A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada

• 1. Introduction

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  A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada was 69 years old when he boarded a freighter in 1965, bound for a country where he knew nobody. His luggage amounted to a suitcase, an umbrella, some dry cereal, forty Indian rupees, and two hundred three-volume sets of a book he had translated himself. The rupees were worth about seven US dollars.

  Decades after his death, some scholars and Indian political leaders would call him one of the most successful propagators of Hinduism abroad. Critics in America and parts of Europe would call his movement something very different.

  Who was the man on that ship, and what order had pushed him across an ocean at an age when most people retire? How did a stranger chanting in a New York park become the founder of a society with centers around the world? What did he teach, and what did he write? And why did the movement he built draw both deep devotion and fierce suspicion?

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• 2. Calcutta Boyhood

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  On the 1st of September 1896, in Calcutta, now Kolkata, Gour Mohan De and Rajani De welcomed a son one day after Janmashtami, the birth anniversary of Krishna. They named him Abhay Charan. The name means one who is fearless, having taken shelter of Krishna's lotus feet.

  Following Indian custom, his father invited an astrologer to read the child's future. The astrologer predicted that at the age of seventy the boy would cross the ocean, become a famous religious teacher, and open 108 temples around the world.

  Gour Mohan was a middle-income merchant who ran his own fabric and clothing store. He was also related to the wealthy Mullik family, who had traded in gold and salt for centuries. Both parents were Gaudiya Vaishnavas, followers of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, who taught that Krishna is the Supreme Personality and that pure love for him is the highest attainment.

  A Radha-Krishna temple stood directly opposite the De house, and the Mullik family had supported it for a century and a half. Every day young Abhay went to services there, accompanied by his parents or by servants.

  At the age of six he staged his own version of the Ratha-yatra, the yearly chariot festival of Puri in Odisha. He persuaded his father to buy him a scaled-down copy of the enormous chariot that carries Jagannatha, whom devotees know as Krishna, Lord of the universe.

  His mother wanted him to study law in London. His father refused, afraid that Western society would teach the boy bad habits. In 1916 Abhay instead entered the Scottish Church College in Calcutta, a school founded by a Christian missionary named Alexander Duff.

  In 1918, while he was still a student, his father arranged his marriage to Radharani Datta, who also came from an aristocratic family. The couple had five children. After college Abhay built a career in pharmaceuticals and eventually opened his own company in Allahabad.

  India was under British rule, and like many young people he was drawn to Mahatma Gandhi's non-cooperation movement. In 1920 he completed his studies in English, philosophy, and economics. He passed his final exams, yet he skipped the graduation ceremony and never collected a diploma, as a protest against the colonial government.

  Two years later, a friend named Narendranath Mullik would persuade him to meet a Vaishnava scholar named Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati.

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• 3. A Promise to a Teacher

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  "You are an educated young man. Why don't you take the message of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu and spread it in English?" With that question in 1922, Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati set the course of Abhay's remaining life.

  Bhaktisiddhanta lived from 1874 to 1937 and founded the Gaudiya Math, a spiritual institution for spreading Chaitanya's teachings. The word math denotes a monastic or missionary center. He was carrying on the work of his father, Bhaktivinoda Thakur, who had regarded those teachings as intended for all of humanity rather than for any one religion or nation.

  According to his own later account, Abhay objected that India needed independence before anyone would take such a message seriously. Bhaktisiddhanta effectively countered the argument. Abhay agreed to the task and later remembered, "I immediately accepted him as spiritual master. Not formally, but in my heart".

  The formal step took eleven years. Little passed between them until 1928, when itinerant preachers from the Math opened a center in Allahabad, where Abhay and his family lived. He became a regular visitor, gave money, and brought important people to the preachers' lectures.

  In 1933 Bhaktisiddhanta came to Allahabad to lay the cornerstone of a new temple. Abhay received spiritual initiation from him there and was given the name Abhay Charanaravinda. In 1935 he moved to Bombay for business and in 1937 returned to Calcutta, supporting the Math in both cities by donating, leading chanting, lecturing, and writing.

  At the end of 1936, in the holy town of Vrindavan, Bhaktisiddhanta gave him a piece of advice: "If you ever get money, print books". Two weeks before he died on the 1st of January 1937, the teacher also wrote a letter urging Abhay to teach in English.

