Parichayāmṛt

Parichayāmṛt means the nectar of introduction. The title is exact, and it is modest. This is not a biography and it does not try to explain Bābājī. It is a set of introductions — four short essays that walk a newcomer up to the Lord of Haiḍākhāṇ and to three of the great souls who stood near Him, and then stop, leaving the reader to look.

It is a good first book. If you have never read anything from this tradition, you could begin here and lose nothing.

What is inside

The book is short — you could read it in an afternoon — and it is built in a deliberate shape. Two invocations, one at each end, enclose four essays that move outward from Bābājī Himself to the men whose lives were changed by Him.

Around these sit the Śrīmanmunīndra Sūkta, the hymn to the Lord of Sages, which opens the book and closes it again; a Humble Submission explaining why the book was made; and, in this edition, a translator’s preface and closing note.

The essay most readers come for

The third essay is on Śyāmācharaṇ Lāhiṛī — Lahiri Mahāsaya. For readers in the West, this is often the point where the tradition suddenly connects to something they already know.

In 1861, a government accountant was posted to Rānīkhet in the Himālayan foothills. Walking in the hills above the town, he met an ascetic who called him by name, told him they had known one another before, and gave him the initiation into Kriyā Yoga. That accountant became Lahiri Mahāsaya. Through his disciple Śrī Yukteśvar, and Yukteśvar’s disciple Paramahaṁsa Yogānanda, that meeting reached the whole world in Autobiography of a Yogi — where the ascetic is called Mahāvatār Bābājī.

This book is written from inside the tradition that says the ascetic in the hills and the Bābā of Haiḍākhāṇ are the same. It does not argue the case; it simply tells the story as the lineage holds it. Whether you come to that as a devotee or as a curious reader, this essay is where the two accounts meet.

The fourth essay, and why it is here

Somvārī Bābā — whose name was Śrī Paramānanda Jī Brahmachārī — held a great bhaṇḍārā, a feeding of all comers, at his āśram every Monday. The common people simply called him the Monday Bābā, and the name stuck so thoroughly that it displaced his own. Born in a Sārasvata brāhmaṇa family at Pīḍ Dādankhān in the Punjab, he lived some forty or fifty years in Kūrmāñchal.

He is included because Bābājī spoke of him. Asked what sort of saint Somvārī Bābā was, Haiḍākhāṇḍī Bābā answered that such a saint is rare in the world — that he was a peerless brahmachārī. The essay is, in that sense, a portrait drawn on Bābājī’s own recommendation.

Who wrote it

Mahendra Mahārāj signed himself simply Charaṇāśrit — “one who has taken refuge at the Feet.” He never used a grander name.

Bābājī appeared to him on his fifth birthday and gave him a sweet. He never forgot the face. After finishing school he spent about twenty-five years searching — through Tibet, Nepal and across India — for a figure he had seen once as a child. In 1949, in the hill town of Almora, he came across a photograph of the old Haidākhāṇ Bābā, who had disappeared in 1922, and recognised him at once as the man from his childhood.

The rest of his life went into gathering and setting down, in Hindi and Sanskrit, everything he could hold of his Lord, and into repairing Bābājī’s old temples and āśrams so that they would be standing when He returned. Mahendra Mahārāj died in 1969. Bābājī reappeared at Haiḍākhāṇ in 1970.

Much of what this library holds comes from his hand, or from his disciple, the Alwar scholar Ācārya Viṣṇudatt Śāstrī.

What you are actually reading

A note on the text, so you know what is in your hands:

• The English is a fresh translation made for this library, working from the 2003 Hindi printing. Sacred terms are kept in their original sound with IAST diacritics, glossed lightly at first appearance.
• The Hindi is the original, set from an OCR scan of that printing. It is faithful, but a stray character may have survived the scan here and there.
• The plates in the reading view are the photographs of the original book, including the portrait of Mahendra Bābā himself.
• The Farsi edition is offered as a PDF download only. Its text layer is scrambled mid-word, so putting it into the reader would publish corrupted Persian.

If you are deciding where to start

Read this book if you want the shortest honest route into who Bābājī is, or if you came to this site from Autobiography of a Yogi and want to see where that thread leads.

Read something else first if you are looking for the events of the 1970–1984 ministry, or for Bābājī’s teachings in His own words — this book is older in spirit than that, and points at Him from a distance rather than reporting Him directly.