Foreword to the First Printing of Śrīla Prabhupāda-līlāmṛta – Volume Three (chapters 22–28)

In the course of doing research for my book on the Hare Kṛṣṇa movement and afterwards – during the late sixties and seventies – I had the good fortune, on several occasions, to meet and speak with A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda. I feel honored, therefore, to write the Foreword to this volume.

This work by Satsvarūpa dāsa Goswami is an eloquent tribute to the memory of a man who played a central role in American religious history during the countercultural sixties and seventies. It will provide a mine of information to scholars and to anyone else interested in the movement Prabhupāda brought to America from India, and in the counterculture itself, the social milieu in which the movement took root and flourished in its early years.

In this volume we encounter one of the most important periods in Śrīla Prabhupāda’s life, as he courageously establishes and develops his movement in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, the counterculture capital of the West Coast. That he, an elderly foreigner with a thick Bengali accent and a relative stranger to Western (what to speak of countercultural) ways could minister so effectively to the hippies of the Haight-Ashbury – where sexual promiscuity and drug abuse were blended into a “do-your-own-thing” ethic and where bowing to any sort of authority was rejected on principle – gives some indication of his extraordinary ability and fortitude. The author presents a number of brief case histories of some of Śrīla Prabhupada’s early followers, personal accounts that illuminate the struggle of many youths to find meaning and an alternative way of life within a counterculture lacking cohesion and direction. Unable to identify with the religious institutions of the establishment, these young people found truth in the message of Śrīla Prabhupāda and experiential validation of that truth in the chanting of the mahā-mantra, the divine names of Kṛṣṇa. In reading these accounts, the reader will be struck with Śrīla Prabhupāda’s personal qualities – his strength of purpose, his genuine humility, and his deep spirituality – by which he gently led his erring disciples from hedonism to Kṛṣṇa. He was a practical man. He knew that not all who attended his sessions would become converts. But he believed that even a little contact with Kṛṣṇa consciousness would bring them tangible spiritual benefit.

In this volume we have, in effect, a fascinating close-up study of the process of religious conversion, about which psychologists and sociologists are so intrigued. We witness how Śrīla Prabhupāda’s disciples gradually changed their ways, accepting moral and spiritual discipline under his compassionate guidance, and we learn of backsliders whose conversions were insufficient to keep them from giving in to sensual temptations. For some of his followers, those with doubts and inner struggles, conversion was a slow or vascillating process. This compelling story reveals much of the process and degrees of conversion. The incidents themselves clearly contradict the loosely made claims of some uninformed critics that the Hare Kṛṣṇa movement employs some kind of occult “mind-control.” These examples make it sufficiently clear that conversion to Kṛṣṇa consciousness is a process that engages the full range of intellectual, emotional, and volitional faculties.

Although never compromising his lofty principles, Śrīla Prabhupāda mobilized existing resources of the contemporary subculture to make the Vaiṣṇava faith better known. Without endorsing the drug abuse of the hippies to whom he was ministering, he dared to have set up and then appear at a “Mantra-Rock Dance” featuring such attractions as Janis Joplin and the Grateful Dead. What a contrast! Amid the intermingling of incense and marijuana smoke and pulsating strobe lights illuminating depictions of Kṛṣṇ’s life, Śrīla Prabhupāda delivered his timeless message of Kṛṣṇa consciousness. Then, with the aid of poet Allen Ginsberg, he soon had the entire crowd dancing and swaying like grain in the wind as they chanted the mahā-mantra: Hare Kṛṣṇa, Hare Kṛṣṇa, Kṛṣṇa Kṛṣṇa, Hare Hare/ Hare Rāma, Hare Rāma, Rāma Rāma, Hare Hare.

This is also the story of Śrīla Prabhupāda’s sacrificial life. He brought his message to America at an advanced age when most elderly gentlemen in India are content to retire in comfort in the bosom of their families. As might be expected, the accumulative strain of traveling, lecturing, and sleeping little while spending his early morning hours translating and commenting on religious texts he was preparing for publication brought illness. His weak health led him to return to India and to his Vedic doctors, in whom he showed considerably more faith than in Western medicine. Still, he was not content to remain in India, and this volume closes with his return to America and to his anxiously waiting disciples.

Perhaps more than anything else, this volume reveals those extraordinary personal attributes of Śrīla Prabhupāda that elicited such deep reverence and affection from his disciples. Besides being a man of deep moral strength, humility, and holiness, he was genuinely renounced. Unlike many modern gurus, he was content to live as his disciples did. Even when his health failed and he returned to the blazing heat of Delhi for his recovery, he sought nothing better than a poorly furnished room, without air-conditioning, in a Hindu temple where he had resided before coming to America. Śrīla Prabhupāda’s life, as it is revealed here, is the epitome of his ideal, an ideal that he set forth for others to follow. In an age of pervasive hypocrisy and cynicism, it is this kind of rare model that we need.

Dr. J. Stillson Judah
Professor Emeritus, History of Religions
Graduate Theological Union and Pacific
School of Religion
Berkeley, California