The 116-Year-Old Oldest Yogi in the World

Teaching his students how to get to Heaven

Swami Buaji with the author in 2011

The last time I saw him in 2011, Swami Buaji was 116 years old, perhaps the oldest yogi in the world. He was five feet tall with perfect eyesight and hearing. Born in 1888, he lived through three centuries and mastered every Kriya, including balancing from the top of a ten-foot pole while hanging on by only one arm, stopping the circulation of his blood, blowing air through his eyes, arresting his pulse, and blowing a conch shell for five minutes without taking a breath (which he did at a United Nations Peace Conference).

“Feel my bicep,” he said to me, pulling up the sleeve of his orange dhoti and flexing his muscle. “Feel my chest!” He pounded on his rock-hard chest with his fist. “Do I look weak?” He grinned through his long white beard and mustache. Swami Bua had been practicing yoga since he was a child and said that because of it, he never had been sick a day of his life. During his lifetime, he met Swami Sivananadan in 1930, Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranatha Tagore, Theosophist Annie Besant and Siva Yogaswami of Jaffna, Sri Lanka.

Born in Tamil, India, the youngest of sixteen siblings (“I am the last but not the least,” he cackled), Swami Buaji was severely crippled. When he was ten, doctors said he would die, so his parents and guru carried him to the burial grounds to be burned on the funeral pyre; but when the flames were lit, his body started to shake. His guru pulled him off the pyre, took him back to his hermitage, and for the next eight years, taught him yoga. By 17, Swami Bua had regained his health, but his family would not take him back, so he lived the rest of his life as a strict sannyas.

Swami Bua was still a teenager when he began to teach yoga to adult students. “My guru told me to teach yoga to others,” he said. “Because yoga brought me back to life, he told me to share my happiness with others.”

Swami Bua’s reputation spread, and he was invited all over the world to teach yoga workshops. Indira Ghandhi gave him a special award for teaching yoga. In 1969 he came to America and rented a small, cheap apartment in Manhattan near Columbus circle (which was not gentrified at the time). He stayed in the same apartment, teaching two classes of yoga a day in his living room. In perfect health, he slept no more than four hours a day and ate only grains, lentils, and vegetables, which his wife cooked for him daily.

Considered a Holy Saint by Hindu Magazine (which named him Saint of the Year), Swami Bua’s students came from all over to attend his classes. Even those who moved away, visited once or twice a year to take his class. One student asked him what his spiritual path was and he said, “My method of meditation comes from the Bhagavad Gita.” He said he perfected his technique by watching animals stretch. “I don’t follow anybody’s teachings,” he told me. “My teaching comes from God.”

Swami Buaji’s class consisted of one hour and fifteen minutes of asanas followed by savasana, during which he always recited the same meditative prayer, the philosophy by which he lived his life. "Be kind, be tolerant, be peaceful, be philanthropic, radiate love and affection with whomever you come across,” he would chant. “You are not this body; you are not this mind. You are something supreme, you are something divine. Begin the day with love, spend the day with love, fill the day with love, end the day with love, That is the way to God.”

After class, we gathered at his feet, spellbound as he told us, “By practicing yoga, we get perfect health and happiness as well as mental, physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual benefits. Health is wealth and sickness is sin. I do Yoga to live long, to live healthy.”

I asked him, “Is yoga the secret to a long life?”

He smiled. “Long life itself is the greatest secret in life.”

“And is your long life because you teach yoga?” I asked.

“I do not teach yoga,” he said. “I teach how to get to Heaven.”

In 2011, I was leaving for India on a work trip, and Swami Buaji asked me to please bring him back water from the sacred River Ganges (which he called “Ganga”). I returned with two small vials, each the size of a travel shampoo. He looked at the bottles and said unhappily, “But this is not enough!”

At 116 years old, in 2011, Swami Buaji left America and returned home to India. I knew he would never return. He planned to anoint himself with the sacred water from the Ganges before leaving for Heaven. It is now 14 years since he left, and I miss him terribly.