The Pastimes of Scholarship

I spent long hours in study. I never took to service of Your lotus feet as I do now. Reading on and on, I felt knowledge would be the highest goal. That knowledge was ignorance.

I spent long hours in study. I never took to service of Your lotus feet as I do now. Reading on and on, I felt knowledge would be the highest goal. That knowledge was ignorance.

Is there a higher enjoyment beyond the relative pleasures and pains of material life? His Holiness Revatinandana Svami describes how to achieve the realm of transcendental consciousness, where pleasure is ever increasing

We may find a typical villager in a Vedic community living with his wife and a few children in a thatched hut with mud walls and a dirt floor. He has a couple of cows, a well and four or five acres of land. The river is nearby.

They have converted three Greyhound buses into mobile temples to bring the message of Krishna consciousness to every town and village in the United States and Canada.

In Calcutta in 1896, the teachings of Lord Caitanya began their journey to the West. In Bengali-speaking Calcutta on August 20th of that year, Srila Bhaktivinoda Thakura published a small English treatise entitled Lord Caitanya—His Life and Precepts.

For a typical initiation, about one hundred devotees gather in the temple. The devotees to be initiated—perhaps a dozen of them—sit in two rows, facing the devotee designated to be the priest of the ceremony.

Srila Prabhupada thought if he could get some of the Westerners to become devotees of Krishna, the Indians would then realize the importance of the spiritual culture they had given up.

With this issue, we mark the beginning of the tenth year that BACK TO GODHEAD is being published in the West. It is unique because it is devoted to Krishna.

After the disappearance of Srila Bhaktivinoda Thakura, his son, Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Gosvami Maharaja, a great scholar and pure devotee, continued to expand the mission of Lord Caitanya.

Many of us feel that this divorcing of the personal or devotional from learning, from wisdom, is a bad thing. And so I think we have a great deal to learn about the religions of India from people who have taken a direct, more involved and, I think, more complete and total approach to the things we read about in books.
Devotees chanting Hare Krishna in front of the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street.
Everywhere we hold Krishna conscious festivals. People become inspired to join us. Soon we hope to see hundreds of buses bringing these blissful festivals to every town and village.

Four days after his thirty-eighth birthday, Srila Prabhupada’s very dear disciple Jayananda dasa passed away in his quarters at the Los Angeles Temple complex (New Dvaraka). For the last few months his body had been ravaged by leukemia.