Trained as a physician, he left India for British Malaya in 1913 and spent a decade treating plantation workers and the poor, often refusing payment. He later said the suffering he saw there sharpened a wish to heal something more than the body.

He gave up his medical practice in 1923 and reached Rishikesh in May 1924, where a wandering monk named Vishwananda Saraswati initiated him into the monastic order and gave him the name Sivananda. Rishikesh stayed his home for the rest of his life.

In 1936 he founded the Divine Life Society at Rishikesh, publishing books, running free medical care, and teaching yoga to visitors from India and abroad. He wrote more than two hundred books in his lifetime, on subjects from anatomy to meditation.

He died at his ashram on the banks of the Ganges on 14 July 1963. By then the Divine Life Society had branches across India and abroad, and disciples he trained — among them Chidananda and Satyananda — carried the teaching further still.