Baladev and Nagarjun

Baladev is a son of a military man and since his childhood he was trained to be strong to follow the steps of his father. His father chose for him the name Baladev which means "god of strength", wanting him to become a strong and fearless warrior, but he didn't expect the name would shape Baladev's fate quite differently than expected.

Young Baladev met a fakir who made him realize that his true destiny was being a street performer. Baladev left his home and followed the fakir for several years. When the fakir left this world, Baladev continued to entertain people on his own.

Nobody knows where Nagarjun came from to this world. Baladev ji says he once found a little boy in the jungle, playing with a couple of small snakes. Good Lord Shiva, the child was only several months old! The snake could so easily bite him to death but it didn't. For three days Baladev tried to find the boy's parents in the two nearby villages but people kept telling him they have never seen this baby before.

On the third day he had a vision during a deep meditation, where the boy's name and his destiny were revealed to Baladev. The name was Nagarjun, "best of the snakes" (lit. "pure snake"). Baladev saw some of the things the boy will be able to do when he grows up and he had never seen such a beautiful young yogin and such amazingly pliant body postures before, even though he had met many great yogins and fakirs in his life, but this boy was the prince of yoga himself.

Since then Baladev ji and little Nagarjun lived as a father and his son. As a young boy, Nagarjun spent hours a day in the company of yogins who taught him great things about the human body, and even when he was still under ten years old he mastered over a hundred yogic postures, including very rare ones.

But the boy truly flourished in his teen years, when even the greatest yogins of the time (and the two travelled a lot around the country and met many great saints and performers) couldn't give him any more advanced lessons and Nagarjun started inventing his own branch of yoga, which he called Mahanagyoga, "supreme snakish yoga", the most physically challenging branch of yoga so far.