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B. K. S. Iyengar
 The yoga guru B. K. S. Iyengar was born in a small
Indian village during the 1918 influenza pandemic and subsequently
fell victim to malaria and tuberculosis. Doctors did not expect him
to live past the age of 20. But Iyengar, now 88, made a dramatic
recovery, one he attributes to the physical and spiritual healing
powers of the yogic practice he began when he was 15. Iyengar—whom
the BBC has called “the Michelangelo of yoga”—went on to become one
of the most famous yogis in the world, widely credited with bringing
the approximately 3,000-year-old practice to the West. Described by
Stacy Stukin for the Los Angeles Times (October 10, 2005) as
a man with “wild eyebrows, infectious charisma and notoriety for a
ferocious teaching style that includes whacks on the head and slaps
on the bum,” Iyengar developed his own style of yoga, known for its
emphasis on precision and alignment and its use of props such as
blocks and ropes to make the yoga positions easier to attain.
Iyengar yoga, as the practice is called, now has approximately four
million practitioners around the world and is taught at 534
institutes. Over the course of his almost 75 years of practice,
Iyengar has given an estimated 10,000 lecture/demonstrations and
authored 18 books. Speaking to Iyengar during the guru’s most recent
visit to the United States, the Reverend Thomas J. Mikelson, a
Harvard Divinity School professor, praised his wide-reaching
influence. “Because of you, our breath is stronger. Our posture is
straighter,” Mikelson said, as quoted by Elizabeth Gudrais in the
Providence (Rhode Island) Journal (October 13, 2005). “We dance
more lightly on the earth.” The yogi has become such an institution
that the word “Iyengar” was recently added to the Oxford English
Dictionary. “Iyengar means yoga,” he told Amy Waldman for the
New York Times (December 14, 2002). “Yoga means Iyengar. They
are synonymous terms.”
Yoga, one of the six schools of Hindu philosophy,
combines meditation with physical poses—which can range in
difficulty from a simple lunge to an elaborate headstand—as a way of
achieving mental clarity, self-knowledge, and eventual
enlightenment. Iyengar told Waldman that the practice also gives him
“emotional stability” and “spiritual delight.” “I can remain
thoughtfully thoughtless,” Iyengar explained to Waldman. “It is not
an empty mind.” Today, more than 17 million Americans regularly
practice yoga, making it a multibillion-dollar-per-year industry. As
yoga has grown in popularity it has also, perhaps inevitably,
undergone some distortion. And while Iyengar is consistently praised
for bringing yoga to the West, he is also often criticized for his
emphasis on physicality and accused of competitiveness with other
forms of yoga and other gurus. Iyengar dismisses such criticisms,
asserting that his spiritual connection to yoga has freed him from
such earthly concerns. “I have not been to school or college. I had
no teacher to guide me. Yet I’ve written books and addressed
universities. Is that not
enlightenment?” Iyengar told Suma Varughese for Life Positive
(February 1999). “Yoga gave me the ability to see my body as my
small self, and my soul as my infinite self.” Speaking with Charlie
Rose on The Charlie Rose Show (October 14, 2005), Iyengar again
attributed the positive developments in his life to his practice.
Helping others discover the benefits of yoga—which he credits with
saving his life—is his driving purpose, he said. He explained to
Rose, “From the years I started yoga up until now, I have lived a
contented, happy, healthy life, physically, mentally, intellectually
and spiritually.”
The 13th child of a poor family, Bellur
Krishnamachar Sundararaja Iyengar was born on December 14, 1918 in
the village of Bellur, in the Indian state of Karnataka. Iyengar’s
early life was difficult. The influenza pandemic left both him and
his mother sick and weak; his father, Sri Krishnamachar, a
schoolteacher, died when Iyengar was nine. Afterward Iyengar left
Bellur to live with one of his brothers in Bangalore. Throughout his
childhood and adolescence, he was plagued by malaria, tuberculosis,
and typhoid fever. “I was an anti-advertisement for yoga,” he told
Colleen O’Connor for the Denver Post (October 9, 2005), adding that
he twice considered committing suicide to escape the physical pain
of his day-to-day existence. At 15 Iyengar went to live with a
sister and her husband, Sri Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, on his
brother-in-law’s invitation. There, he began to learn yoga under
Krishnamacharya’s strict instruction. Practicing for 10 hours each
day, Iyengar tolerated his teacher’s frequent abuse for the sake of
improvement. As Iyengar’s yogic practice improved, so did his
health—a confluence of events he believed was not coincidental.
