Krisnamacharya Reaching Out Through the Ages

I stumbled upon a rare and beautiful display of yoga today in a spot no less sublime than youtube.com-and it gave me the most curious sense of calm.

The Krisnamacharya yoga film is a silent movie produced in 1938 (watch it at www.youtube.com/watch?v=cd_eTupTCbI) that shows the great yoga teacher Sri Tirumala Krisnamacharya demonstrating asana and pranyama. The thing is so old that any claim it once had to copyright has expired.

Krisnamacharya was the teacher of BKS Iyengar and Sri K. Pattabhi Jois, founder of the Ashtanga style of yoga. For his part, Krisnamacharya was an extremely influential Indian yoga teacher, healer and scholar whose students include many of today's most important yogis, and whose long reach is still very much felt in the yoga world.

Krisnamacharya was born in 1888 in the state of Karnataka in India. Throughout his childhood, he was passionately tutored by his father, Sri Tirumali Srivinasa Tattacharya, in the venerated art of yoga. When his father died, 10-year-old Krisnamacharya moved and began a period of travel throughout India, studying the six Indian philosophies, including yoga. Over the years, he developed a reputation for being a strict and unyielding teacher of yoga, and also a physician of Ayurvedic medicine.

Krisnamacharya died in 1989 at the age of 101. His influence has touched the practice of yoga the world over.

Indeed, here he is in front of me on my computer screen today: bending and stretching, pointing and flexing. Remembering his breath. Touching his gratitude.

The film begins on some windswept landscape of yesteryear, scrubby vegetation littering the background. It's the morning of some ancient day, and the quality of light that surrounds this man as he takes his ropy body through its well-practised paces is brilliant. The film is jumpy and grainy; its silence is profound.

The yogi begins with the salamba savangasana, and when he revolves his legs in the sky above his body, the shadow they cast make him look like a human sundial. He shows his viewers (unfathomable, surely, to such a mystical man performing in front of a recording device whose far-reaching powers he could never have imagined) setu bandhasana: his long brown feet arched and pointed out, his forehead making contact with his mat, his arms crossed earnestly over his chest.

Then the camera angle changes, and Krisnamacharya demonstrates utpluthih, with strong arms supporting a supple body that, already at age 50, has all of yoga's gifts built into its cells.

It is remarkable, sitting in front of a computer screen in Toronto in 2009, to be able to reach back through the ages and make contact with a man whose simple yogic gestures, unfolding courtesy of a technological conduit Krisnamacharya couldn't have conceived of in his day, convey a message whose relevance the passage of time has done nothing to dull. If ever there was any doubt of the longevity of this ancient ritual, it is quashed with the enduring presence of this special man, communicating with the future through his body, on a mat strewn across dirt that's 71 years old.