From Bengal to Boston
Born Mukunda Lal Ghosh in Gorakhpur in 1893, Yogananda was educated in Bengal and trained from his teens by Sri Yukteswar Giri, himself a disciple of Lahiri Mahasaya — the figure credited with the modern revival of kriyā yoga under the cryptic instruction of the legendary Babaji of the Himalayan tradition. The lineage Yogananda inherited was 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 path approaches more slowly. In 1920 he was sent to address the International Congress of Religious Liberals in Boston; he never returned to India for permanent residence, founding what became the Self-Realization Fellowship in Los Angeles the same year and teaching there for the next three decades.
Autobiography of a Yogi
The 1946 book is the document by which Yogananda is most widely known. It is not a doctrinal exposition but a sequence of autobiographical episodes — the meeting with Sri Yukteswar, the encounters with Babaji, the testimony of saints and yogis Yogananda met across northern India, the move to America, the reception in Boston and Los Angeles — written in a high-Edwardian English register that has not aged comfortably. The book's durability rests less on its prose than on the world it claims to describe: a continuous, named lineage of householder 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. It was the book Steve Jobs reread annually and asked to be distributed to mourners at his memorial; George Harrison treated it as a primary teaching text. Several million copies are in print across more than fifty languages, and it remains, with Nisargadatta Maharaj's *I Am That*, one of the two twentieth-century works that most consistently introduce English-language readers to the Indian contemplative inheritance.
Teaching and method
The kriyā yoga curriculum Yogananda transmitted is initiatory: the formal techniques are taught only after a period of preparatory lessons and a vow of confidentiality, in keeping with the lineage's practice. The publicly available material — the Autobiography, the printed Lessons, the lecture corpus — points at the work without disclosing the techniques themselves. The orientation is more devotional than is common in the non-dual lineages: Yogananda speaks freely of God, and his framing draws explicitly on both the Hindu bhakti current and a self-consciously Christian register intended for an American audience that had not yet developed the Sanskrit ear. His Self-Realization Fellowship — the choice of English name was deliberate — frames the work as the recognition of the self in the Vedāntic sense rather than as religious adherence.
In the index
The *Autobiography* is the index's primary Yogananda reference and the most accessible Western-facing entry into the kriyā yoga lineage in print. The contemporary Indian voice closest to its register is Sadhguru, whose Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy and Inner Engineering Online course treat disciplined inner technique as a curriculum rather than a heritage object — a different lineage (Śaiva yogic, southern India, distinct from the Lahiri Mahasaya stream) but a comparable insistence that the work is actually doable and that the recognition is the point. Ram Dass is the index's primary contemporary voice for the bhakti current that Yogananda's writing also threads — his guru Neem Karoli Baba sat in the same devotional Hindu landscape Yogananda described from a generation earlier. The convergence of these three streams — kriyā discipline, bhakti devotion, contemporary Western articulation — is the soil in which most English-language yoga and meditation practice still grows, whether or not the Sanskrit names are in use.
What he isn't
Yogananda is not the source of modern Western postural yoga — that is mostly traceable to T. Krishnamacharya and his students Pattabhi Jois, B. K. S. Iyengar and T. K. V. Desikachar, working in a different lineage and with different priorities. He is not a non-dual teacher in the strict Advaita sense: his framing assumes a personal God, a soul, a path of accumulated practice across many lifetimes, and an institutional structure (the SRF) intended to outlast him. The hagiographic register of the Autobiography — the materialisations, the saintly competitions, the predictive miracles — does the book no favours with skeptical readers and is sometimes embarrassing to its devotees; it is best read as the testimony of a tradition that does not regard the natural-supernatural distinction as load-bearing, rather than as a literal travel diary. What survived after his death is the SRF itself — a tightly governed organisation that has retained the Lessons curriculum largely unchanged for seventy-five years — and the book, which has gone on travelling on its own.
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