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Biography of Sri Chinmoy

By admin • January 4, 2010

sri_chinmoySri Chinmoy Ghose was born in 1931 in East Bengal, India— today’s Bangladesh. He was the youngest of seven children. He lost his father to illness in 1943, and his mother a few months later. Orphaned, in 1944 the 12-year-old Ghose joined his brothers and sisters at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry, French India, where elder brothers Hriday and Chitta had already established a presence. There he spent the next twenty years in spiritual practice, including meditation, study in Bengali and English literature, and work in the ashram’s cottage industries. There he absorbed the teachings and tutelage of India’s great wisdom and fostered his deep aspiration to be of service to humanity. In 1964 he voyaged to New York, where he has lived since that time.

Sri Chinmoy began writing poetry at an early age, his early efforts being in his native Bengali tongue. However, Sri Chinmoy learnt English metre and rhyme and most of his poems have since been written in English. His first English poem was written in 1945 and was entitled “The Golden Flute”.
In his poetry, Sri Chinmoy is attempting to express the inexpressible, to articulate what is beyond the scope of words. Sri Chinmoy is above all a poet of the inner landscape, and he never forgets that the poem is ‘a finger pointing at the moon’, an invitation to the silence beyond the words.

“The Absolute” is a good example of this. This poem encapsulates a profound spiritual experience; He does not have to argue his case, he just expresses a spiritual consciousness. This inner confidence is reminiscent of the great mystic poets such as Kabir, Mirabai and Rumi. With this kind of poetry we feel it is coming from an inner source of spontaneity and creativity.

Recently Sri Chinmoy’s poetry has focused on short mantric sutra’s or aphorisms. They display a haiku-like compactness, a tremendous density and compression of language. Many of Sri Chinmoy’s short poems are also instructional, their apparent simplicity revealing more and more profound depth on each re-reading.

During the 1970s, while in America, Sri Chinmoy attracted followers such as musicians Carlos Santana, John McLaughlin, Narada Michael Walden, Roberta Flack and Boris Grebenshikov. Sri Chinmoy also had the Olympic athlete Carl Lewis as a student. Frederick Lenz (Atmananda) became a follower around 1972, but he left and became a guru on his own around 1981. In 1976, Chinmoy released a meditative album on Folkways Records entitled Music for Meditation.

In 1977, he founded the Sri Chinmoy Marathon Team, which holds running, swimming, and cycling events worldwide, from fun runs to ultramarathons. Its precursor was the 1976 Liberty Torch Run, a relay in which 33 runners marked America’s bicentennial by covering 8,800 miles in 7 weeks, mapped out over 50 states. This concept was expanded in 1987 to become the international Peace Run (later renamed World Harmony Run), generally held every two years.

Sri Chinmoy died from a heart attack while at his home in Jamaica, Queens, New York on October 11, 2007. His works, teachings and efforts are great asset. According to an estimate, Sri Chinmoy wrote 1,500 books, 115,000 poems and 20,000 songs, created 200,000 paintings and gave almost 800 peace concerts. His short songs were written in Bengali and English.


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