If you cannot practice Bhakti Yoga, then just try to work for me.
By working for me, you will come to the perfect stage.
—SRI KRISHNA IN THE BHAGAVAD GITA, 12.10
THE SWAMI STEPPED OFF the plane at San Francisco International Airport. When he emerged from the customs area, devotees and friends stared in disbelief. He looked younger than when he had left. He was tanned from his six months in India, energetic, and beaming. They escorted him to a waiting car, and the driver brought him to Frederick Street. The Swami stepped out and took stock of the storefront temple. Nothing had changed. Without funds, his students had maintained but not expanded.
“All the brahmacharis may get jobs,” he advised, referring to the unmarried students living in the temple. “Our temples are not meant for simply eating and sleeping. We are not afraid of work. Whatever our engagement is, by offering the results to Krishna, we become Krishna conscious.” Come to morning kirtan and classes, he said, have a prasadam breakfast and then go out, work, and donate money to help support the temple. Then in the evening, come back together again for more kirtan and classes.
“What is the difficulty?” he asked, the wording he frequently used when challenging his students to do more. If he at age seventy could start a worldwide mission, why should there be any difficulty for twenty-somethings to get a job?
Disciples often heard him say that working in a spirit of devotion could lead to self-awareness—a hard concept for them to grasp, since it seemed counterintuitive: coming to know oneself as an eternal being through dedication to one’s job? At first, it made no sense. Gradually, through classes and discussion, they came to respect the proposal that working like “normal” people could also lead to spiritual progress. “Not by merely abstaining from work can one achieve freedom from reaction,” explained the Bhagavad Gita, “nor by renunciation alone can one attain perfection . . . Perform your prescribed duty, for doing so is better than not working.”102
Still, this was the first time they heard him encourage them to find secular jobs. There was no shame in earning a living, he said, and he reminded them that Krishna favored working with devotion over withdrawing from the world. More emphatically, Krishna recommended work as a path to liberation for beginners in devotional life. Don’t reject the world or your duties in it, Krishna told Arjuna, for they are the tools of your enlightenment.103
Some of the Swami’s disciples took his suggestion to heart. Twenty-one-year-old Tamal Krishna Das found a job at a Kodak photo lab and submitted to the repetitious shuffling of films between drying racks. Another disciple, a former musician whom the Swami had named Vishnujan Das, carved bamboo flutes and sold them to hippies and tourists. Tamal Krishna’s total weekly income after taxes was less than $50 a week, and Vishnujan’s was not much more. Meanwhile, attendance for meals at the temple was increasing and so were monthly expenses.
The Swami assessed their dilemma and proposed an alternative strategy. Rather than working for such small compensation, depend on Krishna. Go out on the streets as they did in New York, chant Hare Krishna, and see what happens. Resigning from paid secular jobs to take up devotional service effectively meant rising from karma yoga to bhakti yoga, which was a higher stage of spiritual action. Karma yoga involved working in the world, generating income, and donating a portion of the income for devotional purposes. Higher than karma yogis, Krishna explained in the Bhagavad Gita, were bhakti yogis whose only motive was to love and serve him. That level of unqualified devotion had been the ideal for Vaishnavas throughout history.
Besides, he told his disciples, your life will be less stressful if you don’t have to commute to jobs elsewhere. “In your country, people have to drive to an office fifty miles off. And because you have a car to get there, you think, ‘I am advanced.’ This is maya, illusion, thinking, ‘I’m happy. I have this car.’ These poor fellows have to rise early in the morning, and make so much haste—zoom, zoom, zoom,” he said, imitating morning traffic. “Don’t you feel botheration? We have created a civilization that is so painful, but we are thinking we are advanced. Better to give up this job and just depend on Krishna.”
“Then,” he said, anticipating objections, “the question comes, ‘How shall I live?’ The answer is given in the Srimad Bhagavatam: ‘Happiness derived from sense enjoyment is obtained automatically in course of time, just as in course of time we obtain miseries even though we do not desire them.’104 You don’t aspire for misery: it is forced upon you. Similarly, happiness also will be forced upon you, whatever you are destined to receive. So don’t try for getting happiness or for discarding distress. That will go on. You simply try for Krishna consciousness. God has supplied for everyone. Why not for you?”105
ON THE FIRST DAY OF sankirtan, devotees assembled at the intersection of Market and Powell, the busiest intersection of downtown San Francisco. As manager of the sankirtan party, Tamal Krishna signaled Vishnujan to begin singing. Mukunda tapped out a beat on a mridanga, while Yamuna, Gurudas, and others followed on kartals. The line of devotees swayed to and fro, as they did in temple services. A crowd grew around them. Tamal Krishna had brought a conch shell, which he blew from time to time to flavor the music. Inspired by the moment, he moved among the crowd, extended the conch shell and requested donations, and the white bone conch filled with coins. To anyone who made a donation, he handed a copy of Back to Godhead. By the end of the day, he had collected $12 and distributed two dozen magazines. Excited by the exchange, the sankirtan crew added other locations to their itinerary, and donations climbed to $40 a day. With some of the money, the devotees purchased yellow dhotis for the men and colorful saris for the women, and the impression on passersby was one of a well-organized, well-appointed street performance.
