dates unknown (as told by Yogananda) · A portrait
Known only through Paramahansa Yogananda's 1946 autobiography and his teachers, a Himalayan master is said to have lived for centuries without aging, appearing rarely, reviving a meditation practice passed down through his students.
As Yogananda tells it, around 1861 near Ranikhet in the Himalayas, Babaji taught the meditation technique later called Kriya Yoga to a young government clerk, Lahiri Mahasaya — the first link in a chain of teachers that would reach Yogananda himself.
As Yogananda tells it, Babaji met Sri Yukteswar at a religious gathering in 1894 and asked him to write a book showing that Christian and Hindu scripture pointed to the same underlying truth. The result became The Holy Science.
No birth record, no death record, no account from outside this lineage exists. Everything told about him — his age, his appearances, his instructions — comes from the testimony of teachers and students inside the tradition, passed down and written into their own books.
Yogananda's autobiography, published in 1946, carried the story west and made Babaji known to readers who had never heard of Kriya Yoga. Within the tradition his presence is still held as guiding that lineage; outside it, the story remains just that — a story.