Swami Krishnananda

The India he was born into

He was born on 25 April 1922 in Puttur, a market town in the wet green hills of South Kanara, the coastal district below the Western Ghats that then belonged to the Madras Presidency and now forms Dakshina Kannada in Karnataka. It is Tulu and Kannada country, thirty miles inland from Mangalore, and it is Madhva country: the great dualist Vedāntin Sri Madhva was born some sixty miles up the coast, at Pājaka near Udupi, in the thirteenth century, and the orthodox Brahmin families of the district had for six hundred years held, as a matter of birth, that the soul and God are eternally distinct. That is the tradition he was born into, and it is worth keeping in mind that the most uncompromising non-dualist on this site began life in a household whose scriptures said he was wrong.

The year matters too. 1922 was the year of Chauri Chaura and Gandhi's arrest, the year the non-cooperation movement was called off and the country went quiet to wait. It was also, in the Himalaya, the decade in which a Tamil doctor from Pattamadai, having given up a practice in Malaya, wandered north and settled in 1924 in a hut on the Ganga at Rishikesh. By the time the boy in Puttur was fourteen, that doctor — Swami Sivananda — had founded the Divine Life Society, in 1936, and was beginning to publish the flood of books that would reach even South Kanara. The boy's whole life would be spent in that man's ashram, doing that man's paperwork, and becoming, in his teacher's phrase, its "Dakshinamurti and Sankaracharya."

Where the life was lived

This is the smallest map on the site. Puttur for twenty-one years; a few months of a government job at Hospet; some months in Varanasi; and then, from the summer of 1944 until his death in November 2001, one ashram on one riverbank at Rishikesh, which by his Society's account he almost never left. He is the one teacher here who did not travel, and the point of the map is to show how little ground a whole life can need.

Subbaraya of Puttur

His name was Subbaraya. He was the eldest of five children of Kombrenje Shankara Narayana Putturaya and Kaveri Amma, a devout, orthodox, Sanskrit-speaking Madhva household, and his own account of his boyhood is a catalogue of precocity told without vanity. He stood first in every subject at the Puttur high school. He taught himself Sanskrit from the Amarakośa, the ancient thesaurus every traditional student memorised, and from whatever scriptural texts were in the house. And he decided, while still a boy, to memorise the whole of the Bhagavad Gītā, seven hundred verses, by a method of his own: he would not eat breakfast, or lunch either, until the day's quota of verses was by heart. Within months he had the whole book, and he recited it, in full, every day.

Two things came of this. The first was that a Madhva boy, reading the Gītā and the Upaniṣads in Sanskrit for himself rather than through his family's commentators, drifted steadily — his Society's biography says "increasingly rooted" — into the Advaita of Sri Śaṅkara, and did so alone, with no teacher and against his upbringing, simply because that was what the texts said to him. The second was more childlike and more decisive. He read in the Bhāgavata that Lord Nārāyaṇa dwells at Badrinath, in the Himalaya, and he believed it literally: he began secretly to wish to go north, to the mountains, and see the Lord there. The longing for renunciation, the Society says, "grew stronger every day."

The man who left twice

He did what eldest sons did. In 1943, aged twenty-one, he entered government service at Hospet, in the Bellary district — the hot Deccan interior, the ruins of Vijayanagara a few miles off. It did not last long. Before the year was out he had left, and gone not home but to Varanasi, the oldest city of learning in the north, where he stayed some months. And then something the Society's page describes with unusual reticence — "the longing for seclusion and the unknown call from the Master" — drew him up the Ganga to Rishikesh. He arrived in the summer of 1944. He was twenty-two.

What happened there is told in one sentence. He met Swami Sivananda and fell prostrate before him, and the saint said: "Stay here till death. I will make kings and ministers fall at your feet." Both halves came true. He stayed until his death fifty-seven years later, and in the decades between, as General Secretary of one of the largest spiritual organisations in India, the ministers did come. But the sentence is worth reading for its first half rather than its second. A twenty-two-year-old with a government job behind him and a Madhva family in the south had just been told, on the first day, that he would never leave. He never did.