The Swami had not yet witnessed them in action. One morning, the eight-person crew assembled in front of his building, and when he came down for his daily walk, they broke out in a rousing kirtan. He looked on with a smile and nodded in time to the music. It was not yet much of an international society, but these young people had heart, and that was their advantage. With Krishna’s help, his little fledgling group could learn and grow, and one day they might indeed become something grand and make a mark on the world. The Swami beamed, perhaps seeing a bit of himself in their willingness to jump up and down for the right cause. He lifted his arms and danced along, sending the sankirtan crew into overdrive. The devotees spun in circles, drums blaring, kartals harmonizing with the San Francisco cable cars. It was, in its modest way, a version of the chanting and dancing Chaitanya Mahaprabhu had inspired five hundred years before:
Chaitanya Mahaprabhu signaled the kirtan to begin and fourteen drums played at once. Mahaprabhu danced and the sound of the chanting was tumultuous. The Vaishnavas came together like an assembly of clouds and as they chanted the Holy Names in great ecstasy, tears fell from their eyes like rain. The sankirtan chanting resounded, filling the three worlds. Indeed, no one could hear any sound other than the sankirtan.106
San Francisco radio interview:
INTERVIEWER: We are talking with Swami A.C. Bhaktivedanta, head of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. Your Grace, what is the basis of your teachings?
PRABHUPADA: The basis is Bhagavad Gita As It Is. It is very old, at least five thousand years. The speaker is Lord Krishna. Krishna means “All-Attractive,” the perfect name for God. And the subject matter is our relationship with God. There is life after death. Unfortunately, people do not believe in a next life. Even though every day they can remember their childhood, you were a child, I was a child. Then we became boys, then youths. Now I am becoming old, and when this body will be useless, we will have to take another body. This information is available in the Bhagavad Gita. That is the preliminary study, and if one studies this book nicely he goes to other books. I am preparing Srimad Bhagavatam, but the project is very great and will take sixty volumes. It is no trifling thing, no blind faith, this Krishna consciousness.
INTERVIEWER: What is the significance of your robe?
PRABHUPADA: I am a sannyasi. According to Vedic culture, there are four divisions of human society. Brahmachari, student life. Then grihastha, household life. Then vanaprastha, retired life. And then sannyasa, which means preaching transcendental knowledge to the society from door to door. In Vedic culture, there are different dresses for each division. So this saffron dress means he is understood to be a man of transcendental knowledge.
INTERVIEWER: You also have a garland of flowers around your neck.
PRABHUPADA: That is offered by the disciples as a matter of respect for the spiritual master.
INTERVIEWER: You have some paint down your forehead and your nose—and so do all your followers who are here in the studio.
PRABHUPADA: These marks mean the body is a temple of Krishna. We mark twelve parts of the body. The idea is that we are being protected by God from all sides.
INTERVIEWER: When I went to shake hands with everybody, I found that all your right hands were wrapped. What is the significance of that?
PRABHUPADA: It is not exactly wrapping. It is a bag for our beads. The beads are for chanting Hare Krishna. They are sacred and therefore we keep them in a bag so they won’t touch the dust.
INTERVIEWER: Must one renounce his religion to join Krishna consciousness?
PRABHUPADA: No, religion is a kind of faith. Krishna consciousness is transcendental to religious faith. Faith can be changed, but you cannot change the nature of the soul. That is your actual constitutional situation: part and parcel of the Supreme. That cannot be changed.
INTERVIEWER: Is there conflict with other Eastern religions?
PRABHUPADA: The only conflict is between atheists and theists. We are not trying to replace Christianity or Judaism with something Indian. In one sense, Krishna consciousness is the post-graduate study of all religions.
INTERVIEWER: The whole world has heard of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Many people go to him for meditation. Is meditation part of your philosophy?
PRABHUPADA: Meditation means to search out who I am. Unless you come to that point, there is no meaning of meditation. And once you know who you are, then meditation ends, and the activities after meditation begin. We take our understanding of who we are from Bhagavad Gita: eternal souls, parts and parcels of Krishna. And the activity after meditation is called bhakti, devotional service.107
IT WAS IN MAY 1968 while in Boston that the Swami happened to mention to disciples that “Swamiji” was not a particularly respectful title for a spiritual master. “The spiritual master is usually addressed by names like Gurudev, Vishnupada, or Prabhupada,” he said.
“May we call you Prabhupada?” his secretary, Govinda Dasi, asked.
It took a few moments of reflection, weighing the consequences of adapting a title that had always referred to his guru, Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati. No doubt, some of his godbrothers back in India would object. Still, it was his disciples’ request, and if they were to make further progress in their spiritual life, then honoring their guru in this way would help. If such an important change in title were to take effect, he recommended that they publish an article in Back to Godhead explaining its significance. The word had two meanings, the article described: first, the master (prabhu) at whose feet (pada) other masters gathered; second, one who was always found at the lotus feet of Krishna, the Supreme Prabhu. The article specified that there had been other Prabhupadas in Vaishnava history, such as Rupa Goswami Prabhupada and Swamiji’s guru, Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati Prabhupada. Now, the article concluded, the followers of A.C Bhaktivedanta Swami wanted to follow that tradition and henceforth would address their guru with this honorific title.
DISCIPLES FANNED OUT ACROSS AMERICA, chanting Hare Krishna, distributing magazines, and opening temples. Dayananda, who worked for IBM in San Francisco and earned a decent salary, found a showroom for rent in an office building on Hollywood Boulevard, directly across from the famed Grauman’s Chinese Theater. It was an ideal location for a Krishna center: a ground-floor space with a floor-to-ceiling display window in the heart of the city. At night, with the other offices closed and dark, the brightly lit showroom glittered like a movie set and attracted crowds of curious tourists. Following Prabhupada’s recommendation that they avoid commuting to work, all the devotees had to do was head out the door and begin chanting.
