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A Modern Claimant and His Movement

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A Modern Claimant and His Movement

Among the modern figures who have claimed identification with the coming avatar, one of the most institutionally developed is Vijay Kumar Naidu, an Indian spiritual teacher who adopted the name Kalki Bhagavan and, together with a close collaborator presented as an incarnation of a complementary female principle, built a large organization commonly known as Oneness University, centred on a substantial ashram complex, sometimes referred to by followers as the Golden City, in Andhra Pradesh in southern India. The movement teaches a program built around what it calls deeksha, a transferable process presented as producing spiritual awakening, and it drew a substantial international following from the 1990s onward, including significant numbers of visitors and students from outside India, making it one of the more globally visible modern movements to organize itself around a specific living claimant to Kalki's identity. The organization has also faced public controversy and legal scrutiny in India over the years, including disputes concerning its finances, land holdings and other institutional matters, controversies that are a matter of public record though contested in their details by the organization itself.

As with other modern Kalki claimants noted in Hindu tradition's own long history of such figures, Oneness University's teachings and specific claims about its founder's identity have not achieved anything approaching consensus recognition within the broader Hindu tradition, and mainstream Vaishnava theology generally continues to treat Kalki's actual advent as a future event tied to the close of the current Kali Yuga rather than as something already accomplished in the person of any specific contemporary teacher.

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