Neem Karoli Baba: Core Teachings, Key Ideas and Practices

Neem Karoli Baba (c.1900-1973), known as Maharaj-ji, taught love and service rather than technique. His verifiable biography, Kainchi Dham, his Western students, the practice you can try, and the criticism.

Who was Neem Karoli Baba?

Neem Karoli Baba was an Indian Hindu teacher, born around 1900 in Akbarpur in what is now Ambedkar Nagar district, Uttar Pradesh, who died on 11 September 1973. His birth name is recorded variously as Lakshman Narayan Sharma or Lakshmi Narayan Sharma, and he came from a landowning Brahmin family. He was married as a boy, in the region of eleven years old, and fathered two sons and a daughter. At some point he left home to live as a wandering sadhu, and by most accounts he later resumed contact with his family while continuing to travel. Students called him Maharaj-ji, an honorific rather than a name. He was a devotee of Hanuman, the monkey deity of the Ramayana associated with service and devotion, and the temples built around him are overwhelmingly Hanuman temples. He wrote nothing, gave no formal lectures, founded no membership organization, and appointed no successor. He was usually seen wrapped in a plaid blanket, sitting on a wooden bench called a takhat, receiving visitors. Almost everything known about him in English comes from people who sat in front of that bench and wrote it down afterwards.

The gaps in the record are real and worth stating plainly. There is no birth certificate, no school register, no reliable chronology of the decades between leaving home and the founding of Kainchi Dham in 1964. He was known under different names in different districts, which is normal for a wandering sadhu and hopeless for a biographer. Ram Dass, his best-known Western student, opened Miracle of Love by saying more or less that no biography of the man was possible: facts were few and stories were many. That is an unusually honest admission from a devotional writer, and it should set the expectations of anyone reading about Neem Karoli Baba today. What is solid is the last decade. From the mid-1960s until his death he was based mainly at Kainchi in the Kumaon hills and at Vrindavan, visited by a documented cast of Indian officials, businessmen, academics and, from 1967 onwards, young Americans, several of whom wrote first-person accounts that can be compared against each other.

Where does the name Neem Karoli Baba come from?

The name Neem Karoli Baba derives from a village usually spelled Neeb Karori or Nib Karori in Farrukhabad district, Uttar Pradesh, where he lived for a period as a young ascetic. The traditional story is that he was thrown off a train for riding without a ticket near that village, the train then would not move until he was invited back aboard, and the name of the spot stuck to him. The date of that episode is not firmly established.

What did Neem Karoli Baba do for a living or hold as a position?

Neem Karoli Baba held no post, no salary, and no institutional office. He was not a monastic abbot, a scholar, or an ordained priest in any recognized lineage, and he did not run the ashrams built around him in any administrative sense. Devotees, including wealthy Indian families and civil servants, funded and managed the temples. He owned effectively nothing and is consistently described as refusing to handle money.

What did Neem Karoli Baba actually teach?

Neem Karoli Baba taught devotion and service rather than a technique, and his students compress the whole of it into the phrase they still use as a motto: love everyone, serve everyone, remember God. That is a follower's summary rather than a verbatim quotation, but it maps accurately onto what the accounts describe. There is no system underneath it. He did not teach a graded meditation curriculum, did not give levels or initiations, did not diagnose chakras, and did not set his students philosophical positions to hold. Neem Karoli Baba's teachings were delivered as instructions to specific people in specific situations: go home, get married, take that job, feed those people, stop asking. Because the instruction was personal, it often looks contradictory when collected. He told one visitor to meditate and another to stop. What stays constant across the accounts is the priority order. Service to the person in front of you outranks spiritual attainment. The name of God repeated continuously outranks technique. And the ordinary householder life is treated as an adequate container for practice, not an obstacle to escape. Renunciation as a lifestyle was not what he asked of most people who came to him.

The theological frame is bhakti, the devotional stream of Hinduism that treats love of God as the path rather than as the reward for a path. In bhakti the practitioner is not trying to dissolve a self through analysis. The practitioner is trying to fall in love, and the recommended tools are the divine name, song, story and service. Hanuman is the model figure here, because in the Ramayana Hanuman's power comes from devotion to Ram and is expended entirely in service. Neem Karoli Baba's relentless emphasis on feeding people fits that frame exactly rather than being a folksy add-on. Ram Dass recounted asking how to raise kundalini energy and being told to feed people, and asking about the best way to serve God and being told the same thing. Whether or not that exchange happened word for word, it is the shape of the teaching. There is also a strong universalist streak: visitors report being told to keep their own religion, and Neem Karoli Baba is widely reported to have spoken with real warmth about Christ.

