Haridas Chaudhuri - California Institute of Integral Studies

California Institute of Integral Studies

In 1951, Chaudhuri was invited by Frederic Spiegelberg of Stanford University to join the staff of the newly formed American Academy of Asian Studies in San Francisco, having been recommended for that post by Sri Aurobindo during the final year of Aurobindo's earthly life. He accepted the invitation, eager to implement in a Western educational institution the integral approach to education that he had developed as a student of Sri Aurobindo. Soon after his arrival in San Francisco, Chaudhuri and his wife Bina established the Cultural Integration Fellowship, from which emerged an educational branch later to become California Institute of Integral Studies. Over the past 30 years, the Institute's original emphasis on Asian religions and cultures evolved to include comparative and cross-cultural studies in philosophy, religion, psychology, counseling, cultural anthropology, organizational studies, health studies, and the arts. The influence of both Haridas and Bina Chaudhuri (and their early protégés in San Francisco) upon the emergence of Asian philosophies and ways of knowing within the American cultural mainstream would be difficult to overestimate. They both worked tirelessly until the ends of their lives in this world to bring a truly integral perspective to the philosophical, scientific, and religious mainstream of the incipient world culture, and in so doing did great service to the memories of their own teachers, and all who were privileged to learn from them or to know them.