72 pages • 2 hours read
Paramahansa YoganandaAutobiography of a Yogi
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1946A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 37-40Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 37 Summary: “I Go to America”
Yogananda travels to America, where he has been invited to serve as a delegate to an International Congress of Religious Liberals in Boston. Anxious about the trip, Yogananda prays for divine guidance, and Babaji appears at his door. He tells Yogananda that he, Babaji, has chosen him to spread Kriya Yoga in the West. He gives Yogananda instructions and prophecies and then departs.
Yogananda leaves India in August 1920. During the two-month voyage, he is asked to give a lecture titled “The Battle of Life and How to Fight It.” After a nervous beginning in which he can find no words, he prays to his master and gives a talk in English that is received extremely well.
On October 6, 1920, he addresses the congress, and his lecture is well received by the audience. For three years, Yogananda lives in Boston, giving lectures and teaching classes. In 1924, he tours the continent, giving lectures in many big cities. By the end of 1925, he has established an American headquarters in Los Angeles. As the 1920s continue, Yogananda lectures at clubs, colleges, and churches all over the nation. From 1920 to 1930, his yoga classes are attended by tens of thousands of students.
Chapter 38 Summary: “Luther Burbank: A Saint Among the Roses”
Yogananda visits the botanist Luther Burbank in Santa Rosa, California. Burbank has created numerous hybrid crops, including Burbank varieties of tomato, corn, and squash. He talks about plant evolution and about his hope that children will be educated in simple and natural living. Yogananda tells him about his Ranchi school, and Burbank gives Yogananda his book titled The Training of the Human Plant.
Yogananda visits Burbank many times. He initiates him into Kriya Yoga, and Burbank practices it devoutly. Yogananda starts up a magazine, East-West, and an article by Burbank appears in the first issue. When Burbank dies in 1926, Yogananda spends a day in seclusion, mourning him.
Chapter 39 Summary: “Therese Neumann: The Catholic Stigmatist”
In meditation, Yogananda hears the voice of his master, Sri Yukteswar, asking him to return home. After 15 years in America, Yogananda leaves in June 1935. After a brief visit to England and Scotland, he travels to Germany to meet a Catholic mystic, Therese Neumann of Konnersreuth. Neumann reportedly has not eaten or drunk anything for 12 years, and she carries the stigmata, the wounds of Christ, on her body. When Yogananda asks her about eating, she says she only eats the Host each morning, which is a paper-thin wafer the size of a coin. Yogananda notices freshly healed wounds on her hands, and she says that every week in a trance she observes the Passion of Christ, during which her wounds bleed. Yogananda learns from her brothers that she sleeps only one or two hours a night, but she is active and energetic.
With Therese’s permission, Yogananda observes her weekly trance. He sees blood flowing from her lower eyelids. The cloth around her head is drenched in blood from the wounds inflicted by the Crown of Thorns, and there is a bleeding wound in her side, in the place where the Roman soldier thrust a spear into Christ’s body.
Leaving Therese, Yogananda and his party tour Europe by car and then go to Palestine and Egypt before returning to India.
Chapter 40 Summary: “I Return to India”
Yogananda arrives in Bombay (now Mumbai), India, in October 1935. He travels to Calcutta with his secretary Richard Wright, and large crowds greet him. In Serampore, he is reunited with his father and Sri Yukteswar. Then he returns to Calcutta and works hard to rectify the financial difficulties of the school at Ranchi. Soon, the situation improves. The curriculum continues to focus on Kriya Yoga, the feature that differentiates it from all other schools. The boys practice their spiritual exercises daily and learn correct moral values. (Classes for girls only are conducted in local villages.)
In 1939, a Yogoda Math (ashram) was established next to the Ganges in Dakshineswar, a few miles north of Calcutta. It was the headquarters in India of the Yogoda Satsanga Society.
Chapters 37-40 Analysis
Chapter 37 is notable because it includes Yogananda’s meeting with the immortal Babaji. True to form, Yogananda has the great guru appear under modest circumstances. Sitting in his home on Garper Road, Yogananda is anxious about his upcoming trip to America, and he prays intensely, desperate for some divine support for his mission. There is no response—no vision, no comforting divine voice, nothing. Babaji does not suddenly, magically manifest in Yogananda’s living room. Instead, he walks up the road and knocks on the door. When, after a short while, Babaji leaves, he tells Yogananda not to try to follow him, but Yogananda nevertheless tries. He finds that for a few minutes, his feet are fixed to the floor, so he cannot follow the departing Babaji. Babaji manifests his enormous power, which far exceeds that of Yogananda, but he does so in a modest, unspectacular way.
In the brief space of Chapter 37, Yogananda covers more than a decade of his life in America. Although he calls his book an autobiography, he is not always its central character. His time in America is arguably the high point of his career, but his eye is always on something wider than his own doings. Indeed, the two chapters that follow, on Luther Burbank and Therese Neumann, show his curiosity about others rather than any focus on himself. In those chapters, he is more of a reporter than an autobiographer, although of course he also weaves his own observations into the narrative.
Writing of his trip to Europe in 1935, Yogananda has presented an accurate portrait of Therese Neumann, according to objective reports written by others over the years. Since 2005, Neumann has been designated a Servant of God by the Catholic Church, which means that she may in the future become a candidate for sainthood. Also notable in this chapter is that Yogananda does firsthand reporting; he visits Neumann himself and records what she said not long after the interview took place. This is in contrast to most of the stories about Babaji and those about Lahiri Mahasaya and Sri Yukteswar, which are secondhand and happened many years before Yogananda put them in writing.
