I oftentimes say, when devotees ask me to speak about Prabhupāda, that I can say my only qualification is that I happened to be on the planet at the same time that Prabhupāda was spreading the Kṛṣṇa Consciousness Movement. I took part in his mission, but I didn’t really have so much personal exchange or association with him. I did get the opportunity to see him many times: a few times in the United States, twice in New York as well as in Philadelphia, and al...

How Rupa and Sanatana came to give up the service of the Nawab is very interesting. One year I taught The Nectar of Devotion, Srila Prabhupada’s summary study of Rupa Gosvami’s Bhakti-rasamrta-sindhu, at the VIHE (Vrindavan Institute for Higher Education), and immediately after the course I rushed to Mayapur to accompany Radhanath Swami and Sacinandana Swami on parikrama of Gauda-mandala-bhumi, the places in Bengal where Mahaprabhu enacted His pastimes. The first place we visited was Ramakeli, the capital of Nawab Hussain Shah, where Rupa and Sanatana were engaged in service and where th...

A section of the Padma Purana glorifying the Bhagavatam presents an allegorical account of bhakti’s travels. In India’s traditional wisdom texts, bhakti, or devotion, is sometimes presented as a person. This is especially so in Gaudiya Vaishnava literature. In Kavi Karnapura’s Chaitanya-candrodaya-natakam, for example, we see bhakti personified as a character in a play. In the modern era, Bhaktivinoda Thakura’s Bhakti-tattva-viveka describes her as an embodiment of the svarupa-shakti, the internal energy of the Lord, and thus a manifestation of Sri Radha, Krishna’s ultimate spiri...

The place Srila Prabhupada called his "Western world headquarters" remains a vital oasis of Krishna consciousness. Part One: Some History Starting off in Midcity LA, 1968. ISKCON’s new center in Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco, was getting a good turnout. It was “the summer of love,” 1967, when idealistic youth gathering in the Haight to seek peace, justice, and alternative lifestyles often became overwhelmed by the area's crime, pimps, and drug dealers. Srila Prabhupada’s disciples offered hot prasadam meals at the ISKCON storefront every day, and their center became a dr...

Sometimes Srila Prabhupada affectionately spoke about his father. When he did, it was always with great fondness. "My father would make sure that whatever I wanted I would get," he said. "Even if it was in the middle of the night and I wanted puris, my father would say to my mother, 'Make him puris if he wants puris.' Sometimes my mother would resist, but my father would make her do it. It was like that. I don't know. Maybe my father knew. He was always doing things like that. Then my mother ...

For those of us who have traveled the length and breadth of India, there are many temples that have allowed us in and left indelible and inspiring memories for our spiritual progress. There have also been some temples who have kept us, as Westerners, out, or even kicked us out after we have already entered, as if they do not want to share their culture with us, or anyone they feel does not meet their requirements

From Srila Prabhupada’s teachings and Gaudiya history, it seems that there has always been a tension between two kinds of followers of Lord Caitanya’s mission—the preachers and the reclusive practitioners. These are known as the gosthy-anandi (GA) and bhajan-anandi (BA), respectively. The debate between the two centres around how they realise the confidential essence of Lord Caitanya’s teachings, Vraja-bhakti, and the failings that each sees in the other’s pr...

Srila Prabhupada gives the following information about Shri Lokanatha Goswami: "Shri Lokanatha Goswami was a personal associate of Shri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu and a great devotee of the Lord. He was a resident of a village named Talakhadi in the district of Yashodhara in Bengal. Previously he lived in Kachnapara. His father's name was Padmanabha, and his only younger brother was Pragalbha. Following the orders of Shri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, shri Lokanatha went to Vrindavana to live. He established a temple named Gokulananda.