One who is a friend to others and free of ego, who is tolerant and whole-heartedly engaged in acts of devotion—such a soul is very dear to me.
—BHAGAVAD GITA, 12.13–14
INDIA, 1970
Embedded in the geography of Mahaprabhu’s prophesy that the names of Krishna would be chanted “in every town and village” was India itself. With his global mission sufficiently underway in America and Europe, the time had come for Prabhupada to return and revitalize Krishna consciousness in its homeland. In early 1970, he instructed leading students to prepare for an all-India tour.
Word spread that A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami was arriving in Calcutta with Western disciples. Reporters, godbrothers, friends from his younger days, and a crowd of enthusiastic bystanders assembled at the airport to greet them. When Prabhupada disembarked, a kirtan group from the Calcutta Chaitanya Math chanted Hare Krishna, and well-wishers piled garlands of gardenias and marigolds around his neck until his face was nearly covered by the fragrant flowers.
Then garlands were offered to his students, and the VIP reception took them by surprise. Some had visited India before, but they had been tourists then. Within the first few moments of their arrival dressed as devotees, it was clear they were part of something extraordinary. Not only was the crowd greeting them enthusiastically, but people were looking at them with awe. For a thousand years, foreigners had come to India to conquer and exploit. Prabhupada’s disciples were standing that history on its head. They had come to honor India’s spiritual culture, and the onlookers applauded and cheered, crying out, “Sadhu! Sadhu!” and stepped forward to touch their feet.
A reporter asked what advice Prabhupada wished to give India.
“I have been around the world,” Prabhupada said, “and I have found that happiness and peace cannot be established by materialistic advancement. My advice to the Indians is that if you advance only in science and technology, then you will remain backward forever. Chant the Holy Names of Krishna. All animosity, all problems will be solved if they take this advice.”
A supporter who had offered to be their host escorted them to waiting cars. At the supporter’s home, Prabhupada’s sister, Bhavatarini, was on hand to greet him and his disciples. It was past midnight, but Prabhupada would not allow his students to rest without first accepting the dishes of prasadam Bhavatarini had prepared.
“Whatever my sister cooks, we have to eat,” he told them and then added with affection, “and we must eat everything. This is her favorite activity.”
The following day, Amrita Bazar Patrika ran a front-page story about the Calcutta native who had brought Krishna to the West and his triumphant return to India. “Many VIPs have come to Dum Dum Airport before,” the article reported, “but never before have we seen gaiety and celebration of this magnitude.”
Other disciples arrived in the days that followed, and the entourage swelled to forty men and women. They moved cross-country by train, bus, and rickshaw, and everywhere they went Prabhupada presented his Western students as evidence that Chaitanya Mahaprabhu’s message was indeed universal. Stay pure, he told his young followers. Here in India you will be judged by people who know devotional culture and who will be skeptical whether Westerners can maintain such a high standard of behavior.
They arrived in Bombay. One of the first people to greet him there was Sumati Morarjee, who had given him his ticket to America five years before. “I did not think you would come back alive!” admitted the head of Scindia Steamship Company.
Invitations for Prabhupada’s disciples to appear at public events flooded in. One program billed itself as a gathering of holy people. Organizers ushered the devotees into a hall furnished with long rows of wooden tables. Sitting on the tables at one end of the hall were yogis and sadhus in various stages of dress and undress. Some wore elaborate robes; others were covered with nothing but ashes and armbands. Many sported scraggly beards and matted hair that reached to the ground. A few held tall metal tridents. The devotees stared at them, and the sadhus stared back, each group thinking the other to be the strangest thing they had ever seen. Not knowing what else to do, the devotees broke out in kirtan, and the audience responded with ecstatic clapping and dancing. In his enthusiasm, one of the organizers led them out of the hall and onto the streets of the city, and many in the audience followed along, singing and dancing in delight over Westerners performing like natives.
Now it was they who were strangers in a strange land, yet in a sense they had also come home, and each day compounded the feeling, until whatever residue remained of life before Krishna began fading into memory. One evening, when the devotees returned to their quarters and gave their report, Prabhupada encouraged them to take the chanting to the streets, as they did in America.
The following morning, a dozen male disciples in crisp robes and heads freshly shaved, and as many female disciples in colorful silk saris, worked their way down crowded marketplaces in the center of the city. Their voices synchronized with the drums and kartals and the entourage proceeded in unison, left foot over right, right foot over left. Pedestrians hurrying to work stopped and gawked, not quite believing their eyes. Patrons in food stalls put down their samosas and blinked in disbelief. Customers exited shops to congregate on the sidewalk and stare. For their part, the devotees did their best to not get distracted by the crowd that swelled around them, and to stay fixed on keeping step with the kirtan leader.
After a few days of such sorties down the main thoroughfares of Bombay, the press took notice. Radio commentators, photographers, and journalists followed them wherever they went. A reporter for the Times of India wrote, “Can the materialistic West, or at any rate, a microscopic part of it, have turned at last to embrace the spiritualism of the East? I met several of the kirtan-chanting Americans and was at once struck by their sincerity and utter surrender. The Vaishnavas of Mathura [the city outside Vrindavan where Krishna first appeared five thousand years before] could not be so guileless, I thought, as this band of Bhakti enthusiasts.”132
The Times journalist followed Prabhupada and his disciples to a program on Bombay’s Chowpatti Beach, where cool breezes stirred clouds over the Arabian Sea and the sand was fine and soft underfoot. Several thousand people had assembled before a raised stage for talks by popular swamis. After two hours of dry philosophy by mayavada teachers, it was Prabhupada’s turn. He did not utter a word but simply looked at his disciples.
“Begin chanting,” he said.
The devotees launched into an enthusiastic kirtan with mridangas and kartals. Shyamasundar and Malati’s two-year-old daughter, Saraswati, pirouetted across the stage. The impersonalist swamis rose and walked off, uninterested in the ecstasies of devotion. The devotees jumped into the audience. The crowd rose from their seats, chanting and clapping and dancing along. Devotees lead a joyous chorus line back and forth from one end of the huge tent to the other. Some people cried, others laughed. Police joined in, dancing along with the best of them. Finally the kirtan came to an end. The crowd was buzzing.
“I do not feel that I have to say very much,” Prabhupada said into the microphone. “You can see the result of Krishna consciousness. It is not something artificial. It is there in everyone. We simply have to revive it.”
The next day the Times journalist wrote, “One greying reporter whom I had always regarded as a particularly unsentimental person said to me in an emotion-choked voice, ‘Do you realize what is happening? Very soon Hinduism is going to sweep the West. The Hare Krishna movement will compensate for all our losses at the hands of padres through the centuries.’ ”133
Some readers did not share the reporter’s enthusiasm. One letter to the editor of a local paper summed up the feelings of many traditionalists: “These foreign Hindus of the Hare Krishna movement cannot be equal to the native original Brahmins. They will have to be relegated to the lower castes.” Another reader wrote that the movement was “just a sporadic fad of sentimentalists.” Prabhupada was incensed and wrote to the editor, “Lord Krishna says that anyone who comes to him is eligible to be elevated to the highest position of going back to home, back to Godhead. How can the bhakti movement be guilty of being ‘sporadic’ when this science was taught in the Gita five thousand years ago—when our activity is sanatan-dharma, the eternal occupation of the living entity?”134
By responding to critics in the Indian press, Prabhupada drove home for his Western disciples something startling: Even people who should know better, people born and raised in India, did not understand their own devotional culture.
