Long pilgrimage life teaching shivapuri baba biography

Long Pilgrimage: The Life and Teaching of the Shivapuri Baba is the legacy of Sri Govindananda Bharati, hailed by many as one of India’s greatest unsung saints.

Written by John G Bennett in collaboration with Thakur Lal Manandhar, it was first published in 1965, with a Western reader in mind. Only in 2006 was this slim volume finally printed in Nepal.

Long pilgrimage life teaching shivapuri baba biography

This is a big little book. Just a 185 pages from start to finish, it is both a biography and a way of life.

Bennett gets off to an interesting start by introducing the world of 1826, the year of the Baba’s birth, before introducing us to the central figure—a baby born into a family of South Indian brahmins.

The guru, who is today revered simply as Shivapuri Baba, embraced the life of an ascetic at an early age and spent decades in meditation before he reached “God-Realization”.

Although Bennett remarks that Baba revealed nothing of those y