The honeymoon lasted about a week. Occupants on upper floors protested the smell of incense, the loud singing, and the traffic of oddly dressed young people through the lobby of their office building. Management issued a twenty-four-hour eviction notice, and Prabhupada’s students found themselves on the sidewalk with their sleeping bags, knapsacks, drums, and cymbals. For the next several months, they bedded down wherever invitations could be had, in garages and living rooms and whatever other shelter they could find around the city.
Don’t be discouraged, Prabhupada told them, and he described his own experience in India as a sannyasi with no fixed residence and no money for food and how in retrospect he valued those difficulties as spiritual assets. Material comforts evaporated sooner or later for everyone, he reminded them, and until the soul goes back to Godhead, it never has a permanent address. This was just one more change of location. The practitioner fixed in knowledge of the soul viewed a change of residence like a change of body—nothing more than a minor disturbance.108
After weeks of searching, Gargamuni found a building for sale on La Cienega Boulevard. The two-story former church featured a chapel room with a high ceiling, full-length windows, a stage where the altar had stood, office rooms, kitchen, two bathrooms, and a meeting hall—enough room to accommodate hundreds of guests. The building also stood apart from its neighbors: There would be no complaints about loud kirtans.
For devotees accustomed to working out of curio shops, derelict storefronts, and, in Montreal, a former bowling alley, this bit of news carried the aura of fantasy. A church building projected institutional authority: Maybe the Hare Krishnas would finally get a little respect.
Tamal Krishna’s crew of brahmacharis took up the renovations. They stormed in wielding brooms, paintbrushes, and hammers, and every room received a fresh coat of paint. A devotee construction engineer, Nara-Narayan, built an altar. Then, inspired by the stature of their new church-temple, he crafted a gargantuan vyasasan—the elevated seat where Prabhupada would sit as representative of Vyasadev, the avatar who had compiled the Vedic wisdom into written form thousands of years before. In other temples, the vyasasan was a simpler affair, and Prabhupada had never asked for more than that. Nara-Narayan set himself the task of creating something royal, rich, and magical, with gold-leafed metal filigree borders; a large, ornate seat with wide silk-covered cushions; a five-foot-tall padded circular back; and carved lion’s paws for feet. When light filtered down onto the vyasasan from the room’s high windows, the overall impression was less like a piece of furniture than an enchanted creature that might upend itself and start chanting.
The Los Angeles congregation was not prepared for Prabhupada’s reaction when he arrived in the newly renovated temple and saw what awaited him. He had not hesitated when, two years before, disciples had made a seat for him in Matchless Gifts, but that was little more than a pillow on a wooden bench. This was a throne as one might have imagined in a king’s palace. When he finally overcame his surprise and climbed slowly onto the elevated vyasasan, his voice faltered. He was not at all worthy of such an offering, he said with tears in his eyes, but he would accept it on behalf of his Guru Maharaj, Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati.
Without calling it by name, the literal elevation of their teacher to a higher level marked a third transition in the trajectory of his mission.109 He had begun four years before in New York as Swamiji, their teacher and friend. Then students had taken to calling him Prabhupada, “the master at whose feet many gather,” the guru and head of their Society. Now they had created for him a seat such as had been reserved throughout history for great acharyas, heads of the Vaishnava lineage—or for a saktyavesha avatar, a soul empowered by God to bring holiness back into the world.
PRABHUPADA’S BHAGAVAD GITA had finally found a publisher in Macmillan, and now he could concentrate on completing his edition of the Srimad Bhagavatam. Still remaining was Chaitanya Charitamrita, the principal biography of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu. It was Chaitanya who had inaugurated the chanting of Hare Krishna and demonstrated the character of a Vaishnava: “humbler than a blade of grass, with all respect for others.”110 And it was Chaitanya who had embodied the love of Radha for Krishna, a unique contribution that revealed the heights to which love for God could grow. When Mahaprabhu left the world in 1533, His Goswami followers created a library of devotional texts and diaries. Based on these, Krishnadas Kaviraj Goswami wrote his biography, Chaitanya Charitamrita, in eleven thousand verses.
It was crucial that his students understand Mahaprabhu’s teachings. The Krishna consciousness philosophy was grounded in Mahaprabhu’s principle of achintya-bhedabheda-tattva: the soul’s simultaneous and inconceivable oneness with God and difference from God. In this one idea, all the anomalies surrounding personal divinity were resolved. How could God be a person in one place and everywhere at the same time? Is God in his creation, or is he separate from his creation? And if souls were sparks of God, did that not make them God?
Mahaprabhu’s principle of “simultaneously, inconceivably one and different” reconciled the apparent contradictions. All living beings were one with God in quality, just as a gold ring shared the qualities of a gold mine. Yet a ring was never quantitatively as great as the mine. In the same way, souls shared God’s qualities but in minute quantity. All of creation was “one with God,” as the mayavada impersonalists were fond of saying, but the oneness was one of quality and interest, not quantity. Souls were eternal individuals, just as Krishna was an eternal individual, and with the permanent individuality of Krishna and souls came the capacity to give and receive love. For hundreds of years, this critical distinction had been lost on mayavada or impersonalist seekers of truth. Mahaprabhu’s biography would clear up the confusion.