  After that death, the Math's unified mission broke apart as senior disciples fought for power. Abhay kept out of the struggle, though he kept writing for their publications.

  In 1939 elders of the Gaudiya community honored him with the title Bhaktivedanta, joining the Sanskrit words for devotion and for the culmination of Vedic knowledge. In 1944 he began an English fortnightly called Back to Godhead. He wrote, edited, financed, published, and distributed it entirely on his own, and his followers still publish it today.

  He took the retired order of life in 1950 and settled in Vrindavan, though he sometimes commuted to Delhi. In 1952 he started an organization called The League of Devotees in the central Indian city of Jhansi. It collapsed two years later.

  On the 17th of September 1959, prompted by a dream of his late teacher, he entered the renounced order of life in Mathura and received the name Bhaktivedanta Swami. He kept the initials A. C. in front of it as a gesture of humility and connection to the name his teacher had given him.

  From 1962 to 1965 he lived at the Radha-Damodar temple in Vrindavan and began translating the Srimad-Bhagavatam into English. With great struggle he raised money to print its first canto, in three volumes. Those volumes were the books waiting in his luggage when he finally began arranging passage to America.

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• 4. Second Avenue to Haight-Ashbury

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  Sumati Morarjee, head of the Scindia Steam Navigation Company, first tried to talk the elderly traveler out of his plan. She finally relented and gave him free passage on a cargo ship, the Jaladuta. The 35-day voyage began on the 13th of August 1965.

  He suffered two heart attacks at sea. On the 17th of September 1965 the ship reached Boston Harbor, and he continued on to New York City.

  His only contact was the Agarwals, an Indian-American family who were strangers to him but had agreed to sponsor his visa. They lived in Butler, Pennsylvania, so he took a bus there and spoke at venues such as the local YMCA. After about a month he took a bus back to New York.

  He stayed in a windowless room and in a Bowery loft. Then, with the help of early followers, he found a place on the Lower East Side. At 26 Second Avenue stood a storefront curiosity shop with the lucky name Matchless Gifts, and he turned it into a small temple.

  There he taught classes on the Bhagavad-gita and led group chanting of the Hare Krishna mantra. One Sunday his group chanted under a tree in Tompkins Square Park. The New York Times covered it under the headline "Swami's Flock Chants in Park to Find Ecstasy; 50 Followers Clap and Sway to Hypnotic Music at East Side Ceremony".

  The followers were mostly young people from the 1960s counterculture, and his terms ran against the spirit of that scene. To be initiated, a student had to vow to avoid sex outside marriage, meat, fish and eggs, intoxicants of every kind including coffee and tea, and gambling. Initiates also promised to chant sixteen rounds of the mantra daily on a strand of 108 beads.

  In his first year in New York he initiated nineteen people. In July 1966 he incorporated the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, known as ISKCON. In December 1966 he recorded chanting and a brief talk for an album called Krishna Consciousness, released on the Happening label. He put his students to work typing his manuscripts for the second canto of the Bhagavatam.

  In 1967 he opened a second center in San Francisco, in the heart of the hippie district of Haight-Ashbury. The temple drew many new members and marked the start of rapid growth for the movement.

  To raise money and attention, disciples organized a two-hour event called the Mantra Rock Dance at the Avalon Ballroom. It paired chanting led by Prabhupada with rock performances by the Grateful Dead and other famous bands. About three thousand people came, and one commentator called it the "ultimate high of that era".

  Later that year his followers held San Francisco's first Ratha Yatra. A flatbed truck with four pillars and a canopy stood in for the three huge wooden carts of Puri. It was the festival he had imitated as a six-year-old, and he would go on to establish it in major cities worldwide with large chariots and thousands of participants.

  Until mid-1968 his students called him the Swami or Swamiji. From then on they called him Prabhupada. In 1968 he also asked three married couples among his disciples to carry the movement to London.

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• 5. Around the World

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  "Krishna Chant Startles London" and "Happiness is Hare Krishna" were among the headlines that greeted the three married couples after they began singing on London streets in 1968. They dressed in robes and saris, and they drew attention at once.

  The Beatles were already listening. George Harrison and John Lennon had obtained a copy of the mantra recording made by Prabhupada and his New York students, and they had begun singing it. In August 1969 Harrison produced a single of the mantra performed by the London disciples, billed as The Radha Krishna Temple, and released it on Apple Records.

