Subject: Mid-September 2010 Newsletter from Srivatsa Ramaswami--Mr Mark Singleton's Letter Date: Friday, 10 September 2010 01:14 From: Srivatsa Ramaswami
Page 1 of 8 conclusion was that you must have been doing a daily practice of the six series (presumably of Ashtanga Vinyasa as taught by the late Sri K. Pattabhi Jois). You use this example as a prelude to an explanation of the immense and multi-faceted learning of T. Krishnamacharya, of which this particular high profile teacher was oblivious. This kind of encounter is precisely where my book's inquiry begins. How is it possible that such misunderstanding can occur? How is it that this American teacher (and, presumably, thousands of other teachers and practitioners like him) can have such a narrow vision of the totality of yoga on the one hand, and of the vast learning of T. Krishnamacharya on the other? How can this teacher assume that these six series represent the sum of Krishnamacharya's yoga legacy over his sixty year teaching career? I'm not entirely sure of the meaning of this anecdote in relation to the whole article, but I presume you are suggesting that I am making the same mistake as this American teacher. The fact is that such misunderstandings do occur on a very regular and widespread basis. My book is an attempt to explain why this is so. Just to be clear, I am *not* making an argument about the relative age of asanas, nor whether they came before or after physical culture exercises: I agree with you completely that such a genealogy is futile and beside the point. Rather, I am interested in showing how certain meanings become attached to physical practice, whether it be yoga or gymnastics, and how these accreted meanings inevitably change the way people approach these disciplines. In sum, my investigation aims to show how modern understandings have altered the meaning of yoga practice for many people. It is not an attack on the venerability of yoga as such, but on how yoga has been taken and shaped by modern ideas. Let me take an example. You write, "The head stand, the sarvangasana, padmasana are distinctly different from gymnastics and each one of them has scores of vinyasas that are uniquely yogic and no other system seems to have anything like that." While that is true in one sense, it is also true that "gymnastic" systems from the early twentieth century did in fact routinely use positions such as the ones you mention. Physical culture journals are full of representations of these postural shapes. However, it should be clear that the meaning is quite different in the modern, non-yogic context. To take one instance: a shape very much like sarvangasana was the emblem of the British Women's League of Health and Beauty during the 1920s. It was not associated with yoga, but rather had its own characteristic set of meanings. It helped one to stay young, trimmed fat around the waist and so on. Obviously, this cosmetic reading of the posture makes it something wholly other than the meaning of the posture in a medieval hatha yoga context (notwithstanding some overlaps). My study is really
Page 2 of 8 about how these other meanings come to attach themselves to yoga. It investigates how modern, scientific, physical culture-oriented understandings are read back into the original yoga posture, and how they thus alter the original meaning of that posture. It is as if one were to take two pieces of tracing paper and on the first draw a yogi in sarvangasana. On the other, one draws the emblem of the Women's League. Placed one on top of the other, these figures appear identical-and yet they carry vastly different meanings. But what happens as yoga begins to enter the modern gymnastic-dominated world is that these two meanings compete and sometimes merge. The sarvangasana that many people know today (especially in "gym yoga" contexts) incorporates some mix of both. This is what is interesting about how yoga has developed, for better or worse, in the West. One might well lament this as a degradation of the integrity of sarvangasana (or whichever posture is in question), but it seems to me that this describes quite well the actual process of yoga's transformation in modern Western society, as it is reflected in the understandings (and misunderstandings) of its practitioners. When one makes this process the primary focus of study, it then makes little sense to argue about whether gymnastics or yoga came first, or to squabble about the relative age of asanas. This is a false debate, and it is largely irrelevant to my project. It seems to me that you have wrongly assumed that this is what I'm up to, which is why I have to assume that you haven't yet had chance to read the book thoroughly. Of course there are postures that date back a long time. I, for one, would certainly not want to assert otherwise. And of course yoga is not just gymnastics: as I argue consistently in Yoga Body, this is a spurious claim-often made by those that want to denigrate yoga, particularly hatha yoga. That said, I do think that a lot of the body practices that we see emerging in the modern period reflect a very particular zeitgeist, and that many people (in India and elsewhere) were innovating new, radically adapted physical practices in the name of "yoga". Let me be clear: I am not judging one way or another on the desirability and integrity of these experiments, but merely presenting the facts as I see them. This period of experimentation is a historical fact. It also seems incontrovertible that many of these systems were in some sense new, insofar as they incorporated modern understandings into yogic knowledge. Regardless of whether you consider these experiments as lamentable betrayals of yoga per se, or as developments of tradition, there is no doubt (historically speaking) that things were changing very quickly in the early years of the twentieth century. We only have to look at the self-consciously gymnastic experiments in yoga of the likes of B. C. Ghosh, Prof. Sundaram, Shri Yogendra, Swami Kuvalayananda and others to see that this is the case.
