3HO (Sikh Dharma Fellowship)

In 1969, Harbhajan Singh Puri (1929–2004), a Sikh from the Punjab, India, arrived in Los Angeles and began to teach the art of kundalini yoga. He adopted the name Yogi Bhajan, built a small following of students, and legally incorporated the Happy Healthy Holy Organization (3HO) by the end of that year. The life of this small group was structured around kundalini yoga practice, strict vegetarianism, and communal living. Early students of Yogi Bhajan went on to establish yoga centers in several American cities, including San Francisco, Santa Fe, Washington, D.C., and New York City.

In late December 1970, Yogi Bhajan took a group of his students to the Darbar Sahib, the inner sanctum of the Golden Temple in Amritsar, India, the most sacred site in the Sikh tradition, where several of them underwent the initiation ceremony of the double-edged sword (khande di pahul). In the process, they made the transition from the practice of yoga to taking new names, wearing traditional Sikh/Punjabi dress (bana), and committing to follow the Sikh path with some modifications, such as strict vegetarianism and wearing only white clothes—a color associated with purity.

The Shiromani Gurdwara Prabhandak Committee, the central administrative body overseeing Sikh gurdwaras, warmly welcomed this development, honored Yogi Bhajan with the title of Sri Singh Sahib (“the Honorable Sikh”), and assigned him the responsibility of spreading the Sikh message in the West. Yogi Bhajan saw the acceptance of the Sikh path by his American followers as a step toward Sikhism turning into a world religion beyond the boundaries of Punjab and Punjabi ethnicity.

With Amritsar in the background, Yogi Bhajan established his community in Espanola, New Mexico. Organized around the importance of a holistic lifestyle, traditional Sikh practices such as study of the Guru Granth Sahib, Sikh scripture, and martial training (gatka) were encouraged. To facilitate the transmission of knowledge about the Sikh way of life, Yogi Bhajan arranged to send the younger members of the community to Punjab and later established the Miri Piri Academy in Amritsar, [Page 1284]where American Sikh children received traditional Sikh education. In the subsequent decades, the 3HO community also ventured out into businesses such as The Golden Temple Restaurant, Yogi teas, Akal Security, and so on.

With Yogi Bhajan's death in 2004, the 3HO Sikh community is now in the postfounder phase of its growth. The community has successfully managed to address the absence of his leadership by creating an administrative structure that oversees the religious life of the community at Espanola and other centers and its multiple business concerns. Even though their numbers have declined over the years, and by the end of the first decade of the 21st century they probably numbered only a few thousand, the rise of the 3HO is an interesting development in Sikh history, and the group constitutes an intriguing component of the global Sikh community.