If Prabhupada prepared an edition of Chaitanya Charitamrita with the same degree of detail as Srimad Bhagavatam, with synonyms for each word, transliterations, translations, and commentaries, the project would fill more than a dozen volumes. There was no guarantee he would live long enough to finish both the Bhagavatam and another multivolume work, so he set aside his work on the Bhagavatam and wrote a summary of Mahaprabhu’s life called Teachings of Lord Chaitanya. When disciples realized the depth of Prabhupada’s concern to see it published, they raised the funds and presented him with finished copies.
“You do not know how pleased I am,” he wrote on learning of its publication. The impersonalist missions, he said, had nothing substantial to offer people for their spiritual well-being, but because Vedanta centers had money and published so many “rubbish literatures,” impersonalism had gained a following. “You are all God,” the mayavada yoga teachers pontificated. “You are moving the sun, you are moving the moon.” And as soon as they had a toothache, Prabhupada chided, they went to the dentist God for repairs.
“You can just imagine how powerful our society will become,” he predicted, “when we have published as many substantial literatures.”111
WHEN CONTEMPLATING THE ENORMITY of the Srimad Bhagavatam, the same thought occurred to him: A summary could serve as an insurance policy for future generations. Sage Vyasadev had divided the Bhagavatam’s eighteen thousand verses into twelve cantos, a graduation of subject matter intended to prepare readers for entrance into the tenth canto, which described Krishna’s private life. The nine earlier cantos described the structure of the universe, the nature of matter and spirit, the avatars of God, and the lives of exemplary devotees throughout history. These preliminary topics would prepare readers for understanding the tenth canto’s descriptions of Krishna’s lilas or pastimes. The first two cantos were compared to Krishna’s lotus feet. Cantos three and four were compared to his legs, five and six to his middle, seven and eight his arms, and nine his throat. The tenth canto was compared to Krishna’s lotus face.
“I don’t want to pass away before my disciples are able to see Krishna’s face,” he explained. He would call this summary KRSNA: The Supreme Personality of Godhead. It would come to be known by its popular name, the Krishna Book.
Among the many detailed descriptions contained in the tenth canto, it was Krishna’s rasa lila, his loving exchanges with the gopis—the cowherd women of Vrindavan—that posed the greatest risk of misinterpretation. Krishna’s body and those of the gopis were pure spirit, yet the tenth canto’s descriptions of Krishna embracing and caressing the gopis bore resemblance to sexual relationships between conditioned, embodied men and women. To avoid that misunderstanding, a proper commentary was needed.
The rasa dance takes place one autumn night when the scent of jasmine flowers fills the air over Vrindavan, and the moon illuminates its forests. Seven-year-old Krishna plays his flute, and the young cowherd girls hear. They leave their homes and run toward the music, leaving their families behind and milk boiling over on wood-burning stoves. In the forest under the moonlight, the gopis assemble. Krishna attempts to reason with them. Why have you come here? Your families must be anxious. Go and take care of them. We will still be together, as I am wherever my devotees chant my glories and meditate on me. Go home.
His words break their hearts, and they scratch the ground with their toes. Tears stream from their eyes and smear their makeup. Don’t speak like this, they say. We have given up everything for you. You are the real dharma of our lives, not our families. Our hearts are breaking. If you refuse us, we will die.
As the source of creation, Krishna is atma-rama or self-satisfied: He does not need the company of young girls. But he is also compassionate and cannot bear to see those who love him distressed, and so he walks with the gopis to the banks of the Yamuna River and embraces them. Such is his mystic power that each gopi thinks she alone is with Krishna in the moonlight, and each thinks herself the most fortunate girl in the world—and in that moment, when pride enters their hearts, Krishna disappears.
The gopis are driven mad by this sudden separation and beg trees and flowers to tell them where he has gone. They find his footprints in the sand. Next to Krishna’s footprints they see a second set of prints, those of a young girl. After a brief search they find her, Radha, abandoned like them and grieving. Together they continue the search until the moonlight fades, and they return to the riverbank. Krishna is not there, but they rebuke him as though he were. “You who have always protected us,” they say, “you who are the witness in the hearts of all beings—you made promises to us. If even your flute can enjoy the nectar of your lips, why not we? Husbands, sons, brothers—we have forsaken them all to be with you.” And the gopis weep.
Krishna hears their lament and returns to the bank of the river. The gopis disguise their anger as philosophic inquiry. What, they ask, do you think of someone who ignores the love of others? Krishna acknowledges their troubled hearts. You have given up the world for me, he says, and it was out of love for you that I became invisible. If I were to make myself too easily available, then our love for one another would be cheap. You deserve better than that. I am unable to reciprocate love as deep as yours. The Supreme Person, whom no one can defeat, stands helpless before the gopis’ love.
The gopis forget their heartbreak, and the rasa dance begins. They form a circle. Denizens of heaven appear in the sky, playing instruments and singing. As Krishna and the gopis dance, their bracelets and ankle bells add to the celestial music. Krishna smiles. He multiplies himself, and each gopi thinks she alone is dancing with her beloved.112
The Srimad Bhagavatam consisted of a week-long discussion between Pariksit, last of the great Vedic kings, and his spiritual adviser, the sage Sukadev. Krishna was the source of dharma or righteous behavior, Pariksit said. How could he permit himself to perform the rasa dance—an act which, if performed by anyone else, would be seen as immoral and condemned? Sukadev replied that Krishna’s actions may sometimes appear to contradict dharma, but they have purpose and are without flaw. He dwells in the heart of all as the paramatma, Supersoul, the witness within. If he chooses to step out of the gopis’ hearts to embrace them, where is the impropriety? It is no more unethical for Krishna to dance with his own energies than for a child to play with his own reflection in a mirror. The rasa lila was not licentious, Sukadev explained, only misunderstood.