DESPITE THE HECTIC TRAVEL SCHEDULE, Prabhupada never failed to rise early to work on his books, and his consistency amazed everyone around him. He never slowed down. Aging merely fueled his determination. Krishna had given him a chance to set humanity back on track, and the price for such an honor was non-stop effort. Growing old was no excuse.
“I want to travel around the world with two dozen boys and girls,” he announced one morning. “Let us impress Krishna consciousness into every country of the world.” Round-the-world tours were a young person’s adventure, but he lived in a place beyond consideration of age or discomfort. Since his first contact with Bhaktisiddhanta, Prabhupada had trained himself to minimize physical needs and sleep. It was well known among followers that he rested at most four hours at night, then rose to write and chant. They had never met anyone like him. He was seventy-five years old and gave people less than half his age a run for their money.
Traveling with him through India opened their eyes to something quite unexpected. Back home in the streets of New York, Los Angeles, or San Francisco, the public saw them as an anomaly, a curiosity, something alien and suspect. Here they were heroes led by an elderly guru who was quickly becoming one of the most renowned spiritual figures in the nation.
To be adored for chanting Hare Krishna—what a change that was.
IN SURAT, GUJARAT, the entire city turned out for Prabhupada and his “dancing white elephants,” as he had affectionately dubbed his Western disciples. Thousands of people lined the streets to watch them perform sankirtan. Crowds cheered and threw flower petals from windows and rooftops. The turnout was so large that after the third day the mayor closed schools and proclaimed a citywide holiday. Signs posted around town read: WELCOME TO THE AMERICAN AND EUROPEAN DEVOTEES OF KRISHNA.
Throngs of locals assembled outside the home where Prabhupada and his students stayed. The crowds blocked traffic as they cried out to see the saint who had brought Krishna to the world. Relenting, Prabhupada walked out onto the balcony of his room.
“Hare Krishna!” he called down. The crowd roared, arms waving in the air.
“Practically, there is no credit for me,” he would often tell reporters. “If there is any credit, it goes to my spiritual master, Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati Goswami Prabhupada, who is helping me by sending so many good souls to this movement. My business is just to carry out his order. That is the way of the disciplic succession.”135
ONE OF THE DEVOTEES with the India traveling party from its outset was an African-American renowned for his melodious singing and expert mridanga playing. In 1969, while on shore leave from the U.S. Navy, nineteen-year-old Donald Brawley had met devotees on the streets of Los Angeles and accepted their invitation to meet Prabhupada at the temple on La Cienega Boulevard.
“What are you planning to do with your life?” Prabhupada asked from behind his desk. The young sailor replied that he intended to become a doctor.
“How many people graduate with a degree in medicine each year?” Prabhupada asked.
“Thousands,” the young man replied.
“How many graduate with a degree in the science of the self?” Prabhupada challenged. “We need doctors of the soul. First be a doctor for yourself, then you can be a doctor for others.”
Prabhupada initiated the sailor in March 1969 and gave him the name Dinanath Das.
“IN INDIA, we were received like demigods,” Dinanath recalled. “It was very surreal, all these people touching our feet, garlanding us, and anointing our face with sandalwood pulp. People were constantly inviting us to their homes and serving us feasts and insisting, ‘Eat more! Eat more!’ Prabhupada laughed and reminded us that in India it was considered an insult to refuse a gift. When he spoke at these receptions, he reiterated for our hosts that this worldwide chanting was Chaitanya Mahaprabhu’s prophesy and that everyone born in India had the duty to help fulfill it.”
Invitations arrived from all parts of India for Prabhupada and his “dancing white elephants” to visit homes, temples, schools, and community centers. He took advantage of these offers to introduce his students to places of pilgrimage such as Kurukshetra, where Krishna spoke the Bhagavad Gita; and Rama Tirtha Sarovara, where, in the Satya Yuga, Sage Valmiki, author of the epic Ramayana, had established his ashram. They traveled outside urban centers to bring the chanting of Krishna’s names to villages where white people had never been seen before and entire populations turned out to greet them. The devotees arrived back at their quarters after fifteen-hour days, exhausted and ready for sleep. Prabhupada would be at his desk, chanting, translating, energized, and ready for more. The next day they rose, packed, and traveled on across the subcontinent.
Interview, Bombay, November 7, 1970:
PRABHUPADA: I went to America and remained with a friend’s son in Pennsylvania for three weeks. I had no money, and my philosophy was completely different [from the American way of life]. I asked the Americans to cease from four kinds of sinful activities: illicit sex, meat eating, intoxication, gambling—these were their daily affairs.
REPORTER: Then why were they attracted to Hare Krishna?
PRABHUPADA: You are taking Krishna as Hindu. That is your mistake. He is God. I am not interested to preach Hindu dharma. Krishna consciousness is not Hindu. Don’t misunderstand the philosophy. We are teaching love of Godhead. First stage is brahma-jnana, knowledge of God as light, just like seeing sunlight. Then paramatma-jnana, knowledge of God in the heart. Then bhagavad-jnana, knowledge of Krishna, the Supreme Personality of Godhead. That is pure bhakti. We are not talking of Hinduism or any ‘ism.’ We are talking about the science of God.136
IN JANUARY 1971, they arrived in Allahabad at the campgrounds of the Ardh Kumbha Mela, held every six years after the even bigger Maha Kumbha Mela. There, the three sacred rivers converged: the Ganges, Yamuna, and Saraswati. To prepare for Kumba Mela’s fifteen million pilgrims, the Indian Army had erected a sprawling city of wood and canvas dwellings. Prabhupada’s entourage staked tents, set up a corrugated tin kitchen, lined the floor with hay and burlap rugs, stoked wood fires, and began cooking. Each day during Kumbha Mela, they distributed hundreds of plates of vegetables, fried flatbread puris, and sweet semolina halava. Prabhupada ranked distributing prasadam as equal in importance to chanting Hare Krishna, and in years to come disciples would feed fresh, nutritious prasadam lunches to more than one million indigent children across India every day.137
For miles on either side of their tents, the pageantry of Kumbha Mela was on display. Devotees met yogis, some of them rumored to be five hundred years old; naked fakirs on elephants; wizened sadhus, their arms atrophied from remaining upraised for years; and “sky-clad” (naked) naga babas. For some devotees, accounts of mystic yogis in books such as Paramahansa Yogananda’s 1946 memoir Autobiography of a Yogi had been the impetus to their own spiritual journey. Prabhupada understood their fascination with mystic displays, and he regaled them with stories about yogis he had known growing up at a time when such things were commonplace. Trailanga Baba, a friend of Yogananda’s grand-guru, Lahiri Mahasaya, had lived not far from Prabhupada’s childhood home and passed away when Prabhupada was still a boy. Rumors held that Trailanga had been more than three hundred years old at the time. Visitors reported seeing him levitate, drink poison without harm, and shrink himself down to the size of a pea.
