Advaitanand Ji Ji (Paramhans Dayal Ji)

Shri Swami Advaitanand Ji Maharaj (5 April 1846 - 10 July 1919) was the founder and first guru of the Paramhans Advait Mat, a North Indian devotional lineage. Within the tradition he is most often addressed not by this monastic name but as Paramhans Dayal Ji or Dada Gurudev Ji. He initiated Swami Swaroopanand Ji Maharaj, the second guru, at whose samadhi at Nangli Sahib the tradition's best-known shrine now stands.

He was born Ram Yaad, a name given because he was born on Rama Navami. Devotees address him as Paramhans Dayal Ji Maharaj (also transliterated Paramhans Dyal), as Dada Gurudev Ji ("grandfather-preceptor," reflecting his position as guru of the guru for later generations), and simply as the First Guru or First Spiritual Master. Sources also render the monastic name as Advait Anand.

As a nineteenth-century historical figure rather than a Puranic deity, he has no classical iconography. Devotion centres on photographic and painted portraits, and on his samadhi shrine at Teri in Karak district, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan, which serves as the focal object of veneration in place of a sculpted image.

He was born at Chhapra in Bihar to the scholar Pandit Tulsi Pathak. His mother died within months of his birth and his father when he was five, and he was raised by his father's disciple Lala Narhari Prasad, who arranged his education in Sanskrit, Hindi and Arabic. At about sixteen he left home to meditate in the forests of Bihar. The decisive meeting came at Jaipur in 1883, where he met the ninety-year-old Swami Anandpuri Ji, who taught him the kriya of pranayama and yoga and later designated him his spiritual successor. He then travelled widely through Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan teaching Sahaj Yoga and bhakti, founding a network of ashrams known within the tradition as Krishna Dwaras.

His guru was Swami Anandpuri Ji, whom he met at Jaipur in 1883; the tradition traces itself further back to the Paramhans of Kedarghat, Kashi. His own successor was Swami Swaroopanand Ji Maharaj (1884-1936), whom he initiated into sannyas in the early 1900s at Teri and who assumed the gaddi on 20 October 1919. The guru succession Anandpuri, Advait, Swarupa is recited by name in the Nangli Nitya Niyam prayer NN002 held in this platform's library.

He is the origin point of the entire Paramhans Advait Mat lineage, which by the time of his successor's death had grown to more than three hundred ashrams across northern India. Every later branch of the tradition, including the Nangli Sahib line, the Sar Shabd Mission and Shri Anandpur Dham, counts him as its First Spiritual Master, whatever their differences over the succession after the second guru.