Who Is Mahavatar Babaji, and Why Do So Many Kriya Traditions Trace Back to Him?

Somewhere around 2018, I was invited to judge a debate competition at a Swaminarayan school in Vapi. My friend Rajesh Rathore had pulled me into it. After the event, someone handed me a small gift, a book called The Apprentice to a Himalayan Yogi, by Sri M.

I read it, and I was hooked. Not just on the book, but on a name that kept coming up behind it: Mahavatar Babaji. One thread pulled into the next, and that is really how this whole interest began for me.

There is a strange footnote to this story. Around the same time, Sri M walked through Surat as part of his Walk of Hope, a 7,500 km padayatra from Kanyakumari to Kashmir in 2015-16, crossing 11 states to spread a message of peace, harmony, and tolerance. He visited the school I was running at the time. I missed meeting him that day, just a scheduling clash. It was only three or four years later, after I had already started following his work, that I found out it was him.

That is the kind of thing that stays with you. Maybe that is why I still find myself pulled back into this subject. Many of the Kriya Yoga traditions I have encountered since, big and small, trace their lineage in some form to Mahavatar Babaji. He is the guru behind the guru behind the guru. And the more I read about him, the less anyone actually seemed to know.

A quick note before we go further, since it is only fair you know where I am writing from. Over the years this reading turned into practice. I personally follow the Ananda path, the tradition built on Swami Kriyananda's teachings of Paramahansa Yogananda, and I have visited Sri M at Madanapalle myself. I also keep up regularly with SRF and YSS material. There is an older thread here too, I have always been drawn to mythological and legendary figures, and long before any of this, I was fascinated by Baba Gorakhnath through, of all things, the Nagraj comic books I read as a kid. I have also had my own metaphysical experiences along the way, the kind that are impossible to prove to anyone else but that shape how you read a subject like this. So as this series goes on and we get into these specific traditions, I am not writing as a neutral outsider looking in from a distance. I will try to be fair and honest about all the paths we cover, but you should know I have my own footing in some of this ground.

The portrait of Babaji commissioned by Paramahansa Yogananda, drawn by his brother Sananda Lal Ghosh, from the public-domain edition of Autobiography of a Yogi.

The mystery at the center

Here is the first thing that surprised me. This is not some outside skeptic's claim. It comes from Self-Realization Fellowship, the organization founded by Paramahansa Yogananda and one of the principal institutions through which the Babaji, Lahiri, Yukteswar, Yogananda lineage is taught today.

SRF says plainly on its own website that there are no historical records of Babaji's birth and life. Not scarce records. Not disputed records. None at all.

Yogananda himself, in Autobiography of a Yogi, called Babaji a deathless avatar who has lived for untold years in the remote Himalayas, appearing only rarely to a chosen few. No birth certificate. No verified name. No confirmed dates. Just a presence that keeps showing up in other people's stories.

That makes the admission all the more interesting to me. The organization doesn't try to fill the historical gap with a conventional biography. It simply acknowledges that the records aren't there, while preserving the tradition through the testimony of its gurus.

You will find the same four faces on the altar wherever this lineage is practiced, not just at SRF. Ananda Sangha, the path I follow myself, keeps the identical arrangement on its own altars, Krishna, Christ, Babaji, and Yogananda, side by side. Different organization, same acknowledgment: the tradition rests on testimony passed down through the gurus, not on a documented biography of the man at the center of it.

An altar at an SRF meditation circle, with Babaji pictured alongside Jesus, Krishna, and Paramahansa Yogananda, the four figures SRF, YSS, and Ananda all venerate as living embodiments of the same divine consciousness. (Photo: Riquix, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.)

A name that traces back to one book

I wanted to see how far the trail actually went, so I chased down one specific claim: that Babaji's birth name was Nagaraj.

The earliest published source I could find for this specific claim is M. Govindan's 1991 book, Babaji and the 18 Siddha Kriya Yoga Tradition. Govindan says the information came through oral transmission from his teacher, Yogi Ramaiah. But I could not find an earlier documentary source independently establishing the name. A researcher who dug into this, the Jansankalp Foundation, reached the same conclusion.

That was a small but clarifying moment for me. A detail repeated confidently across dozens of websites, and the earliest trace of it I could find was a single book, less than forty years old.

I am not saying this to debunk anything. An oral tradition can genuinely preserve things that never made it into a historical archive, that does not automatically make it false. But it does mean we should be careful about what we call history, what we call lineage, and what we call belief. A lot of what sounds like ancient tradition is really one person's account, retold enough times that it starts to feel like fact.

Three kinds of claims in this story

The more I read, the more I noticed a pattern. Every story about Babaji mixes together claims that actually sit on different levels of certainty.

• Historical record — Things that can be independently documented. Lahiri Mahasaya, the disciple Babaji is said to have initiated into Kriya Yoga in 1861, was a real, historically verifiable person, born September 30, 1828, in the village of Ghurni in Bengal.
• Lineage testimony — What a guru, disciple, or institution says happened. That Babaji met and initiated Lahiri Mahasaya in 1861 falls here. Not something you can independently check, but not invented out of nowhere either.
• Spiritual or metaphysical claim — Things that cannot really be tested by any historical method. That Babaji is deathless and has lived for centuries falls here.

I found this three way split genuinely useful. It is probably the most honest way to approach someone like Babaji, not choosing between believer and skeptic, just being clear about which level a given claim sits on.

Why this matters going forward

Going in, I assumed the lineage from Babaji would be one simple line. Babaji taught someone, who taught someone, who taught someone, all the way down to today.

It is not that simple. The tradition splits early, and more than once. One stream runs through Lahiri Mahasaya and his students. Other streams claim a completely separate line, through teachers who say they met Babaji independently. Some of these streams barely acknowledge that the others exist.

If one undocumented, unverifiable figure is the claimed root of so many paths, how did those paths grow apart? And maybe the more interesting question: what does each of those paths actually look like today?

That question is personal for me too. The book that started all this does not simply follow the familiar Babaji, Lahiri Mahasaya, Sri Yukteswar, Yogananda line. Sri M's own lineage traces through another Himalayan master, Maheshwarnath Babaji, described by his own organization as a senior disciple of Sri Guru Babaji, Mahavatar Babaji himself.

Which raises a question I will be sitting with for the rest of this series: if Babaji is the common source, did he have more than one line of transmission?

The cave at Dwarahat, if you want to see it for yourself

This part is not a metaphysical claim, it is a place you can actually go. The Yogoda Satsanga Sakha Ashram at Dwarahat, in Uttarakhand, maintains what it calls the Holy Cave of Mahavatar Babaji, the site where tradition holds that Babaji initiated Lahiri Mahasaya into Kriya Yoga in 1861. A sign at the cave, put up by the ashram, states this plainly and asks visitors to use the space only for meditation. The cave is open to visitors from 10 AM to 3 PM every day.

I have not made this visit myself yet, but it is on my list, and I would encourage anyone drawn to this lineage to go. Whatever you make of the historical questions in this post, standing at a place that generations of practitioners have treated as sacred ground is its own kind of experience, one that does not depend on resolving any of the uncertainty above.

The sign at the Holy Cave of Mahavatar Babaji, Yogoda Satsanga Sakha Ashram, Dwarahat, Uttarakhand, marking the site tradition holds as where Babaji initiated Lahiri Mahasaya into Kriya Yoga in 1861.

A Shri Mahavatar Babaji Prarthana, a Hindi devotional prayer offered to Babaji. (Photo: Das krishnadas, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.)

Your Questions, Answered