Prabhupada described that as a boy he had witnessed mystic powers on display when his father took him to the circus. They walked the fairgrounds holding hands and watched as one popular yogi proved his resistance to rusty nails and another made a syrupy gulab jamun sweet appear from thin air. “That mystic power is worth about two paise,” young Abhay’s father, Gour Mohan, told him. Two paise was the price of a gulab jamun in sweet shops.
Despite the fascination of such mystic performances, at the 1971 Ardh Kumbha Mela it was Prabhupada’s disciples who created the greatest buzz.
WORK BEGAN THAT MONTH to prepare for yet another public event. This time, ISKCON would be the organizer in Bombay, and devotees drew on their American savvy to promote and advertise. Thirty-foot-wide colored banners hung at major intersections and large posters appeared on the sides of office buildings. A twenty-foot-wide hot air balloon floated over the fairgrounds, with the words HARE KRISHNA emblazoned in bright colors.
The first day of the festival, ten thousand people attended. Word spread, and attendance on the second day doubled. Later that month, Prabhupada sent Giriraj and Tamal Krishna to Calcutta to organize a similar pandal program, which ended up drawing more than twice the attendance of the Bombay program. On the final day, forty thousand people packed into a huge tent erected on Calcutta’s Maidan field near the city center. By now, the Hare Krishna movement had begun attracting young Indian men and women. Prabhupada held initiations, and his traveling sankirtan party swelled.
Politicians and business people also felt drawn to Prabhupada’s movement, but they were cautious about trusting its authenticity. Many of these business people came from India’s wealthier and more influential families. They had seen gurus try to revive India’s spiritual culture before, and fail. Most of these swamis were self-appointed “incarnations” who recited Sanskrit verses or performed a few mystic tricks to prove their “divinity,” but nothing much had come of it.
But in Prabhupada, these influential men and women of Indian society found a devotion to Krishna they had not witnessed in others. In his discussions with members of the nation’s elite, Prabhupada invited them to judge Krishna consciousness by the evidence before them: Europeans and Americans who had set aside worldly pursuits to live as bhakti yogis and as aspiring servants of Krishna.
“India’s culture is Krishna conscious,” he reminded a group of Bombay civic leaders, “but we have forgotten that culture and are becoming too much materially absorbed. I have now forty-two temples in the West, and in each there are fifty to one hundred disciples.” It was a good start, he concluded, but there was more to do. “Please help me with this movement,” he asked.
The guests agreed: The Krishna consciousness movement was something unprecedented. Some became his initiated disciples and helped build temples, print books in local languages, and fund prasadam distribution programs. Others who were not yet ready for initiation paid a fee to become “Life Members” of ISKCON, which entitled them to sets of books and overnight privileges in the growing number of temples worldwide. With the help of these well-to-do supporters, Krishna consciousness in India spread.
DESPITE THEIR CONSTANT TRAVEL, Prabhupada insisted that his disciples not compromise their daily devotional practices. Each morning they showered and dressed and marked their foreheads with tilak. Often they stayed in homes that featured a temple room, and in the morning devotees gathered before the altar. One or another among them would volunteer to serve as pujari and perform the arati ceremony as Prabhupada had taught. Over time, disciples had improved their standards of deity worship, and pujaris followed the strict protocols outlined in the traditional texts, purifying their hands with drops of water, then presenting the deities a stick of incense and offering it in seven circles around the whole body of the deity, then a flower, conch, handkerchief, and other items, while the assembly sang prayers.
After arati, devotees chanted their daily sixteen rounds of beads. They put their hands in their bead bags and murmured the maha-mantra quietly to themselves: “Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare, Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare.” Some sat on cushions, eyes closed, listening intently. Others wrapped a wool chadar around their shoulders and strolled quietly around the neighborhood as they chanted.
Assembling again in the temple room, the devotees bowed down when Prabhupada entered to lead discussion on the Srimad Bhagavatam. Often his explanations connected stories from long ago with the world around them. In one such morning program, he spoke from the sixth canto of the Bhagavatam, relating the life of Ajamila, a young man with a good heart but little resistence when a beautiful woman came between him and his family.
“You will find many Ajamilas at the present moment,” Prabhupada said. “It is the Age of Kali.”
Ajamila left his family and fathered ten children with his new love, occasionally resorting to illegal means for securing the money to maintain them. After a long life, he lay dying and regrets haunted him. Death approached, and in fear Ajamila called out for his young son, Narayan, whom he had named after Krishna, the shelter (ayan) for all humans (nara). By calling out the name of the Supreme Being at the moment of death, Ajamila’s soul was liberated from further material births. The story recalled for Prabhupada his own situation as a child.
“I was not at home when my father was dying,” he said. “He was living for one more day just to see me—always inquiring whether Abhay has come back.”
The story of Ajamila had meaning for them, he cautioned. If you choose to marry, he said, don’t become an Ajamila. Take your responsibility as spouses and parents seriously. Love one another and raise your children to always think of Krishna. “What is learned early in life,” he reminded them, “is never forgotten,” and it would have occurred to disciples there that surely he was the living proof.
PRABHUPADA TRAVELED ON, one country after another. In June 1971, he flew from Delhi to Moscow to meet with an Indologist at the Academy of Sciences. After checking into their hotel, his assistant, Shyamasundar, went looking for some of the city’s scarce vegetables. Two teenage Russians watched, surprised to see a tall American with shaved head and cotton robes crossing Red Square. Shyamsundar stopped and invited the young Moscovites to meet Prabhupada. Within ten years of that first encounter, there were more than 100,000 Krishna followers in Russia. For people isolated so long by a government that denied them access to spiritual knowledge, Krishna consciousness fell like a healing rain.
He would not stop traveling, and one round-the-world journey became two, then three, then four. Occasionally, he admitted retirement appealed to him, since it meant he could concentrate on completing the Srimad Bhagavatam. “This body is old,” he would said. “It is giving warning.” But then he would dismiss retirement as impractical, since his students still had not convinced him they were capable of managing ISKCON on their own.
IN OCTOBER 1971, he drove with disciples to Vrindavan. Twenty years before, he had lived there penniless and unknown. Now he was returning as a renowned spiritual ambassador who had made Vrindavan famous around the world. Civic leaders greeted him with words of admiration, calling him the “great preacher of Vedic culture.” He had been “one of us” in the early days of his mission, they proudly declared, and by his efforts “all the people of the world are becoming very intimately related with Vrindavan-dhama.”138
Despite the warm reception, Brijbasis harbored reservations about his disciples. On social grounds, many residents viewed the foreigners as mlecchas, meat-eaters and outcasts, impure and unfit for devotional worship. On emotional grounds, they viewed them as uncouth strangers who simply did not fit in with Vrindavan life. They had some cause for concern, since this early generation of Krishna devotees had not yet mastered the habits of proper Vaishnavas. Some persisted in eating with their left hand, others chewed their fingernails or allowed their prayer beads to touch the ground, and Brijbasis feared such behavior would bring shame on Krishna’s holy dhama.