Did Neem Karoli Baba teach a meditation method?

Neem Karoli Baba taught no distinct meditation method of his own. He did not create a technique with a name, a sequence of stages, or a teacher-training structure, which separates him sharply from teachers such as Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. What he pointed people toward were existing Hindu devotional practices already in common use: repetition of the divine name, particularly Ram, recitation of the Hanuman Chalisa, kirtan singing, and practical service.

What did Neem Karoli Baba say about money and worldly life?

Neem Karoli Baba consistently sent people back into ordinary life rather than out of it. Accounts describe him telling married visitors to stay married, telling students to finish their studies, and telling professionals to keep working. He refused to handle money himself and is not documented as charging for access, though the ashrams around him were funded by wealthy devotees. He did not preach poverty as a requirement.

What is Kainchi Dham and why does it matter?

Kainchi Dham is the ashram and Hanuman temple Neem Karoli Baba established in 1964 in the Kumaon hills of Uttarakhand, India, about seventeen kilometers from Nainital on the Bhowali to Almora road. The name comes from the Hindi word for scissors, describing the two sharp hairpin bends of the road where the site sits beside the Kosi river. It matters because it is where the last decade of his life is best documented, and because it is where most of the Americans who later carried his name in the West actually met him. Kainchi Dham is not a large or architecturally grand complex. It is a cluster of temple buildings and halls in a steep river valley, and its central activities are darshan, recitation, and the serving of free food. The ashram holds an annual bhandara on 15 June marking its founding, which now draws crowds large enough to close the road. Since the mid-2010s the site has become a mass destination rather than a quiet retreat, driven partly by Indian domestic tourism and partly by publicity around its association with well-known technology executives. Visitors expecting solitude will be disappointed.

The second important site is Vrindavan in Uttar Pradesh, the town associated with Krishna, where Neem Karoli Baba died in September 1973 and where his samadhi shrine now stands. Other temples connected to him are scattered across northern India, most of them Hanuman temples founded or inspired during his lifetime. Outside India the main site is the Neem Karoli Baba Ashram and Hanuman Temple in Taos, New Mexico, which grew from a project begun by Ram Dass and other students in the late 1970s. A white marble Hanuman murti was commissioned from carvers in Jaipur, shipped to the United States, and installed on a farm property near Taos that became the ashram. It is one of the few places in North America where the daily rhythm of a north Indian bhakti temple, including the Hanuman Chalisa and the serving of food, runs continuously. None of these places charge for entry, and none of them offer a course of instruction.

Why did Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg get associated with Kainchi Dham?

Steve Jobs traveled to India in 1974 with Daniel Kottke and reached Kainchi Dham, but Neem Karoli Baba had died the previous year, so the two never met. Mark Zuckerberg said publicly in 2015 that Jobs had advised him to visit a temple in India, and Indian press reporting identified it as Kainchi Dham. Neither man was a student of Neem Karoli Baba, and the association is heavily used in tourism marketing.

Is Kainchi Dham a monastery where you can stay and study?

Kainchi Dham is a functioning temple and pilgrimage site, not a teaching monastery with a residential curriculum. There is no course, no retreat program of the kind Western seekers often expect, and no resident teacher giving instruction in Neem Karoli Baba's name. Visitors come for darshan, participate in recitation, receive prasad, and leave. Accommodation in the area is handled by hotels and guesthouses in nearby Bhowali and Nainital.

Who were the Western students of Neem Karoli Baba?

The Western following around Neem Karoli Baba began in 1967, when Richard Alpert, the Harvard psychologist dismissed alongside Timothy Leary over psychedelic research, was led to him by an American wanderer known as Bhagavan Das. Alpert was given the name Ram Dass and returned to the United States to write Be Here Now, published in 1971, which became one of the most widely circulated spiritual books of the American counterculture and brought a stream of young Westerners to Kainchi in the early 1970s. Several of them became significant figures. Krishna Das, born Jeffrey Kagel, built a career performing kirtan in the West and is largely responsible for call-and-response Sanskrit chanting becoming a fixture of American yoga studios. Jai Uttal did similar work in a more eclectic musical register. Larry Brilliant, a physician, was told by Neem Karoli Baba to work on smallpox, joined the World Health Organization eradication campaign, and later co-founded the Seva Foundation in 1978 with Ram Dass, Wavy Gravy, the WHO adviser Nicole Grasset and the Indian eye surgeon Govindappa Venkataswamy. Lama Surya Das went on to teach Tibetan Buddhism.

