domination and so on that all plays into it,

we really thank you for listening.

God bless you, and we'll see you next time.