1855 – 1936 · A portrait
A Bengali swami published a book in 1894 arguing history moves in 24,000-year cycles and humanity was rising, not declining — then trained a teenage disciple for a decade to carry meditation west.
In 1894 he published The Holy Science, arguing the traditional yuga ages span roughly 24,000 years, not millions, driven by the sun's own orbit around a companion star — a mechanism modern astronomy doesn't accept, though the precession of the equinoxes it explains is real.
In Serampore in 1910, a seventeen-year-old named Mukunda Lal Ghosh found him sitting in a courtyard and recognized him at once as the teacher he had been searching for. Sri Yukteswar trained him for a decade in Kriya Yoga.
He kept a quiet hermitage on the Bay of Bengal at Puri, where he prepared his disciple, by then called Yogananda, to carry the practice to America — a journey Yogananda began in 1920.
He died in Puri on 9 March 1936. Yogananda later wrote that his teacher appeared to him afterward in Bombay — an account Yogananda gave as his own direct experience, and one outside evidence cannot confirm.