[2][3] According 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.
[4] The Yogasanagalu did contain tables of asanas and vinyasas, and these are "comparable"[5] 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);[5] the approach was "experimental".
[7] 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".
[12] The vinyasa sequences used in the touring demonstrations of Krishnamacharya's yoga were, according to an interview with Jois, "virtually identical to the aerobic schema" of modern Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga, namely "several distinct 'series' within which each main asana is conjoined by a short, repeated, linking series of postures and jumps based on the Surya Namaskar model".