Swami Prabhupada: bhakti in a New York storefront
Part 6 of The Masters Who Crossed the Ocean. He arrived in New York in 1965 at sixty-nine, with seven dollars and a trunk of his own books — and within a decade had founded a worldwide religion.
The Masters Who Crossed the Ocean — Part 6 of 12.
He arrived in New York in 1965 with the equivalent of seven dollars, a trunk of his own translations, and a mission he had been given more than forty years earlier. He was sixty-nine, had suffered two heart attacks on the voyage over, and had no organisation, no money and no followers. Within a decade, A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada had founded a global religious movement.
The instruction
He was born Abhay Charan De on 1 September 1896 in Calcutta, into a family devoted to Gaudiya Vaishnavism — the ecstatic, devotional Krishna-worship of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu. In 1922 he met his guru, Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati, who gave him a charge he would carry for the rest of his life: "You are an educated young man. Why don't you take the message of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu and spread it in English?" For decades he balanced that calling against business and family, took the renounced order of sannyasa in 1959, and retreated to Vrindavan to translate the vast Srimad-Bhagavatam into English.
The Jaladuta
Then, at sixty-nine, he acted. In August 1965 he boarded the cargo ship Jaladuta for a thirty-five-day crossing to America, suffering two heart attacks at sea, and landed in Boston with almost nothing but his books and his resolve.
Matchless Gifts
In New York he turned a Lower East Side storefront — a curiosity shop called "Matchless Gifts" — into a temple. He taught the Bhagavad-gita and led the public chanting of the Hare Krishna mantra, asking initiates to follow strict vows: no meat, no intoxicants, no gambling, no illicit sex. In July 1966 he incorporated the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON). The following year he opened a temple in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, at the height of the hippie moment, and the famous Mantra-Rock Dance shared a bill with the Grateful Dead.
A movement, and a book
Celebrity helped: George Harrison produced a Hare Krishna single that charted in Britain in 1969 and later donated an English manor that became a major temple. But the engine was Prabhupada himself — author of Bhagavad-gita As It Is and dozens of volumes, founder of more than a hundred temples, initiator of nearly five thousand disciples, circling the globe again and again in a single decade. He died on 14 November 1977 in Vrindavan, at the temple he had built, having brought a devotional tradition from relative obscurity to global presence in one lifetime.
Next in the series: Sri Aurobindo, the revolutionary who became a philosopher-yogi.
Continue the series · The Masters Who Crossed the Ocean