“Suppose after you and I are gone, they become a nuisance and make a disturbance,” one Brijbasi said. Prabhupada objected to this insinuation.
“You are putting blame on my disciples. It is not good for you. My disciples are really devotees of God, and you are saying like that. I cannot tolerate this thing.” His students were doing their best, he said, maybe imperfectly, but the effort deserved the encouragement of Vrindavan’s residents, not their disdain.
“If you have any suggestion for them,” he said, “you tell it to me, not to my disciples. My students are very new, and if they hear others discouraging them, they may become weak. I am trying hard to save them, so confidentially we can speak of these things, but not in front of them.”139
Certain Brijbasis refused to eat prasadam cooked by Prabhupada’s disciples, and Vishwambhar Goswami, mayor of Vrindavan, spoke on the Westerners’ behalf. He had known Prabhupada from the early days and proudly defended his disciples’ legitimacy. “They have left all maya to come here and chant Hare Krishna,” Vishwambhar Goswami argued. “We can accept anything from the hands of such devotees.”140
PRABHUPADA AND HIS STUDENTS TOURED Vrindavan, walking from one holy place to another, and at each stop he recounted Krishna’s pastimes. “Just over there,” he said, pointing to a hilly spot at Barsana, the village where Radha was born, “Krishna used to come down that hill.” Pointing to another spot nearby, he added, “Radha would come down this hill, and they would meet in the middle.” They came to another spot, and Prabhupada described that this was where child Krishna played with his cowherd friends. One day he ate dirt and his friends tattled on him to Mother Yashoda.
“Oh, your son is eating dirt!” they said.
“Krishna!” Mother Yashoda scolded. “You are eating dirt?”
“No,” the child replied. “Those cowherd boys are my enemies. This morning we had some quarrel, so now they are telling lies about me.”
“No! No!” the cowherd boys cried out. “He ate dirt! He ate dirt! We saw him!”
“All right, we shall see,” Mother Yashoda concluded. “Open your mouth.”
When the Supreme Being was so ordered by his mother, he obediently opened his mouth—and in her child’s mouth Yashoda gazed upon the entire creation. She saw outer space in all directions, mountains, oceans, planets, the moon, and stars. She perceived eternal time, the totality of elements, and all forms of life. In that one cosmic vision, she beheld the infinity of existence. She saw herself as well, holding child Krishna on her lap, and Yashoda wondered if perhaps she had gone mad.
“Or else,” she thought, “I am mistaken in thinking he is my child. Surely, Krishna is the Supreme Personality of Godhead. And if so, then it is only an illusion to think I am his mother and that Nanda Maharaj is my husband.”
Rather than see her love for him weakened by preoccupation with his identity as the Supreme Being, child Krishna used his mystic skill to erase all such thoughts from her mind, and Yashoda once again knew herself to be Krishna’s mother.
“Well, whatever is done is done. Just don’t do it again,” she told Krishna with a wag of her finger, and off the cowherd children went to resume their play.
Prabhupada and his disciples resumed their tour of Vrindavan.
A PIOUS VRINDAVAN COUPLE, Kashi Prasad Saraf and his wife, Gita Devi, owned a parcel of land in the area called Raman Reti, a few miles from the center of Vrindavan. The quiet, pastoral acreage sat at the end of a tree-lined dirt path that bordered a dense forest. Peacocks and deer wandered about, and at night, tigers and wildcats rummaged for food and stalked four-foot-tall horned nilgai antelopes. The Sarafs had no children and announced they had chosen to gift the land to Prabhupada for construction of an ISKCON temple. The deed for the 4,800-square-yard property was signed on March 12, 1972. Prabhupada directed students to build a temple that would honor Krishna and Balaram, for it was here in Raman Reti that the Supreme Person and his brother, Balaram, herded cows and played as children five thousand years before.
Some devotees volunteered to clear the land and secure building materials, but they soon left, complaining that the brutal heat and lack of drinking water made life unbearable. Older devotees stepped in and reassured Prabhupada they would carry out the work. This core team included Gurudas and Yamuna, who had helped found the London temple; a Dutch devotee-architect named Saurabha; and a British assistant, Gunarnava. None of them had ever built anything like the proposed Vrindavan temple, let alone under such conditions, and every day they survived development of the Krishna-Balaram Mandir was like a year of survival anywhere else.
In those pioneer days, there were moments when being a devotee felt like living in an adventure movie. Just getting up in the morning could be life-threatening, especially when a scorpion crawled over someone’s sleeping bag or a snake slithered out from under a pile of clothes. As always, Prabhupada found just the right words to keep his disciples encouraged. You are on the front line for Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, he told them, and great sacrifices were to be expected. Are you convinced, he asked them, that Krishna consciousness is the most important thing for setting the world back on track?
“As far as I am concerned,” he said, “I am convinced. Therefore, I am pushing on, because it is fact, not fiction. Whenever someone says, ‘Do you believe in Krishna?’ I say, ‘No, not belief. It is fact.’ But are you convinced? It was my plan to give Krishna consciousness to the world, with your help. But you have to be spiritually strong.”
To remain “spiritually strong,” the Western devotees charged with building Vrindavan’s most prestigious new temple gathered together at the end of a day’s work. They took up seats on piles of sand and bricks and other construction remnants, and for several hours as the sun slowly dropped below the horizon of trees, they read passages from the Srimad Bhagavatam and recited verses from the Bhagavad Gita. This evening sanga relieved the stress of days spent dealing with shortages of everything and the complaints of laborers whose language they did not speak. Sanitation was non-existent. They lived in mosquito-infested mud huts and bathed by squatting on planks of wood and dousing themselves with water from rusty tin buckets. Prabhupada shared their austerities and demonstrated the devotional quality of samatvam, equipoised, in all circumstances. “The nonpermanent appearance of happiness and distress, and their disappearance in due course,” said the Gita, “are like the appearance and disappearance of winter and summer seasons. They arise from sense perception, O scion of Bharata [Arjuna], and one must learn to tolerate them without being disturbed.”141
Prabhupada’s old friend and godbrother, O.B.L. Kapoor, visited the construction site and offered words of praise. “I can hear Sri Rupa Goswami, Sri Jiva Goswami, and others,” he said, referring to the Chaitanya Mahaprabhu’s leading disciples, “saying, ‘Long Live Prabhupada!’ ” Another one of Prabhupada’s godbrothers, Ananda, came to cook for the devotee crew and care for their health with homemade remedies. These elder Vaishnavas understood better than others how difficult a task Prabhupada had undertaken. Since the days of the Goswamis and their sixteenth-century renovation of Vrindavan, few had ever tried as hard to resuscitate Krishna consciousness. Even among Prabhupada’s disciples, not many grasped just how difficult a job it was for him to spearhead the International Society for Krishna Consciousness.
