NEW DELHI — B. K. S. Iyengar, who helped introduce the practice of yoga to a Western world awakening to the notion of an inner life, died on Wednesday in the southern Indian city of Pune. He was 95.
新德里——B·K·S·艾扬格于周三在印度南部城市浦那逝世，享年95岁，在西方世界开始了解“内在生活”概念期间，他曾出力将瑜伽引入西方。The cause was heart failure, said Abhijata Sridhar-Iyengar, his granddaughter.
他的孙女阿比加塔·斯里达尔-艾扬格(Abhijata Sridhar-Iyengar)说，其死因是心力衰竭。
After surviving tuberculosis, typhoid and malaria as a child, Mr. Iyengar credited yoga with saving his life. He spent his midteens demonstrating “the most impressive and bewildering” positions in the court of the Maharaja of Mysore, he later recalled.
艾扬格童年时曾患过肺结核、伤寒和疟疾，他说是瑜伽救了自己的命。他后来回忆说，十几岁的时候他在迈索尔的王公宫殿里展示“最惊人，最让人眼花缭乱”的瑜伽体式。
A meeting in 1952 with the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, an early yoga devotee, proved to be a turning point, and Mr. Iyengar began traveling with Mr. Menuhin, eventually opening institutes on six continents.
1952年，他与早期瑜伽爱好者耶胡迪·梅纽因(Yehudi Menuhin)会面，这成了他人生的转折点，他开始随同梅纽因旅行，最终在六大洲都开办了学校。Among his devotees were the novelist Aldous Huxley, the actress Annette Bening and the designer Donna Karan, as well as a who’s who of prominent Indian figures, including the cricketer Sachin Tendulkar and the Bollywood siren Kareena Kapoor. He famously taught Queen Elisabeth of Belgium, 85 at the time, to stand on her head.
他的拥趸包括小说家阿尔都斯·赫胥黎(Aldous Huxley)、女演员安妮特·贝宁(Annette Bening)和设计师唐娜·卡兰(Donna Karan)，此外还有众多印度名人，包括板球运动员萨辛·坦都卡(Sachin Tendulkar)和宝莱坞女星卡琳娜·卡普(Kareena Kapoor)。他的著名事迹是教授当时85岁的比利时伊丽莎白皇后做头倒立。In a 2005 book, “Light on Life,” Mr. Iyengar mused about the vast changes he had seen.
艾扬格在2005年的《生命之光》一书中，思省了自己曾经目睹的巨大变迁。“I set off in yoga 70 years ago when ridicule, rejection and outright condemnation were the lot of a seeker through yoga even in its native land of India,” he wrote. “Indeed, if I had become a sadhu, a mendicant holy man, wandering the great trunk roads of British India, begging bowl in hand, I would have met with less derision and won more respect.”
“70年前我开始练习瑜伽的时候，嘲笑、排斥和公然谴责就是瑜伽修习者要面对的命运，甚至在印度本土也是如此，”他写道。“事实上，如果我去做一个苦行僧，就是一个行乞的圣人，在英属印度的宽阔道路上拿着碗乞讨，也不会遇到那么多嘲笑，反而还会赢得更多尊敬。”The news about Mr. Iyengar — or “guru-ji,” as many here called him, using a Sanskrit honorific — rippled through India on Wednesday morning. Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Twitter that he was “deeply saddened” by Mr. Iyengar’s death and offered “condolences to his followers all over the world.”
艾扬格被许多人依照梵语中的敬语，称为“尊敬的上师”(guru-ji)，他的死讯在周三早上传遍了印度。印度总理纳伦德拉·莫迪(Narendra Modi)在Twitter上说，对于艾扬格的死讯“深感悲伤”，并且“向他在世界各地的追随者们表示慰问”。Mr. Iyengar’s practice is characterized by long asanas, or postures, that require extraordinary will and discipline. A reporter who watched daily practice in 2002, when Mr. Iyengar was 83, said that he held one headstand for six minutes, swiveling his legs to the right and the left, and that when he finished, “his shoulder-length hair was awry, he seemed physically depleted,” but he wore the smile of a gleeful child.
