Reference: Inner Engineering (Content)
This paper presents the summary of Part two, chapter 2.7.1 from the book, INNER ENGINEERING By Sadhguru. The contents are from the first edition (2016) of this book published in the United States by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
The summary of the original material (in black) is accompanied by brief comments (in color) based on the present understanding.
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A LEGENDARY YOGI
“Raghavendra Rao, the yoga teacher I met as a boy, led a life that would be considered superhuman by conventional standards. He was known as Malladihalli Swami because he hailed from the village of Malladihalli, which is in the southwestern Indian state of Karnataka. He was known to do 1,008 surya namaskars a day. Later, after he was ninety years of age, he brought the number down to 108 (not because he wasn’t capable, but because there was no time). That was his spiritual practice. In addition to being a yoga master, he was a wonderful Ayurvedic doctor. He was one of the few nadi vaidyas—traditional physicians who diagnose your ailment by feeling your pulse. He would not only tell you what disease you had today, but could predict what ailment was likely to afflict you in the next ten to fifteen years, and would teach the requisite remedial practices. One day in a week, he would be available in his ashram as an Ayurvedic doctor. Wherever he was, he would travel back to the ashram on Sunday evening to be there on Monday morning. If he sat down at four o’clock in the morning, he was there right through the day till seven or eight o’clock in the evening. Volunteers would come in shifts to help him, but he himself sat through the whole day. For every patient who came, he had a joke to tell. People would forget they had come for treatment. It was less like a doctor-patient interaction and more of a festival!
“This happened when he was about eighty-three years of age: One Sunday, late at night, he was at a railway station about forty-six miles from his ashram. He was with two companions, and they discovered that there was a railway strike. This meant no trains and no other means of transport. His commitment to his work was such that he left his two companions on the platform and just ran forty-six miles overnight on the railway tracks! At four o’clock in the morning he was at the ashram, ready to treat his patients. People at the ashram did not even realize that he had come running. Only when his other two friends reached there did they tell the others what Swamiji had done! That is how incredibly he lived. He lived up to the age of a hundred and six and taught yoga until his dying day.”
The above is the original text (as denoted by quotation marks) from the book. It narrates a wonderful story about Sadhguru’s boyhood Yoga Teacher. It highlights the dedication of that Yoga teacher to keep his schedule as an Ayurvedic doctor one day a week despite all his other work. On one occasion, the circumstances were such that he had to run forty-six miles overnight to keep his schedule the next morning. He did that at about eighty-three years of age.
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