Swami Kriyananda

The legacy

Prominent in this film is a true-life account of Swami Kriyananda, one of the foremost spiritual teachers of Yoga principles in the world today...

Swami Kriyananda

Swami KriyanandaIn 1948 at the age of twenty-two, he became a disciple of the Indian yoga master, Paramhansa Yogananda. For the past 63 years he has been the most prominently-known of Yogananda's disciples throughout the world, and today, at the age of 85, one of the very few who lived and worked closely with the legendary master.

A modern-day Renaissance man, Kriyananda is accomplished as a author, composer and song writer, poet, playwright, lecturer, photographer, linguist, TV and radio broadcaster, and founder of spiritual communities on three continents.

He has written over 140 books, translated into 31 languages, with worldwide sales of about 3 million copies. He has composed 400 musical pieces, with CD sales at about one million copies.

In 1968 he published the book which made him known as the "father of the spiritual community movement", Cooperative Communities: How to Start Them and Why. He founded the first community that year, followed by seven others, including ones in Italy and India.

Most recently he has taken up screen play writing and has written scripts for three movies.

At the core of this film is the meeting of young J. Donald Walters (later known as Swami Kriyananda) with one of the preeminent spiritual figures of modern times, Paramhansa Yogananda a meeting which saved his life and changed not only his destiny, but that of thousands of others...

Paramhansa Yogananda (1893–1952)

Author of the best-selling spiritual classic, Autobiography of a Yogi, India's "spiritual ambassador to the West” came to America in 1920, and was the first great master of yoga to live and teach in the United States for most of his life, over a period of more than 30 years.

A national sensation, Yogananda's lectures and books were extensively reviewed by the major media of the era, including Time Magazine, Newsweek, and Life, and he was invited to the White House by President Calvin Coolidge. In 1925 he established an international headquarters atop Mr. Washington in Los Angeles, the Self- realization Fellowship, and inspired the founding of the first "world brotherhood colony" at Ananda Village in 1968. Yogananda continued to lecture and write up to his passing in 1952.