The Indian side of the following is far larger and much less discussed in English. Dada Mukerjee, a professor of economics at Allahabad University, hosted Neem Karoli Baba for long periods and wrote two of the most useful memoirs, By His Grace and The Near and the Dear, both of which read very differently from the American accounts: quieter, more domestic, less concerned with wonder. Government officers, police officials and business families made up a substantial part of the circle, and the temples were built with their money. Anyone reading only the American literature comes away with a distorted picture in which Neem Karoli Baba appears mainly as a guru to hippies. The Seva Foundation is arguably the most consequential downstream effect. It has run cataract surgery and eye care programs for decades, and Brilliant has repeatedly said in interviews that the instruction to work on public health came from his teacher. That is a rare case where a guru's influence produced a measurable, checkable outcome in the world.

What is the connection between Neem Karoli Baba and Ram Dass?

Ram Dass was Neem Karoli Baba's most influential Western student and the main reason his name is known outside India. Ram Dass, born Richard Alpert, met him in 1967, described the encounter in Be Here Now in 1971, and later compiled Miracle of Love. Ram Dass continued teaching until his death in December 2019 and founded the Love Serve Remember Foundation, which archives his talks and keeps the material available.

Did Neem Karoli Baba name a successor or lineage holder?

Neem Karoli Baba named no successor and established no lineage of authorized teachers. Nobody today holds a legitimate claim to teach in his name as a designated heir, and organizations that use his name were founded by devotees or by later parties without his appointment. This is a meaningful difference from lineage traditions such as Tibetan Buddhism or the Ramakrishna Order, and it means claims of official authority should be treated skeptically.

Which books record Neem Karoli Baba's teachings?

The core English sources on Neem Karoli Baba are four books, none written by him. Miracle of Love: Stories About Neem Karoli Baba, compiled by Ram Dass and published in 1979, is the largest collection, drawn from accounts gathered over several years from many devotees and organized by theme rather than chronology. Be Here Now, published in 1971, is Ram Dass's own story and the book that made the encounter famous, though it is only partly about Neem Karoli Baba and is as much a document of American counterculture. Dada Mukerjee's By His Grace: A Devotee's Story and The Near and the Dear: Stories of Neem Karoli Baba and His Devotees give the Indian household view and are the closest thing available to a sustained first-person record by someone who lived with him. Krishna Das has also written about the period, most notably in Chants of a Lifetime, which is more memoir than biography. Every one of these is devotional. None was written as history, none uses footnotes or contemporaneous documents, and all were composed years after the events they describe.

Reading them in the right order helps. Starting with Miracle of Love is common and probably a mistake, because it is a dense, thematically arranged wall of miracle accounts with no narrative spine that a newcomer can use to calibrate it. Mukerjee gives a more ordinary texture: an old man arriving unannounced, disrupting a household, being fed, being difficult, leaving. Be Here Now is worth reading for what it did historically more than for what it says about Neem Karoli Baba. Ram Dass's later recorded talks, many freely available through the Love Serve Remember Foundation, contain a good deal of material about his teacher delivered more reflectively than the books. There is no critical scholarly biography of Neem Karoli Baba in English, which is the single largest gap in the literature.

Are there recordings or transcripts of Neem Karoli Baba speaking?

There is no substantial body of recordings or verified transcripts of Neem Karoli Baba speaking. He died in 1973, largely before casual audio recording reached the settings he lived in, and his exchanges were short, personal and mostly in Hindi. Photographs exist in quantity and are widely reproduced. Any English sentence presented as a direct quotation from him has passed through memory, translation and a devotee's editing, usually years later.

What is the most reliable single book about Neem Karoli Baba?

Dada Mukerjee's The Near and the Dear is probably the most reliable, because Mukerjee was an academic economist who lived with Neem Karoli Baba over long stretches and wrote in a restrained register with far less emphasis on the supernatural than the American accounts. It is still a devotee's memoir with all the limits that implies. No source about Neem Karoli Baba should be read as independently verified.

What are the Neem Karoli Baba miracles, and how should a reader treat them?

