What the book is
*Autobiography of a Yogi* was first published in Los Angeles in 1946 by the Self-Realization Fellowship press Paramahansa Yogananda had founded twenty-six years earlier, and went into a second edition in 1951 in which the final chapter on Sri Yukteswar was expanded and a foreword by Sir Francis Younghusband added. The book is not a doctrinal exposition. It is a sequence of autobiographical episodes — Yogananda's Bengali childhood and early disciplined practice, the meeting with Sri Yukteswar at the Serampore āśram in 1910, the encounters along the Ganges with sages and [jīvanmuktas](lexicon:jivanmukti) the lineage had preserved record of, the 1920 voyage to Boston for the International Congress of Religious Liberals, the founding of the Self-Realization Fellowship in Los Angeles the same year, and the three subsequent decades of teaching in the United States. The presentation is high-Edwardian English of the kind that has not aged comfortably and a register of frank wonder the modern Western reader is rarely invited to accept at face value. The durability of the book rests less on its prose than on the world it claims to describe: a continuous, named householder lineage of yogis with reproducible techniques, operating in a register where direct experience of the absolute is treated as a matter of disciplined practice rather than of theological speculation.
The lineage it transmits
The lineage the Autobiography foregrounds is the modern [kriyā yoga](lexicon:kriya-yoga) transmission of Lahiri Mahāsaya — whom the tradition holds to have received the technique from the legendary Babaji of the Himālayan tradition in 1861 — through Sri Yukteswar Giri to Yogananda himself. The lineage is structurally distinct from both the renunciate daśanāmi tradition that descends from Ādi Śaṅkara and the postural haṭha yoga that the West would later mistake for yoga itself. Kriyā is a householder transmission of disciplined inner technique — breath, mantra, attention to the subtle channels of the spine — said to accelerate the recognition that the rest of the eight-limbed rāja yoga path approaches more slowly. Yogananda treats the lineage's claim of accelerated practice as testable rather than rhetorical, devotes substantial chapters to the jīvanmuktas (the figures the tradition recognises as having stabilised the recognition in life rather than at death) he met along the Ganges and in the south, and is unembarrassed in his presentation of the [siddhis](lexicon:siddhi) — paranormal capacities — the older texts had treated as side-effects of advanced practice. The presentation invites the modern reader to refuse the world it describes; the text is plainly indifferent to the refusal.
Where to encounter it in the index
The book itself is the single most-cross-referenced text in the lexicon outside the Upaniṣads — quoted by name in the entries on yoga, Hinduism, kriyā yoga, Sri Yukteswar, Lahiri Mahasaya, tantra, jñāna yoga, bhakti and rāja yoga. The contemporary teachers in the index who carry the post-Autobiography American Hindu inheritance are the closest functional companions. Sadhguru's longer-form lectures and his book *Inner Engineering* operate in the same householder-yogi register Yogananda established, treating disciplined interior technique as a matter of practical engineering rather than of theological commitment; the *Inner Engineering Online* programme delivers the Shambhavi Mahāmudrā kriyā that Sadhguru's lineage transmits, structurally adjacent to the kriyā Yogananda's lineage taught. *Be Here Now* and the broader Ram Dass corpus, published from 1971 onward, is the Autobiography's closest American counterpart — a younger man's account of meeting a north-Indian guru and reorganising his life around what the encounter disclosed — in a counter-cultural rather than Edwardian register. The contemporary non-dual lineage that meets Yogananda's work at the doctrinal end runs through Nisargadatta Maharaj's *I Am That* and into Rupert Spira's longer-form talks and *Being Aware of Being Aware* — the two twentieth-century texts the Autobiography is most often paired with in English-language presentations of the Indian inheritance.
What it isn't
The Autobiography is not a manual. The kriyā technique the lineage transmits is treated in the book as the subject of the work, not as the instructional content of it; the techniques themselves are not disclosed in print and are taught only after a sequence of preparatory lessons and a vow of confidentiality. The book is also not a survey of Indian spirituality. Its account is unembarrassedly partisan — it is the version of the inheritance the lineage of Lahiri Mahāsaya, Sri Yukteswar and Yogananda transmits, and other Indian lineages are described from inside that frame rather than presented in their own terms. Readers who arrive expecting a balanced account will leave disappointed; readers who treat the text as the lineage's case for its own seriousness will find what it actually is. And it is not, finally, a work the modern Western reader is invited to assess for its propositional content. The figures the Autobiography describes — bilocating saints, the supposed historicity of Babaji, the resurrection of Sri Yukteswar — sit at the line where Western canons of plausibility break against the register in which the tradition records its own self-understanding. The text neither argues the question nor backs away from it; the reader's response is the work's first piece of evidence about what the reader is actually willing to consider.
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