Theos-Talk Archives (September 1997 Message tl00228)

AP WIRE - Monk Gloats Over Yoga Championship

"I am the serenest!" he says.

LHASA, TIBET - Employing the brash style that first brought him to
prominence, Sri Dhananjai Bikram won the fifth annual International Yogi
Competition yesterday with a world-record point total of 873.6.

"I am the serenest!" Bikram shouted to the estimated crowd of 20,000
yoga fans, vigorously pumping his fists. "No one is serener than Sri
Dhananjai Bikram-I am the greatest monk of all time!"

Bikram got off to a fast start at the Lhasa meet, which like most
major competitions, is a six-event affair. In the first event, he
attained total consciousness (TC) in just 2 minutes, 34 seconds, and
set the tone for the rest of the meet by repeatedly shouting, "I'm
blissful! You blissful?! I'm blissful!" to the other yogis.

Bikram, 33, burst onto the international yoga scene with a
gold-mandala performance at the 1994 Bhutan Invitational. At that
competition he premiered his aggressive style, at one point in the
flexibility event sticking his middle toes out at the other yogis.
While no prohibition exists against such behavior, according to Yoga
League Commissioner Swami Prabhupada, such behavior is generally
considered "unBuddhalike."

"I don't care what the critics say," Bikram said. "Sri Bikram is
just gonna go out there and do Sri Bikram's own yoga thing."

Before the Bhutan meet, Bikram had never placed better than fourth.
Many said he had forsaken rigorous training for the celebrity status
accorded by his Bhutan win, endorsing Nike's new line of prayer mats
and supposedly dating the Hindu goddess Shakti. But his performance
this week will regain for him the number one computer ranking and
earn him new respect, as well as for his coach Mahananda Vasti, the
controversial guru some have called Bikram's "guru."

"My special training diet for Bikram of one super-charged,
carbo-loaded grain of rice per day was essential to his win," Vasti
said.

The defeated Gupta denied that Bikram's taunting was a factor in his
inability to attain TC. "I just wasn't myself today," Gupta
commented. "I wasn't any self today. I was an egoless particle of
the universal no-soul."

In the second event, flexibility, Bikram maintained the lead by
supporting himself on his index fingers for the entire 15 minutes
while touching the back of his skull to his lower spine. The feat
was matched by Gupta, who first used the position at the 1990 Tokyo
Zen-Off.

"That's my meditative position of spiritual ecstasy, not his,"
remarked Gupta. "He stole my thunder."

Bikram denied the charge, saying, "Gupta's been talking like that
ever since he was a 3rd century Egyptian slave-owner."

Nevertheless, a strong showing by Gupta in the third event, the
shotput, placed him within a lotus petal of the lead at the
competition's halfway point.

But event number four, the contemplation of unanswerable riddles
known as koans, proved the key to victory for Bikram.

The koan had long been thought the weak point of his spiritual
arsenal, but his response to today's riddle-"Show me the face you
had before you were born "-was reportedly "extremely illuminative,"
according to Commissioner Prabhupada.

While koan answers are kept secret from the public for fear of
exposing the uninitiated multitudes to the terror of universal
truth, insiders claim his answer had Prabhupada and the two other
judges "highly enlightened."

With the event victory, Bikram built himself a nearly insurmountable
lead, one he sustained through the yak-milk churn and breathing
events to come away with the upset victory.