The Teachers Who Shaped Yoga, Era by Era

Yoga was transmitted from person to person for centuries before any of it was written down, and even after the texts appeared, the texts were rarely enough on their own. Someone had to explain them. That is why the history of yoga is, to a large extent, a history of teachers — people who received something, changed it, and passed it on.

What follows is a map of those people, grouped by era. The century after each name is given in parentheses, and where the dates are contested — which is the case for almost everyone before roughly 1800 — I have marked them as approximate. This is an entry point, not a ranking, and it is inevitably incomplete.

The Vedic and Upanishadic Era (c. 1500–200 BCE)

The Rishis (c. 15th–8th c. BCE) — The seers who composed and transmitted the Vedas orally across generations, in which the word “yoga” first appears, long before it had anything to do with physical postures.
Yajnavalkya (c. 8th–7th c. BCE) — A sage of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad whose dialogues turned attention from ritual toward the nature of the self, and whose name is attached to the later Yoga Yajnavalkya, one of the earliest texts to treat asana and pranayama in detail.
Kapila (c. 7th–6th c. BCE) — The semi-legendary founder of Samkhya, the analytical philosophy of consciousness and matter that Patanjali later borrowed almost wholesale as the metaphysical scaffolding of yoga.
The Buddha (c. 6th–5th c. BCE) — Not a yoga teacher in the usual sense, but his systematic approach to meditation, breath awareness and the causes of suffering shaped Indian contemplative practice so deeply that later yoga texts absorbed much of it.
Krishna (c. 5th–2nd c. BCE, as a literary figure) — In the Bhagavad Gita he teaches Arjuna that yoga is not one path but several — knowledge (jnana), devotion (bhakti) and selfless action (karma) — and that it is available to anyone living an ordinary life, not only to renunciants.

The Classical Era (c. 200 BCE–500 CE)

Patanjali (c. 2nd c. BCE–4th c. CE) — He compiled the Yoga Sutras, 196 aphorisms that gave the tradition its first systematic framework and its most quoted definition, yoga citta vritti nirodha — yoga is the stilling of the fluctuations of the mind.
Vyasa (c. 5th c. CE) — His commentary, the Yoga Bhashya, is so tightly bound to the Yoga Sutras that for most of history the two were read as a single work, and nearly every later interpretation passes through him.

Vedanta, Tantra and the Devotional Currents (8th–17th c.)

Adi Shankara (c. 8th) — The philosopher who systematised Advaita Vedanta, the non-dual view that the individual self and ultimate reality are not two things, which remains the philosophical background of much modern yoga teaching.
Abhinavagupta (c. 10th–11th) — The great Kashmir Shaivite scholar whose Tantric writings reframed the body and the senses as vehicles for realisation rather than obstacles to it — the shift that made Hatha yoga conceivable.
Ramanuja (11th–12th) — He argued against Shankara that devotion to a personal divine is itself a complete path, giving bhakti yoga its most rigorous philosophical defence.
Mirabai (16th) — A Rajput princess who abandoned her royal life to write ecstatic devotional poetry to Krishna, and who remains the tradition’s clearest example of bhakti practised as a whole life rather than a technique.
Kabir (15th) — A weaver-poet whose verses mocked both Hindu and Muslim orthodoxy in favour of direct experience, and who is still quoted in yoga classes wherever the point is that ritual is not the practice.
Chaitanya Mahaprabhu (15th–16th) — He made ecstatic chanting of the divine name a collective public practice, and the kirtan sung in studios today descends fairly directly from what he started.

The Hatha Yoga Era (c. 9th–17th c.)

Matsyendranath (c. 9th–10th) — The founding figure of the Nath tradition and, by legend, the first human recipient of Hatha teachings; the seated twist Matsyendrasana carries his name.
Gorakhnath (c. 10th–11th) — Matsyendranath’s student, credited with organising Hatha yoga into a systematic path and building the Nath order that carried it for centuries.
Swami Swatmarama (15th) — Author of the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, the first major manual devoted to physical practice, with detailed treatment of asana, pranayama, mudras and bandhas.
Gheranda (17th) — The teacher of the Gheranda Samhita, which lays out a seven-limbed purification path and describes thirty-two asanas, giving us one of the fullest pictures of what pre-modern Hatha practice actually involved.

