A few years ago, I was reading a thread on Quora, one of those late-night rabbit holes where the questions get stranger and the answers get more fascinating, and someone had asked: “Are there really saints in India who have been alive for centuries?” The comments ranged from scorn to reverence. Skeptics called it folklore. Devotees shared names and lineage stories. And I sat there, hours past my bedtime, realizing that I’d been circling this question for years without ever looking at it honestly.
It’s easy to dismiss the idea outright. A thousand-year-old human being? Ridiculous. But it’s also easy, and just as intellectually lazy, to accept it without examination because it sounds mystical and appealing. What I’ve found more worthwhile is sitting with the tradition as it actually exists, taking seriously what the scriptures, the teachers, and the accounts describe, and holding it all with open hands rather than a clenched fist of certainty in either direction.
Mahavatar Babaji: The Account That Started It All (For the West)
For most Westerners, the idea of a deathless yogi entered popular consciousness through one book: Paramahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi, published in 1946. In it, Yogananda describes a figure known as Mahavatar Babaji, a yogi said to live in the remote Himalayas, appearing to select disciples across centuries, his body perpetually youthful.
Yogananda didn’t claim to have met Babaji himself. He inherited the account through his lineage, from his guru Sri Yukteswar, who received it from Lahiri Mahasaya, who reportedly met Babaji in person in 1861 near Ranikhet in the Kumaon hills. Lahiri Mahasaya’s account of that meeting is one of the most vivid passages in the book:
“The saint smiled and spoke caressingly. ‘Lahiri, surely this cave seems familiar to you?’ … Babaji struck the rocky wall of the cave and produced a golden palace… ‘Lahiri, does this palace stir your memory?’ I gazed around, a sudden wave of recollection overwhelming me.”
– Paramahansa Yogananda (1946), Chapter 34: “Materializing a Palace in the Himalayas”
What’s striking about Yogananda’s treatment of Babaji isn’t sensationalism, it’s the matter-of-fact tone. He presents it the way someone would present a family history: “This is what my teacher’s teacher experienced.” There’s no attempt to prove it scientifically. There’s no defensiveness. It’s offered as testimony within a spiritual tradition, and it’s left to the reader to make of it what they will.
Yogananda also describes Babaji’s mission in terms that elevate the account beyond mere spectacle:
“The Mahavatar is in constant communion with Christ; together they send out vibrations of redemption, and have planned the spiritual technique of salvation for this age. The work of these two fully-illumined masters, one with the body, and one without it, is to inspire the nations to forsake wars, race hatreds, religious sectarianism, and the boomerang evils of materialism.”
– Paramahansa Yogananda (1946), Chapter 33: “Babaji, the Yogi-Christ of Modern India”
Whether or not you accept the literal truth of this, you can feel the seriousness of the claim. This isn’t a party trick. In the tradition, immortality isn’t something you achieve for yourself, it’s a state of service, a sustained presence maintained for the benefit of humanity.
Trailanga Swami and the Older Accounts
Babaji isn’t the only figure in this lineage of extraordinary longevity. Trailanga Swami, a saint of Varanasi, was said to have lived for around 280 years, passing in 1887. Yogananda mentions him in Autobiography of a Yogi as well, noting that thousands of people in Varanasi witnessed his unusual feats, sitting for days on the scorching ghats without food, floating on the Ganges for hours. Lahiri Mahasaya himself reportedly confirmed Trailanga Swami’s extraordinary age.
Then there’s Devraha Baba, a sadhu who lived on a raised wooden platform near the Yamuna river. Multiple Indian presidents and prime ministers visited him. His devotees claimed he was over 250 years old. Photographs exist from the early 1900s, and those who met him decades later said he looked no different. He passed, or, as his followers would say, left his body, in 1990.
And the tradition extends much further back. The Nath Sampradaya, a lineage of yogis tracing back to Gorakhnath (whose dates scholars place anywhere from the 9th to the 12th century), has long held that advanced practitioners can achieve kaya siddhi, mastery over the physical body, including the ability to extend life indefinitely. The Hatha Yoga Pradipika, compiled in the 15th century, describes practices aimed at precisely this: overcoming decay through control of prana, bindu, and nada.
