Kripalu Maharaj the First Jagadguru in over 700 Years
Kripalu Maharaj Ashram

Kripalu Maharaj was born into a highly respected Bramin family in the village of Mangarth, near the city of Allahabad, on the Sharat Poornima, the night of the full moon, in October of 1922.

For Hindus, Sharat Poornima is the time when Krisna and Shri Raseshwari Raha Rani are thought to have revealed the true bliss of Vrindavan on a night some 5000 years ago.

Kripalu Maharaj is only the 5th personality in the last 2500 years, and the first in over 700 years to be accorded the status of Supreme Jagadguru, ‘world teacher,’ or ‘master of masters.’

His followers hold that his spiritual stature and divine personality are beyond the understanding of the material mind, and that his divinity can never be comprehended abstractly, but only by direct experience through his presence.

He is known to his adoring devotees as Shri Maharaji Ji, and at 81 years of age, Kripalu Maharaj still takes an active role in teaching the devotional philosophy of Bhakti yoga to thousands of adoring followers in northern India and throughout the world.

According to his followers,
Kripalu Maharaj belongs to a special category of saints that are called rasik saints. The personalities of these rasik saints is such that they are viewed as the most loving and intimate manifestations of the divine self, and to experience their presence is to experience the dissolution of all formalities into pure and all encompassing divine love.

From the time of his birth and while he was growing up, Kripalu Maharaj impressed others with his unique and virtuous being. At the age of 14, he traveled to Indore for the purpose of studying Sanskrit literature.

Once in Indore,
Kripalu Maharaj astounded his teachers by mastering all of his subjects in just two years. He left Indore at the age of 16, in a state of divinely absorbed consciousness and walked to Chitakroot and Sharbang.

Everywhere Kripalu Maharaj went, people saw the physical expressions of his Bhao consciousness, the state of divine ecstasy, and invited him into their homes, where he stayed sometimes for hours and sometimes for days, but all the while, always in the Bhao state.

From Citrakoot and Sharbang, Kripalu Maharaj traveled on the Mahoba and to Jhansi. Everyplace he went, everyone who encountered him experienced the manifestation of his loving being and glimpsed through his being his divine state of consciousness.