Sri K. Pattabhi Jois (1915–2009), a disciple of Krishnamacharya, transmitted the Yoga Korunta for more than sixty years. Here is his life, and the thread of a transmission that made Ashtanga Yoga known throughout the world.
Youth and training
Sri K. Pattabhi Jois was born on 26 July 1915, on a full-moon day, near Somnāthpur in Karnataka. His father, a well-known astrologer, served the Maharajah of Mysore.
A graduate in Sanskrit and Vedic philosophy in 1937, he went on to teach Sanskrit at the University of Mysore until 1973. He began yoga in 1927, at the age of twelve: for three years he walked some 35 km each day to reach his guru, Sri T. Krishnamacharya, whose teaching he received for twenty-five years (1927–1952). Krishnamacharya asked him to transmit the Yoga Korunta.
The Ashtanga Yoga Research Institute
Founder and director of the Ashtanga Yoga Research Institute of Mysore (1942), he explored there the healing virtues of yoga, and was honorary professor at the Government College of Indian Medicine (1976–1978).
He was married to Savitramma, known as Amma, who left too soon in December 1997. She had herself studied yoga with Krishnamacharya — it was there that she met Guruji. They had three children.
Their son Manju teaches yoga in California; their daughter Saraswati lives in Mysore and teaches as well.
The spread to the West
In 1964, André Van Lysebeth — the first European — came to study the Yoga Korunta in Mysore and made it known through his magazine Yoga. Around 1972, Pattabhi Jois received the first Americans; the practice reached California, then Hawaii. In 1975, Guruji and Manju made their first American tour. Since then, Ashtanga Yoga has spread across the world.
Guruji passed to the other shore of existence on 18 May 2009, in Mysore. He had taught without interruption for 63 years the method he had learned from his guru in 1927.
Om Loka Samasta Sukhino Bhavantu — Om Shanti, Shanti, Shanti.
In short
From Mysore to the whole world, Sri K. Pattabhi Jois embodied a faithful transmission: that of the Yoga Korunta, received from Krishnamacharya and carried on today by his lineage.
