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Finding God through Yoga: Paramahansa Yogananda and Modern American Religion in a Global Age

2020; Oxford University Press; Volume: 107; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/jahist/jaaa257

1945-2314

Candy Gunther Brown,

American Constitutional Law and Politics

Finding God through Yoga is a well-researched, engaging biography of a historically significant, previously understudied Indian American Hindu yoga guru, Paramahansa Yogananda, known as the Father of Yoga in the West. Organizing his biography chronologically, David J. Neumann helps readers evaluate the public identity that Yogananda cultivated in his prolific publications by comparing that persona with accounts written by family, friends, disciples, and critics, and by contextualizing all these writings historically. The introductory chapter corrects distorted understandings of Yogananda—for instance, as merely promoting “yoga as a popular postural health practice focused on mindfulness,” a reading that “completely ignores Yogananda's explicit central goal, the experience of God” through “religion,” not just “spirituality” (pp. 4, 5). Neumann, moreover, frames his study as illuminating “the role of religion in transnational history, a topic that has received scant attention from historians pursuing transnational themes in the modern era” (p. 6). Yogananda was “one of the earliest ‘global gurus’” and, indeed, a highly effective Hindu missionary from India who engaged in “intentional evangelism” to white, liberal Christians in America (ibid.). Growing up in India, he studied the tactics and texts of Christian missionaries and learned to emulate them, quoting extensively from the Bible but reinterpreting the message to promote a “universal religion” that was nevertheless “constructed mostly from Hindu materials” (p. 7).