Introduction
This book is not actually a biography— at least not in the traditional sense
of the word. It is not the story of a person but a persona. When Paramahansa
Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi was first published in 1946, the Yogi had
already become a stock character on the American cultural landscape. Time maga-
zine, in a 1947 review of the then- little- known spiritual classic, provocatively titled
“Here Comes the Yogiman,” gives the following account of the state of things:
Some of the most literate practitioners of the English language have writ-
ten about yoga. Several of them have even sweetened their message with
some of their best sex- novel tricks. But despite the literary followers of
Indian philosophy— Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, John (Voice
of the Turtle) Van Druten and Gerald Heard— yoga is still as mystifying as
Sanskrit to the average American.
One trouble is that there are no bar associations or synods to set stan-
dards among swamis (holy men, monks)— almost anyone in the U.S. can
set up shop as a swami if he can find any followers. As a result, there are
devout swamis who lead the good life, and there are swamis who simply
enjoy a good life. Few of either kind write their autobiographies, so this
life story by California’s Paramhansa Yogananda (a Bengali pseudonym
meaning approximately Swami- Bliss- through- Divine- Union) is some-
thing of a document. It is not likely to give the uninitiated much insight
into India's ancient teachings. It does show exceedingly well how an alien
culture may change when transplanted by a businesslike nurseryman from
the tough soil of religious asceticism into hothouses of financial wealth
and spiritual despair.So who exactly is the “Yogiman”? And what precisely is a Yogi? Even in contem-
porary times, when yoga studios compete with coffee shops for the amount of real