The typist

He was given no glamorous work. Swami Sivananda, who wrote more than almost any religious teacher of the century, selected him for correspondence: letters, messages, the compiling and editing of books. Then he was set to typing his teacher's handwritten manuscripts, which the old doctor brought him every day. He typed the whole of Swami Sivananda's Brahma Sūtras — a very large book, with a word-by-word translation of every sūtra and an introduction to every topic — from the master's longhand. He "confined himself mostly to literary work," the Society says, and then adds a sentence that is the key to the whole man: he "never had any kind of relationship with visitors," and "people who came from outside never knew that he existed in the Ashram."

Consider what that means. The ashram at Rishikesh in the late 1940s was one of the most visited spiritual places in India; the most famous seekers of the age passed through it. And one of the most brilliant minds in the building sat in a room typing someone else's book and was, to all of them, invisible. This was not shyness. It was the sādhana. A young man who had memorised the Gītā by fasting understood perfectly well that the ego is fed by being seen, and had found, in his teacher's typewriter, a way of not being.

On Makar Saṅkrānti, 14 January 1946, the day the sun turns north, Swami Sivananda gave him sannyāsa and the name Krishnananda: the bliss of Kṛṣṇa. He kept a special love of Kṛṣṇa and of the Bhāgavata, the book that had sent him to the mountains, for the rest of his life. He was twenty-three.

The ashram he never left

Since the whole of the rest of the life happens inside it, the place should be described. Sivananda Ashram stands on the right bank of the Ganga at Muni-ki-Reti, just upstream of the town of Rishikesh, where the river comes out of the last Himalayan gorge and turns south towards the plain. When the young Subbaraya arrived in 1944 it was eight years old — a former cowshed and its neighbours, taken over in 1936 by a doctor-monk and a handful of students, already with a press turning out his books, a free dispensary, a kitchen that fed pilgrims, and a daily round of chanting and classes that had drawn seekers from across India. Over the next half-century it grew around him into the small town the Society's obituary calls Shivanandanagar: the Viśvanātha temple, the Bhajan Hall where the daily satsang has been held since the founder's time, the hospital, the printing press, the Forest Academy where he taught, his teacher's kutir, and, after 1963, the Samādhi shrine where his teacher lies. From beside it a suspension footbridge — the Ram Jhula, which the ashram calls the Sivananda Jhula — carries pilgrims across to the Swargashram side where the founder had first lived. Everything in the account of his funeral, the procession from shrine to shrine and the boat under the bridge, happens within a few hundred yards of the room where he typed the Brahma Sūtras in 1945.

He knew the outside world well, from the hundreds of letters he answered and the visitors who, in later years, came to the General Secretary's office rather than to the invisible typist. But he did not go out to it. The Society's account records no journeys after the summer of 1944, and this study takes it at its word. The claim being made for him is not that he saw nothing, but that he saw no need.

1947: fourteen days

Something happened between the typewriter and the first book. He said later that when Swami Sivananda uttered the great Upaniṣadic sentences — the mahāvākyas, "That thou art," "I am Brahman" — he "felt a mysterious change within himself." And sometime in 1948 he had what he called "a lightning glimpse of Truth," after which, in the Society's words, he lived "as a Jīvanmukta enjoying the Sahaja Samādhi Avasthā" — as one liberated while living, in the natural, unbroken state. These are his Society's claims about him, and this site reports them as such; but they are the only teacher's-eye account we have, and the book that came out of those years is their best evidence.

In 1947 his teacher asked him to write. He wrote The Realisation of the Absolute in fourteen days. The preface is signed and dated 1 August 1947, two weeks before Indian independence; Swami Sivananda's foreword is dated 8 September. He was twenty-five. It is still, his Society says, "considered by many as his best book — terse, direct, and stimulating," and it has been translated into German. It is a treatise on Vedānta "and its methodology," which is the phrase to notice: he was not writing devotion, he was writing method. "Intellect is never free from subject-object-relationship," the preface says, "and every such relation falls short of Reality." And yet: "We can rise above the intellect through the medium of the intellect itself backed up by faith in and devotion to the Ideal." The whole of his later teaching — reason driven to its limit and then surrendered, never skipped — is in those two sentences, written by a young man who had been in the ashram three years.

From 1948, on his teacher's instruction, he wrote more, began to conduct classes, and to give lectures. The typist had become the teacher without ever leaving the room.

