Teachers

Atmananda Krishna Menon

1883 – 1959

Kerala-born police official who became one of the most original twentieth-century Advaita teachers. Developed the higher reason method, an investigation that uses the mind to look back through itself to its source.

Gaudapada

c. 6th century

The parama-guru of Shankara, author of the Mandukya Karika. The bridge figure between the Upanishads and Shankara's later systematic Advaita.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

1918 – 2008

The Indian teacher who took a single mantra-based meditation technique out of the Shankaracharya tradition and onto the global stage. Through Transcendental Meditation, his retreats in Rishikesh, and decades of teaching across the West, he became the most widely-heard voice of contemplative practice in the second half of the twentieth century.

Nisargadatta Maharaj

1897 – 1981

The bidi-cigarette merchant of Mumbai who became one of the most direct nondual teachers of the twentieth century. Recorded in I Am That, his teachings centre on prior-to-consciousness recognition.

Ramana Maharshi

1879 – 1950

The sage of Arunachala. Spent fifty-four years living at the foot of the sacred mountain in Tiruvannamalai, teaching primarily through silence and through the question Who am I?

Ranjit Maharaj

1913 – 2000

Fellow student of Nisargadatta under Siddharameshwar Maharaj. Taught quietly in Mumbai for sixty-five years before being persuaded to receive Western students in his eighties. His teaching method centres on the simple recognition That you are.

Shankara

788 – 820

The systematic founder of classical Advaita Vedanta. Wrote commentaries on the principal Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Brahma Sutras that defined the tradition for the next twelve centuries.

Siddharameshwar Maharaj

1888 – 1936

The teacher of Nisargadatta and Ranjit Maharaj. Second master of the Inchagiri Sampradaya, the Marathi devotional Advaita lineage descending from Bhausaheb Maharaj. Distinguished for his systematic four-bodies method.

Anthony de Mello

1931 – 1987

The Indian Jesuit whose teaching stories and retreats took the contemplative essence of the Christian tradition and stripped it down to a startlingly direct invitation to wake up. Drew openly on the Eastern traditions while remaining a Catholic priest until the end.

Augustine of Hippo

354 – 430

The North African bishop whose Confessions opened the contemplative interior to Western thought. Augustine's account of the restless heart finding rest only in the divine became the foundational psychology of Christian mysticism.

Bede Griffiths

1906 – 1993

The English Benedictine monk who spent the last forty years of his life at a Christian ashram in Tamil Nadu, integrating the contemplative inheritance of his own tradition with the nondual recognition of Advaita Vedanta. One of the central figures of the twentieth-century Christian-Hindu dialogue.

Bernard of Clairvaux

1090 – 1153

The Cistercian abbot whose sermons on the Song of Songs turned biblical love poetry into a map of the soul's journey toward union. Bernard reshaped medieval contemplation around the language of bridal mysticism.

Brother Lawrence

c. 1614 – 1691

The Carmelite lay brother whose conversations and letters, collected after his death as The Practice of the Presence of God, distilled the contemplative life to the simple continuous turning of the heart toward God in the midst of ordinary work.

Hadewijch

c. 1200 – c. 1260

The thirteenth-century Brabantine Beguine whose visions, letters, and poems represent the highest literary expression of Beguine mysticism. Hadewijch wrote in courtly Middle Dutch about the soul's love affair with God in language of striking precision.

Hildegard of Bingen

1098 – 1179

The twelfth-century Benedictine abbess, mystic, composer, and natural philosopher whose visions of the living light shaped medieval German spirituality. The earliest of the great Rhineland women mystics.

Johannes Tauler

c. 1300 – 1361

The Strasbourg Dominican who carried Eckhart's Rhineland mysticism into pastoral form. Tauler's sermons survived the condemnation that buried Eckhart and shaped the German contemplative tradition through Luther and beyond.

John of the Cross

1542 – 1591

The Spanish Carmelite reformer whose Dark Night of the Soul is the most precise account in any tradition of the dismantling of every spiritual support before pure recognition. With Teresa of Avila, the founder of the Discalced Carmelites.

Julian of Norwich

c. 1342 – c. 1416

The English anchoress whose Revelations of Divine Love is the first book in the English language known to be written by a woman. Julian's vision of a love that wills and works all things, and her insistence that all shall be well, anchors the English contemplative tradition.

Marguerite Porete

c. 1250 – 1310

The Beguine whose Mirror of Simple Souls pushed the apophatic mysticism of love into territory the Inquisition could not allow. Marguerite was burned at the stake in Paris in 1310 for refusing to retract her book, which then survived anonymously to become a quiet influence on Eckhart and on the entire Rhineland tradition.

Mechthild of Magdeburg

c. 1207 – c. 1282

The thirteenth-century Beguine whose Flowing Light of the Godhead is the earliest substantial work of mysticism written in German. Mechthild's bridal mysticism and her bold dialogues with God shaped the Rhineland tradition that came after her.

Meister Eckhart

c. 1260 – c. 1328

The Rhineland Dominican whose sermons pushed Christian apophatic theology into territory most readily described as nondual. Eckhart's God beyond God and his teaching on the birth of the Word in the ground of the soul remain the most radical formulations in Western mysticism.

Teresa of Avila

1515 – 1582

The Spanish Carmelite who founded the Discalced reform with John of the Cross and whose Interior Castle remains one of the great topographies of the contemplative path. Teresa wrote with practical clarity about prayer, mystical experience, and the dynamics of union.

Bankei Yotaku

1622 – 1693

A seventeenth-century Japanese Rinzai Zen master who taught a teaching of unusual directness and accessibility. Bankei dispensed with koan study and formal practice and pointed his students again and again to what he called the Unborn Buddha-Mind, the awareness that is already and obviously the case before any thought of practice or attainment arises.

