Long before meditation and yoga became global phenomena, Paramahansa Yogananda was already trying to bring these practices to the West. His influence also reached people far removed from the spiritual world, including Steve Jobs, who was a well-known admirer of Autobiography of a Yogi, the book written by Yogananda. One edition of the work even states that Jobs went so far as to order 500 copies to distribute among his guests.
Yogananda died on March 7, 1952, in Los Angeles, after delivering a speech at a dinner honoring India’s ambassador to the United States. According to records from the time, he suffered a coronary occlusion. For his followers, however, his death was a mahasamadhi, the term they use to describe the conscious departure from the body of a spiritually realized master.
What happened afterward is what turned his death into an extraordinary story. His body was taken to Forest Lawn Memorial-Park and embalmed. Harry T. Rowe, the funeral director, left a notarized statement about its condition, in which he stated that he observed no visible physical disintegration even 20 days after the death. He also noted that there were no visible signs of mold and described the state of preservation as unprecedented in his experience.
The account was later incorporated into the tradition of his followers as a possible manifestation of his spiritual state. The organization founded by Yogananda preserves the Forest Lawn statement as part of the documentation about his final days. However, there is an important difference between the documented fact and its interpretation: what can be directly attributed to the funeral director is that he observed no visible signs of decomposition; considering that a supernatural phenomenon is a later religious interpretation.
The story is even more striking because of the influence that Autobiography of a Yogi went on to have decades later. The book, originally published in 1946, became one of the best-known works on Eastern spirituality in the West and was translated into dozens of languages. Its influence even reached Silicon Valley’s technology culture, where Steve Jobs is among its best-known readers.
Thus, Yogananda’s death came to be surrounded by two stories that continue to draw attention: that of a spiritual teacher whose work reached one of the most important figures in modern technology and that of a body which, according to the funeral director who had it in his care, showed no visible signs of decomposition even 20 days after his death. More than seven decades later, the case continues to be presented as one of the most unusual episodes associated with his life.