Sri Daya Mata, Guiding Light for U.S. Hindus, Dies at 96

Sri Daya Mata, who for more than five decades was the leader of one of the most influential Hindu groups in the United States and an ardent advocate of the healing power of meditation, died on Tuesday at the group’s retreat for nuns in Los Angeles. She was 96.

Her death was confirmed by Lauren Landress, a spokeswoman for the group, the Self-Realization Fellowship/Yogoda Satsanga Society of India
 
, which is based in what once was an elegant hotel on Mount Washington in Los Angeles.

From 1955 until her death, Sri Daya Mata — her name means “true mother of compassion” in Sanskrit — was the society’s president and spiritual leader. In her flowing ocher sari, she presided over an organization that now has more than 600 temples, centers and retreats in 60 countries, about half of them in the United States. Ms. Landress estimated that the society had “hundreds of thousands” of followers, but said she could not be more specific.

The society, whose monks and nuns adopt Indian names, teaches that there is a unifying truth behind all religious experience, and the group encourages its members to honor their roots in other faiths. Most members follow a vegetarian
 
diet, practice yoga
 
, chant and meditate.

Meditation, Sri Daya Mata said, is a universal balm: “If we turn our consciousness within, in deep meditation, communing with God even a little bit every day, we begin gradually to experience that love which is our real nature.

“Feeling love within ourselves, it is very easy to give it to others.”

The Self-Realization Fellowship was founded in 1920 by the Indian yoga master Paramahansa Yogananda soon after he arrived in the United States as a delegate to the International Congress of Religious Liberals in Boston. He became well known as the author of “Autobiography of a Yogi,”

Read full report fron Newyork Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/03/us/03mata.html
 
 

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