To become Krishna conscious, candidates had to overcome the effects of thousands, if not millions, of births in material bodies. The cumulative karma of so many lifetimes ran deep, and old habits died hard. Even stalwart disciples could succumb to sex, drugs, and other allurements of secular life. The BBT archives house more than five thousand letters written by Prabhapada, mostly to disciples, offering words of encouragement.
“Once, in the mid-seventies,” senior disciple Ravindra Svarup wrote to Prabhupada in a commemorative offering, “a devotee showed me something I was probably not supposed to see: your correspondence files for a few years, filled with all the letters you had received. I was shocked by the volume of problems within our movement, by the maya bedeviling your followers, not excluding many leaders. It seemed not a day went by without your mail delivering to you setbacks, perplexities, quarrels, and failures. The combination of the world’s resistance and the movement’s weaknesses seemed to present an overwhelmingly fatal obstacle. It was a disillusioning and discouraging few hours of reading for me. . . . I understood then more of your greatness. . . . You knew with chilling clarity of vision all the shortcomings and failures of your followers and your institution. You corrected as much as possible and kept on advancing Lord Chaitanya’s mission with whatever flawed and imperfect instruments came to your hands.”142
IN HINDSIGHT, THE MOST DECISIVE year in the growth of Prabhupada’s movement was 1972. Spurred by the conviction that nothing pleased him more than seeing books about Krishna distributed, that December Los Angeles sankirtan devotees conducted a bookselling “marathon.” Teams of devotees set out in vans to try their luck in shopping malls during the holiday period. The heavy volume of Christmas traffic combined with the mood of gift buying, and the result was magical. Devotees sold one Krishna Book, then another and another, and in the three days leading up to Christmas, the Los Angeles crew sold more than eighteen thousand books and magazines.
When results of the Los Angeles marathon reached Prabhupada, he was incredulous. Eighteen thousand books and magazines—about Krishna—in three days? “It is scarcely believable,” he told his secretary, and he requested that telegrams be sent to the other temples informing them of what had happened. Officers of his publishing company, the Bhaktivedanta Book Trust (BBT), made projections based on the three-day pilot program and realized ISKCON’s financial problems were over.
“That’s when ISKCON’s fortunes turned around,” commented Ramesvara Das, former BBT director. “The 1972 marathon changed everything.”
Prabhupada saw his disciples’ enthusiasm for selling books and encouraged them to continue. “There is no literature throughout the universe like Srimad Bhagavatam,” he declared in a morning class soon after the marathon. “Every word is for the good of human society. Somehow or other, if a book goes in someone’s hand, he will be benefited.”
Vaishnavas honored sacred texts such as the Bhagavad Gita or Srimad Bhagavatam as “literary incarnations” of God. Even holding such a scripture could be the beginning of someone’s spiritual journey. “Therefore we are stressing so much,” Prabhupada continued, “please distribute books, distribute books.” Receiving weekly reports of book sales gave him strength, he told them, and made him feel “like a young man.”
Inspired by his appreciation for book sales, entrepreneurial distributors expanded their outreach to include shopping malls, rock concerts, airports, and other public venues. “The results showed us he had been right,” concluded Ramesvara, “namely, that a global society for Krishna consciousness could be supported through books. What drove us was knowing he had given his life to create these books for the benefit of the world. His health was so precarious, the least we could do was let him see results while he was still alive.”
RECEIPTS FROM DISTRIBUTION of BBT publications soared from $100,000 in 1972 to more than $1 million in 1973, and Prabhupada issued a directive for how the movement’s newfound revenues should be spent. Fifty percent was to be used for printing more books and the other fifty percent was to be made available as loans for purchasing land and building temples and farms.
“He had no interest in accumulating large sums of money for himself,” Ramesvara explained. “He reminded us that a true Vaishnava could receive a million dollars in donations in the morning and be a pauper again by night. Everything was meant to be engaged in Krishna’s service, not hoarded. So he instructed us to make sizeable loans to help purchase properties and construct temples all over the world—and that was how the Hare Krishna movement was built.”
ON AUGUST 9, 1973, Prabhupada entered Paris’s City Hall, the fabled Hotel de Ville. The five-block-wide landmark had been commissioned in 1533 by King Francis I and completed in 1628 during the reign of Louis XIII. From its balconies in 1870, the establishment of the French Third Republic had been declared. During the liberation of Paris from the Nazis in August 1944, president Charles de Gaulle had greeted cheering crowds from atop one of its many guilded balustrades.
Prabhupada strode across the marble-arched hallway and noted the elaborate frescoes, gold-leafed columns, and carved inlaid furniture. If the purpose of such ostentation was to remind heads of state that they were guests of the world’s artistic and cultural capital, the message bounced off him like raindrops. Later and in private, he would express appreciation for the caliber of workmanship, but in the moment he was impervious. He strode through the corridors with an expression both somber and purposeful. He knew that official receptions in the Paris City Hall were reserved for France’s most distinguished visitors—in 1961, ten years before Prabhupada’s reception, John and Jacqueline Kennedy had been received in the same room he now entered—and he intended to make the most of the occasion.
The chief of protocol, a handsome woman wearing a black Chanel dress and pearl necklace, invited him to sit on a nineteenth-century gold-leafed wing chair, the seat of honor for visiting dignitaries. She invited me to sit in a more modest chair next to him.
“Yogesvara,” Prabhupada said, leaning toward me. “You translate.”
That the reception was happening at all fell just short of miraculous. The elegant chief of protocol would forever be blessed, I thought. She had met devotees in Charles de Gaulle airport the month before. Both she and they were there to greet the mayor of Bombay. The devotees described Prabhupada’s preeminence as an ambassador of Indian spiritual culture, and the chief of protocol commented that Prabhupada, too, deserved a proper reception when he came to Paris.
Just before the reception was to begin, the woman explained in French the procedure for an official reception. As she spoke, I translated softly into Prabhupada’s ear.
“When the deputy mayor arrives,” I said, “you are supposed to stand up. He will give a greeting in French. Then you will be invited to respond.”
Prabhupada pulled back, and with the signature sideways tilt of his head that signaled a challenge, he asked, “I’m supposed to stand—for who?”
Uh-oh, I thought. Trouble. No one in the history of France, as far as we knew, had ever remained seated during an official reception. It was unheard of. Wars had been waged over such a break with tradition. There were bound to be repercussions.
Deputy mayor Jacques Dominati arrived in a three-piece suit, flanked by guards carrying gold-tipped spears and wearing plumed metal helmets. The deputy mayor stood before Prabhupada’s chair and waited. Nothing happened. Prabhupada stayed seated and stared at him, hands resting casually on the carved lion head of his walking cane. Dominati looked anxiously at his head of protocol as if to inquire, “Has this Hindu not been told the rules?” The head of protocol glowered at me. I pretended to make notes, not daring to look at her. Dominati’s expression changed from cordiality to disgust. If slow-burning coal had a face, it might have looked like Dominati’s expression at that moment. The photographers snapped away, single clicks accelerating into machine-gun rapid fire with each passing second. This was front-page stuff.
