Hari Prasad Shastri was born in 1882 at Bareilly in northern India and educated at Benares and Allahabad University. A gifted Sanskrit scholar who was well versed in the metaphysical wisdom of Advaita Vedanta, he lectured at Waseda University in Tokyo from 1916-1918 during which time he wrote a wonderful evocation of Buddhism titled Echoes of Japan. He afterwards moved to China for a period of eleven years and was Dean of the Foreign Department at Hardoon University and Professor of Philosophy at Nankwang College, where he founded the Asiatic Review and supervised the publication of the standard Chinese edition of the Buddhist Scriptures (over 5000 texts). At the instigation of his spiritual teacher, Shri Dadaji of Aligarh, he traveled to Britain in 1929 where he founded Shanti Sadan , the Center of Adhyatma Yoga in the West, and made several distinguished translations of Advaita classics such as the Avadhut Gita of Mahatma Dattatreya (1934), Ashtavakra Gita (1949), the Panchadashi of Vidyaranya (1954), and the Aparokshanubhuti of Shankara (1955).

Dr. Shastri was not just a scholar but was also an acharya (teacher) in the direct line of one of the oldest teaching schools of classical yoga, the Yoga of Self-Knowledge (Adhyatma Yoga). He died in 1956.

The World Wisdom publication Seeing God Everywhere includes the beautiful piece "O Hanami: Flower Viewing" by Hari Prasad Shastri.