Paramahansa Yogananda (born Mukunda Lal Ghosh, 5 January 1893, Gorakhpur; died 7 March 1952, Los Angeles) was an Indian yogi, monk and teacher who introduced Kriya Yoga to the West, founded the Self-Realization Fellowship (SRF) in Los Angeles in 1920, and wrote Autobiography of a Yogi, first published in December 1946 by Philosophical Library. The book has stayed in print continuously since publication, has been translated into more than 50 languages, and is among the most-read spiritual books of the 20th century. Yogananda’s lineage is the Kriya Yoga teacher-line of Sri Yukteswar Giri (his guru), Lahiri Mahasaya (Yukteswar’s guru), and Mahavatar Babaji (the lineage’s claimed originator). His samadhi shrine is at Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale, California.
Early life and meeting Sri Yukteswar
Yogananda was born in Gorakhpur (Uttar Pradesh) to a Bengali Kayastha family that later moved to Calcutta. His father, Bhagabati Charan Ghosh, was a senior official with the Bengal-Nagpur Railway. As a young man Mukunda was drawn to spiritual seeking, visiting various ashrams and saints across north India. In 1910, aged seventeen, he met Swami Sri Yukteswar Giri (1855–1936) at Serampore, near Calcutta, and immediately recognised him as his guru. He spent the next ten years training under Yukteswar at the ashrams in Serampore and Puri.
Yogananda took monastic vows in the Swami Order in 1915, taking the name Yogananda Giri (the suffix -ananda is standard in the Giri branch of the Dashanami Sannyasi order). The honorific Paramahansa (“supreme swan”, a high monastic title) was conferred by Sri Yukteswar in 1935.
The move to America and the founding of SRF
In 1920 Yogananda was invited to attend the International Congress of Religious Liberals in Boston as the Indian delegate; his address on “The Science of Religion” launched his American teaching career. He stayed in the US for 32 years, returning to India only briefly in 1935–1936. In 1920 he founded the Self-Realization Fellowship in Boston (incorporated in Los Angeles in 1935), and in 1925 established its international headquarters on Mount Washington, Los Angeles.
His Indian organisation, the Yogoda Satsanga Society of India (YSS), had been founded earlier in 1917 at Dihika near Asansol and headquartered at Dakshineswar near Calcutta, with subsequent ashrams at Ranchi, Noida and other Indian locations. Both organisations (SRF in Los Angeles, YSS in Ranchi) operate as parts of the same monastic order.
Kriya Yoga as taught
Kriya Yoga is the technique at the centre of Yogananda’s teaching. He described it as “an instrument through which human evolution can be quickened” and as a method of “soul-realization”. The technique itself is taught only after a period of preparation and only to initiated students; the published works describe its results and lineage but not the precise practice.
The lineage Yogananda claimed is:
- Mahavatar Babaji: the lineage’s claimed semi-mythical originator, described as living deathlessly in the Himalayas, who gave Kriya Yoga to Lahiri Mahasaya in 1861.
- Lahiri Mahasaya (Shyamacharan Lahiri, 1828–1895): a Bengali householder yogi who, after his 1861 meeting with Babaji in the Himalayas, taught Kriya Yoga in Varanasi.
- Swami Sri Yukteswar Giri (1855–1936): Lahiri’s disciple, Yogananda’s guru. Author of The Holy Science (1894), a comparative work claiming convergence between Vedanta and Christian scripture.
- Paramahansa Yogananda (1893–1952): sent west by Yukteswar in 1920.
Yogananda’s published exposition of Kriya Yoga’s broader framework appears in his commentary God Talks with Arjuna: The Bhagavad Gita (published posthumously, 1995) and in The Yoga of Jesus and The Second Coming of Christ, both produced from his lecture notes after his death.
Autobiography of a Yogi
The Autobiography of a Yogi, first published December 1946 by Philosophical Library (New York), is the book that brought Indian yoga teaching to broad Western audiences. Its 48 chapters mix Yogananda’s life with accounts of saints and miracle-workers across India, his meetings with Sri Yukteswar, Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Therese Neumann and Luther Burbank, and his teachings on Kriya Yoga and Vedanta cosmology.
