India's 30 Greatest Gurus

A mystic is someone who claims no second-hand knowledge of God. They say they have seen, or been seen. India has produced such people in every century: a weaver in Kashi who said one word of love outweighs a lifetime of book-learning, a teenager at Nevasa who put the Gita into the Marathi of ordinary people, a temple priest at Dakshineswar who longed for the Divine Mother as a child cries for its mother, a blanket-wrapped baba in the hills of Nainital who urged everyone to feed the hungry.

This collection gathers 30 of them, from the 8th century to the present day. We chose them for three reasons: the depth of their realisation as their traditions remember it, the living lineage or practice they left behind, and the range of paths they show, from the Name sung in the street to silent self-enquiry. They are not ranked. They are grouped into five eras and listed in order of time within each.

Each page tells the life in plain words, sets out the core teachings, and ends with a few principles you can practise this week. Where history is uncertain, we say so. Where a story is told by devotees, we tell it as theirs.