Satyananda Saraswati

He entered into the state of Mahasamadhi, i.e leaving the body at will on 5 December2009

In September 1989 he moved to Rikhia, Deoghar, Jharkhand. There he lived as a paramahamsa sannyasin and performed vedic sadhanas including Panchagni ("Five fires"), an intense spiritual practice performed outdoors surrounded by four fires under the Indian sun. It was during the Panchagni sadhana that he claimed to have received the divine mandate "Take care of your neighbours as I have taken care of you". There too, he conducted a 12-year Rajasooya Yajna which began in 1995 with the first Sat Chandi Maha Yajna, invoking the Cosmic Mother through a tantric ceremony. During this event, Satyananda passed on his spiritual and sannyasa responsibilities to Niranjanananda.

In 1988 Satyananda handed over the active work of his ashram and organisation to his spiritual successor, Niranjanananda Saraswati, and left Munger.

An Australian Royal Commission investigated allegations of child sexual abuse at the Satyananda Yoga Ashram at Mangrove Mountain, New South Wales, Australia during the 1970s and 1980s. Alleged abuses by and against multiple individuals took place between 1974 and 1989, with eleven witnesses alleging abuses in Australia, and two witnesses alleging abuses in both Australia and India. Two witnesses alleged that Satyananda, who was no longer alive at the time of the Royal Commission, had sexually abused them; this evidence was deemed "out of scope" and "untested", and accordingly no finding was made against Satyananda in the Australian Royal Commission's final report.

The psychotherapist Josna Pakhana and the yoga teacher and researcher Jacqueline Hargreaves write that "shocking levels of abuse were deeply entrenched" in Satyananda's Mangrove Mountain ashram in Australia in the 1970s. They state that the Royal Commission "concluded that Swami Satyananda Saraswati (b. 1923, d. 2009), the founding guru, had overarching authority at the Mangrove Mountain ashram (and its centres) in his role as head of Satyananda Yoga worldwide."

Satyananda wrote over 80 books, including his popular 1969 manual Asana Pranayama Mudra Bandha. Satyananda's writings have been published by the Bihar School of Yoga and, since 2000, by the Yoga Publications Trust established by his disciple Swami Niranjanananda.

Among those who attended courses at the Bihar School of Yoga were students from abroad and students who subsequently emigrated from India. Some of these people in turn invited Satyananda to teach in their own countries. He lectured and taught for the next twenty years, including a tour of Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Singapore, North America between April and October 1968. The foreign and expatriate students also established new centres of teaching in their respective countries.

In 1964, he founded the Bihar School of Yoga at Munger, with the intention that it would act as a centre of training for future teachers of yoga as well as offer courses on yoga.

In 1962, Satyananda established the International Yoga Fellowship Movement in Rajnandgaon. This inspired the establishment of ashrams and yoga centres spiritually guided by Swami Satyananda in India and around the world.

In 1956, Sivananda sent Satyananda away to spread his teachings. Basing himself in Munger, Bihar, Satyananda wandered as a mendicant through India, extending his knowledge of spiritual practices and spending some time in seclusion.

At age eighteen, he left his home to seek a spiritual master. In 1943, at the age of twenty, he met his guru Sivananda Saraswati and went to live at Sivananda's ashram in Rishikesh. Sivananda initiated him into the Dashnam Order of Sannyasa on 12 September 1947 on the banks of the Ganges, and gave him the name of Swami Satyananda Saraswati. He stayed with Sivananda for a further nine years but received little further formal instruction from him.

Satyananda Saraswati (25 December 1923 – 5 December 2009), was a Sanyasi, yoga teacher and guru in both his native India and the West. He was a student of Sivananda Saraswati, the founder of the Divine Life Society, and founded the Bihar School of Yoga in 1964. He wrote over 80 books, including the popular 1969 manual Asana Pranayama Mudra Bandha.

Satyananda Saraswati was born in 1923 at Almora, Uttaranchal, into a family of farmers and kshatriyas, the warrior caste.