Our Gurus

Chinmaya Mission stands within an unbroken lineage of Vedantic masters — a tradition in which the wisdom of the scriptures is passed from guru to disciple, kept alive and made new for each generation. At the heart of our Mission is our founder, Pujya Gurudev Swami Chinmayananda, together with the great teachers who shaped him and those who have carried his work forward.

Pujya Gurudev Swami Chinmayananda

Born Balakrishna Menon in 1916 in Ernakulam, Kerala, Pujya Gurudev began life as a journalist and a participant in India’s freedom movement — and, by his own telling, a skeptic who once set out to expose the sadhus as frauds. Instead, in Swami Sivananda he found a living embodiment of the very truth he had doubted. In 1949 he was initiated into sannyasa by Swami Sivananda, who gave him the name Chinmayananda — “one who revels in the bliss of pure Consciousness” — and sent him to the Himalayas to study under Swami Tapovan Maharaj.

In December 1951 he gave his first Jnana Yajna, a Upanishad lecture series in Pune, launching what he called the “Gangotri Plan” — to bring the wisdom of Vedanta out of the Himalayas and into the lives of everyday people. Devotees formally founded Chinmaya Mission in 1953 to carry the work forward. Over four decades Gurudev conducted 576 Jnana Yajnas across the globe, and by the time he attained mahasamadhi in 1993 the Mission had grown into a worldwide movement of spiritual, educational, and charitable activity.

His Gurus

Heads of the Mission