From Physics Graduate to Disciple of the Shankaracharya

Before he became known by the honorific Maharishi, meaning great seer, the man born Mahesh Prasad Varma completed a degree in physics at Allahabad University in the early 1940s, an unusual academic background for a figure who would later be remembered chiefly as a spiritual teacher. Rather than pursuing a scientific career, he became a close disciple of Swami Brahmananda Saraswati, who held the position of Shankaracharya of Jyotirmath, one of the four major monastic seats established within the Advaita Vedanta tradition attributed to the eighth century philosopher Adi Shankara, and spent roughly thirteen years studying under him in the Himalayas.

Brahmananda Saraswati died in 1953, and after a period of further retreat, Mahesh began developing what he described as a simplified, easily learned form of meditation drawn from this Advaita Vedanta background but presented in largely non technical, non sectarian language, centered on the silent mental repetition of a mantra selected for the individual practitioner and practiced for about twenty minutes twice a day. He began teaching this method publicly in India from 1955 and founded the Spiritual Regeneration Movement in 1957 as a formal vehicle for spreading it, marking the start of a teaching career that would take him, within little more than a decade, from regional Indian religious circles to global public attention.