Page 3 of 8 But it is also important to note the narrowing of the term "gymnastics" from the 1960s onwards, such that when people hear the word today, the immediate association is with televised displays such as those of the Olympics. This is clearly also your primary association. But it is inadequate. The term used to carry a much wider, richer meaning that has far less to do with Nadia Comăneci and her ilk than most people today assume. Imagine that Bikram Choudhury's attempt to make yoga an Olympic event is successful: millions of people around the world will begin to associate yoga primarily (and probably uniquely) with a particular kind of asana display. This would be as narrow and skewed an understanding of "yoga" as is our contemporary understanding of "gymnastics". As well as being ways to stay fit and healthy, early modern gymnastics traditions were often deeply spiritually oriented-they were understood as methods of using the body to access the divine. In many ways, they match the predominant understanding today of the practices and function of yoga itself. This is no accident. You write: "We do not find deep movement, synchronized breathing, and the significantly profound exercises like the bandhas-- which are an integral part of Sri Krishnamacharya's asana practice-- in other forms of physical exercises, especially gymnastics." Well, the fact is that we do find all these things (or close approximations of them) in early modern, non-Indian gymnastics traditions. Deep movement is usually a cornerstone of the gymnastic traditions I investigate, and it is often assumed that such movement must always be accompanied by synchronized breathing (termed "rhythmic breathing" in the parlance of the time). Surprisingly, exercises that appear-at least in form-to be identical with the mula, uddiyana and jalandhara bandhas also crop up in these early gymnastic practices. So "gymnastics" is historically a tradition that is much richer, and structurally closer to Sri Krishnamacharya's method, than you are giving it credit for. That said, the meaning of the deep movement, the synchronized breathing, the gymnastic "bandhas" is obviously different in this context. Compare a gymnastic manual of the time with the Hatha Pradipika and one sees in a moment how distinct the frames of understanding are. However, this historical perspective is not immediately available to practitioners of yoga. And the result, once again, is that meanings start to merge. It's not hard to see why this happens: the gymnastic frame of reference was likely to be more familiar to modern audiences, and so the practices of yoga which appear to overlap with gymnastics are interpreted and (mis-) understood in that context, rather than in the unfamiliar, and apparently arcane, context of classical yoga. The learning was just not available, and besides, people were happy and comfortable with
Page 4 of 8 their "gymnastic" understanding of yoga. Once again, this is not judge this process for better or worse. My job has been to show how it came about. You focus particularly on the aspect of breathing as a distinguishing feature of the yoga tradition. I have already mentioned the key role that synchronized breathing played in many of the "spiritual" gymnastics traditions of the time (there are more details in my book). Further, you note that in yoga the respiration rate is often reduced to 3-5 breaths per minute, as opposed to "contemporary aerobic exercises including gymnastics and gym workouts". While this is very true, a quick review of the audio CD of the Ashtanga Vinyasa primary series by Sharat Rangaswamy (grandson of K. Pattabhi Jois), shows that each full pose (not including entry and exit) takes about 20 seconds. As you know, there are five breaths per pose, which makes about one breath every four seconds, or one inhalation and one exhalation every two seconds. This is, from my own experience, also roughly the speed that the sequence, as taught to him by T. Krishnamacharya, used to be counted through by Sri K. Pattabhi Jois (with the entire series often being completed in just over and hour). These are just rough estimates, but it seems clear that the Ashtanga system moves away from the principles of breathing that you lay out as being in some senses defining of "yoga", and particularly of the yoga of T. Krishnamacharya. How do we explain this? Well, you yourself have contextualized this particular aspect of Krishnamacharya's teaching as srustikrama, a method of practice for youngsters, and which was particularly suited to