“This world,” Prabhupada explained, “is a relative manifestation of the spiritual world. Just like a photograph, where you find the details of your beautiful face. The photo is not the reality, but still, you can understand a notion of the actual thing by scrutinizing the photograph. Here, when boys and girls mix, there are so many distressful things that create material bondage. There, in the spiritual world, it is the highest. So everything is there in the spiritual world. Just like the love between Radha and Krishna. They are not married, but from childhood they were friends, and Radharani [‘Queen’ Radha] could never forget Krishna. But there was no inebriety. Here, the so-called love is lust—the same thing but only a perverted reflection. Like the reflection of a tree, where the topmost part becomes the lowest. In the spiritual world, love is pure.
“The impersonalists,” he continued, “think that because the material varieties are abominable, therefore the spiritual world must be void. That is a material calculation. They cannot imagine that in the spiritual world also there is love because here, in this world, the so-called love—lust—is frustrated and followed by so many calamities. In one sense, their idea is right: How can these nonsense things exist in the spiritual world? But their conclusion is to erase variety and make the spiritual world impersonal. They cannot understand that the photograph is a reflection of the actual person. The real explanation is that the spiritual world is the fountainhead of all emanations. These things are not understood in the beginning.”113
“Almighty Lord” (Maha-Vishnu), “Creator of the Universe” (Jagannath), “Supreme Being” (Adi-Purusha)—these were descriptive titles. Who was the person behind the titles? Who was the person behind the functions of God? The Krishna Book would reveal the answer.
Los Angeles was an ideal place for Prabhupada to write the Krishna Book. Devotees there appeared capable of maintaining temple programs on their own now. He had installed deities of Radha and Krishna, and the daily services were going smoothly, and for the first time since arriving in America, he was free from the distractions of management. Within a half-hour drive of the temple, students rented him an apartment on Hayworth Avenue, a long residential street of two-story buildings. In his second-floor apartment, Prabhupada chose a quiet room in the rear, and in December 1968, he began work on the Krishna Book. How this one publication proved to be a turning point in the fortunes of the Krishna consciousness movement would become clear within the next two years.
HE WOKE EACH MORNING at about two o’clock and wrote, just as he had done in Vrindavan. The routine was more or less the same now, transposed to Los Angeles. He opened the weighty tome of commentaries by acharyas from centuries past, raised the microphone to his lips, and spoke. “By reading this one book, KRSNA, love of Godhead will fructify.” Starting with those words in his preface, Prabhupada described that Krishna came into the world to reestablish the proper functioning of society, yet despite the sobriety of that mission he always remained the darling of Vrindavan village, the adorable divine child who made mischief and won hearts.
One by one, the little metal clicker on the side of Prabhupada’s Dictaphone registered how many pages he recorded. By mid-morning, he was done for the day. While he showered and dressed, an assistant quietly entered the room, released the tape from its housing in the recorder, and noted down the number of clicks. Disciples who came to cook and clean asked, “How many clicks did Prabhupada record last night?” and challenged one another to calculate how many more clicks it would take before the Krishna Book was finished.
From time to time, he would break from writing to show assistants how to cook a dish. Often the recipe required a trip to the local Indian grocery for vegetables they had never heard of before, such as karella (bitter melon), bhindi (okra), or lauki (bottle gourd). He was as good at cooking as he was at any of the other roles he played for them and would demonstrate for his young assistants how far to press down on a melon to test for ripeness, how to measure spices in the palm of the right hand, and the proper way to prepare several dishes simultaneously using a brass three-tiered cooker: dal soup on the bottom, steam rising through holes in the second tier to cook the vegetables, then rising again through holes in the top layer to steam rice.
Two or three times each week, he visited the temple. La Cienega is a major arterial road that runs north from El Segundo Boulevard to Sunset Strip in West Hollywood, a wide stretch that in the late 1960s was home to film studios and restaurants, and disciples anticipated healthy attendance for services and meals. Prabhupada walked through the temple and nodded in approval at the scraping and painting and other improvements. People were visiting Krishna centers now not only one-by-one but in twos and threes, as couples and families, and he reminded his disciples to receive guests properly. There are small, everyday kindnesses that some people seldom knew in the rest of their lives: a warm welcome, a friendly smile, a fresh meal. At least in Krishna’s temple, they should be greeted respectfully, given a tour, and a clear explanation of Krishna philosophy. He wanted his students to remain sensitive to a central fact of the human condition: Without knowledge of their souls, people suffered. It took many lifetimes for them to find Krishna, and when they finally did, they deserved a warm welcome.
Nor should devotees neglect to extend such courtesies to one another. His students were to always address one another as prabhu, “master,” and bow to them, for all devotees were worthy of respect. He gave them a prayer to say to one another each day:
vancha-kalpatarubhyash cha
kripa-sindhubhya eva cha
patitanam pavanebhyo
vaishnavebhyo namo namaha
I offer my respectful obeisances unto the Vaishnava devotees of the Lord. They are just like desire trees and can fulfill the desires of everyone, and they are full of compassion for the fallen conditioned souls.
