18/10/2017
Life Sketch of Yogacharya B.K.S. Iyengar
The life and work of Yogacharya B. K.S. Iyengar are of epic proportions.
Sri Iyengar is credited with bringing the ancient art of yoga into the modern world. His extensive demonstrations and teachings planted the seeds for the phenomenal flowering of yoga in the West over the last 30 years, while also winning innumerable converts around the world – including in India, where yoga began.
The method he refined for eight decades is one of the world’s most widely-practiced yogas, with Iyengar Yoga Institutes and Associations, teachers, and students in 77 countries around the world – while each morning he reaffirmed his lifelong commitment to yoga with his own personal practice, surrounded and observed by generations of his admiring students, at the method’s mother institute in Pune, India.
Mr. Iyengar died August 20 in Pune at age 95, after a brief illness.
His seminal Light on Yoga, first published in 1966 and continually in print since, is the bible of yoga for teachers and students of all methods. His 2005 international bestseller, Light on Life, summed up a lifetime of teaching and practice, advising readers on the journey to wholeness, inner peace, and ultimate freedom. And he continued to publish. His most recent work, Core of the Yoga Sutras, was released in 2012.
Well into his 95th year, he continued to teach around the world. In 2005, he led an International Yoga Conference sponsored by Yoga Journal Magazine in Estes Park, Colorado, in the United States. His groundbreaking journeys to Russia, where he taught in Moscow in 2009; and to China, where he taught in Guangzhou in 2011, sparked the burgeoning interest in yoga in these countries.
Called the “Michelangelo of yoga” and the “king of yogis,” he was included in Time Magazine’s global list of the World’s 100 Most Influential People and -- only the most recent of his dozens of honors -- named a recipient of the Padma Vibhushan, the second highest civil award in India, B. K. S. Iyengar, universally acknowledged as the world’s greatest yoga teacher, remained its most knowledgeable and respected practitioner.