Affectionately known as Babaji, Baba Hari Dass is the inspiration for the Salt Spring Centre of Yoga. Babaji is a yogi and a quiet scholar who has remarkable skills in sculpture, music, architecture, yoga philosophy, writing and story-telling, and Indian cosmology. He is a leading exponent of Ayurveda, the ancient Indian science of health, an author, a monk, and is proficient in half a dozen languages.
Baba Hari Dass comes from a region of the Himalayas in India. He left home at the age of eight to join a renunciate sect in the jungles. He is a mauni sadhu, a monk who practices continual silence. He has not spoken since 1952 and communicates by means of a small wipeboard. The purpose is first to conserve energy, second to silence the mind, and third to develop non-attachment to desires. 
Babaji has the marvelous skill of conveying a great deal in the fewest possible written words.
Until recently Babaji spent several months each year at the Sri Ram Orphanage in northern India which he founded, and also made an annual visit to the Salt Spring Centre of Yoga. Now in his late eighties he travels little from his home near Santa Cruz, California, but still attends three days a week at the Mount Madonna Center for the Creative Arts and Sciences, and one day a week at the Pacific Cultural Center in Santa Cruz, where his pithy comments still illumine various classic texts of yoga philosophy.
~ Baba Hari Dass
