sadhus, who he sought out based on referrals and reputation, he practiced many forms of mantras and tantric yoga, and experimented with several schools of Hindu and Buddhist thought. According to papers he presented in India, Burma and the U.S., his quest often consisted of living in remote, primitive conditions. His sādhanā's varied. Sometimes he would be holed up in a country house for weeks or months; in another case he was told to walk through a particularly dangerous forest area. Later, he spent several months in intense meditation at a Zen monastery in Japan. Despite this intense study, he once said that he did not "have a Guru franchise". In 1960, at the invitation of the Burmese Government, he devoted a year to the Panditãrãma Shwe Taung Gon Meditation Center in Rangoon (now Yangon) in the practice and study of ancient Theravada Buddhist techniques. At the conclusion, he was selected by the Burmese Foreign Office and the Ministry of Religion to address a specially-invited audience of the Diplomatic Corps in Rangoon on Buddhist ethics and techniques. Justice U Chan Htoon, an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of Burma and the President of the World Fellowship of Buddhists presided. Social and political commentary From 1962–67, as a special contributor to the Illustrated Weekly of India (The Times of India group), he published approximately 170,000 words of fiction, contemporary comment, criticism, book reviews and – before leaving for the United States, for a year and a half – wrote an unsigned weekly page called "Very High and Very Low". At that time, he was one of the most widely read and influential journalists in India. Some of his material was requested for publication in Britain and the States by, among others, the Transatlantic Review and The Noble Savage edited by Saul Bellow. He was critical of certain policies promoted by Mahatma Gandhi. Unlike Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, who urged Indians not to help the British war effort, Desani encouraged his fellow Hindus to resist German and Japanese enslavement. Philosophy professorship In 1967, based on his 15-year-long devotion to spiritual studies, he became a Fulbright Program lecturer on Oriental Philosophy at the University of Texas, Austin. Eventually, he chose to stay and become a tenured professor in the UT Philosophy Department. During the Spring breaks, he taught Theravada Buddhism. In the early 1970s, he became an American citizen. After he retired,