Lahiri Mahasaya

The teaching

Taught from his commentaries as his pupils took them down, and the Kriya teaching his line hands on.

Kriya, the yoga of the breath

Lahiri Mahasaya teaches that God is found by stilling the breath and with it the mind, and that the way to that stillness is Kriya Yoga, an inward work of breath and attention along the spine. In his line the practice is given only by a teacher, at an initiation and in stages, and its methods are not written out for strangers; what is taught openly is its aim and its meaning. The breath is the tie between the soul and the body. While it moves restlessly the mind is pulled outward into the senses; as it grows calm the mind turns inward; and when breath and mind are still, the soul knows itself.

Breath offered into breath

He finds the practice in the Bhagavad Gita. In its fourth chapter Krishna speaks of yogis who offer the outgoing breath into the incoming and the incoming into the outgoing, restraining the course of both; in its fifth, of the sage who shuts out outward contacts, fixes the gaze between the brows and makes even the breaths that move within the nostrils, and so becomes free. Lahiri reads these verses as the Kriya itself: the breath drawn upward and sent downward along the spine, each breath offered into the other, until their movement is evened and comes to rest.

The field of the battle

His commentary reads the whole Gita as a map of the inner work. The field of Kurukshetra, where the armies meet, is the body. The blind king Dhritarashtra is the mind blinded by the senses, and his hundred sons are the desires and habits born of them. The five Pandava brothers are the five centres of the spine, from the centre of earth at its base to the centre of ether at the throat, and Arjuna, who must fight, is the yogi's power of self-control. Krishna, his charioteer, is the soul, the inner teacher who guides the battle. The war the Gita commands is the yogi's struggle to bring the senses back under the soul's rule.

The householder's way

The way, he teaches, is open to people as they are. He kept his post, his family and his home all his life, and he told his pupils to do the same: to meet their duties to work and kin in full, and to give their hours of practice to God, morning and evening, without leaving the world. The path asks no change of caste or faith; he gave it to Hindus of every caste, to Muslims and to Christians, and asked of each only steadiness. His counsel for the long road is short: banat, banat, ban jai, doing, doing, one day it is done.

The stillness after the practice

The practice itself is not the goal. The goal is the stillness that follows it, which his line calls the state beyond Kriya: a calm in which the breath is quiet of itself, the attention rests at the point between the brows, and the yogi abides as the witness of all that moves. In his teaching this state is carried back into work and family, so that the householder acts in the world from a centre the world cannot shake.

The cautions of the line

The tradition holds to its cautions, and they belong to the teaching. Kriya is learned from an initiated teacher, in its order, never from a page; the breath is never forced or held to the point of strain, and its stillness comes of itself, slowly, over years; the higher methods are given only when the first ones are steady. Anyone who meets dizziness, breathlessness, pain, fear or a troubled mind in breath practice should stop and seek a teacher's counsel, and a doctor's where the body is concerned. The fruit his line looks for is not a wonder but a quiet mind.