Twelve years passed between the morning Bhaktivedanta Swami stepped off the Jaladuta in Boston harbor and the evening he died at the Krishna-Balaram Mandir in Vrindavan. Almost everything described on these pages happened within those twelve years. This includes the storefronts, the world tours, the books and the temples. But what lasted after him tells us more about his life than any list of what he did.
| Detail | Description |
|---|---|
| Temples founded | More than 100, across six continents, by 1977 |
| Sri Chaitanya-charitamrita | 17 volumes, translation completed 1974 |
| Bhaktivedanta Book Trust founded | 1972 |
| Disciples initiated in his lifetime | Nearly 5,000 |
| Initiation after 1977 | By the letter of 9 July 1977, ritviks initiate on his behalf; the new devotees are his disciples |
What He Built in Twelve Years #
By the time of his death, the society Prabhupada had registered in a single room on Second Avenue had more than a hundred temples across six continents. It also had farm communities, restaurants, and schools for the movement's own children. In his final decade alone he circled the globe well over a dozen times. He installed deities and trained leaders. He returned again and again to the same cities to make sure that what he had started there was still standing. In the modern era, few religious founders have built an international institution on this scale. Prabhupada started from nothing, in old age, and did it within a single lifetime. Harvey Cox, the Harvard theologian, described the achievement in these words:
"There aren't many people you can think of who successfully implant a whole religious tradition in a completely alien culture... So when I say [he's] 'one in a million,' I think that's in some ways an underestimate. Perhaps he was one in a hundred million."
A Literary Legacy #
Besides the society, he left his writings. Prabhupada completed Bhagavad-gita As It Is. He also worked on a multi-volume translation and commentary on the Srimad-Bhagavatam, which occupied him from 1962 until his death. He finished Sri Chaitanya-charitamrita, in seventeen volumes, in 1974. Some readers might never work through the full Bhagavatam with all its notes. To reach them, he also wrote Krsna Book, a retelling of Krishna's own life and pastimes taken from its tenth canto. He also wrote The Nectar of Devotion, a summary of the classical Gaudiya text on the practice of bhakti, and dozens of other titles. All of it was published and kept in print by the Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, which he founded in 1972 for exactly this work. From 1973 until his death, his followers distributed several million pieces of this literature every year in airports, shopping malls, and public squares across the world. Since then his books have appeared in more than eighty languages. A full account of that body of work is given elsewhere. His books have been printed in tens of millions of copies in all these languages. By scholarly estimate, this makes Prabhupada the most translated and most widely read author on Krishna consciousness in history.
Continuing the Parampara #
Prabhupada always described himself as one link in a chain, not its beginning. He was a representative of the Brahma-Madhva-Gaudiya disciplic succession, which he had received from his own guru, Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati, and had carried to the West. For initiations after his departure, he left the arrangement set out in the letter of 9 July 1977: eleven ritviks, "representative of the acarya," to accept new devotees as his own initiated disciples, as told on Final Days and Disappearance. The fuller history of the disciplic succession he received is traced on the sampradaya page. He had once worried that India, under Western influence, was forgetting its own spiritual inheritance. Now, in India itself, the movement he built from abroad maintains major temple complexes in Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Chennai, and Kolkata. His Mayapur headquarters draws millions of pilgrims in an ordinary year. In this way the direction was reversed, back toward India. He did not live to see this in full, but he had set it in motion.
From Vrindavan to Kota #
This chain is not just an idea, and it is not found only in ISKCON's largest centers. It is also the reason Nandgram Dham, home of the Hare Krishna Movement in Kota, exists at all. Every temple in this lineage, large or small, is one more link in the same succession that Prabhupada extended from Vrindavan to the rest of the world. This temple is no exception. A fuller account of Prabhupada's own life and mission is available elsewhere. Here, at the close of his biography, we simply note that the work described across these pages did not stop in 1977. It continues, in this temple and in many others, simply as the result of what one man carried across an ocean in 1965.