“Health is a dynamic endeavor that requires tremendous intellectual
attention,” he reflected to Stukin. “You can’t walk into the
pharmaceutical shop and buy health. It has to be earned with
persistence and sweat.” Many of Krishnamacharya’s other students
were scared off by his harsh teaching style; the day before an
important demonstration, Krishnamacharya’s favorite student ran
away, and Iyengar filled in, performing flawlessly.
Iyengar's formal education ended when, at about
age 16, he failed his matriculation exam in English by three points.
With few other skills, he continued pursuing yoga, in the hope of
making a living. Nearly recovered from his illnesses, in 1937 he
moved to the city of Pune, in the Indian state of Maharashtra, to
teach yoga. But finding students was not always easy, and he often
spent days wandering from village to village to teach, sometimes
living on just rice and water. “I had tenacity,” he told Waldman.
“That is a fact.” In 1943 his brothers introduced him to a woman
named Ramamani, and though he was reluctant to get married, because
he felt he could not support a family, he married her that year. He
trained Ramamani in the basic yoga poses so that she could supervise
him, helping him to perfect his practice. In 1948 Swami Sivananda,
the Indian spiritual leader and founder of the Divine Life Society,
conferred the title “Yoga Raja” on Iyengar, but despite his success
within the practice, the couple lived in poverty for the first
several years of their marriage. Still, Iyengar persisted in his
attempts to spread the practice of yoga. “Yoga saved me,” he
explained to Rose. “And I took it as a . . . mission to serve other
people who may be suffering like me.”
After years of anonymity, Iyengar suddenly rose to
fame in 1952, when he took a trip often credited with first exposing
the West to the practice of yoga. While still a struggling yogi in
India, he was summoned to Bombay for what was supposed to be a
five-minute interview with the famous violinist Yehudi Menuhin.
Iyengar reluctantly took the seven-hour train ride to the city; the
seven a.m. meeting turned into a three-and-a-half-hour yoga session,
and Menuhin was instantly taken with yoga. Menuhin arranged for
Iyengar to travel to England, France, Switzerland, and other Western
European countries to teach. In 1956 the Standard Oil heiress
Rebekah Harkness invited Iyengar to travel to the United States,
where he was shocked by American life and its incompatibility with
the teachings of yoga. “I saw Americans were interested in the three
W’s—wealth, women and wine,” he recalled to O’Connor. “I was taken
aback to see how the way of life here conflicted with my own
country. I thought twice about coming back.” He continued to tour,
primarily in Western Europe. Largely through Iyengar’s efforts, yoga
was increasingly seen as a legitimate practice, as perhaps best
indicated by Iyengar's teaching the 85-year-old queen mother of
Belgium in 1958 to stand on her head. In 1962 Iyengar’s guru,
Krishnamacharya, gave him a gold medal inscribed with the words
Yoganga Sikshaka Chakravarti, which translate as “king among yoga
teachers.”
Iyengar cemented yoga’s influence in the West—as
well as his own fame—with his 1966 book, Light on Yoga, an
illustrated guide to more than 200 asanas, or poses. Now translated
into 19 languages, the book has sold more than three million copies.
Iyengar told Varughese that he knew from the start that he could
reach the largest number of people with an illustrated book. One
day, he recalled, he saw a book on yoga whose drawings of poses were
incorrect. “I decided: ‘Here I will hit . . . ,’” he told Varughese.
“I decided to show alignment of body, mind and intelligence.” The
thoroughness and clarity of Light on Yoga made it an instant
classic—it is often described as “the Bible of yoga”—and made yoga a
well-known option among those seeking both physical training and
spiritual healing. “Light on Yoga is the yoga canon of this
century,” Joseph S. Alter, the author of Yoga in Modern India: The
Body Between Science and Philosophy, told Stukin. “It is the most
detailed, systematic and precise book out there about yoga [poses
and techniques].”
With the success of Light on Yoga, Iyengar was
able to realize his goal of opening his own yoga studio, the
foundation for which was laid on January 26, 1973. Soon afterward,
his wife died suddenly, and when the building was dedicated, on
January 19, 1975, Iyengar named it the Ramamani Iyengar Memorial
Yoga Institute (RIMYI). The institute currently has a three-year
waiting list for international students; to attend, an applicant
must have eight years of training from an Iyengar school. In 1981
Iyengar published Light on Pranayama, a guide to breathing patterns.
