Paramhansa Yogananda was born in Gorakhpur, India, on Thursday (considered Guru-day) January 5, 1893. He was not an ordinary yogi or saint, but “came liberated,” as he himself stated. This means that he incarnated as an avatar. He is, in fact, known amongst his followers as a Premavatar, an incarnation of love.
Love and devotion, in fact, were his hallmark. He writes: “My own temperament is principally devotional.”
His life became famous through his bestselling book, Autobiography of a Yogi. His teachings focus on Kriya Yoga, Self-realization, God-union, spiritual living, and healing in body, mind, and soul.
Most essentially, Paramhansa Yogananda represented the ancient and sacred tradition of Kriya Yoga, and a line of Christ-like Gurus: Mahavatar Babaji, Lahiri Mahasaya, and Sri Yukteswar. Kriya Yoga, he stated, is “the airplane-route” to God. It is an ancient “sacred knowledge” which had gradually become inaccessible, but was now being brought back to humanity.
In his Autobiography of a Yogi, Yogananda explains:
“The lost, or long-vanished, highest art of yoga was again being brought to light. Many spiritually thirsty men and women eventually found their way to the cool waters of Kriya Yoga. Just as in the Hindu legend, where Mother Ganges offers her divine draught to the parched devotee Bhagirath, so the celestial flood of Kriya rolled from the secret fastnesses of the Himalayas into the dusty haunts of men.”
Yogananda was the first yoga master of India to take up permanent residence in the West. He arrived in America 100 years ago, in 1920, and toured the entire country on “spiritual campaigns.” Filling the largest halls in many major American cities, he gradually became famous.
He founded Self-Realization Fellowship, which during his lifetime included both the monastic and non-monastic lifestyle. One of his basic “Aims and ideals” was to create communities, “World-Brotherhood Colonies,” an ideal which his disciple, Swami Kriyananda, later manifested as the Ananda movement.
Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi, first published in 1946, helped launch the yoga movement in the Western hemisphere. This is why today he is called “the Father of yoga in the West.”
The documentary film AWAKE narrates his extraordinary life.
He passed away from this world on March 7, 1952, in a spectacular way: his body remained incorrupt for three weeks, after which his casket was closed. This phenomenon was described in the TIME-magazine.