The administrator: forty years

In 1957 the ashram, grown large, formed a working committee, and he was asked to join it as Secretary with particular charge of finance — the man who had written on the unreality of the world was now responsible for its accounts. On 8 September 1958 Swami Sivananda founded the Sivananda Literature Research Institute and made him its President, and a companion institute for disseminating the literature. In 1961, when the General Secretary was away for a long period, Swami Sivananda nominated him General Secretary of the Divine Life Society, and from September that year he edited its monthly, The Divine Life. He was thirty-nine. He held the office for forty years.

Swami Sivananda died in July 1963. The Society passed under the presidency of Swami Chidananda, the saintly wandering monk, and for the next four decades the two men — the one travelling the world as the Society's face, the other at his desk in Rishikesh as its spine — governed together an organisation with branches across India and abroad. The founder had called Krishnananda "our Dakshinamurti and Sankaracharya" — Dakṣiṇāmūrti being the form of Śiva as the silent teacher, Śaṅkarācārya the tradition's master of the texts — and had also, the Society says, seen in him "a rare blend of karma and jñāna yoga, a living example of the Bhagavadgītā's teachings." That is the point of the forty years. The Gītā, which he had memorised by fasting, says that the knower of the Self may still act, must still act, and acts without being bound; and here was a man of the highest metaphysical attainment his Society could describe, spending his mornings on the Absolute and his afternoons on the budget, and finding in the Gītā no contradiction. "Work and Wisdom," his obituary says, "enjoyed a harmonious blend in his life."

The Forest Academy

The teaching happened inside the ashram, in the Yoga-Vedanta Forest Academy his teacher had founded: early-morning sessions, afternoon classes, and the Society's regular three-month courses for residents and visitors. He did not travel to teach; the world came up the river to Rishikesh and sat down. And he spoke, for the most part, without notes. His obituary says most of his books "were the outcome of his extempore unpremeditated discourses" — a man who had memorised the Gītā at twelve did not need a script — and the discourses were taken down, typed, and printed as commentaries "covering the philosophy, psychology, and practice of various disciplines of yoga."

The output is astonishing for a man who also ran the Society. Forty-one books printed in his lifetime; thirty-two printed after his death; nineteen more, never printed, published on the website his disciples maintain — some ninety titles, on practically every major text of Vedānta, on the Yoga Sūtras, on the history of Indian thought, on the Western philosophers he had read as thoroughly as the Eastern. His Society calls him "a Master of all systems of Thought, Eastern as well as Western," and for once the phrase is not hyperbole: the books argue with the European philosophers as readily as with the Indian schools.

What he actually taught

The doctrine is the Advaita he found for himself in the Gītā as a Madhva boy: the one Reality, Brahman, undivided and non-objective; the world real only as Brahman, unreal as world "because no experience in it is unsublated"; the self never a doer; liberation not an attainment but the recognition of what is already the case — "the fact is that Consciousness is ever free." What is distinctive is how he gets there, and four features of his method stand out.

The first is that he treats Vedānta as a discipline of the intellect pushed to its breaking point. He does not ask the student to believe; he asks the student to think until thinking exhausts itself. His preface says it exactly: "Philosophy appears to be an apology for Truth-realisation, and it fulfils itself when it meets the requirements of intuition." Reason is not the enemy. Reason is the vehicle, and it must be ridden to the edge before it can be left.

The second is the cosmos. More than any other teacher in this lineage he insisted that the seeker's problem is not private. The individual is a fragment that has torn itself from a universal structure and suffers because of the tear; his book on the Aitareya and Taittirīya Upaniṣads is described as "an acute analysis of the Upaniṣadic doctrine of universal creation and the involvement of individual suffering when the individual separates itself from the cosmic structure." Meditation, for him, is the reversal of that separation: the fragment learning to think as the whole. It gives his Vedānta a grandeur — the whole cosmos as the body of the Absolute — that is quite different in feel from Sri Ramana's quiet inward "Who am I?", though the destination is the same.

The third is that yoga and Vedānta are one science. He was, his obituary says, "an adept in Rāja Yoga," and his commentary on Patañjali's sūtras, The Study and Practice of Yoga, is as central to his work as anything on the Upaniṣads. His teaching "leaned towards the jñāna mārga of upāsanā and meditation" — knowledge approached through disciplined contemplation, not through hearing alone. Where the Chinmaya and Arsha Vidya teachers hold that the words of the text, properly unfolded, are themselves the means, he held that the mind must also be trained, by the Yoga's methods, to hold what the text reveals. The difference is one of emphasis, but it is real, and a seeker should know it exists.

