Famous Yogi

Many dedicated individuals have influenced the practice of yoga, and spread awareness of yoga throughout the world. Centuries ago, such individuals included Meera from the Bhakti tradition, Shankaracharya from the Jnana Yoga tradition, Patanjali, who formalized the system of Raja Yoga, are just a few examples.
In the late 1800s, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, a Bhakti Yogi, brought about a rebirth of yoga in India. A devotee of Mother Kali and a teacher of Advaita Vedanta, he preached that “all religions lead to the same goal.”
The noted Indian author Sri Aurobindo translated and interpreted Yogic scriptures, such as the Upanishads and Bhagavad-Gita. His epic poem Savitri is a treasure of Hindu Yogic literature, among the longest poems ever written in English. He also founded Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry, which continues to propagate the practice of Integral Yoga, which is Aurobindo’s synthesis of the four main Yogas (Karma, Jnana, Bhakti and Raja).
Other Indian yogis who inspired their countrymen include Swami Rama Tirtha, and Swami Sivananda who authored over 300 books on yoga and spirituality.
Gopi Krishna was a Kashmiri office worker and spiritual seeker who wrote best-selling autobiographical accounts of his spiritual experiences. During the early twentieth century, many yogis travelled to the west to spread knowledge of Yoga.
Swami Vivekananda, Ramakrishna’s disciple, is well known for introducing Yoga philosophy to many in the west, as well as reinvigorating Hinduism in a modern setting during India’s freedom struggle.
Swami Sivananda (1887-1963), founder of the Divine Life Society lived most of his life in Rishikesh, India. He wrote an impressive 300 books on various aspects of Yoga, religions, philosophy, spirituality, Hinduism, moral ethics, hygiene and health. He was a pioneering Yogi in bringing Yoga to the west and throughout the world. He was clear, simple and precise in all his teachings. His motto being: “Serve. Love. Give. Meditate. Purify. Realise.”
Paramahansa Yogananda (1893-1952), a practitioner of Kriya Yoga, taught Yoga as the binding force that reconciled Hinduism and Christianity. Yogananda founded the Self-Realization Fellowship in Los Angeles, in 1925. His book Autobiography of a Yogi continues to be one of the best-selling books on yoga.
A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada popularised Bhakti Yoga for Krishna in many countries through his movement, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, (popularly known as the Hare Krishna movement) which he founded in 1966. His followers, known for enthusiastic chanting in public places, brought Bhakti Yoga to the attention of many westerners.
In 1955, the socio-spiritual organization Ananda Marga (the path of bliss) was founded by P.R. Sarkar also known as Shrii Shrii Anandamurti. Based on tantric yoga, his teaching emphasizes social service in the context of a political, economic and cultural theory; or “self-realization and service to all.”
Also during this period, many yogis brought greater awareness of Hatha yoga to the west. Some of these individuals include students of Sri Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, who taught at Mysore Palace from 1924 until his death in 1989; these students include Sri K. Pattabhi Jois, B.K.S. Iyengar, Indra Devi and Krishnamacharya’s son T.K.V. Desikachar.
About the same time, the Beatles’ interest in Transcendental Meditation served to make a celebrity of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

Why the Dalai Lama Matters - Robert Thurman

Buddhism is all about science. As Shantideva says, "Everything the Buddha ever taught comes down ultimately to a question of wisdom - it was all for the sake of wisdom." That is so simply because it is the attainment of wisdom that enables a being to attain liberation from suffering. Faith, love, and kindness are in fact the products of true wisdom; they are released and empowered by it. The wisdom that understands the visceral interrelatedness of self and other opens the heart to the feeling of natural compassion for the sufferings of those others. Faith, love, kindness are excellent, but none by itself can make liberation possible. Only wisdom can liberate us from suffering. Only when we know that the deepest nature of life is, itself, freedom, only then do we feel free, and feeling free, feel inexhaustible bliss. If science is the systematic pursuit of the accurate knowledge of reality, then science is Buddhism, Buddhism is science.

The analogy with modern science goes even further. The Buddhist theory of emptiness or voidness is not a theory about the essential nothingness of the universe. It is the original theory discovered millenia ago that proposes the relativity of the universe. Things are not empty of their own existence. They are empty of any nonrelational essence or isolated core reality, therefore possessing only the reality of their interrelatedness with other relational things. All things being relational, whenever anything is sought as an absolute by the kind of analytic inquiry that seeks the ultimate nature of that thing, that thing dissolves under analysis and disappears from view. It cannot be found as an absolute. This is obvious, in a way, because if it it found at all, the finder has related to it by finding it and so has voided its absoluteness. Therefore, the voidness theory means that all theories about all things are from a particular perspective, relational, valid, or invalid only in a certain context. All theory is hypothetical, awaiting further refinement by experimental or experiential discovery of further aspects of the realities in question.