[3] He was accused of sexual abuse by several dozen of his female followers; an investigation called the Olive Branch Report found the allegations most likely true.

[4][5][6] Harbhajan Singh Khalsa was born on August 26, 1929 into a Sikh family in Kot Harkarn, Gujranwala district in the province of Punjab (now in Pakistan).

[11] In 1968, Singh emigrated to Toronto, Canada equipped with an endorsement from that country's High Commissioner to India, James George, who was also a student of his.

In three months, he established classes at several YMCAs, co-founded a yoga centre, was interviewed for national press and television, and helped set in motion the creation of eastern Canada's first Sikh temple in time for Guru Nanak's five hundredth birthday the following year.

In 1994, the 3HO Foundation joined the United Nations as a non-governmental organization in consultative status with the Economic and Social Council, representing women's issues, promoting human rights, and providing education about alternative systems of medicine.

[19][20] In the summer of 1970, Singh participated in an informal "Holy Man Jam" at the University of Colorado at Boulder with Swami Satchidananda (another Eastern yogi who has been accused of sexual abuse of his students), Stephen Gaskin of The Farm in Tennessee, Zen Buddhist Jakusho Kwong, and other local spiritual leaders.

A few weeks later, he organized a gathering of spiritual teachers to engage and inspire the 200,000 attendees of the Atlanta International Pop Festival on the stage between the performances of the bands.

[21] When U.S. President Nixon called drugs America's "Number one domestic problem", Singh launched a pilot program with two longtime heroin addicts in Washington, D.C., in 1972.

[30] In March 2020, anti-cult activist Be Scofield published an article in her magazine The Guru reporting sexual abuse and rape of female followers and assistants including Dyson by Harbhajan Singh, based on "over a dozen original interviews".

[42] Scholars including Verne A. Dusenbery and Pashaura Singh have concurred that Harbhajan Singh's introduction of Sikh teachings into the West helped identify Sikhism as a world religion while at the same time creating a compelling counter-narrative to that which identified Sikhs solely as a race with a shared history in India.

[43] Philip Deslippe, a historian of American religion, wrote a 2012 article "From Maharaj to Mahan Tantric: The Construction of Yogi Bhajan's Kundalini Yoga", using 3HO source archive material and news articles to reveal how Harbhajan Singh recreated his own story after his first trip back to India:[11] I set out to answer the question "where did Kundalini Yoga as taught by Yogi Bhajan (KYATBYB) come from?"