The Modern Renaissance (19th–early 20th c.)

Ramakrishna (19th) — A temple priest in Bengal whose reported experiences across several religious traditions led him to teach that they arrive at the same place, and whose most famous student carried that message abroad.
Swami Vivekananda (19th) — Ramakrishna’s student, he addressed the Parliament of World’s Religions in Chicago in 1893 and presented yoga to the West as a universal science of consciousness rather than a religion — the moment yoga crossed an ocean.
Sri Aurobindo (19th–20th) — A Cambridge-educated revolutionary turned philosopher who developed Integral Yoga, arguing that the aim is not to escape ordinary life but to transform it.
Ramana Maharshi (19th–20th) — He taught almost entirely in silence from a hill in Tamil Nadu, and reduced the practice to a single question, “Who am I?”, pursued until the questioner is not found.
Shri Ram Lal Ji (19th–20th) — An ascetic of northern India, remembered as the founder of the Yog Sadhan Ashram and as one of the figures around whom a substantial devotional following formed in his own lifetime.
Swami Brahmananda Saraswati (19th–20th) — Known to his students as Guru Dev, he was appointed Shankaracharya of Jyotir Math in 1941 after decades in the forest, and taught the mantra meditation that one of his students would later export as Transcendental Meditation.
Anandamayi Ma (20th) — A Bengali mystic with no formal training or lineage who became one of the most widely revered teachers of her century, and a reminder that the tradition’s authority has never been exclusively male.
Paramahansa Yogananda (20th) — He moved to the United States in 1920, founded the Self-Realization Fellowship, and wrote Autobiography of a Yogi, the book that introduced more Westerners to yoga than any other.
Swami Sivananda (20th) — A physician turned monk in Rishikesh whose enormous output of accessible books, and whose many students sent abroad, made his lineage one of the most widely spread in the world.
Swami Kuvalayananda (20th) — He founded the Kaivalyadhama institute in 1924 and began measuring the physiological effects of asana and pranayama in a laboratory, effectively starting yoga research.
Shri Yogendra (20th) — Founder of The Yoga Institute in Mumbai in 1918, the oldest organised yoga centre still operating, and an early advocate of adapting practice for householders rather than renunciants.
Neem Karoli Baba (20th) — A wandering saint in northern India who left no writings and no formal teaching, but whose Western students went home and changed the shape of American spiritual life.
Shri Devraha Baba (20th) — An ascetic who lived on a raised wooden platform beside the Yamuna at Mathura until his death in 1990, receiving visitors including several Indian heads of state, and whose birth date nobody was ever able to establish.
Tirumalai Krishnamacharya (20th) — Teaching in Mysore, he developed the dynamic breath-linked practice that nearly all modern posture yoga descends from, and trained four students who each founded a major lineage.

The Great Twentieth-Century Lineages (20th c.)