The book has remained in continuous print since 1946. Rights passed from Philosophical Library to the Self-Realization Fellowship in October 1953, and SRF has issued updated editions since. It has been translated into more than 50 languages. Steve Jobs requested copies of the book be distributed to attendees at his memorial service (2011), and the book was placed on the recommended list of HarperCollins’s “100 Best Spiritual Books of the 20th Century” (1999).
The 1952 mahasamadhi and afterward
Yogananda died on 7 March 1952, at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, while delivering a speech at a banquet honouring the Indian ambassador Binay Ranjan Sen. SRF’s official position is that he entered a yogically-conscious passing (mahasamadhi) and that his body showed an absence of decay in the days following death; the mortuary notarised statement from Forest Lawn (Harry T. Rowe) is quoted in SRF publications. This claim is contested in skeptical and academic accounts and remains a matter of doctrinal commitment.
The Self-Realization Fellowship was led after his death by Rajarsi Janakananda (James J. Lynn), then by Sri Daya Mata for 55 years (1955–2010), then by Sri Mrinalini Mata (2011–2017), and currently by Brother Chidananda. The organisation maintains the Lake Shrine in Pacific Palisades, the Mount Washington headquarters, and ashrams across the US and abroad.
For what it’s worth, on reading the Autobiography
For what it’s worth, the Autobiography of a Yogi is most rewarding when read as a particular hybrid: a sincere first-person memoir of a 20th century Indian monastic life, layered with stories of saints whose miraculous biographies the author accepts at face value. A reader who insists on choosing between “all true” and “all symbolic” will miss what the book is doing. The biographical material (Yogananda’s family, his early Calcutta period, his American mission) is verifiable from independent records; the saint-stories are doctrinal and devotional. Both layers coexist in the text, and Yogananda’s own framing assumes the reader can hold both.
Common questions
Is Kriya Yoga the same as Patanjali’s eight-limbed yoga?
Yogananda taught Kriya Yoga as a specific technique within the broader framework of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. Patanjali’s eight-limbed (ashtanga) yoga consists of yamas, niyamas, asana, pranayama, pratyahara, dharana, dhyana and samadhi. Kriya Yoga as Yogananda taught it is a pranayama-and-meditation technique that fits within this framework but is a specific method drawn from the Yukteswar-Lahiri-Babaji lineage, not a synonym for Patanjali’s system as a whole.
Did Yogananda found a new religion?
Yogananda explicitly framed Self-Realization Fellowship as non-sectarian, claiming convergence between Vedantic and Christian teaching rather than founding a separate creed. His writings present Jesus alongside Krishna as enlightened teachers. SRF accepts initiates from any religious background and does not require conversion. Whether SRF in practice functions as a denominational community is a separate question; the founder’s stated position was non-denominational.
How does YSS in India differ from SRF in America?
Yogoda Satsanga Society of India (founded 1917, headquartered at Ranchi and Dakshineswar) and Self-Realization Fellowship (founded 1920, Los Angeles) are sister organisations under the same lineage and teach the same Kriya Yoga. They operate as separate institutional structures with shared leadership and a single board of directors-level governance. Programs, lessons and initiation procedures are parallel across both.
A limitation worth noting
The lineage chain extending to the legendary Mahavatar Babaji depends on accounts from Lahiri Mahasaya and his disciples; no independent contemporary documentation of Babaji exists outside this lineage. The lineage’s authenticity within its own tradition is unquestioned; the historical existence and details of Babaji are matters of doctrinal commitment rather than historiographic confirmation. Readers approaching the autobiography for historical study should hold this distinction.
For further reading, the official Self-Realization Fellowship site at yogananda.org publishes lineage and biographical material, the Paramahansa Yogananda entry on Wikipedia provides a cross-source account, and the 1946 first edition of the autobiography is in print and freely available in older editions on archive.org.