Three years later he officially retired from teaching yoga, though
he continued to publish books and lead special courses. In 1988 he
published The Tree of Yoga, which compares the eight strains of yoga
to the growth of a tree from a seed. A collection of essays on
aspects of yoga, the book urges readers to maintain a distinction
between their mental and physical properties. “When my body is
tired, I say my body is tired,” Iyengar wrote, as quoted by Sonja Carberry in
Investor’s Business Daily (January 4, 2007). “I never
say I am tired.” He also emphasized the utmost importance of
self-control and willpower. “So the mind is the maker and the mind
is the destroyer. On one side the mind is making you and on the
other side it is destroying you. You must tell the destructive side
of the mind to keep quiet—then you will learn,” he wrote. In 1993
Iyengar published The Art of Yoga, a photograph-heavy volume
examining the details of each move. He taught an 800-student
workshop for a week in Pune to celebrate his 80th birthday, in 1998.
The next year he published Light on Astanga Yoga, explaining a type
of yoga that, according to Iyengar, concerns both the microcosm of
man and the macrocosm of the universe. In 2000 he again led a
special yoga course, this time for senior Iyengar teachers from 40
countries. Iyengar's book Yoga: The Path to Holistic Health appeared
in 2001; Susan Salter Reynolds described it for the Los Angeles
Times (August 5, 2001) as having a “unique look, marrying very clear
photos, bright colors and a lot of white space with Iyengar’s
clear-minded descriptions of the asanas or positions of yoga.” She
added that the volume is, “essentially, a coffee table book,”
calling it “completely unintimidating, very Western-looking, very
non-mysterious,” the last a quality that she felt “has pros and
cons”—as it puts an emphasis on the accessibility of a physical
understanding of yoga, rather than on the more difficult spiritual
underpinnings of the practice. Iyengar, who is frequently criticized
for his focus on the physical, defended his method to Kim Lawton for
Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly (August 4, 2006): “Can a musician play
the violin without body?” he asked. “Then you say, ‘He played
beautifully. It was spiritual.’ How can you say spiritual when he
has used his body, holding the instrument? So we are also using the
body as an instrument to tune the inner mind and the consciousness.”
For his role in bringing yoga to the West, Time
named Iyengar one of its “100 Most Influential People of 2004.” Even
at an advanced age, Iyengar maintained a reputation for being a
demanding teacher, whose predilection for hitting his students until
they achieved the correct position led to the joke that his
initials—B.K.S.—actually stand for “beat, kick, slap.” “People brand
me as a tough teacher,” he told Tom Dunkel for the Baltimore Sun
(October 14, 2005). “Unfortunately, this is a wrong word. I am an
‘intense’ teacher. A tough teacher has a quality of roughness, and
an intense teacher has the qualities of keenness, softness,
smoothness and rhythm.” In 2004 the journalist and yoga practitioner
Elizabeth Kadetsky published her memoir, First There Is a Mountain:
A Yoga Romance, which contains a controversial profile of Iyengar. Kadetsky told Stukin that she set out to show him as “a fascinating,
complicated genius with all the convoluted character particularities
any genius has”; those “particularities” included a decided
competitiveness between Iyengar and teachers of other forms of yoga.
In 2005 Iyengar published his most recent book,
Light on Life, which he promoted with a five-city U.S. tour—his last
U.S. visit, he said. Since he retired, Iyengar has continued to
practice yoga privately between five and six hours a day. “I can’t
say, ‘I’m old, so I don’t want to do it,” he explained to Waldman.
“The escapism of other people, I don’t want.” In 2005, at age 86, he
told Dunkel that he was still able to do the majority of the yoga
poses he could do in his youth, but emphasized that the focus of his
practice is the present and his present capabilities. “What I do
today is important, and I do not brood about my past practices,” he
said. “But what I do at this age, I do it to the maximum. I do not
make any concessions, but I work harder with the wisdom that I
gained.”
Iyengar lives in Pune. He holds honorary
doctorates from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of
Mysore and has won state and national awards in India. He also
oversees a charitable foundation working to alleviate poverty in his
home village of Bellur.
Iyengar did not remarry after Ramamani’s death.
From their marriage he has five daughters—Geeta, Vinita, Suchita,
Sunita, and Savita—and one son, Prashant. Both Geeta and Prashant—who
were instructed by their father and mother—teach at RIMYI. Iyengar
explained to Stukin the significance of that legacy: “I have to give
them the secrets so they can help humanity and carry on.”
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