BHUBANESHWAR, INDIA, JANUARY 1977
IT WAS FOUR O’CLOCK ON a chilly morning when I stepped off the train from Calcutta. The one-story brick station was empty, and a breeze swept down dusty aisles between rows of weathered wooden benches. Outside, a dozen bicycle-rickshaw drivers in weary cotton shirts and stained pants casually blew smoke from cheap beedi cigarettes.
“ISKCON,” I said, mounting the nearest three-wheeler. By 1977, more or less everyone in India knew the acronym for the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. For more than a decade, ISKCON followers—young people like myself dressed in Indian robes and chanting the ancient prayer “Hare Krishna” in public—had been profiled in newspapers and magazines around the world. The rickshaw driver nodded confidently, and off we went.
A half hour later, we glided to a stop by an open field. The driver pointed into the void, then pedaled away, leaving me standing in darkness. To one side of the road, a bare light bulb hung from a tree and glowed weakly, as though powered by a trickle of sap. Beneath the bulb was a foot-long wooden sign nailed to the tree: ISKCON, with an arrow pointing off into the distance. I walked for a while through grasses and wild growth, clutching the bottom of my robes and hoping to avoid snakes and open holes. Morning peeked out from behind a serrated edge of hills in the distance. A dim haze limned a series of thatched huts. Off to the side of the first hut, a heavyset Indian with a big smile methodically stirred something thick and sluggish in a large pot over an open flame. His dhoti—a length of orange cotton cloth—was tied high around his waist to avoid the fire, and steam from the pot encircled him like a translucent veil. I entered the hut, and my teacher, Prabhupada, looked up from behind a low bamboo desk.
“Ah, Yogesvara, you are here,” he said, calling me by my initiated name, meaning “servant of Krishna, the master of all mystic powers.” In 1969, when I was nineteen years old, I left university studies in Paris to become his initiated disciple. It would take too long to explain why. The short form is that French existentialism was taking me nowhere, and Prabhupada was taking me everywhere. I began traveling with him as his translator in French-speaking countries.
I prostrated myself on the floor before him, then sat up and examined his humble quarters. The room was spare. Rattan mats covered a hard-packed cow-dung floor. The walls were made of exposed bricks, and the ceiling of braided straw. Through a cutout window in the wall behind his desk, I saw grassy fields. Dawn was breaking in the distance. On the desk were objects familiar to me from times we had traveled across Europe. Large volumes of scriptural commentaries in Bengali and Sanskrit. A dictating machine with a handheld microphone. Stacks of airmail letters awaiting reply. A wooden box housing the ink pen he used for signing his name, A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami, which he always did in one continuous motion without lifting the nub from the page. A stainless steel pitcher and cup next to a small framed photo of his spiritual master, circa 1930. A space heater kept the fifteen-by-fifteen-foot enclosure warm, and his chest was bare. Prabhupada was thinner than I remembered. Every day since his arrival in American twelve years before, his routine had included a brisk walk and vigorous massage, but he had a seasoned athlete’s disdain for physical training, and rumor had it his health had deteriorated. Circling the globe twelve times in a dozen years was finally catching up with his physical body. He turned from me and looked at the spackled walls and thatched ceiling as though assessing whether they would hold up as well as he had.
“Sometimes my disciples put me up in a fancy apartment,” he said, “and sometimes in a mud hut.” He shrugged his thin brown shoulders. “What’s the difference? The sensations are all the same.”
Before leaving India for New York in 1965, he had lived in similar simplicity: a tiny brick room in a deteriorating medieval temple in Vrindavan, a village two hours southeast of Delhi. Vrindavan is the holiest of holies for Vaishnavas, worshippers of Krishna. He had achieved modest success earlier in life as a pharmacist, but in the 1950s, he gave up all predictable sources of income, moved to Vrindavan, and for the next decade wrote scriptural commentaries, lived like a pauper, and ate whatever food the locals provided. It took several years to secure the official papers and government clearances needed to travel out of the country. When he finally left India and arrived in America, he was unknown and without contacts. What a startling contrast with his life now, twelve years later. By 1977, he had thousands of followers and dozens of centers around the world.
I had come from Paris to ask his permission to write children’s books about Krishna. Stories about Krishna found in ancient scriptures such as the Sanskrit Srimad Bhagavatam were not intended for young people but for advanced practitioners of bhakti or devotional yoga. Still, children in India grew up hearing stories about Krishna the way kids in the West heard stories from the Brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Andersen, and now that many of Prabhupada’s disciples had children of their own, such books would be important. Were there risks in adapting Krishna’s lilas or pastimes for young minds? Might Krishna’s identity as the Supreme Being be misconstrued as a fairy tale if his activities were retold in children’s book form? Did our Vaishnava tradition approve of such simplification?
