Autobiography of a Yogi

Chapters 5-7 put the spotlight on several gurus that the young Mukunda encounters and from whom he learns various lessons. His challenging of Gandhu Baba, the “perfume saint,” is one of the few occasions in the book where Mukunda (or the later Yogananda) adopts a critical attitude to a saint and his powers. As such, it complicates the book’s theme of Visions, Miracles, Foreknowledge, and Healing. In Mukunda’s view, Gandhu Baba’s scents benefit no one and serve merely as a means of showing off. This empty showmanship is anathema to the engaged spirituality Yogananda wants to offer. Through this anecdote, he enhances his own credibility by casting himself as the opposite of this charlatan. Notably, he does not accuse Gandhu Baba of performing an illusion. The perfume phenomenon is genuinely supernormal. The accusation, in a sense, is more serious: Gandhu Baba has genuinely cultivated the swami’s mastery over the fabric of reality, but he is misusing this power for personal gain rather than for the benefit of humankind. Though he is in the text only briefly, it’s possible to view Gandhu Baba as a foil for Yogananda himself, especially in light of another parallel: Gandhu Baba’s student claims that the swami learned his secrets from a master in Tibet who was over a thousand years old. Presumably, this is the story that the perfume saint told about himself—it must have been useful in elevating him in the eyes of his followers while at the same time being impossible to verify. Yogananda’s own chain of masters ends with a similarly apocryphal figure—the immortal Babaji who was purportedly the guru of Lahiri Mahasaya.

The story of the Tiger Swami touches on the notion, fundamental to Indian thought, of karma. The law of karma states that action equals reaction. Whatever a person does in the world, whether good or bad, spreads an influence throughout the cosmos, which will come back to them eventually. By running a kind of circus in which tigers performed tricks for the public, Tiger Swami created bad karma for himself.

Like so many of Yogananda’s stories, this one also features a saint who makes an accurate prediction about the future. The power to discern the future, if the story is true, is likely acquired from a deep understanding of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, according to which “[b]y the clarity of intuitive perception everything can be known” (Shearer, Alistair. Effortless Being: The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, A New Translation by Alistair Shearer. Wildwood House, 1982, p. 103).

Yogananda mentions Patanjali at the beginning of the chapter on the levitating saint. He believes that the saint has mastered the “eightfold yoga” described by Patanjali, whom Yogananda calls “the foremost ancient exponent of yoga” (67). In one of the Yoga Sutras, Patanjali describes how to acquire the ability to levitate: “From sanyama on the relationship between body and akasha, together with absorption in the lightness of cotton fibre, we can move through the air at will” (Shearer 107). (In the state of sanyama, the mind is established in its transcendental state, from which it is able to entertain thought at its most subtle level, including the cryptic formula described here. The Sanskrit word akasha is translated in different ways, as ether or space, or similar.)

Reports of human levitation can be found in many religious traditions, as Rodney Charles and Anna Jordan show in their book Lighter Than Air: Miracles of Human Flight From Christian Saints to Native American Spirits (Sunstar Publishing, 1995). The great Indian philosopher Shankara (AD 788-820) flew through the air when he wanted to visit someone in a city many miles away. “Traveling through the skies,” he reaches the city. “Admiring the beauty and splendor of the numerous buildings of the city, he descended from the skies even like the sun at the close of day, in a lovely wooded park of that place” (Charles 20-21). Charles and Jordan include many other examples from the Buddhist, Islamic, Jewish, and Christian traditions. In Christianity, St. Teresa and Joseph of Cupertino are notable examples (they are also mentioned by Yogananda in a footnote [73]). Other examples include St. Francis of Assisi and Catherine of Sienna.

The levitating saint seems to acknowledge something that eluded the perfume saint—what counts is not the supernormal power itself but the purpose it serves in bringing the yogi closer to God. The levitating saint says to Mukunda, “Do not mistake the technique for the Goal” (69). Mukunda knows what he means: The most important thing is to learn how to love God.

Yogananda follows these chapters on Indian saints with an account of the work of the Indian scientist Jagadish Chandra (J.C.) Bose because he wants to show that India not only possesses spiritual knowledge but also contributes to scientific discoveries. This is part of his focus on The Coming Together of East and West. Bose himself claims to have accomplished such a synthesis with his crescograph, an instrument that measures not only the physical growth but also the emotional development of plants. By including the chapter on Bose, which immediately follows three chapters on swamis and gurus, Yogananda implicitly aligns the scientist with this tradition—like the gurus, Bose is investigating the hidden nature of reality. The methods of science and spirituality may be different, but their aims are compatible. Similarly, Yogananda often explains supernormal phenomena in scientific language. The perfume saint, for example, creates his scents by controlling “vibratory variations in electrons and protons” (54). This compatibility—between yoga and Christianity, between yoga and science—is among the book’s most fundamental themes, as it was Yogananda’s project to bring yoga to a Western audience.