Serampore, 1910. Seventeen-year-old Mukunda found Sri Yukteswar sitting in a courtyard and recognized him at once as the teacher he had been searching for since boyhood. Under Yukteswar's discipline he trained for a decade, learning Kriya Yoga, the meditation technique he would later carry across the world.

In August 1920 he sailed for Boston as India's delegate to a congress of religious liberals, among the first teachers of yoga to settle in America. He founded Self-Realization Fellowship that same year, meaning to plant meditation practice permanently in Western soil.

He published Autobiography of a Yogi in 1946, mixing his own story with accounts of saints and yogis he said he had met. It became one of the best-selling spiritual books in the West and is still cited by teachers who never studied Kriya Yoga.

March 7, 1952. Yogananda finished a speech at a Los Angeles banquet honoring India’s ambassador, then collapsed and died. His organization published a letter from the mortuary director saying the body showed no visible decay for twenty days; it has not been independently verified.