The Neem Karoli Baba miracles are the large body of stories in which he is described as knowing things he could not have known, appearing in two places at once, materializing food, curing illness, and stopping a train. The most repeated single example is Ram Dass's account of his first meeting, in which Neem Karoli Baba is said to have described Alpert's thoughts about his dead mother from the previous night and correctly identified that she had died of a condition involving her spleen. Others include the origin story of his name, where a train reportedly refused to move after he was ejected from it, and many accounts of appearing to devotees in distant cities. The honest position for a reader is that these are reported claims, not established events. They come from devotees, were written down long afterwards, and cannot be checked against any independent record. That does not make the tellers liars. Memory reshapes striking experiences over decades, especially inside a community where such stories carry social value, and none of that requires deception.

What the accounts say about his own attitude cuts against the miracle literature. Devotees consistently report that Neem Karoli Baba deflected attention from displays of power, denied doing anything, and attributed events to God or to Hanuman rather than to himself. Ram Dass repeatedly made the point in talks that the miracles were the least interesting part and functioned mainly as a hook to get a Western rationalist to pay attention. That reading is available to a skeptic too: the stories work as literature about attention and love regardless of whether anything paranormal occurred. The practical risk of the miracle material is that it turns the subject into a wish-granting figure. Much of the modern online devotion around Neem Karoli Baba treats him as a source of job offers and exam results, which is closer to transactional petition than to anything in the teaching itself.

Is there any independent evidence for the Neem Karoli Baba miracles?

No independent evidence exists for the Neem Karoli Baba miracles. There are no contemporaneous documents, medical records, news reports or third-party investigations supporting any of the specific claims. Everything rests on devotee testimony recorded years later, largely in books compiled by followers. A reader is free to find the accounts meaningful, but presenting them as verified history is not defensible, and no serious source about him claims otherwise.

What is the train story about Neem Karoli Baba?

The train story is the traditional account of how Neem Karoli Baba got his name. He is said to have been traveling without a ticket, been put off the train near the village of Neeb Karori in Farrukhabad district, Uttar Pradesh, and the train then would not restart despite attempts to move it until officials, prompted by a local magistrate, asked him to board again. The episode's date is not established and no contemporaneous record exists.

What practice from Neem Karoli Baba can you actually try this week?

The practice most directly traceable to Neem Karoli Baba has two halves that are meant to run together: repetition of the divine name, and feeding people. Neither requires initiation, a teacher, payment, or belief in anything supernatural, which is unusual among the teachers in this category. For the first half, pick one name and stay with it for the week rather than sampling. The traditional choice here is Ram, repeated silently or under the breath. Use a mala of 108 beads if you have one, moving one bead per repetition, which takes roughly five to eight minutes for a full round at an unhurried pace. Do one round on waking and one before sleep. The instruction is not to concentrate hard or to empty the mind; it is simply to return the attention to the name whenever you notice it has gone. For the second half, do one concrete act of feeding somebody this week that costs you time rather than only money: cook a meal for a neighbor, take a shift at a food bank, or bring lunch for a colleague who is struggling. Do it without announcing it.

If you want the fuller devotional version, add a daily recitation of the Hanuman Chalisa, the forty-verse hymn by Tulsidas that his ashrams recite every day. Transliterations with English translation are freely available, a full recitation runs about eight to ten minutes, and there is no permission required to say it. Reciting Awadhi you do not understand feels absurd for three days and then stops feeling absurd, which is the useful part. Kirtan works best with other people: one simple call-and-response chant, sung for fifteen minutes without stopping to talk about it. Keep a short log for the week with two columns, the rounds you did and the people you fed, and nothing else. The point of the log is to expose the imbalance most people find, which is that the inner half is easy to keep and the serving half quietly gets skipped. In the framing Neem Karoli Baba's students describe, the serving half is the one that matters more.

How long before this practice does anything?

Expect no dramatic result from a week of name repetition and service, and be suspicious of sources promising one. What a week reliably produces is information: whether the repetition irritates you, whether you actually follow through on the serving half, and whether either changes how you treat people on an ordinary Tuesday. Devotional practice in this style is measured in years, and its claimed effects are on character rather than on states of consciousness.

Can you do the practice without believing in Hanuman or God?

You can do the mechanics without belief, and many people do, but be clear that you are borrowing a form and leaving its content behind. Repeating a divine name you consider empty is closer to a concentration exercise than to bhakti, and Neem Karoli Baba's teaching assumes an actual object of love. The service half survives translation intact and needs no metaphysics at all. Honest borrowing beats pretending the frame does not exist.

