92 Biography of a Yogiidentity and his status as an avatāra, a fully- realized immortal being, or simply
an extremely advanced adept, there is unanimous consensus within Yogananda’s
lineage that Babaji was responsible for the recovery of the teachings of Kriya Yoga
and their transmission to Lahiri Mahasaya.
Yogananda reports that Lahiri Mahasaya, whose full birth name was Shyama
Charan Lahiri, was born on September 30, 1828, though other sources claim that
the exact date is not known but has been conjectured to be in 1829.^4 There are
few specific accounts of Lahiri Mahasaya’s early life and even fewer of his family
background. His father is mentioned as a practitioner of yoga and his mother as
a Śaiva devotee, though no extraordinary religious fervor is attributed to either
of them by anyone other than Yogananda. In any case, it appears that Lahiri
Mahasaya lived a perfectly ordinary life until his encounter with Babaji in 1861.
He married, had two sons and two daughters, and had a fruitful if unremark-
able career as a clerk for the Military Engineering Department of the British
government. At the age of thirty- three, he received a transfer to Ranikhet and
it was there, in the midst of the Himalayas, that the fateful meeting with Babaji
occurred.
Due to the legendary character of this contact, Lahiri Mahasaya’s interactions
with Babaji will be more fully discussed in chapter 5. Suffice it to say that after
1861 he is regarded as having received initiation into the lost science of Kriya
Yoga and became qualified to initiate others. Having been instructed by Babaji
to serve as an example of the ideal Yogi- householder, Lahiri Mahasaya held his
government post for another twenty- five years. During this time, it is said that
he would initiate one or two people into the sādhana as time permitted. It was
only after his retirement that he began to gather a significant number of disciples.
He died on September 26, 1895, when Yogananda was only two years old; how-
ever, both of Yogananda’s parents received initiation from him. Lahiri Mahasaya
never belonged to any official order nor took any formal vows of renunciation.
His authority appears to have rested solely on his initiation by Babaji into Kriya
Yoga. On a practical level, his apparent level of education and proficiency in the
traditional literary canon likely played a significant role. He produced no original
written works in the formal sense, but he did publish twenty- six commentaries on
texts ranging from the classical darśana schools, to Pāṇini’s grammar, to various
Upaniṣads and devotional texts, including the poetry of Kabīr, to Abhinavagupta’s
Tantrasāra. The Bhagavad Gītā appears to have been a particular favorite and was
the principal text read and studied by his circle of devotees. Among the publi-
cations of Lahiri Mahasaya’s disciples, commentaries on the Bhagavad Gītā are
definitively the most plentiful.
Of all of Lahiri Mahasaya’s biographers, Yogananda is by far the most liberal
in attributing manifestations of superpowers to the man. The biography penned