124 Biography of a Yogiof a short introductory address and, having proclaimed the importance of good
relations between India and the United States, collapsed. Attempts to revive
him by audience members and a promptly summoned ambulance crew proved
unsuccessful. Close disciples claim that, in the preceding days, a change had
come over the Master, and he had spoken as if to hint that he would soon be
leaving them. Accounts of whether or not Yogananda finished the introductory
address vary.
The condition of Yogananda’s body has long served as a final testament to his
superhuman status, especially among devotees. Excerpts from Yogananda’s official
mortuary report, issued by Forest Lawn Memorial Park, are included at the end
of all SRF editions of Yogananda’s Autobiography, attesting that “[t] he absence
of any visual signs of decay in the dead body of Paramhansa Yogananda offers
the most extraordinary case in our experience.” Yogananda’s body was embalmed
twenty hours after death, at which point it had not begun to exhibit any signs of
mold or desiccation. It was then interred twenty days later but remained under a
heavy glass cover for the majority of that time.
It appears, however, that Forest Lawn Memorial Park’s mortuary director
may have been a bit over- enthusiastic in his affirmations of the extraordinary
and unprecedented nature of Yogananda’s lack of visible decomposition. A cur-
sory investigation of these claims has been conducted by Leonard Angel,^66
who was able to ascertain that the uniqueness of the phenomenon had been
greatly overstated. Angel’s method generally consisted of picking out at ran-
dom two licensed embalmers from the local Yellow Pages. Both contacts, who
were credentialed professionals with many years of experience, confirmed that
it was not at all unusual for a body to retain its appearance for over a month,
especially given good conditions and a skilled embalmer. SRF reprints of the
mortuary report generally exclude the paragraphs that refer to Yogananda’s
body being embalmed. An even more problematic omission is a pair of sen-
tences in the report that even the otherwise unadulterated amazement of the
mortuary director could not suppress: “On the late morning on March 26th,
we observed a very slight, a barely noticeable change— the appearance on the
tip of the nose of a brown spot, about one- fourth inch in diameter. This small
faint spot indicated that the process of desiccation (drying up) might finally
be starting.”^67