What criticism and controversy surrounds Neem Karoli Baba?

The most substantial criticism of Neem Karoli Baba is evidentiary: the entire English record is devotional, uncorroborated and retrospective, so the confident biographies circulating online rest on very little. A second and more serious line concerns conduct. In January 2020, shortly after Ram Dass's death, the writer Matthew Remski published an analysis of a chapter in Miracle of Love titled Krishna Play, in which women devotees describe physical contact with Neem Karoli Baba that Ram Dass frames as divine play in the mode of Krishna with the gopis. Remski's argument is about framing rather than a direct allegation: he contends that presenting such contact as sacred forecloses the possibility of anyone in the community reading it as coercive, a pattern he has documented across several yoga and guru organizations. Some devotees involved have not characterized their experiences as abuse and have objected to the reframing. Neem Karoli Baba died in 1973, there was never an investigation, and no finding of any kind exists. What can be said accurately is that the material is in Ram Dass's own book and that the dispute is about how to read it.

A third controversy, now resolved, involves the best-known story in the Western literature. In Be Here Now, Ram Dass described giving Neem Karoli Baba a large dose of LSD, reportedly three tablets of around 305 micrograms each, with no apparent effect. In 2001 the writer Paul Krassner asserted in High Times that Ram Dass had admitted inventing it. Ram Dass denied ever saying that. Krassner's stated source, the psychologist Stanley Krippner, denied having told him any such thing, and Krassner subsequently retracted the claim and apologized in print. So the accusation of fabrication was withdrawn, though the original story remains a single uncorroborated account from an interested party, which is a different matter. Beyond these, there is the ordinary criticism of what has grown up around the name: Kainchi Dham marketed through its association with Silicon Valley executives who never met the man, and a large online devotional economy that promises material outcomes. None of that is attributable to Neem Karoli Baba, but it is what a newcomer meets first.

Was Neem Karoli Baba ever accused of financial exploitation?

No documented financial scandal attaches to Neem Karoli Baba himself, and this is one of the clearer points in his favor. Accounts from both Indian and Western devotees consistently describe him refusing to handle money, owning nothing, charging nothing for access, and directing donations to temple construction and food distribution. He left no estate and built no commercial organization. Later use of his name and image by unrelated commercial ventures is a separate issue.

Why does the criticism of Neem Karoli Baba get so little attention?

Criticism of Neem Karoli Baba gets little attention because there is almost no adversarial source material to work with. He died in 1973 without an organization to investigate, without financial records to audit, and without ex-members organizing publicly, which is what usually generates scrutiny of a guru. The absence of criticism is therefore weak evidence of anything. It reflects a thin record and a diffuse following rather than a cleared name.

How does Neem Karoli Baba differ from Ramana Maharshi and other Indian teachers?

Neem Karoli Baba differs from Ramana Maharshi most sharply in method: Ramana Maharshi gave a specific, repeatable technique, the inquiry into the source of the sense of I, and taught a nondual position in which the individual self is investigated until it is found to be unreal. Neem Karoli Baba gave no technique and took no philosophical position at all. Ramana Maharshi's path is jnana, knowledge through inquiry, and it works largely alone and in silence. Neem Karoli Baba's is bhakti, love through relationship, and it works through the divine name, song, and other people. A seeker who wants a question to sit with should read Ramana Maharshi. A seeker for whom analysis has become another form of avoidance may get more from the devotional route. The contrast with Paramahansa Yogananda is different again: Yogananda built the Self-Realization Fellowship, systematized Kriya Yoga into graded lessons with formal initiation, and left an organization designed to outlive him. Neem Karoli Baba left no method, no lessons, no organization, and no authorized teachers, which is why his influence traveled through individual students rather than through an institution.

The honest limits follow from the same feature. Because there is no method, there is nothing to progress through and nothing to check yourself against, which suits some temperaments badly. If you want measurable practice with stages, feedback and a teacher who can correct your errors, this material offers none of it, and a modern Vipassana course or a Zen training center would serve you better. The teaching also assumes a devotional capacity that not everyone has and that effort cannot manufacture. There is nothing here that treats depression, anxiety or trauma, and the emphasis on surrender and acceptance can be misused to talk someone out of leaving a situation they should leave. The guru relationship itself carries known risks in proportion to how much authority the student hands over, and Neem Karoli Baba is not available to be related to, which means what people actually relate to is an image assembled from devotional books. That deserves stating clearly rather than treating as a technicality.

