Who is Thakur Anukulchandra?

Thakur is an honorific in Bengali, something like “master” or “lord”, used as his name; Sree Sree is a mark of respect placed before it. Within Master Within, “Master” and “Thakur” both refer to him.

He was born in 1888 in Himaitpur, a village in present-day Bangladesh, and the community that gathered around him became known as Satsang; in 1946 it took root in Deoghar, in eastern India, where he established an ashram (Deoghar district, Satsang). Accounts of his life say he studied medicine in Calcutta and practised as a physician in his village. He spoke and wrote in Bengali; his conversations and sayings were recorded by those around him and fill many volumes.

At Master Within we read his life in three roles. A healer: the physician who kept asking what makes a person whole. A builder: the community he led set up schools, workshops and a laboratory, which Souvik has written about in A Laboratory Where There Was No Food; we read that as his conviction that knowing the world is part of serving life. A teacher: the word we return to most in his teaching is Dharma: in his words, that which upholds one’s own life and growth along with that of others. Not a religion among religions.

You do not have to share any belief about him to read here, and nobody is asked to change their religion. For those of us at Master Within he is the Living Ideal: the teacher whose life and words this work draws on. Some of us also hold him, as a matter of our own faith, to be the teacher of this age (in the tradition’s own words, the Fulfiller the Best of this Age), continuing the teachers who came before him rather than replacing them. That is our understanding, offered openly, not a condition.

Where to begin: read What is a Living Ideal?, then the essay What Does Not Move, which walks through his own summary of the path.