艾扬格瑜伽的特色包括长期保持体式，这需要非凡的意志力与训练。2002年，艾扬格83岁的时候，一位见过他日常练习的记者说，他在6分钟内保持头倒立的姿势，双腿向左右转动，结束时，“他的齐肩长发都乱了，体力也似乎完全耗尽”，但他脸上仍然带着孩子般的愉快笑容。Ms. Sridhar-Iyengar said her grandfather recognized early on that yoga, up until then viewed as a mystical pursuit, “had something for everybody, not just the intellectually or spiritually inclined.”
斯里达尔-艾扬格说，早在瑜伽还被视为神秘之物的时候，她的祖父就已发现，瑜伽“对每个人都有好处，不仅是智力或灵性方面的”。“He felt satisfied,” she said. “Even at the end, even a few weeks before, he said, ‘I’m satisfied with what I’ve done.’ He took yoga to the world. He knew that.”
“他感到满足，”她说，“直到最后，就在几个星期前，他还说：‘我对自己做的事情感到满意。’是他把瑜伽带向世界，他知道这一点。”Bellur Krishnamachar Sundararaja Iyengar was born on Dec. 14, 1918, into a poor family in the southern state of Karnataka. The 11th of 13 children, he was born in the midst of an influenza outbreak. Three of his siblings died before reaching adulthood, and he watched his father, a teacher, die of appendicitis when he was 9 years old. Mr. Iyengar himself contracted tuberculosis, typhoid and malaria; by the time he began studying yoga, at 16, he was painfully frail.
拜鲁尔·克里希那马查尔·桑达拉拉亚·艾扬格(Bellur Krishnamachar Sundararaja Iyengar)于1918年12月14日出生在印度南部卡纳塔克邦一个贫穷的家庭里，他是家中13个孩子中的第11个，出生时正值流感爆发，三个兄弟姊妹未成年便夭折了。他的父亲是一位教师，在他9岁那年死于阑尾炎。艾扬格自己患有肺结核、伤寒与疟疾，16岁开始学习瑜伽时，当时他的身体极为虚弱。“My arms were thin, my legs were spindly, and my stomach protruded in an ungainly manner,” he wrote. “My head used to hang down, and I had to lift it with great effort.”
“我细胳膊细腿，肚子难看地鼓起，头总是低着，要抬起来得费很大力气，”他写道。His first teacher was his brother-in-law, a Brahmin scholar who had set up a school of yoga at the Jaganmohan Palace, and who sometimes denied his student food if his performance was deemed inadequate. Mr. Iyengar, then a teenager, was the youngest member of the Maharaja of Mysore’s entourage, and was asked to demonstrate his ability to stretch and bend his body for visiting dignitaries and guests.
他的第一位老师是妻子的哥哥，一位在贾甘莫哈宫开有瑜伽学校的婆罗门学者。如果表现不好，老师有时会不给他饭吃。艾扬格当时只有十几岁，是迈索尔王公的随员中最年轻的一个，人们让他在来访的权贵与宾客们面前展示自己伸展和弯曲身体的技巧。Mr. Menuhin, who visited India in 1952, heard of his practice and penciled him in for a five-minute meeting, and was so instantly impressed that the session went on for more than three hours. Mr. Iyengar recalled, in an interview with CNN, that “the moment I adjusted him and took him, he said, ‘I’ve never felt this sense of joy, elation.’ ”
1952年，梅纽因访问印度时听说了艾扬格的事，安排与他进行5分钟的会面，结果一下就被打动了，会面延长到三个多小时。艾扬格在接受CNN采访时回忆，“我帮他调整，教他的时候，他说，‘我从没有过这样欢乐喜悦的感觉。’”The violinist later brought Mr. Iyengar to Switzerland, where he introduced him to other prominent Westerners who became his followers. In his first visit to New York in 1956, Mr. Iyengar said he encountered little interest in yoga. It was not until the next decade that he began to attract crowds.