Then he returned to his apartment to continue work on the Krishna Book.
BY MARCH 1969, Prabhupada’s presence in Los Angeles had attracted new followers. What had been an abandoned church became the largest of ISKCON’s centers. Still, at least by U.S. government standards, his mission had not yet acquired the imprint of an authentic religion. Prabhupada never referred to Krishna consciousness as a religion—it was the inherent quality of all life, without a point of origin in historic time—yet government recognition would provide several advantages. For one, government authorization would help his disciples circumvent accusations that they followed a weird cult. For another, this was a time when young American men were being drafted for Vietnam, and membership in a recognized religious institution could save lives. “In the spiritual world,” Prabhupada reassured his disciples, “there are no draft boards.”
His students did not know how to react to the politics swirling around the Vietnam conflict. Should they join a picket line? Would university students react more favorably to Krishna consciousness if they saw devotees marching with them against an unjust war? Prabhupada responded that protesting U.S. aggressions in Vietnam would not change the government. Rather, their position should be that devotees were Brahmins, whose job was to provide people with spiritual education. The varnashram system of traditional India—what had come to be erroneously called the “caste” system—prescribed work according to vocational skills. By this standard, wars should be conducted by ksatriyas, qualified soldiers acting under orders issued by a just government. The Brahmins’ duty was to assure that the government was indeed just, and its actions defensible.
The Selective Service had never heard of Prabhupada, whom male devotees listed as their teacher on applications for religious deferment. In March 1969, an assistant area coordinator for the Selective Service visited Prabhupada at his Hayworth Avenue apartment. Prabhupada received him cordially and explained that Krishna consciousness was a spiritual culture that derived its authority from ancient Sanskrit scriptures. He outlined the rules for initiation and impressed the agent with the authenticity of Vaishnava faith.
“You can expect to hear from us,” the Selective Service agent said.
Prabhupada received a letter on March 14, 1969, declaring that before the government would grant ISKCON religious status, he needed to provide further details of its religious and administrative standards. The Selective Service letter specified that he would need to provide names and locations of all his churches, copies of his society’s curriculum, a list of requirements for a diploma with the requisite courses to be mastered, an outline of the rules of conduct and personal standards required of his ministerial students, and a roster of ISKCON’s faculty with their degrees and accomplishments.
Prabhupada sent copies of the letter to his eldest disciples, and together they created a curriculum that would lead to a final examination and, on successful completion, bhakti-shastri certification, signifying a shastri or expert in bhakti scriptures. This was the West’s first residency program for Vaishnava ecclesiastical certification, and despite the monastic conditions, long hours, and rigid studies, Prabhupada’s disciples loved it. There was excitement in learning bhakti theology under the tutelage of its leading exponent, a teacher who embodied bhakti, devotion to God, in his every word and deed.
With five classes per day and written exams at the end of the week, devotees found themselves in constant philosophical discussion. They held mock debates in which teams responded to conflicting points of view such as those from reductionist scientists, fundamentalist Christians, and impersonal Vedantists. People voiced objections to Prabhupada’s society for all sorts of reasons, and the bhakti-shastri curriculum prepared devotees to respond with rational explanations and scriptural references.
Of all the objections to Prabhupada’s movement, the most frequent was also the most predictable: People mistook it for a kind of blind faith, a refuge for lost souls in need of something to shore up their intellectually impoverished lives. Since the days of Voltaire and other Enlightenment philosophies, people averse to divinity had declared the death of God and the irrelevance of faith. Truth, the thinking ran, was not a matter of faith but the product of good science and meticulous experiment. Any benefits religious faith might once have offered such as art or ethics or morality could be achieved with the right combination of physics, mathematics, biological evolution, and the unlimited potential of human intelligence. Hare Krishnas, scarred or bruised early in life—who knew what trauma had pushed them to such emotional extremes—had nothing to offer.
Yet by mid-1969, it was clear that Prabhupada had come not to give refuge to lost souls. He had come to form a cadre of Brahmins capable of spearheading a revolution that would lead to a God-conscious world, and the bhakti-shastri candidates trained with that goal in mind. Each morning, they rose and attended services before the deities of Radha and Krishna, followed by classes on the Srimad Bhagavatam and other bhakti texts. Students chanted verses and studied the English synonyms for each word, which helped concretize the verses’ meaning. The word nirguna, for example, in its simplest translation meant nir, “without,” and guna, “qualities.” According to followers of the mayavada or impersonalist schools, nirguna described the Absolute as impersonal, an undifferentiated energy devoid of qualities and form. From the bhakti perspective, nirguna was translated as “without material qualities,” meaning that God’s form was completely spiritual. Candidates for the bhakti-shastri degree learned to identify and address such differences of interpretation.
Still, noticeably absent from their curriculum were formal classes in the Sanskrit language. The conceit in university departments of Eastern Religions had always been to take seriously only scholars with command of the source language, and in India learning Sanskrit grammar alone was a twelve-year commitment. Prabhupada dismissed such concerns. He had come to raise a class of devotees, not academics. Until his books were published, any English translation of the original texts could do, as he had shown by using Radhakrishnan’s Gita in the early days. Besides, a formal knowledge of Sanskrit offered no guarantee of accurate understanding. Word meanings changed over time: Who could say whether a current translation conveyed the same meaning that was intended thousands of years ago? Even more important, a word in Sanskrit could have many meanings—atma could mean, soul, body, senses, humanity—and the guidance of a qualified guru was critical for mastering the devotional content of scripture. It was the Vaishnava commentaries that took precedent in training candidates for Krishna-conscious life.