  At an Apple press conference, Harrison said the mantra was no pop song but an ancient chant that awakens spiritual bliss in listeners. The single sold seventy thousand copies on its first day. It climbed to number 11 on the British charts, and the singers appeared four times on the BBC television show Top of the Pops. It also sold well across continental Europe, in South Africa, and in Japan.

  The disciples met members of the Beatles in December 1969. In 1970 Harrison produced another hit single, "Govinda", and paid for the first printing of Prabhupada's book on the life of Krishna. The album The Radha Krishna Temple followed in May 1971.

  In 1973 Harrison gave the movement a seventeen-acre estate called Piggots Manor, fifteen miles northwest of London. Devotees turned it into a rural temple and renamed it Bhaktivedanta Manor. Prabhupada visited England many times and traveled from there to Germany, France, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, and the Netherlands.

  In 1970 he made the first of several visits to Kenya. His disciples there were serving the local Indian community, but he insisted on programs for Africans. At a Radha-Krishna temple in a mainly African part of downtown Nairobi, he ordered the doors opened to neighbors. The hall filled quickly, and he led chanting and gave a talk.

  From the 20th to the 25th of June 1971 he stayed in Moscow, where he managed to meet only two Soviet citizens. One was Grigory Kotovsky, a professor of Indian and South Asian studies. The other was Anatoly Pinyaev, a 23-year-old Muscovite.

  Pinyaev received a copy of the Bhagavad-gita, translated it into Russian, and circulated copies underground. He became the first Soviet Hare Krishna devotee and accepted initiation from Prabhupada. He was later held in the Smolensk Special Psychiatric Hospital and treated with drugs by force because of his religious practice.

  In 1970 Prabhupada also turned toward India, returning with ten American sannyasis and twenty other devotees. For his remaining seven years he worked on temples in Bombay, Vrindavan, and Hyderabad, and on a planned international headquarters at Mayapur in West Bengal, birthplace of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu. Western devotees who had embraced Indian spiritual culture caused a sensation among Indians who were busy imitating the West. By the early 1970s the movement's American headquarters was in Los Angeles and its world headquarters in Mayapur.

  His other travels took him to Mexico, Venezuela, Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, and Iran. He sent disciples as far as China.

  As the movement grew he guided his students increasingly by mail, and he wrote more than six thousand letters, many now kept in the Bhaktivedanta Archives. Each morning, wherever he was, he took an hour-long walk during which disciples could ask questions. Afterward he lectured on the Srimad-Bhagavatam, often reading from the manuscript he was working on.

  In ten years he circled the globe fourteen times. He opened more than one hundred temples, dozens of farm communities and restaurants, and boarding schools called gurukulas for the movement's children. He initiated nearly five thousand disciples. Each night, though, his real work started at one in the morning, when he sat down to write.

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• 6. Translating a Tradition

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  Prabhupada woke at 1:00 am every night to translate and comment on the Srimad-Bhagavatam and other texts. He did most of his writing in those early hours, unwilling to give up the time for extra rest even with his age and uncertain health. By 1970 he had produced the Bhagavad-gita, two cantos of the Bhagavatam, a summary of its tenth canto, and a summary of the Caitanya-caritamrta.

  The Bhagavad-gita As It Is came first. He wrote it in 1966-67, and the Macmillan Company published an abridged edition in 1968 and the full edition in 1972. Every verse appears in Sanskrit script and in roman letters, followed by word meanings, a translation, and a commentary he called a purport.

  Scholar of religion Richard H. Davis described it as the first English Gita translation to offer an interpretation from an Indian devotional tradition. By far the most widely distributed English version, it had sold an estimated twenty-three million copies by 2015, counting the original and translations into fifty-six other languages. Prabhupada argued that other translators used the text to express their own opinions. He claimed only to present what Krishna wanted to say.

  The Srimad-Bhagavatam, a work of twelve books that he called cantos, occupied him for the rest of his life. He published the cantos one by one as he finished them. He completed nine cantos and thirteen chapters of the tenth, and his disciples finished the rest.

  In 1968, knowing he might not live to finish, he wrote a summary of the tenth canto titled Krsna, the Supreme Personality of Godhead. Scholar Edwin Bryant notes that this canto has inspired artists, dancers, poets, and temple builders across centuries. Prabhupada had disciple artists fill his books with full-color paintings. A related work, Light of the Bhagavat, was written in Vrindavan in 1961 and published only after his death. It holds forty-eight commentaries and forty-eight paintings.

