Swami Paramarthananda

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

Two of the teachers already on these pages are his: he trained for three years on the Vedānta course at Sandeepany, the Chinmaya Mission's residential school, and learnt from Swami Chinmayananda and from Swami Dayananda Saraswatī. He has been teaching in Chennai, in English, for about forty years. What distinguishes the work is the refusal to compress. He teaches the traditional sequence in order: the prakaraṇa texts, the short manuals that build the vocabulary; then the Upaniṣads, first in the original and then with Śaṅkara's commentary; then the Brahma-sūtras and the Gītā with its commentary. It takes years, because it takes years. And all of it is recorded. A student in any city, with no teacher within a thousand miles, can follow the same syllabus in the same order that a resident student in Chennai follows — which is a genuinely new thing in the history of this tradition, and the same possibility a daily message like this one is built on. He is listed as a living teacher, and the details of his early life are not published; the trust's own account gives the training, the teachers and the four decades in Chennai, and that is what appears here.

The turn it rests on

Every class is recorded, so the full traditional syllabus — prakaraṇa texts, Upaniṣads with commentary, Brahma-sūtras, Gītā — is available to anyone, in sequence.

What was taught

Teaches the traditional sequence — the introductory manuals, then the Upaniṣads with Śaṅkara's commentary, then the Brahma-sūtras and the Gītā — in English, class by class, without shortcuts.