Yogi before West embraced yoga

Vivek Atray

Finding God Through Yoga is a serious attempt to introduce the busy reader to the reasons for the global acceptance of the teachings of Paramahansa Yogananda, popularly known as the father of yoga in the West. David J. Neumann chooses an analytical pathway to discover and uncover the factors responsible for the astounding success of Yogananda as a global guru, particularly on the soil of America, in the early part of the twentieth century.

Neumann lauds Yogananda as an evangelist, a missionary of the ancient tradition of yoga meditation to the West, paradoxically at a time when missionary activities by westerners in Asia were more in vogue.

As Neumann points out, Yogananda, in the years after his dramatic departure from India and arrival in Boston in 1920, penetrated the hearts and minds of a large number of Americans with his spiritual teachings. His speech, The Science of Religion, at the Congress of Religious Liberals caught the attention of American scholars in a land still largely suspicious of long-haired and dark-skinned yogis from the Orient. Neumann highlights Yogananda’s well-received lectures in several major American towns and the establishment of the headquarters of his spiritual organisation, Self Realisation Fellowship, at Los Angeles. He takes pains to explain how facile it was, relatively speaking, for Yogananda to find a foothold in the receptive state of California than it was in states which were not as warm to the ‘strange’ guru and his novel ideas. Southern California, incidentally, was already a magnet for religious diversity at the time, he writes.

Yet, Yogananda gradually steered what can only be described as a subtle wave of ‘American Hinduism’ which permeated into many parts of the land. In the chapter titled The Creation of a Yogi Guru Persona, Neumann emphasises the fact that Yogananda succeeded despite the odds mainly due to his deep understanding of America’s culture as also his widely accepted commentaries on the teachings of Jesus Christ.

In writing this book, Neumann has banked heavily on Yogananda’s globally acclaimed Autobiography of a Yogi, which has been translated into over 50 languages worldwide. Neumann has also carried out extensive research into similar works of other American scholars but finds most of these inadequate in understanding the extent of the impact which Yogananda made in evangelising a ‘global religion’. He further finds it fascinating that the ‘divine’ status of Yogananda, which was widely accepted in India, should find acceptance also with hardened Americans, despite their being wedded to the materialistic way of life.

Neumann avers that Yogananda was amazingly adept at marketing and promoting his work, as is evidenced by the success of his printed lessons on yoga meditation as well as his East West magazine, now called Self Realisation. Neumann writes that Yogananda alternated, during his public speeches, between expounding deep esoteric teachings and relating ‘folksy’ anecdotes!

Yogananda’s legacy endures even today mainly due to the efforts of Self Realisation Fellowship and Yogoda Satsanga Society of India, organisations he established a century ago. Hundreds of monastics and millions of ‘lay’ disciples are practitioners of ‘Kriya Yoga’ which Yogananda taught to the modern man. “The teachings will be the Guru after I am gone,” Yogananda had famously declared. Today, there are over 200 centres across India and over two million Indian devotees who gather regularly at these centres for group meditation activities. Neumann stresses that Yogananda ‘was a teacher both of the inner journey of self-realisation and of religion’. He perhaps misses the point that both spirituality and religion, in their truest sense, are in unison with each other and ultimately seek the same goal, oneness with God.

The book succeeds in examining both the enigmatic persona of Paramahansa Yogananda and the movement that he led with painstaking care. Those who have read the autobiography and other works of Yogananda will find this of immense interest.