Yogananda's Lake Shrine: Gandhi's Ashes and a Wall-Less Temple

Two miles from the Pacific, on a spring-fed lake in the Pacific Palisades hills, there is a five-acre garden that a Bengali yogi named Paramahansa Yogananda designed as a place of worship with no walls. He opened it to the public on August twentieth, nineteen fifty. On the same day, he dedicated what was then the first memorial in the world to honor Mahatma Gandhi.

The memorial is a stone sarcophagus containing a portion of Gandhi's ashes. The ashes had been sent to Yogananda by V.M. Nawle, a publisher and journalist in Poona, who had secured them before they were to be scattered upon the Ganges River. The ceremony at the lake shrine on that August day in nineteen fifty was attended by California's Lieutenant Governor Goodwin Knight and roughly fifteen hundred members of Yogananda's organization.

Yogananda had come to the United States from India in nineteen twenty and spent thirty-two years teaching what he described as the underlying unity of Eastern and Western spiritual traditions. His autobiography, published in nineteen forty-six, introduced millions of Western readers to Indian spiritual practice. He died two years after opening this lake shrine, in nineteen fifty-two.

The lake shrine is still here, largely unchanged. The Gandhi memorial still holds what it held in nineteen fifty. The garden is open to visitors of all faiths and no faith. On a weekday afternoon, people sit by the water in the same stillness Yogananda designed the place for, two miles from the Pacific Coast Highway, which does not know the lake is there.