group situations. Children like to move, and breathe, faster than adults, generally speaking. T. K. V. Desikachar has expressed a similar opinion on more than one occasion, and has added that during that period his father was experimenting with the vinyasa forms that have become so familiar to us through the Ashtanga Vinyasa of Sri K. Pattabhi Jois. What I point out in chapter 9 of my book is that this particular method has many similarities with the standard pedagogical gymnastics of the time in India. Two of the closest relatives of this system, I propose, are Swami Kuvalayananda's immensely popular and widespread regimens of children's gymnastics ("yaugik sangh vyayam"), and a system innovated by the Dane Niels Bukh called "Primary Gymnastics", which was the second most popular system of physical exercise in India at the time. If you read the book you will see that I am careful NOT to propose that Krishnamacharya borrowed his system from either of these sources. There is no way of knowing this apart from suggestive speculation. Rather, I suggest that this teaching format appears to closely match the wider zeitgeist of the time. If Krishnamacharya was innovating in response to that zeitgeist (as Mr. Desikachar suggests he was), then it seems reasonable that he would have come up with similar methods,
Page 5 of 8 particularly in his capacity as a yoga teacher to the royal youth. It also seems perfectly in accord with the principle of adaptation (to constitution, age, country etc.) that is, to my understanding, central to Krishnamacharya's teaching ethos. It seems reasonable to look to this principle in order to understand the way Krishnamacharya taught in that particular time and place. And, incidentally, I do not suggest that his position at the Palace compromised his teaching: merely that he had a job to do, and he used all the available resources to do it to the best of his ability. Please correct me if I am wrong about any of this. To say that I portray Krishnamacharya as "a hata teacher who plagiarized some exercises from gymnastics and called it yoga to make a living, and nothing more" is very saddening to me. It is the cartoon version of my research. It's very unfortunate that now your readership considers that I am a disrespectful ignoramus who neither knows nor cares about Krishnamacharya's vast learning and scholarship. For the record, that is not the case. Note also that I am very careful to point out in the book that this innovation within tradition is perfectly consistent with standard, orthodox procedures of knowledge transmission, as I understand them. The fact that Sri Krishnamacharya was adapting and innovating is not, as far as I can see, inconsistent with his status as the most learned and influential yoga teacher of the modern age, nor with his being steeped in and faithful to tradition. You yourself write that "dandals" were "outside the pale of yogasanas". However, we see their entry into the popular yoga lexicon in the early twentieth century via the system of suryanamaskar. Around this time, Sri Yogendra is complaining that suryanamaskar has been mixed up with yoga by the uninformed: it was, in other words, a new addition to the standard body of practices as he understood it. This is a fact whose implications are often misunderstood. I am not claiming, as your article seems to imply, that there are not ancient traditions of prostration to the sun. Of course there are. I recognize this explicitly in the book, and I have recently commented on the same topic in Yoga Journal. Again, this is to take the mistaken view that I am primarily interested in showing which practices are old and which are new, presumably with the aim of debunking the new ones (?). No. No. What I am interested in is how innovators like the Raja of Aundh revived suryanamaskar in the context of vyayama, and how it was initially promoted as an Indian alternative to Sandow bodybuilding. I am also interested in how (to Sri Yogendra's chagrin) it was subsequently incorporated by others into physical culture-oriented yoga practices. You ask, "Are these physical drills, yoga exercises or devotional practices? Which came first? God knows, Lord Ganesa knows". Well, the
