Sri Yukteswar

Bengali Hindu monk, astronomer, scholar, and Kriya Yoga master who is most widely known as the guru of Paramahansa Yogananda — through whom his teaching reached the West via Yogananda's 1946 Autobiography of a Yogi, one of the bestselling spiritual books of the twentieth century. Born Priya Nath Karar in 1855 in Serampore, Sri Yukteswar studied Sanskrit, astronomy, and the scriptures, married, raised a family, and at the death of his wife took monastic ordination as a swami of the Giri branch of the Shankaracharya order. His own guru was Lahiri Mahasaya, transmitter of the modern Kriya Yoga lineage. In 1894, at the request of Mahavatar Babaji, Sri Yukteswar wrote The Holy Science (Kaivalya Darshanam) — a short book that proposes a unified framework for Vedic and Christian scripture, and that introduces the Yuga theory of the precessional ages of consciousness that has been widely cited in the contemporary integrative spirituality literature. He died in 1936 in Puri, Odisha. His ashram and lineage continue today in the Self-Realization Fellowship.