Background and the Kainchi years
Born around 1900 in Akbarpur in present-day Uttar Pradesh into a Saraswat Brahmin family, the boy left home as a teenager and lived as a wandering sādhu before being recognised as a teacher by villagers in the Kumaon foothills who began calling him Neem Karoli Baba after a hamlet by that name. He was an unusual kind of teacher: he gave no public talks, wrote no books, refused to pose as the originator of a school, and had a habit of disappearing for weeks at a time to other temples and other devotees. His ashrams — Kainchi in the Kumaon hills above Nainital, and a smaller temple in Vrindavan — were the two centres around which a continually shifting community gathered through the 1960s and into 1973. The form of the days at Kainchi was as plain as the architecture: morning darśan on a wooden bench, midday meal eaten in lines on the ground, an afternoon of disappearing-into-room and reappearing whenever it pleased him, evening darśan again. Devotees came from Delhi, Lucknow and Allahabad, and after 1967 a slow but steady flow of Westerners, mostly American, mostly young.
The Western transmission
The pivotal arrival was Richard Alpert in 1967 — the Harvard psychology professor recently fired alongside Timothy Leary for the LSD studies, who reached the temple carrying a private supply of psilocybin and a private despair about what materialism could explain. The story of what happened on the porch — Maharaji asking for the pills, taking what should have been a fatal dose with no apparent effect, then telling Alpert aloud the unspoken thought he had been holding about his recently deceased mother — is the founding scene of an entire stream of American spirituality. Alpert was renamed Ram Dass, servant of God, and went home to write the book that introduced the figure of Maharaji to the West. Krishna Das and Jai Uttal carried the chanting tradition into American kīrtan; Larry Brilliant became a public-health epidemiologist who helped lead the WHO's smallpox eradication campaign and later founded the Seva Foundation with Ram Dass; Steve Jobs went to India in 1974 looking for him, arrived after Maharaji's death the previous September, and kept a copy of Autobiography of a Yogi on his iPad to be reread, by his own request, at his memorial.
In the index
Be Here Now is the most direct testimony in the corpus to what Maharaji's presence was, and what taking him as one's teacher meant for an American academic in the late 1960s. The book's middle section — the hand-lettered brown pages — is essentially a love-letter to him. The Maharaji story is the densest single anecdote: a bhakti yoga recognition compressed into a few minutes of telling, the only God punchline standing in for a whole pedagogy of what a true teacher actually does. Both items are indexed under Ram Dass; the bhakti-yoga entry covers the broader devotional tradition into which Maharaji's transmission sits, and the Maharaji story itself sits alongside it as the entry's closing example.
Why a teacher who taught nothing
The conventional shape of a transmitted lineage is doctrinal: a body of instruction passed from teacher to student through commentary and practice. Maharaji's transmission was the other shape — darśanic, in the older Hindu sense — a transmission through the bare fact of the teacher's presence and the student's exposure to it. He gave no formal upadeśa, no dīkṣā procedure, no graded curriculum. His devotees were left, after his death, with an unusual problem: an instruction so simple it could be written on a postcard (love everyone, feed everyone, remember God) and a recognition so unrepeatable it required no instruction at all. The two halves do not contradict in the Hindu framework; they are how a guru lineage often actually works. What the Ram Dass entry records — and what the book and the talks make available — is one student's forty-year attempt to pass on something that was not, in the strict sense, ever taught.
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