Jyotirmayananda Saraswati, Swami

(1931– )

   advaita teacher and educator

   Swami Jyotirmayananda Saraswati founded the Yoga Research Foundation.

   Born in Dumari Buzurg on February 3, 1931, in the state of Bihar, the boy who would become Swami Jyotirmayananda was a calm, reflective, and successful student. He studied at the Science College of Patna, where he first met Swami SIVANANDA of Rishikesh. He traveled to the Divine Life Society in Rishikesh, where his GURU, Sivananda, put him to work teaching oth-ers. In February 1953, he took the vow of SAN-NYAS (renunciation) from Sivananda and began to teach at the Yoga Vedanta Forest Academy as a professor of religion. He became the editor of the Hindi journal of the Divine Life Society, Yoga-Vedanta.

   In 1962, after many requests, he traveled to the West, staying two years in Puerto Rico, where he founded the Sanatan Dharma Mandir. In 1969 he opened his center in Miami, Florida, where he set up a publishing center and the Yoga Research Foundation. Branches of this organization now exist throughout the world. In 1985, he founded an ashram near New Delhi that offers yoga classes, publishes the Hindi journal Yoganjali, and assists the needy through a medical clinic. The ashram also runs a school for children, the Bal Divya Jyoti Public School.

   Jyotirmananda teaches and lectures on inte-gral yoga and sponsors a monthly magazine, Inter-national Yoga Guide.

   Further reading: Swami Jyotirmayananda Saraswati, Meditate the Tantric Yoga Way (London: Allen & Unwin, 1973); ———, The Art of Positive Thinking (Miami: Yoga Research Foundation, 1988).