Eknath Easwaran

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. In 1961, Easwaran founded the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation and Nilgiri Press, based in northern California. 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. Easwaran developed a method of meditation – silent repetition in the mind of memorized inspirational passages from the world's major religious and spiritual traditions – which later came to be known as Passage Meditation.