Swami Sivananda

Born Kuppuswami in 1887 in Pattamadai, Tamil Nadu, Sivananda trained as a physician and spent a decade practicing medicine in Malaya before renouncing everything in 1924 to live as a monk in Rishikesh, on the Ganges at the foot of the Himalayas. There he fused the healer''s instinct with the renunciate''s path: his motto — "Serve, Love, Give, Purify, Meditate, Realize" — and the Divine Life Society he founded in 1936 framed spiritual life as something practical, joyful, and available to everyone. He wrote some three hundred books, and at his ashram the day turned around satsang: scripture, meditation, and above all the singing of the divine name, which he prescribed with a doctor''s confidence as the simplest and surest practice for the modern age.

Daily kirtan at Sivananda''s ashram traditionally opens with his "Jaya Ganesha" prayer sequence — a garland of name-chants still sung, in the same order, at Sivananda centers around the world. His disciples became a diaspora of song: Swami Vishnudevananda founded the International Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centres, whose satsangs open with the same kirtans from Canada to India; Swami Satchidananda opened the Woodstock festival in 1969 with a chant; and Swami Chinmayananda founded the Chinmaya Mission. Through them, Sivananda''s conviction that chanting belongs at the center of yoga practice passed directly into the Western yoga culture where kirtan lives today.