The fourth is the Bhāgavata. Beneath the metaphysician was the boy who went to the mountains to see Nārāyaṇa, and his obituary insists on "a deep love and devotion for the Śrīmad Bhāgavata Mahāpurāṇa in general and Lord Sri Kṛṣṇa in particular." He never treated devotion as a lower stage. The Absolute of his first book and the Kṛṣṇa of his name were, for him, the same thing seen from the two sides of the human heart.

The sayings, and what they were for

Because almost everything he said was taken down and published, this site can quote him in his own words rather than in others' memories. The lines below are from The Realisation of the Absolute, the book of his youth, which remains the clearest statement of what he taught for the next fifty years.

The first is the whole of his epistemology in one line: knowledge of the Absolute is not a proposition one holds but a condition one is, and the proof that someone has it is not what they say but what they have become. The second is his method. The third and fourth are his metaphysics, and the fourth in particular repays a slow reading: the world is not unreal because it is a dream or a trick, but because every experience in it is eventually cancelled by a later one, and only that which nothing cancels can be called real. The fifth is the Gītā, which he memorised at twelve, arriving at its destination. And the sixth is the one line spoken to him rather than by him, which turned out to be a complete description of his life.

The books, and how to read them

Nearly everything is free to read on the website his disciples keep, and the Divine Life Society prints most of it. The list is long, so here is a way through it.

Begin where he began: The Realisation of the Absolute, short, dense and complete, the treatise of 1947. If it is too compressed — it is very compressed — go to Lessons on the Upanishads, talks on what the Upaniṣads are and what is needed to understand them, and to Isavasya Upanishad for Beginners, a series he gave in Hindi that was translated into English. Then the great commentaries, in the order the tradition itself uses: The Mandukya Upanishad, his analysis of waking, dream and deep sleep, which many regard as his finest single exposition; The Secret of the Katha Upanishad and the verse-by-verse Commentary on the Kathopanishad, together with a series given in April 1982 for his sixtieth birthday; the Mundaka; The Chhandogya Upanishad; and The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad with its companion volume of essence. For the Brahma Sūtra there are three books, of which An Analysis of the Brahma Sutra is the entry and The Brahma Sutra as a Moksha Shastra, on the fourth chapter, the culmination. The Philosophy of the Panchadasi — "the entire Vedānta in a nutshell," as the website says — and his verse-by-verse Commentary on the Panchadasi's first six chapters are where his systematic mind is most at home. For the yoga side: The Study and Practice of Yoga, on Patañjali, and Yoga as a Universal Science. For the wide view: A Short History of Religious and Philosophic Thought in India and The Ascent of the Spirit. And beside all of them, the book he typed rather than wrote — Swami Sivananda's Brahma Sutras — which the site also carries.

Read them knowing that nearly all are spoken books. The voice is a lecturer's: long sentences that circle a point three times before landing, a habit of restating the same truth from the physical, the psychological and the metaphysical sides in turn, and, every few pages, a sentence that stops you cold. Do not skim them. He did not skim anything.

The last days

He had been unwell for some time. On 27 August 2001, "because of indifferent health," he resigned as General Secretary and as Trustee, offices he had held for forty years; the Board accepted it on 10 September. He remained publisher and printer of The Divine Life to the end. Then, on Friday 23 November 2001 — Gopāṣṭamī, the day Kṛṣṇa was first sent out with the cows — the end came, the Society says, "rather suddenly," and he was conscious "till the very last moment."

The account of that day is one of the most exact in the literature of the lineage, and it is exact because he made it so. The night before, he had a dream that told him he was leaving. In the morning he said that the cook, and the doctor who came up from Rishikesh to attend him, should be paid what they were owed that same day — the General Secretary of forty years closing his accounts. He was "very cheerful." He met residents and visitors as usual and talked freely with the people looking after him. At three in the afternoon he asked for a copy of the Bhagavad Gītā with Swami Sivananda's commentary to be kept by his bed — the book he had memorised as a boy, in the edition of the man who had told him to stay till death — and read in it from time to time. At half past three he had his usual light supper. At twenty-five past four he had some difficulty breathing, and asked his attendant, Swami Satyakamananda, to recline him on the bed, "indicating that the last moment had arrived." At half past four he died, in his kutir in the ashram, on the bank of the Ganga, with the Gītā beside him.

