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Śrīla Prabhupāda Līlambṛta
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Volume 5 — Let There Be a Temple
<< Foreword to Volume V >>
 | Volume V of Śrīla Prabhupāda-līlāmṛta covers the time from March of 1971 to April of 1975. During this period, Svāmī Bhaktivedanta traveled extensively, overseeing the rapid expansion of ISKCON.
| | | Although Svāmī Bhaktivedanta’s American and European disciples had already been introduced to Indian food and dress along with Vaiṣṇava devotion, they had not yet learned how to live in India. This volume depicts the struggles of those devotees and of Svāmī Bhaktivedanta as he teaches them to live and do business and build temples in India, among Indians.
| | | Events moved quickly. Devotees were thrust into positions of leadership for which they had little preparation. They were asked to negotiate land purchases while dealing with crafty businessmen, to build magnificent temples without being cheated, and to find their way through the Indian legal system. Sometimes they confronted open arms and sometimes suspicion, and they met with varying degrees of jealousy among the caste gosvāmīs in Vṛndāvana. Western devotees accustomed to a comfortable standard of living found themselves living on land infested with rats, mosquitoes, and even snakes. They chanted and preached, but also protested and fought for their cause in as diplomatic a way as possible. Occasionally a devotee’s responsibility would be too great, and he would have to give it up. But by the end of this volume, due to the constant guidance of Svāmī Bhaktivedanta, ISKCON had become successful at the three sites so important to the Svāmī’s vision for ISKCON in India: Vṛndāvana, Bombay, and Māyāpur.
| | | Like the previous volumes, this is a human story. It is the story of a Vaiṣṇava guru, as understood by his disciples. Events that might on the surface be subject to detrimental interpretation are not ignored but are presented along with their transcendental meaning. The story contains anger and frustration as well as joy and exhilaration.
| | | The devotional understanding is important herein, as it was in the previous volumes. Frequently, those who associated with Svāmī Bhaktivedanta misunderstood his words and acts. But here the author offers us the more mature, interpretive meaning. As the author indicated in the Introduction to Volume III, Although the activities of Śrīla Prabhupāda may appear ordinary, they have an internal meaning. It is this internal meaning which serves as the interpretive framework for the life of Svāmī Bhaktivedanta – in this volume and throughout the entire work. While that meaning is always present, to the ordinary biographer it is seldom self-evident.
| | | Those readers who have been fascinated by the first four volumes of Svāmī Bhaktivedanta’s biography will be fascinated by this volume as well. Like the others, it provides rich data for understanding the growth of a religious movement new to Westerners. It provides documentation more extensive than that available for any other such movement. For the historian of religions, it offers more evidence for the significance of sacred time and sacred space as a motif in religious experience.
| | | Of particular significance is that this volume shows ISKCON to be not merely a “new” religion concentrated on the two coasts of North America, but a movement deeply rooted in India while reaching throughout the world. It is an Indian religious movement in that it originated in India and continues to live and grow in modern India.
Dr. Robert D. Baird
Professor, History of Religions
School of Religion
University of Iowa
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