Swami Sivananda: the teacher whose students taught the world
Part 9 of The Masters Who Crossed the Ocean. A doctor who renounced medicine to write 200 books and train the teachers who carried yoga across the world — the hidden hub of the whole story.
The Masters Who Crossed the Ocean — Part 9 of 12.
He is the hub of this whole story. If you have ever taken a yoga class anywhere in the West, the lineage very likely runs, within a generation or two, back to a former physician in Rishikesh who renounced his profession, wrote some two hundred books, and trained the teachers who taught the world.
The doctor who renounced
He was born Kuppuswami on 8 September 1887 in Pattamadai, Tamil Nadu. He trained in medicine and practised as a doctor in British Malaya for about a decade, with a reputation for treating the poor for free. But conventional medicine, he came to feel, healed only the surface. He abandoned his practice, returned to India in 1924, and at Rishikesh was initiated into monastic life by Vishvananda Saraswati — though he kept nursing the sick, opening a charitable dispensary in 1927.
The Divine Life Society
In 1936 he founded the Divine Life Society, distributing spiritual literature free of charge, and in 1948 the Yoga-Vedanta Forest Academy. His teaching was a deliberate "Yoga of Synthesis," weaving together the four classical paths — karma (action), bhakti (devotion), jnana (knowledge) and raja (meditation) — into a programme ordinary people could follow. He distilled it into six words still repeated by his followers: Serve, Love, Give, Purify, Meditate, Realise.
The teacher of teachers
He was astonishingly prolific, the author of more than two hundred books on yoga and Vedanta. But his greatest legacy was human. The disciples who passed through his Rishikesh ashram became, between them, some of the most important exporters of yoga in the twentieth century: Swami Vishnudevananda (Sivananda Yoga, and the famous "peace planes"), Swami Satchidananda (who opens Woodstock in the next part of this series), Swami Chinmayananda (the Chinmaya Mission), Swami Sivananda Radha and Swami Venkatesananda. He died on 14 July 1963 at his ashram by the Ganga — but through those students, his synthesis reached the world.
Next in the series: Swami Satchidananda, the disciple who opened the Woodstock festival.
Sources: Wikipedia: Sivananda Saraswati.
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