AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A YOGI

The author, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh, had his name changed to Yogananda when he entered the monastic Swami Order as a young man in 1914 and was subsequently given the religious title of Paramhansa in 1935. He spent his earliest years in the town of Gorakhpur in northeastern India, the son of Bengali parents of the Kshatriya caste. Consisting of a few on Hinduism, Yoga and the Swami order, descriptions of meetings with such well knowns as Chandi and Luther Burbank, Yogananda's personal history is fairly interesting and smooth flowing, though it by no means approaches the stature of worthwhile reading for anyone not primarily interested in Yoga. The stages in his life are school, monkhood in the Swami order, master of his own religious school, journey to lecture in the United States and residence in California. Though inclined a bit, perhaps unconsciously, towards the kind of sensationalism that the doctrines of Yoga such as the mysticism, willing of miracles, and mental telepathy, have produced in Hollywood, this commentary does not play these up and emerges as a legitimate if shallow and adorned, study of an interesting and valid branch of eastern thought. Very limited appeal.