Once they had mastered the basics, devotees set out to spread Krishna consciousness elsewhere. In 1969, Prabhupada’s disciples opened nearly one new temple in America each month. Some disciples traveled abroad to open centers in Europe, South America, Africa, and the Far East. Uniting these nascent communities was the experience of kirtan. Chanting bonded people across ethnic, religious, and national borders.
Interview with historian A.L. Basham (1914–1986)
INTERVIEWER: You mentioned earlier that you had taken part in a Chaitanya kirtan in Calcutta. Can you describe that experience?
BASHAM: It was about twenty years ago. I got off a train in Sealdah station just about sunset and noticed a kirtan taking place in one corner of the station yard. I was in no hurry and had time to spare. The devotees had erected a decorative tent in which they had set up a statue of Krishna and numerous brightly colored pictures of Krishna and Chaitanya and various saints of the order. They were chanting “Hare Krishna, Hare Rama,” and a few began to dance. I don’t think I got as far as dancing, but I joined in the chanting and was really carried away. I was there for at least two hours. That is an evening I will never forget—the intense exhilaration and relief, the feeling of security and safety and inner happiness which came from it. And it was so clear that all the people were feeling it—mostly working class people from the buildings and tenements of the surrounding area. No doubt, they worked hard and hadn’t much to look forward to materially. But there was such happiness, such relief from tension and strain on their faces as one could hardly imagine.
INTERVIEWER: Do you think there is anything artificial about Westerners taking to the path of bhakti?
BASHAM: Two or three hundred years ago, nobody in Europe or in the Western world could have become a Hare Krishna even if he wanted to, because he wouldn’t have known anything about it. Very few people had visited India, and those who had knew next to nothing about Indian religion. Now that this is known and understood, it’s bound to have some effect.114
FROM THE OUTSET, Prabhupada had planned to have at least fifty paintings in the Krishna Book, and even before starting to write, he had sent out a request for painters. The “art department” charged with creating this collection of transcendental work began as nothing more than a room in the Boston temple, a three-story residential structure with an unfinished basement. Jadurani had relocated from her native New York, and soon other artist-disciples joined her, each with particular skills to offer and a captivating story to tell about how life had brought them to Krishna consciousness. Most of them had never met before, but there emerged a bright spirit of fellowship. Men and women who under other circumstances might never have so much as exchanged a word talked with the familiarity of old acquaintances and discussed how they would go about depicting the spiritual world on canvas.
In a fifteen-by-fifteen-foot room brightened by daylight filtered through tall bay windows, the artists set up shop. At strategic points around the room they positioned boxes containing tubes of paint, brushes, and tins of turpentine. A tape recorder sat in one corner, and as they worked they listened to recordings of Prabhupada singing, lecturing and dictating the text for the Krishna Book. The room was so small that the half-dozen men and women sat facing away from one another, a human wheel with arms extended like so many spokes toward canvases propped against the walls. It had always been this way, artists against the world, laboring to penetrate to the essence of life with brushes and palettes, though it was doubtful there had ever been such a collective of unseasoned novices charged with depicting the eternal world portrayed in the Puranas.
Given the Krishna Book’s target publication date of early 1970, their task was daunting: at least one finished painting per day. The only way to do that was by working in an assembly line. In a rare spirit of cooperation, the devotee-artists collaborated on one another’s paintings. When Prabhupada sent a letter with the general description of a scene, they discussed as a group how it should be visualized. Inevitably, there were points needing clarification. What did Brahma, the first being, look like? What directions did his four heads face? Was the “swan carrier” that he rode an actual swan? If he was the oldest being in the universe, did he have a long white beard? What did the Bhagavad Gita mean by comparing the material world to a banyan tree? What do souls look like? Do they have hands and feet? Prabhupada replied promptly and patiently to their letters, and the artists translated his answers into paintings that would illustrate the Krishna Book and other publications.
“He had this vision,” explained Ramesvara, former head of the Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, ISKCON’s publishing office, “that people would be stunned seeing these beautiful illustrations—‘This blue cowherd boy is God?’—and that the paintings would compel them to read the philosophy in the books.”
By popular agreement, Baradraj served as designer for the paintings. The young artist and former member of a Canadian rock band grasped the essence of their task: What the world judged as myth, they were to depict as reality. What history had relegated to shelves of folklore and non-Christian religions, they were to illustrate as the cosmology of real people inhabiting real worlds: tangible places accessed via pathways of yoga. Baradraj sketched out each composition on canvas and urged the others to strive for a vivid palette. Jadurani came next, filling in color and refining forms. Murlidhar came last, a classicist with an eye for textures, reflections, light, and detail. He would be the one to add finishing touches to their paintings.
BY THEIR OWN ASSESSMENT, the first dozen canvases were primitive, naïve, and childlike, and left them wondering how they could ever do justice to such an esoteric assignment. Prabhupada had a lifetime of devotion through which to visualize scenes from the Bhagavad Gita and Srimad Bhagavatam. They, on the other hand, knew nothing of the spiritual world. Some had artistic training, but not one among them had ever made a living at art or exhibited professionally. Even professional artists in India, where stone-etched chromolithographic “God prints” had been in circulation since the 1890s—even they, artists born to the culture, had never tackled anything more than simple portraits of Krishna and the demigods. An illustrated tenth canto Bhagavatam was a monumental undertaking, and Prabhupada’s artists judged themselves unqualified for the task.