  The Ishopanishad, an Upanishad of only eighteen mantras, appeared in 1969. The Nectar of Devotion, begun in 1968, summarizes Rupa Goswami's study of devotional principles. Prabhupada also wrote a commentary on Rupa Goswami's eleven-verse Upadeshamrita, a brief guide to devotional service.

  The Caitanya-caritamrta, a seventeenth-century Bengali account of Chaitanya's life, runs to more than 15,000 verses. Prabhupada finished his translation in 1974 in under two years, in seventeen volumes. Before that, no English version was available. Scholar J. Bruce Long called the translation a cause for celebration among scholars and lay readers alike.

  In 1972 he founded the Bhaktivedanta Book Trust to manage publishing and distribution. From 1973 to 1977 his followers distributed several million books and magazines a year in shopping malls, airports, and other public places. By 2023 the books had been translated into eighty-seven languages, and in 2022 the Trust printed more than two million pieces of literature.

  Historian Thomas Hopkins recalled a conversation in Philadelphia in 1975 in which Prabhupada ranked three texts like levels of schooling. The Gita was basic education, the Bhagavatam was graduate study, and the Caitanya-caritamrta was postgraduate work for advanced devotees.

  Not every scholar was admiring. Eric Sharpe and Sanskrit scholar A. L. Herman found his reading of the Gita single-minded and fundamentalist. Historian Robert D. Baird, who gave the most detailed critique by a Western, non-Hindu scholar, observed that Prabhupada read the whole system of Krishna consciousness into any passage, even where Krishna is not mentioned. Baird also noted that Prabhupada condemned scholars as "mental speculators" and rarely argued the way academics do.

  Hopkins reached the opposite verdict. He argued that Prabhupada's debt to earlier commentators made the text clear and usable for modern readers, and that a commentary is meant to engage people with a living tradition. Shrivatsa Goswami added that the books also stirred academic interest in the Caitanya tradition.

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• 7. What He Taught

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  "I am not this body." Prabhupada repeated this maxim often, and it sums up how he understood the human predicament. A body may be male or female, young or old, white or black, American or Indian, he said, but the living being inside is beyond these material labels.

  He taught that living beings belong to Krishna's superior energy and share his qualities of knowledge, bliss, and eternality. Contact with inert matter, which he called the inferior energy, covers that nature and exposes beings to ignorance, suffering, and repeated birth and death. Mistaking the body for the self, he said, is the work of Maya, or illusion.

  The remedy was bhakti, devotional service. He compared the relation between a living being and Krishna to that between a hand and the body. Bhakti could be practiced from the earliest stages of spiritual life, so it was both the goal and the path to it.

  His picture of the Absolute Truth rested on three stages of realization. Practitioners first experience it as Brahman, an all-pervading oneness. At a more advanced stage they perceive Paramatma, the divine presence in every heart. At the highest stage they know Bhagavan, the Supreme Personality of Godhead, whom he identified as Krishna.

  One fire, he said, gives heat and light to a whole room, just as the Absolute fills the world with variety. He taught Chaitanya's doctrine that everything is both inconceivably one with Krishna and different from him. Heat is the same as fire in one sense, yet sitting in the warmth is not the same as burning.

  Here Prabhupada broke with the Hindu teachers who had come to America before him. The visiting swamis mostly followed Shankara, who lived from 788 to 820 AD and held that everything except Brahman is illusory, including the soul and God. Madhva and Ramanuja had answered that view in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and Jiva Goswami had pressed the argument in the sixteenth. Prabhupada waged what he called a crusade against impersonalism, and his criticism extended even to Buddhism.

  His view of society was just as pointed. He taught that people have duties by occupation and by stage of life, but that occupation should be judged by qualities and actual work, not by birth. Following Chaitanya, he said anyone could take up bhakti-yoga. He also valued simple, self-sufficient farming communities as places to cultivate Krishna consciousness.

  The central practice was kirtan, group chanting of Krishna's names, above all the maha-mantra. Chaitanya had taught that in the present age it beat silent meditation, speculative study, temple worship, and physical yoga disciplines. Since the names were identical with Krishna himself, Prabhupada said, chanting uplifts anyone, anywhere. The practice gave the movement its popular name, Hare Krishna.

