to a patient's treatment, because Krishnamacharya felt that if the person could not trust him fully there was little chance of his or her being healed. Once a person began seeing Krishnamacharya, he would work with him or her on a number of levels including adjusting their diet; creating herbal medicines; and setting up a series of yoga postures that would be most beneficial. When instructing a person on the practice of yoga, Krishnamacharya particularly stressed the importance of combining breath work (pranayama) with the postures (asanas) of yoga and meditation (dhyana) to reach the desired goal. Krishnamacharya "believed Yoga to be India's greatest gift to the world." His yoga instruction reflected his conviction that yoga could be both a spiritual practice and a mode of physical healing. His style of yoga is now known as Vinyasa Krama Yoga. Krishnamacharya based his teachings on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali and the Yoga Yajnavalkya. Whereas Krishnamacharya was deeply devoted to Vaishnavism, he also respected his students' varying religious beliefs, or nonbeliefs. A former student recalls that while leading a meditation, Krishnamacharya instructed students to close their eyes and "think of God. If not God, the sun. If not the sun, your parents." As a result of the teachings he received from his father and other instructors, Krishnamacharya approached every student as "absolutely unique", in the belief that the most important aspect of teaching yoga was that the student be "taught according to his or her individual capacity at any given time". For Krishnamacharya, the path of yoga meant different things for different people, and each person ought to be taught in a manner that he or she understood clearly. Krishnamacharya's students included many of 20th century yoga's most renowned and influential teachers: Indra Devi; K. Pattabhi Jois; B. K. S. Iyengar; T. K. V. Desikachar; Srivatsa Ramaswami; and A. G. Mohan (born 1945). Accomplishment as a scholar Krishnamacharya was highly regarded as a scholar. He earned degrees in philosophy, logic, divinity, philology, and music. He was twice offered the position of Acharya in the Srivaishnava sampradaya, but he declined in order to stay with his family, in accordance with his guru's wishes. He also had extensive knowledge of orthodox Hindu rituals. His scholarship in various darshanas of orthodox Indian philosophy earned him titles such as Sāṃkhya-yoga-śikhāmaṇi, Mīmāṃsā-ratna, Mīmāṃsā-thīrtha, Nyāyācārya, Vedāntavāgīśa, Veda-kesari and Yogācārya. One of Krishnamacharya's most distinctive teachings was about