B.K.S. Iyengar (20th) — Krishnamacharya’s student and brother-in-law, he brought anatomical precision and the systematic use of props to asana, and his 1966 Light on Yoga became the century’s most-read yoga manual.
K. Pattabhi Jois (20th) — He codified the fixed sequences of Ashtanga Vinyasa that shaped nearly all flow-based yoga, and was credibly accused by numerous students of sexual assault carried out under the guise of hands-on adjustments.
Indra Devi (20th) — Born Eugenie Peterson in Latvia, she was Krishnamacharya’s first female student and the first Western woman he accepted, and she went on to open yoga to Hollywood, Mexico and Argentina.
T.K.V. Desikachar (20th) — Krishnamacharya’s son, he carried forward his father’s principle of adapting the practice to the individual student rather than the reverse, the approach known as viniyoga.
Swami Satchidananda (20th) — A student of Sivananda, he founded Integral Yoga and opened the 1969 Woodstock festival, an image that fixed yoga in the American counterculture.
Swami Vishnudevananda (20th) — Another of Sivananda’s students, he distilled the practice into five principles and trained tens of thousands of teachers through the Sivananda centres, an early architect of teacher training as we know it.
Swami Satyananda Saraswati (20th) — Another of Sivananda’s students, he founded the Bihar School of Yoga in 1963 and systematised yoga nidra, the guided practice of conscious relaxation now taught almost everywhere.
Swami Dayananda Saraswati (20th–21st) — A monk of the Saraswati order and among the most rigorous modern teachers of Advaita Vedanta, he trained a generation of teachers in the traditional method of studying the texts.
Swami Rama (20th) — He allowed researchers in the 1970s to record him altering his heart rate and brainwaves at will, producing some of the first laboratory evidence that advanced practices do what they claim.
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (20th) — He turned mantra meditation into Transcendental Meditation, a standardised and heavily marketed technique, and became famous as the Beatles’ teacher.
Yogi Bhajan (20th) — He brought Kundalini yoga to the West in 1968 and built a large organisation around it, and was posthumously found by an independent investigation to have sexually abused and coerced students over decades.
Osho (20th) — Born Rajneesh, he was a genuinely original lecturer on meditation and the ego whose Oregon commune collapsed amid criminal charges including a mass food poisoning carried out by his inner circle.
Bikram Choudhury (20th–21st) — He built a global franchise around a fixed sequence of twenty-six postures practised in a heated room, and fled the United States after multiple sexual assault lawsuits and a large civil judgment against him.
Amrit Desai (20th–21st) — Founder of Kripalu yoga and its Massachusetts centre, he resigned in 1994 after admitting to sexual relationships with students while teaching celibacy.
Ram Dass (20th–21st) — Born Richard Alpert, a Harvard psychologist dismissed for LSD research who met Neem Karoli Baba in India and returned as the author of Be Here Now, the book that made Eastern practice legible to a generation.
Vanda Scaravelli (20th) — A student of Iyengar and Desikachar who rejected effort and imposition entirely, teaching instead a practice organised around gravity, breath and the spine’s own intelligence.
Paulie Zink and Paul Grilley (20th–21st) — Working from Taoist and anatomical starting points respectively, they developed the long-held floor practice that became Yin yoga.

Living Gurus and Spiritual Leaders (20th–21st c.)

Mata Amritanandamayi (20th–21st) — Known as Amma, she has embraced an estimated forty million people one at a time over five decades, and built a hospital network, a university and a disaster relief organisation around that practice.
Sadhguru (20th–21st) — Founder of the Isha Foundation and one of the most-followed spiritual figures alive, known for large-scale yoga programmes and environmental campaigns, and criticised for his political alignments in India.
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar (20th–21st) — Founder of the Art of Living, which teaches the rhythmic breathing technique Sudarshan Kriya to millions across more than 150 countries.
Baba Ramdev (20th–21st) — He taught pranayama to enormous television audiences across India and turned that reach into Patanjali Ayurved, a consumer goods company, and his health claims have repeatedly drawn regulatory and court challenges.
Avdhoot Shivanand (20th–21st) — Founder of ShivYog, which combines meditation, Himalayan yogic practice and energy healing, and draws large audiences across India and the diaspora.
Maha Sambodhi Dharma Sangha (20th–21st) — Born Ram Bahadur Bomjon, he drew international attention as a teenager for a prolonged meditation retreat in the Nepali jungle and gathered a following around it, and was convicted in Nepal in 2024 of raping a minor and sentenced to ten years.

Contemporary Teachers (20th–21st c.)

