Fragrance of Surrender

Neem Karoli Baba left no scripture, no systematic doctrine, and not even a name he chose for himself. What he left instead was a life - and The Fragrance of Surrender reads that life, incident by incident, as a philosophy in its own right.From the train that would not move at a small railway station, to the ashram built on the banks of the Kosi river, to the thousands fed from stores that seemed insufficient to feed anyone at all, this book takes ten of the most enduring stories associated with Neem Karoli Baba and asks what they actually mean - not only to devotees, but to anyone interested in how a spiritually integrated life is built.Each chapter sets its incident beside a comparable moment in another tradition: the Desert Fathers and Zen koans, the Bhagavad Gita's karma yoga and Sikh langar, apophatic theology and the Tao Te Ching, the Book of Job and the Rinzai shout. The result is a balanced, historically honest, and philosophically serious portrait - neither pure hagiography nor pure skepticism - of a man who taught almost entirely through presence rather than words, and whose influence, more than fifty years after his death, continues to grow rather than fade.