Agehananda Bharati (1923 – 1991) is a noted American professor of anthropology and tantric studies. Born as Leopold Fischer to an aristocratic family in Vienna, he began the study of four Indian languages at the age of 13. In 1949 CE he travelled to India where he became the first European to be initiated into the orthodox Dasnami Shankaracharya order. Agehananda Bharati (1923-1991), was an anthropologist, a linguist, and a dasnami sadhu. As a sadhu he spent nine months exploring the Indian subcontinent on foot, a pilgrimage described in his autobiography, The Ochre Robe. He later taught philosophy at the Banaras Hindu University (1952 – 54), at Nalanda, and at Buddhist universities in Thailand and Japan. His involvement with both Hindu and Buddhist Tantra resulted in the publication of The Tantric Tradition in 1965, one of the earliest Western academic studies of Tantra. In this, he delineated the philosophical content of Tantra, its terminology, literature, doctrine and practices.
In the late fifties he taught South Asian anthropology at the
University of Washington in Seattle. From 1962, until his death, he taught at
Syracuse University where he occupied the Ford Maxwell Chair in South Asian Studies.
Author of six books and more than five hundred articles published in four
languages, Bharati was best know for his bold critique of both Hindu Renaissance
values, especially in influence of Neo-Vedanta on modern Hinduism, and the
popularization of eastern religions in the West. He reflected upon these
themes as well as his own mystical experiences in ‘The Light at the Center –
Context and Pretext of Modern Mysticism (1976).