How does Neem Karoli Baba compare with Anandamayi Ma?

Neem Karoli Baba and Anandamayi Ma, a Bengali teacher who died in 1982, occupied similar territory as devotional figures who taught by presence rather than by system, and both drew Western seekers in the same period. Anandamayi Ma spoke more often at length and there is a larger body of recorded discourse from her. Neem Karoli Baba's material is almost entirely anecdotal, gathered secondhand, and organized around service rather than around her more explicitly nondual statements.

Who should not follow Neem Karoli Baba's approach?

Anyone who needs verifiable structure should look elsewhere than Neem Karoli Baba's approach. That includes people who want measurable progress, people who are uncomfortable with devotion to a deity, and people currently dealing with a mental health condition, for whom an unstructured practice built on surrender is a poor substitute for treatment. It also suits badly anyone inclined to hand authority to a charismatic figure, since the modern version of that figure exists only as edited memory.

Frequently Asked Questions

When did Neem Karoli Baba die and where is his samadhi?

Neem Karoli Baba died on 11 September 1973. Accounts agree he was traveling by train and became seriously ill near Mathura, and that he died in a hospital in the Vrindavan area of Uttar Pradesh. His followers describe him as slipping into a diabetic coma and repeating the name of God until the end. His samadhi shrine is at the Vrindavan ashram, and it remains a pilgrimage site alongside Kainchi Dham in Uttarakhand. His birth year is usually given as around 1900, but it is an estimate rather than a documented date.

Is Neem Karoli Baba the same person as Guru Maharaj Ji?

No. Neem Karoli Baba was called Maharaj-ji by his students, but that is an honorific meaning roughly great king or great sir, and many Indian teachers have been addressed that way. The name Guru Maharaj Ji is most often associated with Prem Rawat, a different and much younger teacher who led the Divine Light Mission and later the Words of Peace organization. Neem Karoli Baba built no international movement, ran no membership organization, and died in 1973. Confusing the two is common in search results and in casual writing.

Did Neem Karoli Baba write any books?

Neem Karoli Baba wrote nothing. He gave no systematic discourses, published no texts, and left no recorded lecture series. Everything attributed to him comes from other people writing down what they remembered, usually years later. The best-known English sources are Ram Dass's Miracle of Love, published in 1979, and two books by Dada Mukerjee, an economics professor at Allahabad University who was close to him: By His Grace and The Near and the Dear. Readers should treat all of them as devotional memoirs, not as transcripts.

Do you have to be Hindu to follow Neem Karoli Baba's teachings?

No, and Neem Karoli Baba's students included Jews, Christians and people with no religion. He is widely reported to have spoken well of Christ and to have told visitors to stay with the tradition they came from rather than convert. The practices most associated with him, chanting the divine name, reciting the Hanuman Chalisa, and feeding people, are Hindu in form, and there is no honest way to strip that away. What he did not require was formal conversion, initiation fees, or membership.

What is the Hanuman Chalisa and why is it linked to Neem Karoli Baba?

The Hanuman Chalisa is a forty-verse hymn to the deity Hanuman written by the poet Tulsidas in Awadhi, and it is the single practice most associated with Neem Karoli Baba's ashrams. Neem Karoli Baba was a lifelong devotee of Hanuman, built Hanuman temples, and his ashrams recite the Chalisa daily. A full recitation takes roughly eight to ten minutes. Transliterations and translations are freely available, and no initiation or permission is needed to recite it.

Can you visit Kainchi Dham, and when is the busiest time?

Kainchi Dham is open to visitors and sits on the Bhowali to Almora road, roughly seventeen kilometers from Nainital in Uttarakhand, India. Entry is free and food is served. The busiest day by far is 15 June, the annual bhandara marking the ashram's founding, when the road can be effectively impassable with pilgrims. Visitors who want quiet are better off outside June and away from weekends. It is an active place of worship rather than a museum, and photography inside is generally restricted.

What is the strongest criticism of Neem Karoli Baba's legacy?

The strongest criticism concerns the sources rather than the man. Every English account of Neem Karoli Baba was compiled by devotees, often a decade or more after the events, with no contemporaneous record to check against, which makes the biography unusually soft. Separately, the writer Matthew Remski argued in 2020 that a chapter of Ram Dass's Miracle of Love presents physical contact with women devotees as sacred play in a way that fits a documented pattern of spiritualizing coercion in guru communities. Neem Karoli Baba died in 1973, so nothing can be adjudicated.