Prabhupada remained motionless, as though sitting for one of the six-foot-tall paintings of French kings adorning the walls. He continued to look at Dominati with unblinking eyes, silent and grave. It was a lasting image, one captured on film by Yadubara, who worked for Time magazine before becoming a devotee. He and his photographer-wife, Vishakha, had arrived earlier in the day to position lights on tripods that flanked the scene. Vishakha clicked away with abandon on her Nikon. There was no way this confrontation would escape filmed immortality.
After a long silence, Dominati admitted defeat. His face softened into a smile, and he began his welcoming address, elaborating on the many dignitaries who had been received in this same room over the centuries and how appropriate it was to receive Bhaktivedanta Swami, since France had honored spiritual values throughout its distinguished history. Vishakha’s photo of the moment—Dominati standing, hands outstretched, Prabhupada seated majestically before him—formed an iconic image of Krishna consciousness penetrating the world beyond India’s borders. At last Dominati finished, and Prabhupada slowly rose.
“You have spoken very nicely about France as a place that recognizes spirituality,” he said. “Let us examine what is spirituality. There is a soul in the body. Any government unaware of this simple fact is demonic. Your Napoleon once said, ‘I am France.’ Well, France is still there. Where is Napoleon? The soul is gone. Where has it gone?143 That is the subject of education which world governments must support.”
“He spoke in a perfectly structured way,” recalled Jyotirmayi Dasi, head of the French editions of Prabhupada’s books, “so it was easy to translate his talk. The points were logical. But this was strong even for him.”
After delivering a ten-minute response, Prabhupada approached Dominati with a broad smile and did something unusual. He shook the deputy mayor’s hand. That in itself stood out. Prabhupada rarely shook anyone’s hand. On this occasion, it was a gesture of conciliation, like Muhammed Ali putting an arm around the shoulder of Sonny Liston after defeating him in the 1964 World Heavyweight Boxing Championship.
The gesture carried another meaning as well. Prabhupada had remained seated not because he had taken twenty-two flights that year and needed to rest, but because Dominati and other inhabitants of the political stratosphere needed reminding that the nation’s spiritual well-being came before its politics. Good governance was not fulfilled by solely meeting the animal needs of citizenry, and leaders who ignored their constituents’ higher needs—their eternal dharma—were a menace to all they served. Throughout history, learned acharyas had counseled politicians in India regarding this higher dharma. Why not in France?
Around the same time as the reception in City Hall that afternoon, Prabhupada’s sankirtan devotees were arrested by the Paris police for selling magazines without a permit—one more irony in a movement of constant contrasts. The Paris police called devotees les foux de Dieu, “God’s mad people,” unaware that their leader had just been received in City Hall like a head of state.
THE BALANCE OF HIS TIME in paris was absorbed by meetings with French intellectuals and religious leaders. One of the meetings was with a renowned cleric, Jesuit cardinal Jean-Guenolé-Marie Daniélou (1905–74), who occupied a distinguished place in twentieth-century Catholic theology. Along with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Hans Küng, and Joseph Ratzinger (later to become Pope Benedict XVI), Daniélou was leader of a controversial movement called New Theology, which sought dialogue with other religions on such topics as scripture and mysticism.
Beneath the surface of Prabhupada’s meeting with Daniélou lay shifting tectonic plates of French politics. Since World War II and, more vividly, since the student revolution of May 1968 barely five years before the Prabhupada-Daniélou dialog, the French Catholic church had been under siege by socialist ideologues looking to move France’s government away from centralization of authority—any kind of authority, but particularly religious. Daniélou had taken it upon himself to balance the scales by rekindling the French people’s pride in their church. Christianity was “a more advanced stage of evolution,” he wrote. “I believe this idea to be absolutely essential if we are to understand how Christianity completes other religions and other civilizations, summed up in God’s design of giving His spiritual creatures a share in the life of the Trinity.”144 The term “spiritual creatures” did not include animals, since church doctrine held that only humans possessed a true soul with which to enter into the mystery of the Word-made-flesh, Jesus Christ. It was an issue that animated Prabhupada’s discussion with Daniélou on August 9, 1973.
THAT MORNING, disciples drove him to Daniélou’s residence in central Paris. The renowned cardinal was dressed in black robes. He greeted Prabhupada and they sat in armchairs facing one another as disciples recorded the encounter. Glasses of water were offered, and Prabhupada wasted no time getting to essentials.
“May I ask you one question?” he said. “Jesus says ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ Why are you Christian people killing?”
Daniélou might have expected this to be a dispassionate talk on comparative religion, but from the beginning Prabhupada’s blunt inquiry signaled there would be a showdown.
“It is forbidden in Christianity to kill, surely,” the cardinal said, “but there is a difference between the life of man and the life of beasts. The life of man is sacred because man is the image of God. We do not have the same view relating to the beasts. Animals are at the service of man. What is forbidden is to kill a human person.”
“But Jesus does not say ‘human person,’ ” Prabhupada replied. “He just said generally ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ You think that to kill an animal is not also a sin?”
“It is not the words of Jesus,” Daniélou countered, “but from Leviticus, a part of the Ten Commandments which God gave to Moses.”
“But one of the commandments is ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ is it not?” Prabhupada cautioned.
Daniélou shook his head. “It is surely the killing of man,” he said. “I have a great difficulty to understand why in Indian religion animals are not allowed for food.”
“Humans can eat grains,” Prabhupada replied, “Fruits, milk, sugar, wheat.”
“Yes, yes. I understand,” Daniélou interrupted, “but grains and plants are also living beings.”
“That’s all right,” Prabhupada said, “but if I can live on fruits and grains, why should I kill an animal? How can you support that animal killing is not a sin?”
“We think there is a difference of nature between the life of man, life of spirit, and biological life,” Daniélou replied. “Animals and plants are not real beings. They are part of the world of appearance. Only the human person is a real being, and, in this sense, the material world is without importance. It is a question of motivation. There could be a bad reason to kill an animal, but if the reason is to give food to children who are hungry . . .”
Daniélou’s frustration showed in his face and hand gestures. He had dedicated his entire religious career to proving that the French Church was not an anachronism, and that Catholicism had an important contribution to make, particularly when it came to extending compassion to the less fortunate—by which he meant less fortunate humans.
“Why is it forbidden in India,” Daniélou continued, “to kill cows, if doing so will feed children who are hungry?”
“According to the Vedic vision,” Prabhupada explained, “we have many mothers: our original mother, the wife of the spiritual master, the wife of a teacher, the earth, the wife of a king—and also the cow. We drink the cow’s milk, and therefore she is like a mother, is it not? And when she is old and cannot give you milk, should she be killed? How can we support the killing of our mother?”
I had seen Prabhupada exercise this strategy before, in other meetings with clerics and religionists. If Daniélou could at least agree that this one peaceful animal—the cow, whose milk sustained life—deserved compassion, then perhaps they could reach an agreement on the larger issue of whether animals had souls.