Page 6 of 8 answer is that it depends entirely on context. In modern times the context can often be radically different. For example, into which category should we place a mass drill-type practice of suryanamaskar for children led by the Raja of Aundh circa 1935? Certainly he did not categorize it as yoga himself. It would have looked to many like a standard drill gymnastics of the time, and was to some extent conceived by the Raja as a replacement for this. And yet he clearly also recognized the "traditional" meaning of sun prostration. So how one answers your question depends on which aspect is foregrounded. Modern yoga practice, in its popular form, is usually a similar kind of mix of meanings. Once again, to protest that sun worship in India is ancient, and to believe one has said something counter to my thesis, is to entirely miss the point of my inquiry. What is far more interesting to me (given that the age of sun worship is not at all in question) is how divergent meanings become attached and harmonized in modern expressions of yoga. To sum up: I am not particularly interested in judging the relative value of these experiments in yoga, but rather in describing how a particular set of historical factors contributed to the creation of a distinctly modern form of practice. One may wish, in some cases, to judge these innovations as modern "misunderstandings" of the yoga tradition. But my job has been simply to document them. No doubt on account of a lack of such outspoken condemnation on my part, some people superficially read my book as an attack on yoga itself. It could be that yoga has been handed down whole and entire from time immemorial. It could be that all expressions of yoga are traditional and immune from the historical forces of modernity. But this seems hugely unlikely to me. To assert that yoga adapts to the conditions it finds itself in does not seem like a contentious assertion. Nor does it necessarily impugn the "authenticity" of the teachings. I believe that modern Western practitioners today sorely need tools to navigate through the bewildering, and often crass, market place of yoga. Such practitioners do not, in general, have access to truly qualified traditional teachers, nor are they born and bred in places where there are adequate societal frameworks for understanding yoga practice. This problem becomes increasingly acute with the sheer volume of misinformation about yoga on the internet and in books. Being aware of the recent history of yoga, and how it has changed, adapted and diversified in response to modern and global concerns can help practitioners to understand where they are coming from, and spur them to go deeper into their inquiry into yoga traditions. I hope that my study goes some way to aiding yoga practitioners in this process. I have already seen it happening in response to the book, which is heartening. But if Yoga Body is misrepresented simply as an attack on the authenticity of yoga, then I have utterly failed
Page 7 of 8 to get my message across. The tired old debate of whether yoga is old or not is a boring and fruitless one. Practitioners squabble over this in yoga studios all over the world. It's not surprising, then, that some of them instantly assume that my book is part of the same squabble. I am disappointed that your article tends in a similar direction. I hope you will receive this in the spirit is intended. I am a yoga practitioner and teacher (in the Iyengar system) as well as a devoted practitioner. I have given the last fifteen years to deepening my understanding of yoga, through my sadhana and through my research. I remain committed to the practice and study of yoga. Your books have been very helpful in my understanding over the years, and for that I humbly thank you. However, I do think that you have missed the point of my work, for reasons that I can only speculate about. I hope you don't mind me trying to set the record straight here. I would be happy to talk about any of this further, perhaps in person one day. I will be visiting Loyola Marymount University in the near future (for possible collaboration with Chris Chapple), so perhaps if you are around we can meet and get to know each other a little. I would also be interested in perhaps recording a conversation with you, perhaps for publication somewhere, if that seemed appropriate. In the mean time, you are welcome to reproduce any or all of this letter, should you wish. And I would be happy to send you a copy of my book. Yours Sincerely, Mark SIngleton -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Vinyasa Krama Yoga Announcements" group. You cannot post directly to this group, but you can post to our discussion group at http://groups.google.com/group/vinyasa-krama To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/vinyasa-krama-announce?hl=en
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