Paramhansa Yogananda

Paramahansa Yogananda circa 1920.

Paramhansa Yogananda (1893–1952) was one of the first Indian spiritual teachers to reside permanently in the West and to teach yoga to Americans. He moved from India to the United States in 1920 and eventually founded the Self-Realization Fellowship in Los Angeles. He published his own life story in a book called Autobiography of a Yogi, first published in 1946. In his Autobiography, Yogananda provided some details of his personal life, an introduction to yoga, meditation, and philosophy, and accounts of his meetings with a wide variety of personalities, including Mohandas K. Gandhi, Luther Burbank, and Jagadis C. Bose. In this memoir, he claimed to have been given to know the time when he would die in advance.

Paramhamsa, also spelled Paramahamsa, is a Sanskrit title used for Hindu spiritual teachers who have become enlightened. The title of Paramhansa originates from the legend of the swan. The swan (hansa) is said to have a mythical ability to only sip the milk from a water and milk mixture, separating out the more watery part. The spiritual master is likewise said to be able to live in a world like a supreme (param) swan, and only see the divine, instead of all the evil mixed in there too, which the worldly person sees.

Early life

Yogananda was born Mukunda Lal Ghosh in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, India to a Hindu Bengali Kayastha family. He was the fourth of the eight children of Bhagabati Charan Ghosh, the vice president of Bengal-Nagpur Railway, and Gyanprabha Devi. Mukunda's awareness and experience of the spiritual were far beyond the ordinary even from his earliest years. The demands of his father's job caused the family to move several times during Mukunda's childhood, including to Lahore, Bareilly, and Kolkata. According to his memoir Autobiography of a Yogi, he was eleven years old when his mother died, just before the marriage of his eldest brother Ananta. Throughout his childhood, his father would fund train passes for his many sight-seeing trips to distant cities and pilgrimage spots, which he would often take with friends. In his youth he sought out many of India's Hindu sages and saints, including the Soham "Tiger" Swami, Gandha Baba, and Mahendranath Gupta, hoping to find an illumined teacher to guide him in his spiritual quest.

After finishing high school, Mukunda left home and joined a Mahamandal Hermitage in Varanasi; however, he soon became dissatisfied with its insistence on organizational work instead of meditation and God-perception. He began praying for guidance; in 1910, his seeking after various teachers ended when, at the age of 17, he met his guru, Swami Sri Yukteswar Giri. In his autobiography, he describes his first meeting with Sri Yukteswar as a rekindling of a relationship that had lasted for many lifetimes.

He would go on to train under Sri Yukteswar as his disciple for the next ten years (1910–1920) at his hermitages in Serampore and Puri. Later on, Sri Yukteswar informed Mukunda that he had been sent to him by the great guru of their lineage, Mahavatar Babaji, for a special world purpose of yoga dissemination.

After passing his Intermediate Examination in Arts from the Scottish Church College, Calcutta, in 1915, he graduated with a degree similar to a current-day Bachelor of Arts or B.A. (at the time referred to as an A.B.) from Serampore College, the college having two entities, one as a constituent college of the Senate of Serampore College (University) and the other as an affiliated college of the University of Calcutta. This allowed him to spend time at Yukteswar's ashram in Serampore.

In July 1915, several weeks after graduating from college, he took formal vows into the monastic Swami order; Sri Yukteswar allowed him to choose his own name: Swami Yogananda Giri. In 1917, Yogananda founded a school for boys in Dihika, West Bengal that combined modern educational techniques with yoga training and spiritual ideals. A year later, the school relocated to Ranchi.