Vedanta is the philosophy of the Vedas, those Indian scriptures which are the most ancient religious writings now known to the world. ...

My Guru and His Disciple is a sweetly modest and honest portrait of Isherwood's spiritual instructor, Swami Prabhavananda, the Hindu priest who guided Isherwood for some thirty years. It is also a book about the often amusing and sometimes painful counterpoint between worldliness and holiness in Isherwood's own life. Sexual sprees, all-night drinking bouts, a fast car ride with Greta Garbo, scriptwriting conferences at M-G-M, intellectual sparring sessions with Berthold Brecht alternated with nights of fasting at the Vedanta Center, a (...) six-month period of celibacy and sobriety, and the pious drudgery of translating the Bhagavad-Gita. Seldom has a single man been owed with such strong drives toward both sensuality and spirituality, abandon and discipline; out of the passionate dialectic between these drives, My Guru and His Disciple has been written. (shrink)

In this collection of articles, Isherwood writes about his teachers, his conversion to Vedanta, and various literary concerns.

The aphorisms collected in this book, first published in 1953, were composed by Patanjali, a great Indian sage, over 1,500 years ago, and here translated into clear English prose. The accompanying commentary interprets the sayings for the modern world, and in doing so gives a full picture of what yoga is, what its aims are, and how it can be practised.

Gerald Sykes -- Aldous Huxley -- Gerald Heard -- Christopher Isherwood -- John van Druten -- Marianna Masin -- J. Crawford Lewis -- Dorothy F. Mercer -- Kurt Friedrichs -- Swami Atulananda -- Jane Molard -- The Countess of Sandwich -- John Yale -- Joan Rayne -- Durgacharan -- Pravrajika Saradaprana.