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 spent his last years preparing a teenage disciple 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.