Discover Babaji Cave, Spiritual Significance and History

This is the cave where Sri Sri Mahavatar Babaji initiated Sri Sri Lahiri Mahasaya into Kriya Yoga. There is a place to sit and meditate, allowing you to effortlessly enter meditative states.

How to Get There:

The temple is 25 km away from Dwarahat town in the Himalayas. It requires an average of a 1-hour trek to reach the cave from the road side.

Map:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/Z65HfeHSMu6yAfi39

About Babaji Cave

To understand the historical significance of the Babai cave, You must read Chapter 34, “Materializing a Palace in the Himalayas” from the Autobiography of a Yogi, and “A Blessing from Mahavatar Babaji” from Only Love by Sri Sri Daya Mata.

Babaji’s Cave is the place where Babaji initiated Lahiri Mahasaya in 1861, marking the birth of Kriya Yoga in this Dwapara Yuga. All Kriyabans in the world  trace their lineage to this event. (2011 marked the 150th anniversary of Kriya Yoga.)

The Babaji cave lies in the Dunagiri Mountain beyond the hamlet of Kukuchina, 25 km from Dwarahat. The mountain path to the cave is easy to reach the Babaji cave. The trek to the cave takes about one hour for the average person. During the rains, there are a few streams along the way which feed the Gogash River, mentioned in Autobiography of a Yogi.

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About Sri Mahavatar Babaji

There are no historical records relating to the birth and life of Mahavatar Babaji. Paramahansa Yogananda has written in Autobiography of a Yogi that the deathless avatar has resided for untold years in the remote Himalayan regions of India, revealing himself only rarely to a blessed few.

It is Mahavatar Babaji who revived in this age the lost scientific meditation technique of Kriya Yoga. In bestowing Kriya initiation on his disciple Lahiri Mahasaya, Babaji said, “The Kriya Yoga that I am giving to the world through you in this nineteenth century is a revival of the same science that Krishna gave millenniums ago to Arjuna; and that was later known to Patanjali and Christ, and to St. John, St. Paul, and other disciples.”

Shortly before Paramahansa Yogananda left for America in 1920, Mahavatar Babaji came to Yoganandaji’s home in Calcutta, where the young monk sat deeply praying for divine assurance regarding the mission he was about to undertake. Babaji said to him: “Follow the behest of your guru and go to America. Fear not; you shall be protected. You are the one I have chosen to spread the message of Kriya Yoga in the West.”

About Lahiri Mahasaya

Lahiri Mahasaya was born on September 30, 1828, in the village of Ghurni in Bengal, India. At the age of thirty-three, while walking one day in the Himalayan foothills near Ranikhet, he met his guru, Mahavatar Babaji. It was a divine reunion of two who had been together in many lives past; at an awakening touch of blessing.  Lahiri Mahasaya immediately engulfed in a spiritual aura of divine realization that was never to leave him.

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Initiation of Kriya Yoga

Mahavatar Babaji initiated him in the science of Kriya Yoga and instructed him to bestow the sacred technique on all sincere seekers. Lahiri Mahasaya returned to his home in Banaras to fulfill this mission. As the first to teach the lost ancient Kriya science in contemporary times. He is famous as a seminal figure in the renaissance of yoga that began in modern India in the latter part of the nineteenth century and continues to this day.

Paramahansa Yogananda wrote in Autobiography of a Yogi: “As the fragrance of flowers cannot be suppressed, so Lahiri Mahasaya, quietly living as an ideal householder, could not hide his innate glory. Devotee-bees from every part of India began to seek the divine nectar of the liberated master…. The harmoniously balanced life of the great householder-guru became the inspiration of thousands of men and women.”

As Lahiri Mahasaya exemplified the highest ideals of Yoga. “The union of the little self with God.” He is  as a Yogavatar, or incarnation of Yoga.

The Life of Yogi

Paramahansa Yogananda’s parents were disciples of Lahiri Mahasaya, and when he was but a baby in arms, his mother carried him to the home of her guru. Blessing the infant, Lahiri Mahasaya said, “Little mother, thy son will be a yogi. As a spiritual engine, he will carry many souls to God’s kingdom.”

Lahiri Mahasaya

Lahiri Mahasaya established no organization during his lifetime but made this prediction: “About fifty years after my passing, an account of my life will be written because of a deep interest in Yoga that will arise in the West. The message of Yoga will encircle the globe. It will aid in establishing the brotherhood of man: a unity based on humanity’s direct perception of the one Father.”

Lahiri Mahasaya entered mahasamadhi in Banaras on September 26, 1895. Fifty years later, in America, his prediction was fulfilled when an increasing interest in yoga in the West. Paramahansa Yogananda inspired  to write Autobiography of a Yogi, which contains a beautiful account of Lahiri Mahasaya’s life.