book

Paramahansa Yogananda was born as Mukunda Lal Ghosh in Gorakhpur, India, into a Bengali Hindu family.^[2] Autobiography of a Yogi recounts his life and his encounters with spiritual figures of the Eastern and the Western world. The book begins with his childhood and family life, then finding his guru, becoming a monk and establishing his teachings of Kriya Yoga meditation. The book continues in 1920 when Yogananda accepted an invitation to speak at a religious congress in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. He then travelled across America lecturing and establishing his teachings in Los Angeles, California. In 1935, he returned to India for a yearlong visit. When he returned to America he continued to establish his teachings, including writing this book.

The book is an introduction to the methods of attaining God-realization and the spiritual wisdom of the East, which had only been available to a few before 1946. The author claims that the writing of the book was prophesied by the nineteenth-century master Lahiri Mahasaya (Paramguru of Yogananda).

The book has been in print for seventy-five years and translated into over fifty languages by the Self-Realization Fellowship,^[3] a spiritual society established by Yogananda. It has been acclaimed as a spiritual classic, being designated by Philip Zaleski, while he was under the auspices of HarperCollins Publishers, as one of the "100 Most Important Spiritual Books of the 20th Century."^[4][5][6] It is included in the book 50 Spiritual Classics: Timeless Wisdom from 50 Great Books of Inner Discovery, Enlightenment and Purpose by Tom Butler-Bowdon.^[7] According to Project Gutenberg, the first edition is in the public domain, ^[8] at least five publishers are reprinting it and four post it free for online reading.