Maurice Frydman

Maurice Frydman was a Polish-born engineer, humanitarian, and renunciate whose quiet labor preserved one of the most influential nondual texts of the twentieth century.

Born in Warsaw in 1901, he trained as an electrical engineer and traveled to India, where he was drawn into the orbit of the country’s spiritual and political life. He became a disciple of Gandhi, living in his ashram and crafting spinning wheels for the independence movement, and he played a notable part in the Aundh Experiment, helping draft a constitution that devolved state rule to its residents in the late 1930s.

He was associated with Ramana Maharshi, was close to Jiddu Krishnamurti, and eventually took up the renunciate life, shedding his worldly attachments as his spiritual seeking deepened.

Frydman’s lasting importance rests on his role as the compiler, editor, and translator of I Am That (1973), the collection of dialogues with Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj.

Working from Nisargadatta’s Marathi talks, Frydman rendered them into the lucid English that carried the teaching to a global audience and seeded the Western neo-Advaita movement; he also contributed the appendix “Nisarga Yoga.” His relationship with Nisargadatta was one of deep friendship as well as discipleship, and the sage was present at his bedside when he died in 1976.

Without an author’s ambition of his own, Frydman is the indispensable bridge through which a Bombay shopkeeper’s words reached the world, making him a key connective figure in the contemporary-nondual lineage.