Eknath Easwaran

Eknath Easwaran
Born	(1910-12-17)December 17, 1910 Kerala, India
Died	October 26, 1999(1999-10-26) (aged 88) California, USA
Nationality	India, United States
Known for	Spiritual teacher, author, translator and interpreter of spiritual literature, teacher of Passage Meditation

Eknath Easwaran (December 17, 1910 – October 26, 1999) was an Indian-born spiritual teacher, author and translator and interpreter of Indian religious texts such as the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads.

Easwaran was a professor of English literature at the University of Nagpur in India, and in 1959 he came to the United States as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Minnesota before transferring to the University of California, Berkeley where he taught courses on meditation-the first in the country offering credits.^[1][2][3][4] In 1961, Easwaran founded the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation and Nilgiri Press, based in northern California.^[3] Nilgiri Press has published over thirty books that he authored.

Easwaran was influenced by Mahatma Gandhi, whom he met when he was a young man.^[5] Easwaran developed a method of meditation – silent repetition in the mind of memorized inspirational passages from the world's major religious and spiritual traditions^[6] – which later came to be known as Passage Meditation.