D. T. Suzuki

1870 – 1966

Daisetz Teitarō Suzuki, the Japanese scholar and Zen practitioner whose long career of writing, translation, and teaching first brought the contemplative core of Mahayana Buddhism into the English-speaking world. Through more than thirty books in English across nearly seventy years, he opened the way for the post-war Western reception of Zen, Pure Land, and the Mahayana sutras.

Longchenpa

1308 – 1364

The fourteenth-century Tibetan master who is the central synthesiser of Dzogchen, the Great Perfection. Longchen Rabjam gathered the scattered Nyingma and Bön transmissions into the Seven Treasuries and the Trilogy of Natural Ease, a body of writing that remains the touchstone of the Tibetan nondual tradition.

The Buddha

c. 563 BCE – c. 483 BCE

The historical Siddhartha Gautama, the prince of the Shakya clan in northern India who, after six years of ascetic practice and a long sitting under the Bodhi tree, awoke to the dependent and selfless nature of all phenomena and taught the path of liberation for the next forty-five years.

Adyashanti

1962

An American teacher whose nondual teaching grew out of fourteen years of Zen training under Arvis Joen Justi, a dharma successor of Taizan Maezumi Roshi. Adyashanti began teaching in 1996 and has become, through his books and online courses, one of the most widely-heard contemporary nondual voices in English.

Angelo Dilullo

An American physician and contemplative teacher whose 2021 book Awake — It's Your Turn and the long-form videos on his Simply Always Awake channel have made him one of the more practically-minded nondual voices of the past decade. Writes for the reader who suspects awakening is possible and wants a concrete description of what it actually involves.

D. T. Suzuki

1870 – 1966

Daisetz Teitarō Suzuki, the Japanese scholar and Zen practitioner whose long career of writing, translation, and teaching first brought the contemplative core of Mahayana Buddhism into the English-speaking world. Through more than thirty books in English across nearly seventy years, he opened the way for the post-war Western reception of Zen, Pure Land, and the Mahayana sutras.

Gangaji

1942

An American teacher in the Ramana lineage, transmitted to her by Papaji in Lucknow in 1990. Gangaji has held public meetings and retreats in the West since the early 1990s, in plain American English, with an unusually warm and direct delivery that has made the Ramana pointing accessible to a much wider audience.

Greg Goode

A philosopher and contemplative teacher in the Direct Path lineage of Atmananda Krishna Menon, transmitted through Jean Klein and Francis Lucille. Greg Goode pairs the careful inquiry of Advaita with the emptiness teachings of Madhyamaka Buddhism, writing for readers who want the precision as well as the recognition.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

1895 – 1986

An Indian-born teacher who, after spending his early years as the prophesied "World Teacher" of the Theosophical Society, dissolved the organisation built around him in 1929 with a famous declaration that truth is a pathless land. He taught for the next fifty-seven years in plain English, all over the world, refusing every guru posture and pointing again and again to the radical observation of one's own conditioning.

John Butler

1934

An English Christian contemplative whose decades of solitary prayer, lived out across years of farming in Lincolnshire and seasons in Russia, surface in his books and recorded conversations as the same wordless recognition the Cloud of Unknowing pointed to six hundred years before.

John Wheeler

An American teacher in the Nisargadatta lineage transmitted via Bob Adamson, with whom he sat in Melbourne over many years. Writes and teaches in plain spoken English, drawing the recognition back again and again to the simple immediacy of one's own being.

Lisa Cairns

A British teacher in the radical-nonduality stream of Tony Parsons, holding meetings and residential retreats around Europe and the United States in plain conversational English. Her pointing is uncompromising and present-tense, refusing the idea that anything other than what is already happening could be the awakening one is seeking.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

1918 – 2008

The Indian teacher who took a single mantra-based meditation technique out of the Shankaracharya tradition and onto the global stage. Through Transcendental Meditation, his retreats in Rishikesh, and decades of teaching across the West, he became the most widely-heard voice of contemplative practice in the second half of the twentieth century.

Papaji

1910 – 1997

Hariwansh Lal Poonja, known to his students as Papaji, was a direct disciple of Ramana Maharshi who lived a long quiet working life in northern India before drawing a generation of Western seekers to his Lucknow home in the 1990s. The line of teachers who awakened in his presence (Gangaji, Mooji, Eli Jaxon-Bear, Andrew Cohen) carry the Ramana transmission forward in plain English.

Ramesh Balsekar

1917 – 2009

A retired president of the Bank of India who became Nisargadatta Maharaj's chief English translator in the late 1970s and, after Nisargadatta's death in 1981, took up the teaching seat in Bombay. The Western nondual world of the 1990s and 2000s came to him in numbers, and he transmitted the Navnath teaching forward in unusually clear philosophical English.

Robert Adams

1928 – 1997

An American mystic in the Ramana lineage who taught small intimate groups in southern California in the late 1980s and 1990s, suffering through Parkinson's disease, leaving behind a body of recorded talks of unusual stillness and warmth that have grown in influence since his death.

Sailor Bob Adamson

1928

An Australian who met Nisargadatta Maharaj in Bombay in 1976 and was sent home with the instruction simply to share what had been understood. Has taught from his living room in Melbourne for forty years, in plain English, without apparatus, in the direct lineage of the Navnath Sampradaya.

Wayne Liquorman

1951

A Los Angeles teacher in the Nisargadatta lineage transmitted through Ramesh Balsekar. Wayne Liquorman holds open meetings in California in plain American English and has compiled and edited many of Balsekar's books. Sometimes writes contemplative poetry under the pen name Ram Tzu.