What was it like to study with Krishnamacharya? "Richard: Yeah. I mean, these documents also remain, but basically what remains is our students. And that can fetch back very far. I sometimes, in a class, say, okay, let’s say you’re fifty. You are in your vital time. Or, fifty-five. And you teach something really important to a five-year-old. And that five-year- old remembers it. And when that five- year-old gets to be fifty-five, she teaches it to a five-year-old. How far back can this class reach? So, it goes 2000, 1950, 1900, 1850. You know, it takes twenty people to get back a thousand years. And I said, isn’t possible that if something is really remembered, you really found it important and you really teach it, that it’ll be passed on intact? It’ll be somewhat changed, but it won’t change that much. So, we can reach back quite far into human knowledge history by means of oral transmission. And I believe that. So, I don’t know, I’m not a historian in yoga, but it seems to me that yoga is one of those practices, at least as I learned it. Krinamachrya was very precise. Now, I know that in oral tradition there are always variations. As you say, Iyengar went and developed his own. And I’ve taken this sequence, and when I teach it, I teach it not in the order he taught it to me but in a different order. I do the standing poses first... I do the seated poses last. And I don’t know why I decided to do that. I’m more comfortable with it, so I do it. I do it as he taught it, but I do it in a different order. So, I know that there are all these variations, but at the same time there’s a core that remains consistent, and I think that’s really important. And, you know, I know people think it’s threatened by all this digital stuff. I’m not of that opinion. I think the digital stuff, like print before, will coexist. I don’t see a great diminishment in people wanting a face-to-face. Especially when it’s something important. Eddie: That was an amazing thing you just said about someone when they reach fifty-five telling another five-year-old. And that means to go back a thousand years you only need, twenty people. Richard: Twenty, exactly. Leslie: Twenty people exactly. Richard: It’s a thousand years! Eddie: So, if the Patanjali Yoga Sutras, theoretically, were written, say 2,500 years ago, we only need fifty people to keep that link of teaching alive, and that’s like nothing. Fifty".
Posted on: Sat, 28 Sep 2013 20:42:11 +0000
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