Yogananda's Echo Park Temple: Where the Practice Came Ashore

In nineteen twenty-five, Paramahansa Yogananda established his first American ashram in a former hotel on Sunset Boulevard in Echo Park, bringing the Self-Realization Fellowship to the United States at a time when Indian philosophy was barely known in the country. Los Angeles was not the obvious choice. It turned out to be the right one.

The white-domed temple on Sunset Boulevard is still there, still active as an SRF center, largely unchanged from the structure Yogananda adapted for his community a century ago.

Yogananda's nineteen forty-six book, Autobiography of a Yogi, became one of the most widely read spiritual books of the twentieth century. It introduced yoga, meditation, and the lineage of Indian teachers to millions of American readers who would never have encountered these practices through any other channel.

When Steve Jobs died in two thousand eleven, he had arranged for a copy of Autobiography of a Yogi to be distributed digitally to everyone at his memorial service. He had been rereading it annually since his twenties. The Echo Park temple where that tradition entered American life is a modest building on a busy street, and is easy to drive past without noticing.