  He widened the idea of kirtan to include distributing books about Krishna. His teacher and grand-teacher had called that distribution the "great mridanga", comparing it to the drum that accompanies chanting, because it spreads the message further.

  There were quieter practices too. He set up daily Bhagavatam classes at every center. He introduced worship of Krishna through metal, stone, or wooden figures he called the Deity, which he installed in temples worldwide. Food offered to the Deity became krishna-prasadam, meaning the mercy of Krishna. A weekly prasadam feast open to the public became standard at ISKCON centers, and he made it the main outreach tool.

  He led disciples on pilgrimage to Vrindavan, where he built the Krishna-Balaram temple. Yet to one disciple he wrote that wherever a person is absorbed in Krishna consciousness, that place is eternally Vrindavan, because "It is the consciousness that creates Vrindaban".

  All of this was tested by a movement that grew faster than its founder could manage.

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• 8. Storms and Succession

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  In March of 1977, a New York State Supreme Court justice threw out criminal charges against two local Hare Krishna leaders and recognized ISKCON as a bona fide religious tradition. The charges had accused them of illegally imprisoning two followers through brainwashing, and Prabhupada had told his disciples to fight them partly by entering his books into evidence. Two hundred scholars had also signed a document defending ISKCON as an authentic Indian missionary movement.

  Until the mid-1970s, the Western press treated the Hare Krishna devotees with curiosity. Then a young anti-cult movement began labeling the group a destructive cult. Some parents hired deprogrammers to kidnap their adult children and hold them in isolation for days or weeks. The cult image outlived the court victory. Scholar James Beckford notes that devotees selling literature and soliciting donations at airports drew sharp criticism for harassing people for money.

  Inside the movement, problems came even from senior disciples. In 1968 his first sannyasi disciple openly defied his instructions and twisted core teachings. In 1970 four early sannyasis announced at a large gathering that Prabhupada was Krishna, God himself. He had always called himself only a servant or representative of God, and he expelled the four. He readmitted them after they recanted.

  In 1972, eight of the twelve Governing Body Commission members met in New York without consulting him to centralize control of activities and finances. He suspended the whole commission until further notice and wrote directly to temple leaders. He said he wanted voluntary devotion, not corporate bureaucracy. Later he lifted the suspension.

  A different clash peaked in 1976 at Mayapur, when a sannyasi-dominated commission passed resolutions sharply limiting women and families in ISKCON. After hearing both sides, Prabhupada called the stance "fanaticism" and had the resolutions undone. He said, "I cannot discriminate - man, woman, child, rich, poor, educated, or foolish. Let them all come, and let them take Krishna consciousness".

  In India, some local people and officials suspected the American devotees of being CIA operatives. Brahmins opposed his teaching that anyone could perform priestly duties, since he rejected caste by birth. In Juhu, Bombay, the man who had sold land for a temple tried to take it back, using political connections, lawyers, and thugs. Prabhupada persisted and won.

  Sociologist E. Burke Rochford reports that the gurukula boarding schools Prabhupada ordered for the children became like orphanages through mismanagement. After Prabhupada's death it emerged that physical and sexual abuse had happened in them for lack of oversight.

  Some of his own words have also drawn lasting criticism. Scholars describe statements of his as racist toward Black people, as discriminatory against lower castes, and as misogynistic. In a recorded conversation in 1977 he described African Americans in demeaning terms, and he called democracy "the government of the asses". He made generally approving remarks about Hitler. Religious studies scholar Kim Knott has examined his statements about women at length, and she points to a contrast between those remarks and the fuller record of what he taught and did.

  On the 14th of November 1977, at the age of 81 and after a long illness, Prabhupada died in his room at the Krishna Balaram Mandir in Vrindavan. His burial site lies in the temple courtyard beneath a memorial shrine built by his followers.

  He had created the Governing Body Commission in 1970 with twelve leading disciples as ISKCON's ultimate managing authority. Four months before his death he named eleven senior disciples to give initiations on his behalf while he was ill. Even so, his death set off a crisis of authority that destabilized the organization, and disagreements over succession lasted for decades.

  By 2023, nearly one hundred disciples and grand-disciples in succession from Prabhupada were serving as initiating gurus in his branch of the Gaudiya Vaishnava lineage.

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