Over the following decades Srila Bhakti Promode Puri Goswami Maharaja became, across the whole scattered network of Gaudiya Math institutions that had grown out of Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakura's mission, the man most trusted to perform two of the tradition's most exacting rites: installing a new Deity, and conducting a godbrother's samadhi ceremony. His own math's records credit him with installing Deities in numerous Gaudiya Math temples and performing samadhi rites for several of his own godbrothers, including Srila Bhakti Rakshaka Sridhara Deva Goswami Maharaja and Srila Bhakti Dayita Madhava Goswami Maharaja, the founder of Sri Chaitanya Gaudiya Math whose invitation later brought Puri Goswami Maharaja onto the editorial board of the Chaitanya Vani magazine in 1964, a post he held for the next thirty-three years.
The single most striking claim in this part of his life is that His Divine Grace Srila Prabhupada - A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami, by then building the International Society for Krishna Consciousness on a scale no Gaudiya Math institution in India had attempted - personally asked Puri Goswami Maharaja to lay the cornerstone of the Sri Mayapur Chandrodaya Mandir, ISKCON's flagship temple project in Mayapur. This claim appears consistently across sources connected to his own math and to gaudiyahistory.iskcondesiretree.com, but it does not appear in Wikipedia's own article on the Mayapur Chandrodaya Mandir or in any source independent of the Gaudiya Math tradition that this page's research could locate - so it is reported here plainly, as a well-attested claim within that tradition, rather than as an independently verified fact.
A better-documented connection to Srila Prabhupada comes from Puri Goswami Maharaja's own godbrothers' recollections of a visit he paid Srila Prabhupada in Vrindavana in 1977, in the last months before Srila Prabhupada's own disappearance. Shown a photograph of the newly installed Deities at ISKCON's Los Angeles temple, Puri Goswami Maharaja is remembered to have said, in evident emotion, "How happy Srila Prabhupada must be!" - meaning, by the convention of that generation of Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakura's disciples, Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakura himself, whom they addressed by the same honorific title decades before it became closely identified in the West with A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada. He is also remembered telling those around him of his godbrother's work, simply, "His preaching in the West is simply amazing."
In 1989, at the age of ninety-one (his own math's account gives 1987, at eighty-nine - the two published dates disagree by two years), Puri Goswami Maharaja accepted a small plot of land at Ishodyan in Sri Mayapur and built a bhajana-kutira there. As devotees gathered around him, he installed Deities of Sri Sri Gaura-Gadadhara, Radha-Gopinatha, Jagannatha and Lakshmi-Nrisimha, founding Sri Gopinatha Gaudiya Math - his own institution, at an age when most people have long since stopped building anything new. Branch temples followed in Jagannatha Puri, Vrindavana, Calcutta and Midnapore, and, by some accounts, further afield still in Holland, Panama, Costa Rica and the United States. From 1981 onward he also began formally initiating disciples of his own, including members of the family of Sri Madan Mohan Dasadhikari - among them his eventual successor. He also served, in his final years, as siksha-guru to devotees from well outside his own institutional circle: Srila B.A. Paramadvaiti Maharaja, an ISKCON-initiated sannyasi who went on to found the VRINDA network of Vaishnava communities, has written of receiving Puri Goswami Maharaja's siksha and guidance directly, one clear, well-documented example of the wider respect - across institutional lines - this quiet, un-institutional man had earned by the end of his life.
He was named president of the World Vaishnava Association in 1995, and continued editing and receiving visitors into his hundred-and-first year. Sources disagree, in a way worth stating rather than resolving, on the date of his disappearance: most accounts connected to his own math, and to gaudiyahistory.iskcondesiretree.com, give the predawn hours of 21 October 1999 - Narayana Chaturdasi, the day before Rasa Purnima - at Jagannatha Puri, while a Back to Godhead memorial notice gives 22 November 1999. His body was brought to Sri Gopinatha Gaudiya Math at Ishodyan and placed in a samadhi shrine there, and he had already appointed Sripada Bhakti Bibudha Bodhayana Maharaja, his own initiated disciple, as successor and president-acharya of the math he had built at the very end of his life.
