Swami Sivananda

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 Kuppuswami on 8 September 1887 at Pattamadai, on the Tāmraparaṇī in the far south of Tamil Nadu, studied medicine at Tanjore and practised at Tiruchirapalli, and then in 1913 took a post in Malaya — the rubber estates, where an Indian doctor spent his days among labourers with malaria and industrial injuries. He ran a hospital there for ten years and treated the poor without charge. What ended that career was a diagnosis. He became convinced that the suffering he was treating was downstream of something he could not reach with medicine, and in 1923 he gave up the practice and went to Rishikesh, where the Ganges comes out of the Himalaya, and took monastic vows. He practised austerely for years in that cold, crowded pilgrim town. Then, in 1936, he founded the Divine Life Society — and became one of the most prolific religious writers of the century, over two hundred books, printed cheaply and sent anywhere. His instinct was the physician's: make the remedy available, in plain language, to whoever needs it, and do not make them come to a clinic. He fed and treated pilgrims and monks for decades and built a forest academy for scriptural study. He never once travelled abroad. His disciples did, and took yoga and Vedānta around the world. He died at Rishikesh in 1963.

The turn it rests on

A doctor decided the real illness was ignorance of the Self, and changed practice.

What was taught

A doctor turned monk at Rishikesh who initiated the young Balakrishna Menon — later Swami Chinmayananda — into sannyāsa in 1949.