Autobiography of a Yogi

Before Yogananda, knowledge in the United States of the Indian scriptures known collectively as the Vedanta (which literally means “end of the Veda”) had been slowly growing in intellectual circles for about 80 years, but they were still unknown to the vast majority of Americans.

The first translation into English of the Bhagavad Gita, which contains the teaching given by Lord Krishna to the warrior Arjuna, was made in 1785. One American who eagerly devoured the Gita and other Indian texts was philosopher and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882). The Transcendentalist philosophy for which Emerson became famous was saturated by the distilled wisdom of spiritual India. His 1841 essay “The Over-Soul” contains the following passage:

We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul (“The Over-Soul.” Emerson’s Essays, J. M. Dent, 1955, p. 150).

As a succinct expression of the essence of Vedanta, this could almost have been written by Yogananda. (Many years later, Yogananda would read widely in Emerson’s work, and he mentions it several times in the footnotes of Autobiography of a Yogi.)

Emerson passed on his interest in Vedanta to Henry David Thoreau, who was captivated by its wisdom. In Walden, Thoreau’s account of the two years (1845-47) he lived in a wooden hut on Walden Pond, he wrote, “In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial” (Thoreau, Henry David. Walden, or Life in the Woods. Signet Classic, 1980, p. 198). Thoreau went on to read extensively in Indian spiritual philosophy.

The Transcendentalists were thus steeped in Vedanta, and their work proved to be of lasting influence in American culture. However, they learned it from books rather than directly from Indian teachers. It was not until 1893 that an Indian monk reached American shores to convey firsthand the wisdom of India. This was Swami Vivekananda, who traveled to Chicago to address the World’s Parliament of Religions. Swami Vivekananda was an impressive speaker, and the several talks he gave over the two-week period of the parliament were received with great enthusiasm. Vivekananda presented a modernized view of Hinduism that would appeal to the West. He remained in America, teaching Vedanta to interested American students for several years before returning to India in 1896. He was back in America in 1899, and he started a Vedantic Society in San Francisco, returning to India a year later. The Vedantic Society did much to spread the message of Vedanta in America, and Swami Vivekananda was a forerunner of Yogananda, who arrived on American shores 20 years after Vivekanada left them. (Swami Vivekananda appears in Autobiography of a Yogi in the recollections of Yogananda’s disciple Mr. Dickinson.)