He had wished since childhood for jala-samādhi, the committal of the body to water, and had said so again in his last weeks. On the morning of Sunday 25 November his body was seated on a palanquin of flowers and carried around the ashram, with āratī at the Bhajan Hall, the Viśvanātha temple, the Samādhi shrine of his teacher, the Divya Nāma temple and Swami Sivananda's kutir; bathed at Viśvanātha Ghāṭ with milk and Ganga water; anointed with sandal, vibhūti and kumkum; dressed in new ochre; garlanded with tulasī, bilva and rudrākṣa; and laid in a wooden casket in a boat. The boat passed under the Sivananda footbridge, and there the casket was given to the river. The boy from Puttur who had wanted to go to the Himalaya to see Nārāyaṇa had arrived there at twenty-two and never left, and at seventy-nine the mountain river carried him away.

The timeline, plainly

• 25 April 1922 — Born Subbaraya at Puttur, South Kanara (now Dakshina Kannada, Karnataka), eldest of five, in an orthodox Sanskrit-speaking Madhva family.
• c. 1934 — Memorises the whole Bhagavad Gītā, fasting until each day's verses are learnt; teaches himself Sanskrit from the Amarakośa; drawn to Advaita by his own reading.
• 1943 — Government service at Hospet, Bellary district; leaves within the year for Varanasi.
• Summer 1944 — Arrives at Rishikesh; meets Swami Sivananda: "Stay here till death."
• 1944–48 — Correspondence, editing, and typing his teacher's manuscripts, including the whole of the Brahma Sūtras; unknown to visitors.
• 14 January 1946 — Sannyāsa from Swami Sivananda on Makar Saṅkrānti; named Krishnananda.
• August–September 1947 — Writes The Realisation of the Absolute in fourteen days; preface 1 August, his teacher's foreword 8 September.
• 1948 — "A lightning glimpse of Truth"; begins, on instruction, to write, teach and lecture.
• 1957 — Secretary of the ashram's working committee, in charge of finance.
• 8 September 1958 — President of the new Sivananda Literature Research Institute.
• 1961 — General Secretary of the Divine Life Society; editor of The Divine Life from September.
• July 1963 — Death of Swami Sivananda; serves for four decades beside President Swami Chidananda.
• April 1982 — Sixtieth birthday; sādhana-week discourses on the Kaṭha Upaniṣad.
• 27 August 2001 — Resigns as General Secretary and Trustee for reasons of health.
• 23 November 2001 — Dies at 4.30 pm on Gopāṣṭamī, in his kutir at Sivananda Ashram, the Gītā at his bedside.
• 25 November 2001 — Jala-samādhi: the body is given to the Ganga below the Sivananda footbridge.

For the seeker now

Four things from this life are worth carrying away.

The first is the typewriter. For his first years in the ashram the most gifted mind in the building did clerical work and was unknown to visitors, and this was not a waste of his gifts but the making of them. If your spiritual life feels like it is being spent on someone else's paperwork, his is the evidence that this may be exactly the place where the work is done.

The second is that he never went anywhere. Every other teacher on this site has a map full of journeys. His has four dots and stops at twenty-two. Truth, on his evidence, is not somewhere else, and a life that stays in one room can be as vast as any life that crosses oceans, if the room is where the Absolute is being thought about.

The third is the two halves of the day. He is the standing refutation of the idea that the contemplative must be useless, or that the useful cannot be a contemplative. Forty years of budgets and a shelf of ninety books on the Absolute came from the same desk, and he found the reconciliation in the book he had memorised as a child: act, and do not be the doer.

The fourth is his method, and it is a warning as much as an invitation. He will not let you believe your way out. He insists that you think — about what "real" means, about why every experience is cancelled by the next, about whether the intellect can climb past itself — and he offers no shortcut around that thinking, only a promise that it ends. For a seeker in an age that prefers experiences to arguments, he is the teacher who says the argument is the experience, if you follow it far enough.

A note on the pictures

Photographs of him exist in quantity — the Divine Life Society's pages and his own memorial website carry them, from the young monk of the 1940s to the last years — and this site does not reproduce them, nor will it generate a likeness of a real man. The map above is drawn from present-day coordinates. For his face, follow the links below; for his voice, nearly every word he spoke in public for fifty years is there to be read.