Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yoganda: book review

Autobiography of a Yogi (1946, this edition 2018) is the life of the spiritual leader Yoganda from India.

As with any autobiography, Yoganda begins with his childhood in the Himalayan region of northeastern India. His parents moved to Calcutta, where his mother dies, and he returns to the mountains at a young age. He describes his youth, and India, as ‘materially poor’ but with ‘an inexhaustible fund of divine wealth.’

After ten years in a hermitage in his youth, where he learns from a range of saints, sages, and scientists, he moved to America where he lived and worked for 30 years. Along the way, he remembers the wisdom of his elders: ‘Straighforwardness without civility is like a surgeon’s knife, effective but unpleasant. Candor with courtesy is helpful and admirable.’

Apart from the traditions of meditation and his meetings with famous personalities, such as Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore, he recites everyday duties in an everyday life. For example, he comically mentions the theft of his six cauliflowers that he grew from seeds: the thief, ‘evidently one with a vegetable fixation, had left untouched my gold rings, watch and money, all lying openly on the blanket. He had crawled instead under the bed where, completely hidden from casual sight, one of my cauliflowers had aroused his singlehearted desire.’ He also mentions ‘the wonders’ of radio and television. Science fascinated him, as much as spiritually.

Written over 70 years ago, at the end of the Second World War, and widely read by influential business leaders in the East and West, this autobiography is more than an explanation of meditation, miracles, and spirituality; it is also about diet, non-violence, equal respect for all religions, the laws of love, and gratefulness.

MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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