Swami Satchidananda: the saint who opened Woodstock

A chain-smoking manager who became a monk

He had arrived at that field by a long and unlikely road. Born C. K. Ramaswamy Gounder in Tamil Nadu in 1914, he lived, by his own later account, an entirely worldly early life — a chain-smoking manager at India's National Electric Works, married, with two young sons. When his wife died after only five years of marriage, the loss turned him decisively inward. At twenty-eight he renounced the world, took the name Satchidananda — "existence, knowledge, bliss" — and in 1949 found his teacher in Swami Sivananda of Rishikesh.

The Sri Lanka years

Before America there was Ceylon. Through the late 1950s and most of the 1960s, Satchidananda headed the Kandy Thapovanam, one of Sivananda's ashrams in the hill country of Sri Lanka, where he taught yoga and began the interfaith experiments — reworking traditional Hindu festivals to include all faiths — that would become his signature. It was there that he honed the inclusive, modernising approach he later carried west.

Integral Yoga

The crossing came in 1966, when the pop artist Peter Max and a circle of his friends invited Satchidananda to New York. He intended a short visit; he stayed, and so many students gathered that he founded Integral Yoga and its first institute that same year, in an apartment on the Upper West Side. His teaching was a synthesis — the physical practice of hatha yoga joined to breathing, meditation, diet, service and devotion — a complete path rather than mere exercise, summed up in his maxim "Truth is One, Paths are Many."

A guru to the counterculture

His students read like a roll-call of the era's creative life. The Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, the jazz visionary Alice Coltrane, the songwriter Carole King and the actor Jeff Goldblum all passed through his orbit. In 1968 he co-founded the Center for Spiritual Studies in New York with a rabbi, a Zen master and a Benedictine monk — an early, concrete experiment in the interfaith dialogue he preached, and a model that anticipated decades of American spiritual pluralism.

Yogaville and the shrine to all faiths

In 1986 Satchidananda established Integral Yoga's headquarters, Satchidananda Ashram–Yogaville, in rural Virginia. At its heart he built the Light Of Truth Universal Shrine (LOTUS), a lotus-shaped interfaith temple housing altars to all the world's religions — an architectural statement of his central teaching. He blessed it, characteristically, by sprinkling holy water from a helicopter.

Into mainstream medicine

His influence reached well beyond the ashram. The cardiologist Dean Ornish, whose clinically proven programme for reversing heart disease incorporated yoga-based stress reduction and a vegetarian diet, was directly inspired by Satchidananda — who wrote on healthy vegetarian living with a foreword from Ornish. Through that link, the Woodstock Guru's teaching travelled into peer-reviewed cardiology and the American hospital, one of the clearest cases of Indian yoga entering Western medicine.

The man on the stage

He died in 2002, in India, while on a speaking tour. But the image endures: a serene Indian monk, alone on a stage before the defining crowd of a generation, teaching half a million restless young Americans to be still and chant a single syllable. Of all the moments in the long passage of Indian spirituality to the West, few are as vivid or as widely seen — and Satchidananda, calm and smiling at its centre, made himself its most recognisable face.