Yogananda met his guru, Swmi Sri Yukteswar Giri in 1910,, at the age of 17. After graduating from  Calcutta Univerisyt in 1915,  he took formal vows into the monastic Swami Order.  After founding and running a school for boys in  Ranchi, India that combined modern educational techniques with yoga training and spiritual ideals, Yogananda went to the U.S. where, in 1920, he founded the Self-Realization Fellowship or SRF,   in Los Angeles. California. He taught from 1920  until his Mahasamadhi or physical death in 1952.  Twenty years after his vows, Sri Yukteswar conferred upon him the title paramahansa, which means "supreme swan."

Yogananda's followers have made claims of his bodily incorruptibility. the August 4, 1952, issue of Time Magazine  printed a copy of a notarized letter from  Harry T. Rowe, Los Angeles Mortuary Director of the

Forest Lawn Memorial-Park, which stated:

The absence of any visual signs of decay in the dead body of Paramahansa Yogananda offers the most extraordinary case in our experience.... No physical disintegration was visible in his body even twenty days after death.... No indication of mold was visible on his skin, and no visible drying up took place in the bodily tissues. This state of perfect preservation of a body is, so far as we know from mortuary annals, an unparalleled one.... No odor of decay emanated from his body at any time....

It was in the late 20s or early 30's that Yogananda befriended a young boy psychic, Eugene Hubbard, who later played an important role in the founding of the New Age Community Church.