0According to Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga's official history, Krishnamacharya learned the complete system of asanas (postures) and vinyasas (transitions) from an otherwise unknown document, the Yoga Kurunta, supposedly written 5,000 years ago by Vamana Rishi; the history tells that Krishnamacharya copied it out and taught it, unmodified, to Pattabhi Jois. However, the original manuscript was supposedly destroyed by ants, and no copy survives; neither Jois nor any other of Krishnamacharya's pupils transcribed it, as would have been expected in a traditional guru-shishya relationship. Further, Krishnamacharya "surprising did not cite the text in his 1935 Yoga Makaranda or his c. 1941 Yogasanagalu. The Yogasanagalu did contain tables of asanas and vinyasas, and these are "comparable" to Jois's system, but far from being fixed as written in an ancient manuscript, Krishnamacharya's "jumping" yoga style at the Mysore palace was constantly changing, adapted to the needs of specific pupils according to their ages, constitutions (deha), vocations (vrttibheda), capabilities (sakti), and paths (marga), the approach was "experimental" In contrast, the system that Krishnamacharya taught to Jois and that became the basis of Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga was fixed. This may have been because Jois had to teach at the Sanskrit Pathasala in 1933, while Krishnamacharya's other pupils were studying at his Yogasala, so he may, Mark Singleton suggests, have taught the 18-year-old Jois a simple fixed sequence suitable for a novice teacher to use with large groups of boys. Norman Sjoman notes that Krishnamacharya cited the 19th century Sritattvanidhi which documents asanas used in the Mysore palace in his early writings; his early vinyasas developed into forms more like those of Jois, something that Sjoman takes as evidence that Krishnamacharya created rather than inherited the vinyasas: "It was not an inherited format".
Krishnamacharya used "vinyasa" in at least two different ways. One was in a broad sense to mean "an appropriately formulated sequence of steps (krama) for approaching a given posture".The other was a "stage in the execution of an asana". For example, the Sarvangasana sequence is introduced with the words "This has 12 vinyasas [stages]. The 8th vinyasa is the asana sthiti.
