Swami Tejomayananda

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 Sudhakar Kaitwade in Madhya Pradesh on 30 June 1950 and was a postgraduate science student at Indore — and he was drawn, from early on, to devotional music and to the Bhāgavata, which is not where most science postgraduates end up. He joined the Vedānta course at Sandeepany Sadhanalaya in Mumbai at twenty and graduated in 1975. He led Chinmaya Mission's work at San Jose in California, returned to India in 1993, and headed Chinmaya Mission Worldwide from then until 2017. What he is loved for is a particular refusal. There is a tendency, once a student has grasped that reality is non-dual, to become embarrassed about devotion — to treat singing to Rāma as a stage one has left behind. He would not have it. His talks on the Rāmāyaṇa and the Bhāgavata sit beside commentaries on Tattva Bodha, Upadeśa Sāra and the Pañcadaśī in the same body of work, by the same person, with no apology and no seam. More than fifty titles, many of them the plain-language commentaries beginners start from. He founded the gurukula for Indian performing arts at Chinmaya Vibhooti, which is of a piece with all of it. The point he makes with his life is a technical one about this path: the heart and the argument are not two faculties to be traded off, and a teaching that dries out the first has usually misunderstood the second.

The turn it rests on

He showed that rigorous non-duality and unembarrassed devotion are one practice.

What was taught

Carried the Mission for a quarter-century, teaching with devotional warmth and simplicity.