Swami Chinmayananda

The full-length study of this teacher is still being written. What is below is the complete short life, and it is accurate as far as it goes.

The life

He was born Balakrishna Menon at Ernakulam in Kerala in 1916, took a degree in law and literature, and became a journalist during the freedom movement — jailed by the British, ill with typhus in prison, and left on the street when released. A working reporter with a sceptic's instincts. So he went north in September 1947, in the weeks of Partition, on an assignment of his own devising: to expose the swamis of Rishikesh as frauds. He met Swami Sivananda instead, stayed, and was sent higher, to Swami Tapovan at Uttarkashi, where he studied the Upaniṣads and Śaṅkara for years in Himalayan conditions. In 1951 he came down and did something the tradition had not done. He announced a public Jñāna Yajña in Pune and lectured on the Gītā, in English, to anyone who turned up — no qualification, no caste, no initiation, no fee. The orthodox were appalled; the halls filled. He founded Chinmaya Mission on 8 August 1953, started classes for young students, and opened the Sandeepany school, which trained the teachers who now run more than three hundred centres. He taught for forty years across India and abroad, wrote The Holy Geeta and commentaries on the principal Upaniṣads and the Vivekacūḍāmaṇi, and died on 3 August 1993. His shrine is at Sidhbari in Himachal Pradesh, under the Dhauladhar wall of the Himalaya — back in the mountains he had come down from.

The turn it rests on

A sceptical reporter went to write an exposé and stayed to become a monk.

What was taught

A journalist who went to debunk the sages and stayed; from 1951 he taught the Gita and Upanishads to mass audiences in plain English, with jokes, and built children's classes worldwide.