Essence of the Upanishads: A Key to Indian Spirituality Paperback - 2009

Author of the best-selling Classics of Indian Spirituality series, Easwaran had both a deep intuitive knowledge of his own Hindu legacy and a love of English literature. He was chairman of the English department at a major Indian university when he came to the United States on a Fulbright fellowship in 1959.

From the 1960s onwards, Easwaran held classes on mysticism and practical spirituality for a primarily American audience. A gifted teacher, he was able to anticipate the problems that Western readers have with the concepts underlying Indian spirituality, and to explain them in fresh, contemporary, and profoundly simple ways. Throughout his life, he drew on the Upanishads and the other Indian classics for inspiration. As Huston Smith writes, "It is impossible to get to the heart of those classics unless you live them, and he did live them."

In 1961 Easwaran founded the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation in California, and in 1968, at the University of California, Berkeley, he taught the first academic course on meditation ever offered for credit at a major American university. He continued to teach his method of passage meditation and his eight-point program for spiritual living to an American and international audience for almost forty years. His twenty-seven books on meditation and the classics of world mysticism have been translated into twenty-six languages.

Through the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation and its publishing arm, Nilgiri Press, Easwaran continues to reach an ever-growing audience around the world through publications and retreats.