Throughout his childhood, his father would fund train-passes for his many sight-seeing trips to distant cities and pilgrimage spots, which he would often take with friends. According to Autobiography of a Yogi, he was eleven years old when his mother died, just before the marriage of his eldest brother Ananta she left behind a sacred amulet for Mukunda, given to her by a holy man, who told her that Mukunda was to possess it for some years, after which it would vanish into the ether from which it came. Since his father was a Vice-President of the Bengal Nagpur Railway, the nature of his job caused the family to move several times during Yogananda's childhood, including to Lahore, Bareilly, and Kolkata. According to his younger brother, Sananda, from his earliest years young Mukunda's awareness and experience of the spiritual was far beyond the ordinary. He was the fourth of the eight children, and second of the four sons, of Bhagabati Charan Ghosh, the Vice President of Bengal-Nagpur Railway, and Gyanprabha Devi. Yogananda was born in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, India, to a Hindu Bengali, Kayastha - Kshatriya family. His continued legacy around the world, remaining a leading figure in Western spirituality to the current day, led authors such as Philip Goldberg to consider him "the best known and most beloved of all Indian spiritual teachers who have come to the West.through the strength of his character and his skillful transmission of perennial wisdom, he showed the way for millions to transcend barriers to the liberation of the soul." The book has been regularly reprinted and is known as "the book that changed the lives of millions." A documentary about his life commissioned by the SRF, Awake: The Life of Yogananda, was released in 2014. Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs had ordered 500 copies of the book for his own memorial, for each guest to be given a copy. He published his book, Autobiography of a Yogi, in 1946, to critical and commercial acclaim since its first publishing, it has sold over four million copies, with HarperSan Francisco listing it as one of the "100 best spiritual books of the 20th Century". His "plain living and high thinking" principles attracted people from all backgrounds among his followers. By 1952, SRF had over 100 centers in both India and the US today, they have groups in nearly every major American city. For the next two and a half decades, he gained local fame as well as expanded his influence worldwide: he created a monastic order and trained disciples, went on teaching-tours, bought properties for his organization in various California locales, and initiated thousands into Kriya Yoga. Arriving in Boston in 1920, he embarked on a successful transcontinental speaking tour before settling in Los Angeles in 1925. Yogananda was the first major Indian teacher to settle in America, and the first prominent Indian to be hosted in the White House (by President Calvin Coolidge in 1927) his early acclaim led to him being dubbed "the 20th century's first superstar guru" by the Los Angeles Times.
His long-standing influence in the American yoga movement, and especially the yoga culture of Los Angeles, led him to be considered by yoga experts as the "Father of Yoga in the West." A chief disciple of the Bengali yoga guru Swami Sri Yukteswar Giri, he was sent by his lineage to spread the teachings of yoga to the West, to prove the unity between Eastern and Western religions and to preach a balance between Western material growth and Indian spirituality. Paramahansa Yogananda (born Mukunda Lal Ghosh January 5, 1893 – March 7, 1952) was an Indian Hindu monk, yogi and guru who introduced millions to the teachings of meditation and Kriya Yoga through his organization Self-Realization Fellowship (SRF) / Yogoda Satsanga Society (YSS) of India, and who lived his last 32 years in America.