What is Autobiography of a Yogi?
*Autobiography of a Yogi* is Paramahansa Yogananda's 1946 memoir of his spiritual life and the householder [kriyā yoga](lexicon:kriya-yoga) lineage of Lahiri Mahāsaya and Sri Yukteswar Giri. It traces his life from a Bengali childhood through decades of teaching in the United States, describing encounters with saints and [jīvanmuktas](lexicon:jivanmukti) along the Ganges and the founding of the Self-Realization Fellowship in Los Angeles. The book has been in print continuously since 1946 in more than fifty languages and is among the most influential introductions to Indian contemplative traditions in the English language.
First published by the Philosophical Library in New York, it went into a second edition in 1951 with an expanded final chapter on Sri Yukteswar and a foreword by Sir Francis Younghusband. The Self-Realization Fellowship has published it since 1953. The prose is high-Edwardian English written in a register of frank wonder that the modern reader is rarely invited to take at face value. The book's staying power rests less on its prose than on the world it claims to describe: a continuous, named lineage of householder yogis with reproducible techniques, where direct experience of the absolute is treated as a matter of practice rather than theological speculation.
What the Autobiography is not
The Autobiography is not a manual. The kriyā technique the lineage transmits is the subject of the work, not its instructional content. The techniques are not disclosed in print and are taught only after preparatory lessons and a vow of confidentiality. The book is also not a survey of Indian spirituality. Its account is deliberately partisan: it presents the inheritance as the lineage of Lahiri Mahāsaya, Sri Yukteswar, and Yogananda understood it, and other Indian lineages appear only through that frame. Readers expecting a balanced comparative account will be disappointed. And it is not a work the reader is invited to assess for its propositional content. The figures it describes include bilocating saints, the supposed historicity of Babaji, and the resurrection of Sri Yukteswar. These sit at the line where Western standards of plausibility meet the register in which the tradition records its own self-understanding. The text neither argues the question nor backs away from it.
The lineage it transmits
The lineage the Autobiography foregrounds is the modern [kriyā yoga](lexicon:kriya-yoga) transmission of Lahiri Mahāsaya. The tradition holds that Lahiri received the technique from the legendary Babaji of the Himālayan tradition in 1861, passing it through Sri Yukteswar Giri to Yogananda. This lineage is distinct from the renunciate daśanāmi tradition descending from Ādi Śaṅkara and from the postural haṭha yoga the West would later mistake for yoga itself. Kriyā is a householder transmission of inner technique: breath, mantra, and attention to the subtle channels of the spine. It is said to accelerate what the eight-limbed rāja yoga path approaches more gradually. Yogananda treats the lineage's claim of accelerated practice as testable rather than rhetorical. He devotes substantial chapters to the jīvanmuktas he met along the Ganges and is unembarrassed in presenting the [siddhis](lexicon:siddhi) — paranormal capacities — the older texts describe as side-effects of advanced practice.
Where to encounter it in the index
The book itself is the most cross-referenced text in the lexicon outside the Upaniṣads, cited in 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 its closest functional companions. Sadhguru's longer-form lectures and his book *Inner Engineering* operate in the same householder-yogi register Yogananda established, treating interior technique as a practical matter rather than a theological commitment. The Inner Engineering Online programme delivers the Shambhavi Mahāmudrā kriyā from Sadhguru's lineage, structurally adjacent to the kriyā Yogananda's lineage taught. *Be Here Now* and the 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 thread 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*.
