Swami Krishnananda
General Secretary of the Divine Life Society, Rishikesh
twentieth century · The Chinmaya Lineage
- When
- Twentieth century; the Society's account does not give his years
- Born
- South Kanara district, on the west coast of South India; known in his early life as Subbaraya
- Where the life was lived
- The west coast of South India, then Hospet, Varanasi, Haridwar, and from 1944 the Sivananda Ashram at Rishikesh on the Ganges, where he spent the rest of his life.
- What is left of it
- A large body of published lectures and books on the Upaniṣads, the Gītā, the Brahma-sūtras and yoga.
Made the architecture of Vedānta plain to readers who had no teacher nearby, and kept the institution that printed it running.
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 came from the coastal country of South Kanara, on the Arabian Sea, the eldest of five children; part of his childhood was spent near the Shanmukha temple at Kemminji, and he went to school at Puttur. In 1943 he entered government service at Hospet, in the dry Bellary district — and held Gītā classes for the public while doing it, which tells you where the centre of gravity already was. Then he left. He went first to Varanasi to study the Vedas and Sanskrit, on to Haridwar, and in 1944 to Rishikesh, where the Ganges comes out of the hills. There he met Swami Sivananda and stayed for the rest of his life, eventually as General Secretary of the Divine Life Society. What he left is a shelf of extraordinarily clear expositions — the Upaniṣads, the Gītā, the Brahma-sūtras, yoga — delivered as talks to whoever was in the hall and published cheaply and endlessly by the Society. For a great many readers in the twentieth century, in India and far outside it, those books were the only teacher available. This lineage of the site runs through Sivananda and Tapovan Maharaj to Swami Chinmayananda, and he is the other great expositor of that line: the one who stayed at the ashram and explained everything, while his contemporary took the Gītā on the road.
The turn it rests on
At Rishikesh he met Swami Sivananda and stayed as a resident practitioner, eventually serving as General Secretary of the Divine Life Society.
What was taught
Taught the whole of Vedānta from Rishikesh in lucid, unhurried English, and ran the institution that published it, for decades.
Read the originals
Primary texts and the records kept by the teacher's own institution.
Every daily message names the teacher it came from. Read the messages, or see the whole line this teacher stands in: all fifty-one teachers.