后来这位小提琴家带艾扬格来到瑞士，把他介绍给其他西方名人，他们都成了他的信徒。1956年，艾扬格来到纽约，觉得人们对瑜伽并不感兴趣。直到60年代，他才开始吸引大众。“We were just coming out of the ’60s change-your-consciousness thing, and many of us were in our heads, and wanting to meditate, and reach Samadhi,” or enlightenment, Patricia Walden, a longtime student of Mr. Iyengar’s, said in an interview in 2000. “Iyengar was, like, ‘Stand on your feet. Feel your feet.’ He was so practical. His famous quote was, ‘How can you know God if you don’t know your big toe?’ ”
“我们刚刚经历了60年代的‘改变你的意识’那些事，很多人都想深入内心，靠冥想去寻找三昧(Samadhi)，”2000年，师从艾扬格多年的帕特里西亚·沃尔登(Patricia Walden)说，所谓的“三昧”也就是“觉醒”。“艾扬格说：‘双脚站立，去感受你的双脚’。他注重实际。他的名言是‘如果你连自己的大脚趾都不了解，又怎能去了解上帝？’”Were it not for his celebrity in the West, Mr. Iyengar would hardly have gained a reputation in India, said Latha Satish, who heads a major yoga institute in the southern city of Chennai.
印度南部城市钦奈一家大型瑜伽学校的校长拉塔·萨蒂什(Latha Saatish)说，如果不是因为在西方的名气，艾扬格在印度可能不会出名。“He was at the right time at the right place; he would not have survived here,” Mr. Satish said. In India, he said, “everybody was interested in Western education; yoga was not so popular.” Mr. Iyengar’s trademark improvisations — like the use of blocks, blankets and straps to assist in holding difficult postures — were adopted “because of the need of students abroad,” he said.
“他出现在正确的时间与正确的地点；他本来无法坚持到这个时候，”萨蒂什说。他表示，在印度，“所有人都喜欢西方教育，瑜伽根本不流行。”艾扬格的招牌创新包括使用砖块、毯子和带子来辅助难做的姿势，它们被采纳只是为了“迎合海外学员的需要”，萨蒂什说。Mr. Iyengar’s survivors include a son, Prashant; five daughters, Geeta, Vinita, Suchita, Sunita and Savitha; five grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
艾扬格在世的亲人包括儿子普拉尚特(Prashant)、五个女儿吉塔(Geeta)、维尼塔(Vinita)、苏西塔(Suchita)、苏尼塔(Sunita)和萨维塔(Savitha)。以及五个孙辈和三个重孙辈。Past students recalled Mr. Iyengar as warm and charismatic, but also strict. Elizabeth Kadetsky, who wrote a memoir of the year she spent studying with him, recalled that she was standing on her head in a class when he “took his fingers and shoved them in my upper back, and bellowed, ‘In the headstand, this portion of the back is not straight.’ ”
以前的学生都说艾扬格温和且富有领袖魅力，但也非常严格。伊丽莎白·卡德茨基(Elizabeth Kadetsky)曾经根据自己随艾扬格学习的一年经历写过一本回忆录，她回忆自己在课上做头倒立时，“他用手指推我的上背部，大吼：‘做倒立，后背这里不能挺直。’”As his influence spread, she said, he was fiercely competitive with other leading yoga gurus, and would get cranky when asked about their methods.
她说，随着他的影响力日益增加，他开始同其他重要的瑜伽导师激烈竞争，被问到其他人的方法时会发脾气。“He demanded loyalty,” she said. “One had to be 100 percent with him.”
“他需要忠诚，”她说，“别人必须全心全意地对他。”By the time he reached his 80s, Mr. Iyengar had become accustomed to the kind of reception usually reserved for pop stars. As power yoga became a multimillion-dollar industry, he occasionally cringed at the commercialization of the practice, and wondered whether it would survive its own popularity. But the pleasure he took in the practice was unaffected.
步入80多岁的时候，艾扬格开始习惯流行明星般的待遇。随着力量瑜伽成为价值千万美元的大产业，他偶尔也会对这种锻炼方式的商业化表示厌恶，觉得过分流行可能会扼杀它。但是修习瑜伽带给的他快乐仍然不减。At the end of a session in 2002, he lay on his back, knees bent so that his calves were beneath his thighs, arms out to either side, weights holding him down. He lay still for 12 minutes, perfectly immobile except for the twitch of a pinkie. Asked what he was thinking, he replied, “Nothing.”
2002年，在一次课程即将结束时，他平躺着，弯曲膝盖，让小腿肚处于大腿下方，伸开双臂，重心放低。他静静地躺了12分钟，除了小指抽动了一下，完全保持静止。人们问他当时在想什么，他说：“什么也没想。”“I can remain thoughtfully thoughtless,” he said. “It is not an empty mind.”
“我可以保持有思的无思，”他说，“这并不是头脑空空。”