An Authority BAPS Holds Still Continues

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

BAPS does not treat Shastriji Maharaj's authority as closed with his death in 1951. The organization holds that the Akshar ideal he identified in Gunatitanand Swami continues in a living line of successor gurus, each recognized in turn as the present manifestation of that same principle and, on that basis, as spiritually equivalent in authority to the one before, an idea that distinguishes BAPS's internal self-understanding from an organization that simply remembers a founder's teaching after the fact. Shastriji Maharaj himself, in this account, occupies a double place: the historical figure who built the institution in 1907 by consecrating the first shared shrine of Akshar and Purushottam, and the first in an unbroken succession that the movement holds is still teaching and still to be found today in its serving guru. That claim of continuing, living authority, rather than the 1907 founding date alone, is what BAPS teaching identifies as the actual substance of what Shastriji Maharaj established.