Sri K. Pattabhi Jois

K. Pattabhi Jois (26 July 1915 – 18 May 2009) was an Indian yoga guru who developed and popularized the flowing style of yoga as exercise known as Ashtanga vinyasa yoga.

Krishna Pattabhi Jois was born in a Kannada Brahmin family on 26 July 1915 (Guru Pūrṇimā, full moon day) in the village of Kowshika, near Hassan, Karnataka, South India.

Jois's father was an astrologer, priest, and landholder.

His mother took care of the house and the nine children - five girls and four boys - of whom Pattabhi Jois was the fifth.

From the age of five, he was instructed in Sanskrit and rituals by his father, which is standard training for Brahmin boys.

No one else in his family learned yoga.

In 1924 Krishnamacharya supposedly researched an ancient text which he called the Yoga Korunta; he described this as badly damaged and with many missing portions, and claimed he had learned the text from a teacher named Rama Mohan Brahmachari on a supposed seven-year stay in the Himalayas.

In 1927, at the age of 12, Jois attended a lecture and demonstration at the Jubilee Hall in Hassan, Karnataka by T. Krishnamacharya and became his student the next day.

He stayed in Kowshika for two years and practiced with Krishnamacharya every day.

Jois studied with Krishnamacharya from 1927 to 1929 in his own village, and then in Mysore from 1932 to 1953.

He studied texts such as Patañjali's Yoga Sūtra, Haṭha Yoga Pradīpikā, Yoga Yajñavalkya and the Upaniṣads.

Jois began his studies with Krishnamacharya in 1927 and was taught what Krishnamacharya called the Yoga Korunta method.

An entire system of practices including pranayama, bandhas, (core muscular and energetic locks) and drishti (visual focal points) were included along with āsanas (postures) and vinyāsas (connecting movements), defining the method that Jois went on to teach.

Jois stated that he had never seen the text; its authenticity is impossible to validate as no copy has ever been seen by scholars.

A major component of Ashtanga Yoga absent from Krishnamacharya's early teachings was Surya Namaskar, the Sun Salutation.

In 1930, Jois ran away from home to Mysore to study Sanskrit, with 2 rupees.

Around the same time Krishnamacharya departed Hassan to teach elsewhere.

Two years later, Jois was reunited with Krishnamacharya, who had also made his way to Mysore.

During this time, the Maharaja of Mysore, Krishna Rajendra Wodeyar, had become seriously ill and it is said that Krishnamacharya had healed him, through yoga, where others had failed.

The Maharaja became Krishnamacharya's patron and established a yogaśala for him at the Jaganmohan Palace.

Jois often accompanied Krishnamacharya in demonstrations, and occasionally assisted Krishnamacharya in class and taught in his absence.

However, Surya Namaskar already existed, and Krishnamacharya was aware of it in the 1930s, as it was being taught, as exercise rather than as yoga, in the hall next to his Yogaśala in the Mysore palace.

The Maharaja of Mysore sometimes attended classes when Jois was assisting, and offered Jois a teaching position at the Sanskrit College in Mysore with a salary, scholarship to the college and room and board.

Jois held a yoga teaching position at the Sanskrit College from 1937 to 1973, becoming vidwan (professor) in 1956, as well as being Honorary Professor of Yoga at the Government College of Indian Medicine from 1976 to 1978.

Jois continued to teach at the Ashtanga Yoga Research Institute in Mysore, now in the neighbourhood of Gokulam, with his only daughter Saraswathi Rangaswamy (b. 1941) and his grandson Sharath for the rest of his life.

In 1948, Jois established the Ashtanga Yoga Research Institute in Mysore, India.

Pattabhi Jois is one of a short list of Indians instrumental in establishing modern yoga as exercise in the 20th century, along with B. K. S. Iyengar, another pupil of Krishnamacharya in Mysore.

Jois sexually abused some of his yoga students by touching inappropriately during adjustments.

Sharath Jois has publicly apologised for his grandfather's "improper adjustments".

In 1948, Jois established the Ashtanga Yoga Research Institute at their home in Lakshmipuram.

He published the book Yoga Mālā, in Kannada in 1958; an English translation appeared in 1999.

In 1964 he built an extension in the back of the house for a yoga hall.

In 1964, a Belgian named André Van Lysebeth spent two months with Jois learning the primary and intermediate series of the Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga system.

Not long afterward, van Lysebeth wrote the book J'apprends le Yoga (1967, English title: Yoga Self-Taught) which mentioned Jois and included his address.

This brought Westerners to Mysore to study yoga.

The first Americans came, after Jois's son Manju demonstrated yoga at Swami Gitananda's ashram in Pondicherry.

His first trip to the West was in 1974, to South America, to deliver a lecture in Sanskrit at an international yoga conference.

In 1975 he stayed for four months in Encinitas, California, marking the beginning of Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga in America.

Norman Allen, one of his first western students, collaborated with Jois on his trips to America.

To accommodate the increasing number of students, he opened a new school in Gokulam in 2002.