“In India,” Prabhupada said, “meat-eaters are advised to kill some lower animals like goats, even up to buffaloes. Don’t kill cows. It is the greatest sin, and so long as one is sinful, he will not be able to understand what is God. A human being’s main business is to understand God and to love him. But if he remains sinful, he cannot. Therefore, this cruel maintenance of slaughterhouses must be stopped.”
“The importance is to love God,” Daniélou agreed, “but the practical commandments can be various. God says to Indians that it is not acceptable to kill animals, but then he says to the Jews and others that it is.”
Prabhupada had little patience for dismissal of a principle central not only to a religious life but to an ethical one as well. “Whether you call Jesus Christ God or confidential representative of God,” Prabhupada said, “when the instruction is, ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ why should we interpret it in another way to our convenience?”
“Jesus ate the Passover lamb,” Daniélou argued.
“That’s all right,” Prabhupada conceded, “but Jesus Christ never maintained slaughterhouses. In certain circumstances, when there is no other food or a life must be saved—that is another thing. In wartime, they ate hogs and dogs. But why maintain slaughterhouses just for the satisfaction of the tongue? Our Krishna says, ‘Vegetable, fruits, milk, grains—these things should be offered to me with devotion.’ ”145
“Soul means human soul,” Daniélou repeated with a shake of his head. “In animals, you have some psychological existence but not a life of spirit with freedom and a mind. You Hindus also admit there is a difference in nature between spiritual creation and the material world. The material world is not of the same essence as the spiritual world. And man is a part of the spiritual world.”
Prabhupada shook his head. “Our Bhagavad Gita says, ‘In all species of life the spirit soul is there.’146 This outward body is just like a dress. You may have a very costly dress, and I may have a very shabby, poor dress, but both of us are living entities. Similarly, these different bodily forms of living entities are just like different types of dress.” He pointed to Daniélou’s robes.
“You are in black dress, and I am in saffron dress. This is external. Within the dress, you are a living being, and I am also a living being. The Vedic literatures have calculated there are 8,400,000 forms of living entities, but they are all part and parcel of God. Say that one man has ten sons, not all equally meritorious. One may be a High Court judge, and another may be an ordinary clerk. For the father, there is no distinction that this son—the High Court judge—is very important, but the clerk son is not. If the High Court son says, ‘Father, your other son is useless. Let me kill and eat him,’ will the father allow?”
Daniélou shifted uneasily in his chair. “The difficulty for us,” he said, “is metaphysical. The idea that all life is part of the life of God? This is difficult for us to admit. There is a great difference between the life of man, who is called to partake of the eternal life of God, and animal life, which is temporary.”
“That difference is due to development of consciousness,” Prabhupada replied. He pointed out the window of Daniélou’s office. “That tree is also a living entity, but its consciousness is not yet developed. If you cut the tree, it resists but in a very small degree. That was shown by Jagadish Chandra Bose, a scientist in Calcutta.147 When you cut a tree, it feels. And for an animal, we see it resists being killed. It cries and makes a horrible sound. So it is a question of development of consciousness—but the soul is there.”
Daniélou would not relinquish the point. “Why,” he asked, “would God make animals that eat other animals? Is it a fault in the creation?”
“No,” Prabhupada said. “God is very kind. If you want to eat animals, then he will give you good facility. You can become a tiger and eat animals unrestrictedly. God will give you the body of a tiger in your next life so that you can very freely eat. Why bother to maintain a slaughterhouse? ‘I give you nails and jaws. Just eat.’ Meat-eaters are awaiting that life.”
The finger pointed at Daniélou made him uncomfortable. “I am very joyful to speak with you,” he said, checking his watch, “and if I can, tomorrow I will visit your temple. Yes, yes. I hope I can come tomorrow.” And with that, the meeting was over.
As we drove back to the Paris temple, I struggled to understand why my teacher had chosen to debate vegetarianism rather than find points of agreement with a dignitary from the French church. Surely there was more to be gained by establishing common ground. Daniélou’s movement—New Theology—proposed that religion could transform modern culture. His advocacy of that cause had earned him an appointment to the Académie Française along with an invitation from Pope John XXIII to serve as consultant to the Second Vatican Council. Would it not have been advantageous to win him over as a friend of Krishna consciousness?
I leaned over from the back seat and said to Prabhupada, “His point was that Christianity sanctions meat-eating based on the view that lower species do not have souls, but still . . .”
“That is foolishness,” Prabhupada replied. “First of all, we have to understand the evidence of the soul’s presence within the body. Then we can see whether the human being has a soul, and the cow does not. What are the different characteristics of the cow and the man? If we find a difference in characteristics, then we can say that in the animal there is no soul. But if we see that the animal and the human being have the same characteristics, then how can you say that the animal has no soul? The general symptoms are that the cow eats, and you eat. The cow sleeps, and you sleep. The cow mates, and you mate. The cow defends, and you defend. Where is the difference?”148
My confusion dissipated. If Prabhupada stuck so firmly to this one point, that a divine spark animates all life, it was not from an unwillingness to cooperate with religious leaders. Rather, he understood that religious leaders would never have the impact on modern culture that Daniélou wanted if they failed to understand the basics. Without acknowledging the sanctity of life in all its forms, good intentions alone would not improve the human condition. In dozens of such discussions during his European tour, Prabhupada was obliged to defend this basic concept of Vedic philosophy, the sanctity of all life. Many of these dialogues took place among highly educated guests. Some were acclaimed authors and educators. Yet almost without exception their intellectualism was tainted by the same assumption Daniélou had made, namely that only human life deserved respect.
HIS ROOM IN THE PARIS temple was on the second floor of a four-story triangular building in the Fifth Arrondissement, an exclusive quarter near the famous Arc de Triomphe. The building had originally been designed as a residence for an aristocratic family of four. We were an ashram of forty. Due to the added traffic, polished oak floorboards buckled, dainty boiserie bookshelves collapsed, one-hundred-year-old plumbing gave out, and wealthy neighbors scowled. In the flush of income from selling books, the devotees in charge had simply picked the wrong neighborhood to set up shop. It was the Hollywood Boulevard fiasco all over again, and eventually we would also be asked to leave, but it was fun while it lasted. I slept on the floor of the upstairs publications office and opened the window one morning to find Princess Grace of Monaco standing on the terrace of her apartment across the street. It was 8 a.m., and she wore a tiara. Another morning I draped a wool chadar over my head and walked along the main avenue chanting on my beads. Ladies of the night sometimes took up positions on this elegant tree-lined boulevard, waiting for customers. In the shadowy pre-dawn light, a car slid up, and the window came down. A man leaned over, assessed my robes and covered head, and asked, “Combien?” How much?
Poor fellow. I smiled, pulled off the chadar to reveal my shaved head, held up my beads, and answered, “C’est gratuit!” It’s free!
He groaned in disgust and drove off at a clip.
