Yogaville
organization
Yogaville, or Satchidananda Ashram, is the Buckingham County, Virginia headquarters of Satchidananda Saraswati's organization.
Ashram
The ashram was founded in 1980 by Satchidananda Saraswati, whose western notability stems from his opening of the Woodstock festival. The ashram is the international organizational headquarters of Swami Satchidananda's documented teachings. It is located in Buckingham County, Virginia. The primary goal of guru Yogiraj Sri Swami Satchidananda (1914-2002) was interfaith understanding as a vehicle to world peace. To this end, the LOTUS (Light Of Truth Universal Shrine) was constructed and inaugurated in 1986. Swami Satchidananda had been living in Yogaville, though he was visiting Madras, in South India at the time of his death.
The property in rural Virginia, along the James River, was identified for the community from the air as the swami flew over, looking for land farther south than his ashram in Pomfret, Connecticut. Swami Satchidananda acquired 600 acres in 1979 to form his town, financing it by selling property in Falls Village, Connecticut that had been given to him by Carole King. As of 1986, when the LOTUS was dedicated, around 120 people were living on a total of 750 acres.
“Yogaville” enters the record as organization. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Yogaville and organization can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Yogaville” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Yogaville and organization provides the most credible route into that argument.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q14713574. The first chronological checks are 1980, 1914, 2002 and 1986.
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This entry incorporates text from “Yogaville” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.