you guys rock -- jois/patanjali

[Guest guest]

oh i don't know about that, screwgee. sri k.

patthabhi jois seems to me a wise and loving teacher. he

professes faith in patanjali's teaching regarding the

ashtanga, so i don't sense any tautology in his use of

"ashtanga" to describe his style. seems more like an

accurate reference to patanjali's eight limbed system,

offered from a place of humility and deference. i don't

think he deliberately meant to confuse

anybody.<br><br>he might have called his style "korunta yoga" after

the manuscript credited with detailing the physical

techniques, "vanama yoga" after its author, or

"krishnamacharya yoga" after his master who rediscovered that

document in a calcutta library in the 1930s. naming the

style more specifically might have prevented those

content with minimal knowledge from mistaking his

"ashtanga yoga" as the only practice based on patanjali,

but apparently he considered all of the other sources

as secondary. yoga to me is about "it ain't what you

do but the way that you do it," so pattabhi jois's

embracing of patanjali is good enough for me.<br><br>(it

also might have helped if krishnamacharya had referred

to the "yoga korunta" just once in all his extensive

writings on yoga, or if he had used his skills as a

sanskrit scholar to copy so important a document from the

original palm leaf pages before they were, as legend has

it, eaten by ants. but these are mere trifles. why

quibble? it's all good.)<br><br>as i said before,

patanjali makes no reference to specific asanas. thanks for

reiterating that. you're also correct in stating that he says

very little about how asanas should be practiced, if

we were judging by word count alone. good to

remember that sutra means aphorism, a distillation of the

truth. a little goes a long way:<br><br>sutra

2.46<br>asanas should be steady and comfortable.<br><br>sutra

2.47<br>asana is mastered by releasing tension and meditation

on the infinite.