Pattabhi Jois: Ashtanga yoga guru

Pattabhi Jois, affectionately known as Guruji by his thousands of followers, was a leading yoga guru for 75 years. He brought the ancient form of Ashtanga yoga from a small shala (studio) in Mysore, India, to the West where he popularised it in Britain, the US, Canada and across the Continent. Its practitioners include such celebrities as Sting, Madonna and Gwyneth Paltrow.

Ashtanga exercises the body and its followers believe that it can provide a steadying energy through the synchronisation of breathing with strenuous physical movement.

Krishna Pattabhi Jois was born in 1915 in the heart of Karnataka state, India, in Kowshika, a small village with just one main road and only a few hundred inhabitants. Religious practice was the focus of village life. His father, an astrologer, was a traditional Brahmin, and Jois received a strict Brahmin upbringing, learning the sacred texts by heart and always wearing his sacred thread beneath his clothes.

At the age of 12 he attended a yoga demonstration by Sri Krishnamacharya, who had been taught the ancient form of Ashtanga yoga by a guru in Tibet. It had existed since time immemorial, being passed down through generations of teaching, and had been rediscovered in a series of ancient texts, the Yoga Korunta. Krishnamacharya became Jois’s teacher, and he left home for Mysore on a bicycle with only two rupees in his pocket.

Jois trained with his teacher everyday for nearly twenty years, while also studying Sanskrit. On one occasion they attended a lecture together. A large crowd had assembled in a dusty field to hear Krishnamacharya speak. Unable to find a platform for his teacher, Jois bent backwards and his teacher stood on him for half an hour. As a youth Jois also played football, as a goalkeeper, for the Mysore Lions.

In the 1930s Jois was asked to teach the Maharaja of Mysore, who was ill. Jois began teaching Ashtanga at the Maharaja’s Sanskrit college. Initially he had only a couple of pupils. However, in 1964 he taught his first Westerner, Andre van Lysbeth, a Belgian. A steady trickle of Westerners began to arrive looking for enlightenment and they persuaded Jois, who had begun teaching from his own home, that he must travel to the West to inform people about Ashtanga.

He made his first trip to the US in 1975, where his students acted as his interpreters. After that he made visits to Europe, New Zealand and Australia. He toured to London at least four times and would take workshops of about 150 people every day for the duration of his stay. His students were dedicated to him.

In Mysore he built the Ashtanga Yoga Research Institute, and his classes expanded to 40 or 50 people at a time. The students came in waves, starting at different times and leaving when they had finished. By the end of a day Jois could well have seen several hundred people. He would teach six days a week from 4.30am, having been teaching his grandson since 1.30am, and would not finish until 4.30pm.

Jois was a man of few words and when he did speak to his students he often talked through the Ashtanga texts that he knew intimately. His favourite sayings were: “Practice, practice and all is coming” and “Ashtanga is 99 per cent practice, 1 per cent theory.” His students reported that even in a class with many people, he could make each individual feel as if he was just talking to them.

Jois was deeply traditional but he was also unjudgmental; he taught women just as he taught men. He lived above the school, and even if students arrived at the end of the day he would invite them in and teach them.

He was a family man, as well as a guru. When students praised him for his wisdom he would always say: “I am only teaching what my teachers teach me.” He was often to be seen in a white vest and a threadbare lunghi — and his thrifty habits included a tenddency to stockpile plastic bottles and plastic bags in his house.

Jois always taught that Ashtanga yoga was for everyone, especially householders with busy lives, work and family. The yoga would not take up a whole day but was a condensed version that could be done in two hours every morning. The school was in the centre of Mysore, among the hustle of the city, the pollution and rickshaws. It was not an ashram on the beach, cocooned from real life. Jois worked hard to keep Ashtanga a pure form of yoga. He did not work through large yoga associations. Instead, teachers were only allowed to teach when they had visited him in Mysore at least two or three times and had been given his permission.

Jois maintained a strict and deeply religious regime throughout his life. Once on a pilgrimage to the Ganges he gave up his favourite fruit and vegetable as a sacrifice — until his death he never again ate oranges or okra. He donated a great amount of his money to religious projects. He still taught yoga daily at the age of 91.

His wife and one of his sons predeceased him, and he is survived by a son and a daughter.

Pattabhi Jois, guru of Ashtanga yoga, was born on July 26, 1915. He died on May 18, 2009, aged 93