West’s yoga guru gets clean chit in paternity suit

Parmahansa Yogananda guru has been cleared by DNA testing of charges that he broke his celibacy vows and fathered a child, his Los Angeles h...

Parmahansa Yogananda guru has been cleared by DNA testing of charges that he broke his celibacy vows and fathered a child, his Los Angeles headquarters announced on Wednesday. The announcement marked the latest development in a seven-year paternity dispute involving Paramahansa Yogananda, the first to introduce yoga to the west 80 years ago. The guru, who died at age 59 in 1952, was accused of having an illicit affair with a married disciple and fathering Ben Erskine, now a 69-year-old Oregon gold miner.

To conclusively settle the claims, Yogananda’s worldwide organization, ‘Self-Realization Fellowship’, hired a former San Diego criminal prosecutor to establish an independent testing process to compare Erskine’s DNA to samples taken from Yogananda’s three male relatives in India. The results from two separate labs both showed no relationship between Erskine and the Yogananda clan.

Erskine, informed of the results Wednesday, said he still believed that ‘‘Yogananda is my father.’’ His attorney, Shane Reed, said they would review the DNA results to decide whether to proceed with a court request to disinter Yogananda’s corpse, buried in Glendale, for further testing.

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At stake was more than the guru’s integrity: Any successful paternity action could have led to claims on the assets of Yogananda’s spiritual organization, which owns several pieces of prime property, including the flagship Lake Shrine in Pacific Palisades on the west side of Los Angeles and a hermitage in Encinitas.

The dispute first surfaced in 1995 when Erskine’s daughter, Peggy, approached the fellowship with the paternity claims and financial demands. Erskine said his mother, Adelaide, had been a disciple and photographer of Yogananda in the late 1920s. The miner acknowledged that his mother never told him he was Yogananda’s son or that she had been physically intimate with the famed guru. But he said his mother hinted at the ‘‘wonderful blood’’ in his veins and fought constantly with her husband — Erskine’s stepfather — over her son’s paternity. (LATWP)

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