Amrita 6: Asana through the ages - Magazine - Page 40
The Purpose of Asana
“sana, though, was soon to fall into disrepute, largely due to lurid travellers’
tales of graphic encounters with fierce-looking wandering yogis.”
rose to international fame through his
rousing appeal to universal brotherhood at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago. Originally a follower
of the Tantric priest and mystic Ramakrishna, he ultimately rejected
such practices as unsuitable for his
following of mostly middle-class, affluent, Protestant American women.
In his hugely successful Raja Yoga
(1896), he dismissed the practice of
“placing the body in different postures” because it “deals entirely with
the physical body…its practices are
very difficult…and…do not lead to
much spiritual growth,” merely reducing the ”Hatha-Yogi” to a “healthy animal”.11
The rehabilitation of sana did not
begin until the first half of the twentieth century, when Trimulai Krishnamacharya, the learned eldest son of a
Brahmin family, began to teach Yoga
at the Jaganmohan Palace in Mysore.
Krishnamacharya claimed to have
learnt thousands of postures from his
own guru. In marked contrast with
Raja Yoga, his Yoga Makaranda (1934)
is an illustrated instruction manual almost exclusively concerned with the
practice of sana.
Krishnamacharya clearly saw himself as the torch bearer for a largely
38 AMRITA Issue 6 / Spring 2021
diminished tradition. Lamenting the demise of sana due to
“changes of place, company and lifestyle,” he aligned himself
with the Tantric aim for man to “live with a healthy body, not
just for one hundred years but for as long as he desires”.12
He compared the arduous nature of physical practice, not to
the body building and gymnastics enthusiastically taken up
by the West, but with the indigenous arts of archery and
wrestling. Like Vivekanada, though, he was quick to dissociate himself from the “strange types of practice” whose “only
function is to enthral the audience.”13 For Krishnamacharya, Yoga was not a sideshow. It was a meditative practice
steeped in tradition and religion.
B.K.S Iyengar was later to recall the stigma attached to
physical practice: “Yogis all over the world criticised me for
doing physical yoga!”14 His Light on Yoga was a photographic instruction manual which borrowed heavily in style and
content from Yoga Makaranada. Endorsed by Yehudi
Menuhin, its publication collided happily with a nascent fitness boom and a renewed interest in spirituality. At the same
time, a steady pilgrimage of American yoga enthusiasts,
headed by Nancy Gilgoff and David Williams, travelled to
Mysore where a young Pattabhi Jois had taken over Krishnamacharya’s role at the Palace. The status of sana was
consolidated further as they exported the complex series of
postures which characterised the Ashtanga system to their
native land.
So what, if anything, connects the ancient yogi to the
contemporary practitioner? There is one important link:
Yoga has always been regarded as the agent of transformation. For the Buddhist as for the Samkhyan, sana’s primary
purpose was to eliminate the distractions on the path of
meditation caused by physical discomfort- a necessary step
in the quest for liberation. For the Tantric aivite, it was part