Sharath Jois (20th–21st) — Pattabhi Jois’s grandson, he led the Ashtanga institute in Mysore until his death in 2024 and was, for many practitioners, the last direct link to that lineage.
Judith Hanson Lasater (20th–21st) — A physical therapist and one of the founders of Yoga Journal, she did more than anyone to establish restorative yoga as a serious practice rather than a soft option.
Dharma Mittra (20th–21st) — He photographed himself in 908 postures in 1984 to create the poster that hangs in studios everywhere, and has taught in New York for more than fifty years.
Donna Farhi (20th–21st) — A New Zealand-based teacher whose books on breathing and on the ethics of the teacher–student relationship are among the most thoughtful written in English.
Richard Freeman and Mary Taylor (20th–21st) — A husband-and-wife pair of senior Ashtanga teachers, unusual for the depth with which they ground physical practice in the philosophical texts it came from.
A.G. Mohan (20th–21st) — A student of Krishnamacharya for eighteen years and co-founder of Svastha Yoga and Ayurveda, he is one of the few remaining direct sources on how his teacher actually worked.
Srivatsa Ramaswami (20th–21st) — He studied with Krishnamacharya for thirty-three years, longer than any student outside the family, and teaches the sequenced approach he calls Vinyasa Krama.
Sarah Powers (20th–21st) — She combined Yin yoga with Buddhist meditation and Chinese medicine into Insight Yoga, and shaped how the slow practices are taught today.
Seane Corn (20th–21st) — A prominent American teacher who co-founded Off the Mat, Into the World and has pushed the practice toward social and political engagement.
Shiva Rea (20th–21st) — She developed Prana Vinyasa, a fluid and improvisational approach to flow, and is one of the more identifiable voices in creative sequencing.
Eddie Stern (20th–21st) — A New York Ashtanga teacher who works closely with neuroscientists on what the practice measurably does to the nervous system.
Bernie Clark (20th–21st) — A leading authority on Yin yoga and the author of its most-used teaching references, he has done more than anyone to connect the practice to what anatomy and physiology can actually support.
Christopher D. Wallis (20th–21st) — A Sanskritist and scholar-practitioner of Tantric philosophy whose The Recognition Sutras made the Kashmir Shaivite texts readable outside the academy.
Kino MacGregor (20th–21st) — Certified by Pattabhi Jois at twenty-nine, she became one of the first teachers to build a global following through video, and reaches an audience the shala system never could.
Krishna Das (20th–21st) — A student of Neem Karoli Baba who became the best-known kirtan singer outside India, and for many Western practitioners the first experience of chanting as practice rather than performance.
Travis Eliot (20th–21st) — A teacher of power and Yin yoga and of meditation, known for programmes that treat the strong and the slow practices as halves of the same thing.
Ramiro Calle (20th–21st) — He opened one of Spain’s first yoga centres in 1971 and has written well over a hundred books, making him the main channel through which yoga reached the Spanish-speaking world.
Brigitte Longueville (20th–21st) — Developer of restorative alignment, an approach that works with supported positioning rather than effort to let the body find its own structure.
Adriene Mishler (20th–21st) — Her Yoga With Adriene videos have made her, by simple numbers, the most-watched yoga teacher in history, and for a great many people the first one.

Conclusion

Reading a list like this, what strikes me is how little agreement there is between the names on it. Patanjali gives asana five sutras; Bikram built an empire on twenty-six of them. Ramana taught in silence; Vivekananda lectured across two continents. Scaravelli spent her later years undoing exactly the kind of effort that Iyengar’s early students were trained into. These are not stages of a single argument moving toward a conclusion. They are different answers, and several of them are incompatible.

That is worth remembering when a teacher or a style is presented as the authentic one. The tradition has never been unanimous, and the lineages that feel most solid from the inside are usually a century or two old at most.

It is also worth being honest about the fact that several people on this list caused serious harm. Their techniques still work and their students still teach; both things are true, and the styles that came out of those rooms are not erased by it. But the pattern is common enough in the twentieth century that it should inform how much authority any of us hands over.

If you want to go further, two of these names are worth reading directly rather than about: Patanjali, whose eight limbs still frame the whole practice, and Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita. Both are short. For the wider arc these teachers sit inside, the history of yoga covers the periods rather than the people. And because one lineage produced far more named teachers than any other, the Ashtanga lineage has its own article, generation by generation.

The list is not closed. Someone is teaching now who will be on the next version of it.