Srila Prabhupada Lilamrta Volume 2

Srila Prabhupada-lilamrta tells the story of a remarkable individual and a remarkable achievement. The individual is A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada: philosopher, scholar, religious leader, saint. The achievement is the revolutionary transplantation of a timeless spiritual culture from ancient India to twentieth-century America. This second volume begins in 1971. In the West, Srila Prabhupada had firmly established the Krsna consciousness movement, which his disciples were expanding in his absence. This volume chronicles Srila Prabhupada's triumphant return to India and his plans for constructing temples in three crucial locations: Bombay, the center of India's wealth and business; Vrindavana, the sacred village where Lord Krsna lived and sported; and Mayapur, the holy birth site of Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu, who had inaugurated the Hare Krsna movement some five hundred years earlier. These are vigorous years spent building a spiritual society in India and establishing centers around the world where people could contact the ancient, orthodox faith of India in their own cities. In this volume, Srila Prabhupada circles the globe repeatedly, speaking out on timely issues and defending his budding religious society against "brainwashing" charges in America and shady business practices in India. Srila Prabhupada wanted to unite two worlds, the "lame man" of India and the "blind man" of America. "A blind man can carry a lame man," he said, "and together they can walk. Similarly, the combination of Indian spirituality and American technology can benefit the whole world." His principal means of accomplishing this feat was to publish his books – annotated translations of India's spiritual classics. Under his guidance, the Bhaktivedanta Book Trust was organized, and by 1977 it had produced and distributed more than sixty million volumes of Srila Prabhupada's writings. A final tour of India in 1977 took Srila Prabhupada, eighty-one and in failing health, to the colossal Kumbha-mela religious festival, to Hrsikesha, and finally back to his beloved Vrindavana. The time for his passing had come, he said. As his anguished disciples flooded Vrindavana from all corners of the world, Srila Prabhupada presented them with the greatest challenge – and the greatest lesson – of their young spiritual lives.

Madhurya-Kadambini (Cloud Bank of Nectar), by the renowned Gaudiya Vaisnava acarya Srila Visvanatha Cakravarti Thakura, is a short work, and it is a commentary on an even shorter work – just two verses that appear in Srila Rupa Gosvami’s Bhakti-rasamrta-sindhu.

Srila Prabhupada-lilamrta tells the story of a remarkable individual and a remarkable achievement. The individual is A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada: philosopher, scholar, religious leader, saint. The achievement is the revolutionary transplantation of a timeless spiritual culture from ancient India to twentieth-century America. This first of two volumes begins with the story of the events leading up to Srila Prabhupada's meeting his guru, an encounter that ignited in Srila Prabhupada a slowburning flame of desire to take Krishna consciousness to the Western world. His early life was a period of patient and transcendent determination as he prepared for a mission that would later be crowned with astounding success. In August and September of 1965 Srila Prabhupada traveled alone aboard a steamship from India to New York City, with no more than the equivalent of eight dollars in his pocket and no institutional backing, but with unshakable faith in Lord Krishna and the instructions of his spiritual master. It is the 1960s, an era in which the children of those who fought World War II were leading a sweeping revolt against a society losing its soul to godless mass consumerism. Into this milieu Srila Prabhupada brought a vision for a new kind of society, a society born of a radical transformation of human consciousness from materialism to the loftiest spiritual and ethical idealism. By 1967 he had arrived in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, America's counter-culture capital, where he continued his work of calling America's youth to live up to their higher spiritual ideals and distributing the holy name of Krishna indiscriminately. By the end of the volume, we have seen Srila Prabhupada in England (meeting the Beatles), Holland, Japan, Africa, and finally back in India, where he triumphantly returned with his "dancing white elephants" – a group of his mostly Caucasian Western followers. The research team assembled by the author traveled throughout the world to gather thousands of hours of interviews with hundreds of people who knew Srila Prabhupada; diaries and memoirs from his students; and more than seven thousand of Srila Prabhupada's letters. Then the author and his team distilled this voluminous firsthand source material into a rich composite view of Srila Prabhupada, a dazzling and colorful picture of one of the most remarkable lives of our times.

This book examines issues of leadership and succession in the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) which was founded in by A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada in 1966. After the founder’s death in 1977, the movement was led by a group of gurus in a "zonal system" until their authority was challenged and reformed in the mid-1980s. At the heart of the book is an exploration of the developments, conflicts, and defining characteristics of leadership in ISKCON in this decade. Themes of hierarchy, status, power and authority, and the routinisation of charisma are shown to be keys to understanding the events of the time. With careful analysis of interviews and documentary evidence, the research offers a unique insight into ISKCON as an organisation and the broader religious community in which ISKCON is located. The book will be of particular interest to scholars of new religious movements and those concerned with religious leadership.

Religions are at their core about creating certainty. But what happens when groups lose control of their destiny? Whether it leads to violence, or to nonviolent innovations, as found in minority religions following the death of their founders or leaders, uncertainty and insecurity can lead to great change in the mission and even teachings of religious groups. This book brings together an international range of contributors to explore the uncertainty faced by new and minority religious movements as well as non-religious fringe groups. The groups considered in the book span a range of religious traditions (Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam), old and new spiritual formations such as esotericism, New Age and organized new religious movements, as well as non-religious movements including the straight edge movement and the British Union of Fascists. The chapters deal with a variety of contexts, from the UK and US, to Japan and Egypt, with others discussing global movements. While all the authors deal with twentieth- and twenty-first-century movements and issues, several focus explicitly on historical cases or change over time. This wide-ranging, yet cohesive volume will be of great interest to scholars of minority religious movements and non-religious fringe groups working across religious studies, sociology and social psychology.

Sri Chaitanya-charitamrta is the main work on the life and teachings of Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, the incarnation of Krishna who appeared in India five hundred years ago. Lord Chaitanya introduced the chanting of the holy names of God as the prescribed method of God-realization for our time. He began what is today called the Hare Krishna movement, since the movement's founder, Srila Prabhupada, comes in the Chaitanya line of spiritual masters. Lord Chaitanya transformed the face of India in four respects: philosophically, by encountering, defeating and converting the greatest philosophers and thinkers of His day; religiously, by organizing the largest, most widespread theistic movement in India's history; socially, by His strong challenges to the religious inequities of the caste system; politically, by His organization of a massive civil disobedience movement in Bengal, more than four centuries before Gandhi. This English translation with commentary, by His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, reveals his consummate Bengali and Sanskrit scholarship, his intimate familiarity with the precepts of Sri Chaitanya, and his pure devotion to God.