Don’t worry, Prabhupada told them. These were not material paintings, and the artists did not need to go to art school to do their work. If they chanted Hare Krishna, the inspiration would come from within and their paintings would be “like rain after the drought of mundane art,” he said. “Everyone will become attracted.”
“We knew the inspiration had to come through our hearts if we were going to paint these transcendental personalities and places,” Baradraj recalled. “But we were not advanced devotees, and the full meaning of the subject was not clear to us. What Prabhupada helped us see was that our shortcomings and lack of skill or realization would not be an impediment if we worked sincerely under his direction.”
PRABHUPADA ARRIVED IN BOSTON to monitor progress in December 1969. A full press was now operating out of the 40 North Beacon Street temple. Apart from the second-floor art studio, there were rooms for transcribing, editing, and typesetting. In addition to the printing press, the basement production area housed long wooden tables for stacking and folding printed signatures. The building was ideal for their purposes: The previous tenant manufactured funeral caskets and had installed a small elevator that rose from the basement to a loading dock at the back of the house. Devotees chuckled at the irony of a former funeral parlor churning out magazines about God and reincarnation.
The press that devotees had purchased was a used Chief 29 offset. Among the Chief 29’s many jobs were several booklets summarizing Prabhupada’s position on yoga. The impression of yoga as an exercise fad had concerned him since his arrival in America three years before, when he observed students at New York yoga studios. Classes consisted of physical postures and little or no instruction in the philosophy behind yoga. Almost without exception, gurus in America had framed yoga as valuable for physical and mental well-being but minimized the study of yoga philosophy.
“No theories ever made men higher,” one popular yoga teacher had asserted. “No amount of books can help us to become purer. The only power is in realization.”115 Yoga teachers took that idea on face value: Few ever bothered to study the philosophical background to the practice they presumed to represent. In the 1960s and 1970s, most yoga students labored under the misconception that yoga’s philosophical background was more or less irrelevant and possibly detrimental to yoga practice. “The mind escapes into knowledge,” wrote another, “into theories, hopes, imagination; and this very knowledge is a hindrance. . . . To know is to be ignorant; not to know is the beginning of wisdom.”116
Many yoga teachers who came to America in the 1960s calculated that the physical postures were all that Americans could understand, and so that was what they taught. The consequence had been that many students misunderstood yoga as exclusively a technique to relax the mind and improve the body. This physical variety of yoga was easy and exhilarating. Yet five minutes after leaving their yoga class, students found themselves lapsing back into the same anxieties and stress. Without reforming behavior and opening the heart to God, Prabhupada insisted, the benefits of yoga would remain woefully brief.
“Yogic meditation is possible when there is first yama, niyama,” he said, referring to the beginning steps of yoga as described by sage Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra: morality and ethical living.117 Integral to these basics, Patanjali had included isvara pranidhana: surrender to God.118 That lesson usually fell through the cracks in yoga classes. Among the yoga teachers of the Sixties, Prabhupada was the one who emphazied that yoga was for knowing the soul and awakening the soul’s love for Krishna, the Supreme Being. The message came across in booklets rolling off the Chief 29, with names like The Perfection of Yoga and Krishna Consciousness: The Topmost Yoga System.
WHEN PRABHUPADA ARRIVED FROM THE airport, it was the Chief 29 he wanted to see first. His spiritual master’s presses had been the pride of his mission. Bhaktisiddhanta had even included an image of a printing press in the logo of the Gaudiya Math. Prabhupada entered the workshop surrounded by disciples and stared at the seven-foot-tall, ten-foot-long machine. For the past many weeks, the press devotees had tended to it the way workers bees might tend to a queen, oiling her many cogs, lubricating her many wheels, polishing her many sides and parts. The Chief 29 chanted a mantra-like click-clack-click-clack as rubber grippers fed two-foot-wide sheets of paper down a metal slide and into a vertical bank of rollers one after the other. Out the other end gushed printed pages to be folded and stapled into Back to Godhead magazines and pamphlets such as Krishna, the Reservoir of Pleasure that were then boxed and shipped to temples. Without saying a word, Prabhupada lowered himself carefully to his knees and stretched out, full-length on the cold concrete floor, arms extended in homage. His disciples were stunned: Their guru was giving thanks to a printing press.
By the end of 1969, devotees were distributing hundreds of Back to Godhead magazines daily, and the Boston press operation was no longer capable of keeping up with the demand. In his search for a bigger supplier, Brahmananda contacted Dai Nippon in Japan, one of the world’s largest printers, and ISKCON raised its monthly printings of Back to Godhead to twenty thousand copies.
In October 1969, the Boston press completed layouts for the long-awaited Krishna Book. Brahmananda carefully packed the cardboard layouts into a suitcase and flew from Boston to Tokyo. We are very sorry, Dai Nippon officers told him. You are behind in payments for your Back to Godhead magazine. We will only print this book if you pay us $19,000 in advance.
For the impoverished Hare Krishna movement, $19,000 was a fortune. As often happened in Prabhupada’s mission, help would come from an unexpected source.