A Festival Now Broadcast Live to a Global Following

Several large contemporary Indian spiritual organisations with substantial international followings, including the Isha Foundation led by Jaggi Vasudev, known publicly as Sadhguru, and the Art of Living movement founded by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, have built Guru Purnima into one of their single largest annual events, holding major gatherings at their own ashrams that are simultaneously live-streamed to a global online audience numbering in the millions, a scale of reach for a single festival day that depends entirely on modern broadcast and internet technology unavailable to any traditional guru-disciple relationship before the current era.

These organisations frame their large-scale modern Guru Purnima events as continuous with the ancient guru-disciple relationship this entry's first article describes, even though the relationship between a globally broadcast address to millions of anonymous online viewers and the traditionally intimate, personally supervised bond between an individual disciple and a named teacher is, on any plain reading, a considerably different kind of relationship, an example of a festival built around personal transmission being adapted, not without some structural tension, to an era of mass digital audiences the tradition's founding assumptions did not anticipate.