The week after Prabhupada’s meeting with Daniélou, a group of Theosophists arrived at the elegant Paris temple off Avenue Foch. The visitors described themselves as “esoteric Christians” who believed Jesus possessed certain secret doctrines of which the public was unaware. These doctrines, they said, surpassed the power of natural reason. They acknowledged reincarnation and were curious to know what other secret doctrines Hinduism held.
“What is your deepest truth?” one of them asked once they were settled in Prabhupada’s room. “What are your mystic practices?”
From childhood, Prabhupada had known such people: jnanis, in Sanskrit. They sought knowledge but often failed to recognize that the road to transcendence began with humility and with respect for all life, which meant abstaining from animal slaughter and eating meat. This had been his message to Daniélou and other religionists, but these Theosophists had no interest in such preliminaries. They wanted the bottom line.
“Vaishnavas do not eat meat,” Prabhupada said. “They do not have sex outside of marriage. They do not take intoxicants or gamble.”
“Yes, yes,” a spokesperson for the group said dismissively, “these are no doubt important. But we mean to say, what are the greater truths of your faith?”
“There is no meat-eating, no illicit sex,” Prabhupada repeated, as though they had failed to hear him.
“But these things are external,” the man protested. “They are of the body. It is of no importance spiritually if one eats meat or not.”
Prabhupada shook his head with a mixture of sadness and concern. “Do you accept that killing is a sin,” he asked calmly, “and that Jesus died for your sins?” The guests looked at one another as if confused by this detour away from the topic.
“Well, yes, of course.”
“Then why do you continue to sin?” Prabhupada demanded. “You are not Christians,” he said, and a tear fell from the corner of his eye onto his saffron dhoti. His reaction was so unexpected that the guests made their excuses and departed. I sat there, unsure why the discussion had taken such a turn. It took a while before the thought crossed my mind that here was a person who knew something about Jesus and giving one’s life for others, and about the heartbreak of seeing that sacrifice cheapened by armchair mystics collecting souvenirs. Meetings with mayors and talks with dignitaries had their value, but it was moments such as this, when we caught a glimpse of his heart and the depth of his concern for others, that lingered in memory.
FOR YEARS he had announced plans to build three centers in India: a large, beautiful temple in Vrindavan, where pilgrims would be welcomed when they came to worship Krishna in his homeland; a hotel complex in Bombay, where business people could visit in comfort and leave inspired; and an edifice in Mayapur, the birthplace of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, such as had not been seen in India for hundreds of years: a mecca to Vaishnavism that would include a 400-foot-high domed temple housing a planetarium of Vedic cosmology. The Vrindavan temple was at last nearing completion, and construction had begun in Bombay and Mayapur, but every inch of progress was earned at great effort. Negotiations for land and supplies were endless and occasionally life-threatening when criminal elements plotted to steal devotees’ money. Serving on these huge projects was not for the faint of heart.
“I’m so disturbed by these dealings that I can’t chant my rounds properly,” one disciple confided to Prabhupada after a particularly difficult struggle for land in India. “But I can see that I am making spiritual advancement. I used to think about how to avoid difficult situations. Now I think I should not run away from them.”
Prabhupada agreed. “We should welcome difficulties,” he said. “They give us an opportunity to advance.”
Some time later a renowned athletic instructor made a similar complaint. The gold medalist had begun reading the Bhagavad Gita and occasionally spoke to clients about the benefits of Krishna consciousness. His well-intended gesture backfired when a multimillion-dollar deal fell through after a financial partner connected him with chanting, dancing devotees. Despondent, the instructor related the incident to his spiritual master.
“Do not be upset with the instrument of your karma,” Prabhupada advised. He compared karma to a spinning fan: dangerous. Then he compared the practice of bhakti yoga to unplugging the fan. The fan did not stop spinning immediately. Some residual spinning—leftover karmic reactions to past deeds—continued. Still, the fan was slowing down and would eventually stop, provided the disciple remained vigilant in habit and devotional practices. So when leftover karma created difficulties, he advised, see them as a thin residue of past deeds. Things could be a lot worse.
As we were soon to discover.
PRABHUPADA WAS APPROACHING EIGHTY, yet he continued to tour, spending two days here, a week there as needed, rising early each morning to write and conduct morning classes, then spending the balance of his day answering letters, resolving disputes, recording albums of devotional music, officiating at the opening of new temples and the installation of deities, meeting with guests, and initiating anyone with even a modicum of sincerity. Those of us privileged to observe him during these busy times marveled at how consistently he kept to a daily schedule. No matter how radical the change in time zone, he acclimated without missing a beat. Nor did the meteoric growth of his movement diminish his sensitivity to detail. Some examples come to mind.
The building in London leased by George Harrison for use as a temple was elegant but small. To create a separate space for his assistant, we put up a lightweight dividing wall in Prabhupada’s bathroom. A few of us were huddled in the narrow space and talking about recent events when we heard him call out, “Who is responsible for this?” Prabhupada was peeking around the wall and pointing to a tiny plant perched on the edge of his sink. The plant had shriveled from neglect. “You should take care,” he said, and then he turned on the faucet and splashed a few handfuls of water into the pot.
Later that morning we accompanied him on a walk through Hyde Park. He pointed to a willow tree and asked his assistant to break off a few twigs. Usually Prabhupada brushed his teeth with twigs from neem trees, which contained medicinal qualities, but no neem trees grew in London and willow twigs worked almost as well. His assistant reached out, broke off a twig, then a second. When he reached out to break off a third, Prabhupada held up his hand and said, “No, do not disturb the tree more than necessary.” Then he walked off, quietly reciting a verse from Sri Isopanisad that began “ishavasyam idam sarvam . . .” “Everything animate or inanimate that is within the universe is controlled and owned by the Lord. We should therefore accept only those things necessary, which are set aside as our quota, and not accept more, knowing well to Whom they belong.”149 His mind was no doubt preoccupied by the daily challenges of an international society, but the fate of a neglected houseplant and the comfort of a willow tree held his attention.
“What do you see when you look at a tree?” I asked him when we were back at the temple. He was patient with my often impertinent questions.
“A pure devotee,” he began, not wanting to take such credit for himself, “does not exactly see the tree. He sees the soul who has taken up residence in the tree body. Then again, he does not only see the soul in that tree body. He sees the Supersoul also dwelling there. So a pure devotee does not just see the tree. He sees the soul and Krishna simultaneously.”
Poet William Blake once wrote: “To see a world in a grain of sand / and a heaven in a wildflower / Hold infinity in the palm of your hand / and eternity in an hour.”150 That’s as close as we might have come in those days to describing what it was like to watch Prabhupada interact with the world around him.
HE HAD BEGUN, HE ONCE described, “in a hopeless way, a helpless way,” and now Krishna was showering his mission with success. Books were going out, money was coming in, land was being purchased around the world, temples and farms were opening, and communities were flourishing. Things seemed to be going well. Maybe he could finally retire and dedicate himself to completing his beloved Srimad Bhagavatam.
Were the hard times finally over?