To my relief, Prabhupada thought children’s books were a good idea. “What is learned early in life is never forgotten,” he said with a nod. He never wrote books for young people himself, but he was a prolific author. Spurred by his late guru’s order to see devotional books distributed around the world, Prabhupada had written dozens. Books were still a popular source of knowledge in the 1970s—cable television and Internet cafes were at least a decade away—and disciples distributed his works with missionary zeal. In 1976, ISKCON’s publishing office had ordered what was then the largest single print-run of any book in history: one million copies of the Bhagavad Gita As It Is, his edition of India’s essential wisdom text. Ninety-five flatbed railcars were needed to deliver the paper to the printer’s warehouses in Kentucky. The procession of cars extended nearly two miles. Just before my visit to Bhubaneshwar, the publishing office announced that the number of his books and magazines distributed worldwide had surpassed 100 million. I remember blinking my eyes when reading that number and trying to imagine 100 million of anything, let alone books about Krishna. Despite the preeminence of his own publications, Prabhupada wanted his students to also write, and I was glad he liked the plan for a library of children’s books.
THERE WAS ANOTHER REASON I had made the trek from Paris: to see him once more before it was too late. I wanted to burn into my memory a final impression of this extraordinary spiritual leader who had dedicated his life to convincing the world that consciousness existed separate from matter. The Vedic viewpoint2 asserts that consciousness is not produced by combinations of chemicals or physical laws as most hard sciences claim, and he urged his students to speak out strongly on this point. I do not recall him ever encouraging us to be peaceful or tranquil. Rather, he made frequent reference to fighting a war with maya, by which he meant working diligently to expose the fallacy that consciousness has a beginning or an end. Life, he insisted, was eternal.
Prabhupada conducted his mission in the 1960s and 1970s when spiritual teachers were expected to be peaceniks. He turned that image upside down. For example, he was not anti-science, but he called scientists who presumed to eliminate God from creation “demonic.” He also praised hippies for being dissatisfied with consumer culture, and he condemned the U.S. government for sending young people off to be killed in war while failing to provide them with spiritual direction. One of his more controversial acts was to award his students formal Brahminical initiation—essentially bringing “low caste” Westerners into the “high caste” priesthood—an innovation that had India’s religious hierarchy up in arms. By such spiritual activism, he set the stage for a whole new breed of holy man.
Prabhupada was innovative in technique, but when it came to teaching bhakti yoga, he faithfully represented a lineage that dated from Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, the sixteenth-century avatar of Krishna. The word avatar as used in bhakti texts refers to a scripturally predicted incarnation of the Supreme Being who comes into the world with a particular mission. These bhakti texts identify Chaitanya Mahaprabhu as Krishna himself—the avatari or source of all avatars— whose mission was to propagate the chanting of God’s names. Before Mahaprabhu, Prabhupada’s lineage extended back through cosmic time to the first being, Brahma, and, before Brahma, to Krishna himself. As the current link in that line of preceptors, Prabhupada created a language with which to convey millennial teachings to a contemporary audience.
Bhakti practice begins and ends with the chanting of the Hare Krishna mantra: “Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare, Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare,” which translates as, “O Hare (Radha, the feminine Godhead), O Krishna (the male Godhead), O Rama (another name of Krishna, meaning the source of highest bliss), kindly engage me in your service.” No one ever did as much as Prabhupada to popularize the chanting of Hare Krishna. He could look out from an airplane window, down onto Paris or Nairobi, Moscow or Hong Kong, and know that people in nearly every country had heard the chanting of Krishna’s names as a result of his mission. Paradoxically, few people knew anything about him.
THE BRIEF MEETING IN BHUBANESHWAR was the last time I saw Prabhupada. He passed away ten months later. In our final moments together, the sun rose and burst through the window of his hut as if on cue. His parting words still ring in my ears.
“These books are important,” he said. We were discussing children’s books, but I had the impression he was referring more generally to all books about Krishna. “When people see the books, they will understand Krishna consciousness is here to stay.” The unspoken part of his message was obvious: He would not be around forever, but the knowledge contained in scripture would survive for ages to come, just as it had for thousands of years before.
As of this writing, we have entered the fourth generation of Western Krishna devotees. That alone marks a historic turning point: Hardly anyone in the West knew about Krishna before Prabhupada arrived. Still, it is only within the past few years that followers have begun exploring the connections between Krishna’s teachings and issues of global concern. We humans want happiness for ourselves and others, yet without factoring consciousness into our equations, happiness has no fertile soil in which to grow. Consciousness—the life force which animates the body—is as fundamental to reality as time, space, or gravity. The challenge Prabhupada left his followers was to define the role of consciousness in progressive human society, and ever since his departure in 1977, that has been a work in progress.3
The Vedic texts reveal consciousness at work in every detail of creation. Prabhupada’s mission was to make that vision, obscured for centuries by the intricacies of Sanskrit and the biases of science, accessible. Here, then, is an attempt to describe someone whose teachings ranged from the dawn of time to the end of time, from the tiniest particle to the largest of cosmic scales. It is an epic life, the stuff of legends.
In Prabhupada’s case, it is an epic that has the advantage of being utterly true.