What the Tradition Actually Claims
It’s important to understand what Indian spiritual tradition is and isn’t saying about this. It isn’t claiming that every old sadhu in the hills is a thousand years old. It isn’t even claiming that physical immortality is the goal of yoga. What the tradition says is more nuanced:
First, that the physical body is more malleable than materialist science currently acknowledges. The yogic understanding is that the body is sustained by prana (life force), and that a yogi who has complete mastery over prana can slow, halt, or even reverse the aging process. This isn’t metaphorical in the tradition, it’s considered a literal siddhi, a power that emerges from deep practice.
Second, that these powers are not the point. Every serious text on yoga warns against getting attached to siddhis. Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras list supernatural attainments and then immediately caution that they’re obstacles to liberation if pursued for their own sake. The deathless masters, in the traditional telling, don’t maintain their bodies out of a fear of death or a love of life, they do it because they’ve taken on a mission that requires sustained physical presence.
Third, that these beings are rare. We’re not talking about a population of immortals hidden in caves. The tradition speaks of a handful of extraordinary souls across millennia. Babaji is described as virtually unique in his level of attainment. This isn’t an assembly line.
Between Belief and Dismissal
Where does this leave someone like me, or maybe like you, who respects the tradition but also lives in a world of peer-reviewed journals and healthy skepticism?
I’ve come to hold it this way: I don’t know. And I’ve made peace with that not-knowing.
I find it arrogant to flatly declare “this is impossible” when the accounts come from intelligent, sincere people across centuries, embedded in a sophisticated philosophical tradition that has gotten a great many things right about the mind and consciousness. Western science is barely beginning to understand neuroplasticity and the effects of meditation on gene expression. We’re not in a position to define the outer limits of human possibility.
At the same time, I find it unhelpful to believe blindly, because belief without discernment isn’t faith, it’s credulity. And the yogic tradition itself would say so. Yogananda didn’t ask his students to check their intelligence at the door. He asked them to practice, to experience, to verify through their own direct perception.
An Exercise in Honest Inquiry
If this topic draws you, and the fact that you’re still reading suggests it does, here’s a practice I’ve found valuable. It’s not about proving or disproving anything. It’s about examining your own relationship to the question.
Set aside fifteen minutes. Sit quietly. Ask yourself: “What would it mean about reality if this were true, if a human being could consciously sustain a body for centuries?” Don’t answer quickly. Let the question sit. Notice what arises. Does it excite you? Frighten you? Does it challenge your worldview in ways that feel uncomfortable? Do you notice yourself rushing to debunk it, or rushing to accept it?
Both reactions, the rush to dismiss and the rush to believe, are usually about protecting something. The skeptic protects their model of a predictable, manageable universe. The believer protects their hope that reality is more magical than it appears. Neither is really engaging with the question.
The interesting space is the gap between those two reactions. The willingness to say, “I don’t have enough information to be certain, and I’m okay with that.” That’s where genuine curiosity lives.
What the Mountains Keep
I’ve never been to the high Himalayas. I’ve read enough accounts from travelers, sadhus, and mountaineers to know that the terrain itself is extraordinary, altitude and silence so profound that the mind behaves differently up there. Many people who’ve spent extended time in those mountains report experiences they can’t explain. Whether that’s spiritual reality breaking through, or the effects of altitude and isolation on the brain, or both at once, I honestly don’t know.
What I do know is that India’s spiritual traditions contain knowledge about consciousness, meditation, and the mind-body relationship that Western science is still catching up to. Yogananda recognized this in 1946 and spent his life building a bridge between East and West. That bridge doesn’t require us to accept every extraordinary claim uncritically. But it does ask us to remain open, genuinely open, not performatively open, to the possibility that the map of human potential is larger than we’ve been told.
Are there beings of extraordinary longevity hidden in the folds of the Himalayas right now? The tradition says yes. Science says it has no evidence. And somewhere in the thin air between those two positions, the question itself remains alive, which might be the most interesting thing about it.
I’ll leave you with this: the next time you sit quietly in meditation and the mind goes still (even for a moment) notice how timeless that stillness feels. No age, no aging, no clock. The yogis would say that’s not an illusion. They’d say that’s a glimpse of what you actually are, and that what the deathless masters have done is simply learn to stay there.
