Eknath Easwaran

Eknath Easwaran (1910–1999) was an Indian-born spiritual teacher, author, and translator and interpreter of Indian religious texts, including the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads. He was a professor of English literature at the University of Nagpur in India, and in 1959 moved to the United States as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught courses on meditation. In 1961, Easwaran founded the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation and Nilgiri Press, based in Northern California, which published more than thirty of his books. Easwaran was influenced by Mahatma Gandhi, whom he met when he was a young man. He 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.