About the Author

His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda appeared in this world in 1896 in Calcutta, India. He first met his spiritual master, Śrīla Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī Goswami, in Calcutta in 1922. Śrīla Bhaktisiddhānta, the foremost scholar and devotee of his time, had founded the Gauḍīya Maṭha (a Vedic institute with sixty-four branches throughout India). He liked this educated young man and convinced him to dedicate his life to teaching Vedic knowledge. Śrīla Prabhupāda became his student, and eleven years later (1933) at Allahabad he became his formally initiated disciple.

At their first meeting, in 1922, Śrīla Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī Ṭhākura requested Śrīla Prabhupāda to broadcast Vedic knowledge through the English language. In the years that followed, Śrīla Prabhupāda wrote a commentary on the Bhagavad-gītā, the most important Vedic text, and he assisted the Gauḍīya Maṭha in its work. In 1944 he singlehandedly started an English fortnightly magazine called Back to Godhead. He edited and typed the manuscripts, checked the galley proofs, and even distributed the individual copies for free and struggled to maintain the publication.

Recognizing Śrīla Prabhupāda’s philosophical learning and devotion, the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava Society honored him in 1947 with the title “Bhaktivedanta.” In 1950, at the age of fifty-four, Śrīla Prabhupāda retired from family life. Four years later he adopted the vānaprastha (retired) order to devote more time to his studies and writing, and soon he traveled to the holy city of Vṛndāvana. There he lived in a small room in the historic Rādhā-Dāmodara temple and engaged in several years of deep study and writing. In 1959 he accepted the renounced order of life (sannyāsa). At Rādhā-Dāmodara, Śrīla Prabhupāda wrote Easy Journey to Other Planets and started his life’s masterpiece—a multivolume translation of and commentary on the eighteen-thousand-verse Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam, the cream of the Vedic literatures.

After publishing three volumes of the Bhāgavatam, Śrīla Prabhupāda came to the United States in 1965 to fulfill the mission of his spiritual master. At that time, His Divine Grace wrote some eighty volumes of authoritative translations, commentaries and summary studies of the philosophical and religious classics of India. When he first arrived by freighter in New York City, Śrīla Prabhupāda was practically penniless. But after nearly a year of great difficulty, he founded the International Society for Krishna Consciousness in July of 1966. Before his much-lamented passing on November 14, 1977, he guided the Society and saw it grow to a worldwide confederation of more than one hundred ashrams, schools, temples, institutes and farm communities.

In 1968, Śrīla Prabhupāda created New Vṛndāvana, an experimental Vedic community in the hills of West Virginia. Inspired by the success of New Vṛndāvana (now a thriving farm community of more than one thousand acres) his students have since founded several similar communities in the United States and abroad.

In 1975, Śrīla Prabhupāda’s magnificent Kṛṣṇa-Balarāma Temple and International Guesthouse opened in Vṛndāvana, India. In 1978 a four-acre cultural complex (including a temple, modern theatre, guesthouse, and vegetarian restaurant) opened at Juhu Beach, in Bombay. Perhaps Śrīla Prabhupāda’s most ambitious project is a planned city of fifty thousand residents in Māyāpur, West Bengal. Śrīdhāma Māyāpur will stand as a model for the whole world—a microcosm of Vedic life as it was five thousand years ago.

In addition, Śrīla Prabhupāda gave the West the Vedic system of primary and secondary education. The gurukula (“the school of the spiritual master”) started only in 1972, but already it has hundreds of students and many branches around the world.

Śrīla Prabhupāda’s most significant contribution, of course, is his books. The academic community respects them for their authoritativeness, depth and clarity, and has made them standard textbooks in numerous college courses. In addition, translations of Śrīla Prabhupāda’s books now appear in twenty-five languages. The Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, established in 1972 to publish the works of His Divine Grace, has thus become the world’s largest publisher of books in the field of Indian religion and philosophy. A recent project has been the publishing of a seventeen-volume translation and commentary—which Śrīla Prabhupāda completed in only eighteen months—on the Bengali religious classic Śrī Caitanya-caritāmṛta. In just twelve years, in spite of his advanced age, Śrīla Prabhupāda circled the globe fourteen times on lecture tours that took him to six continents. In spite of such a vigorous schedule, Śrīla Prabhupāda continued to write prolifically. His writings constitute a veritable library of Vedic philosophy, religion, literature and culture.