Foreword
xiii
the festival had become so popular with San Franciscans that the mayor issued a formal proclamation—“Ratha-yātrā Day in San Francisco.”
By late 1966 Śrīla Prabhupāda had begun accepting disciples. He was quick to point out to everyone that they should think of him not as God but as God’s servant, and he criticized self-styled gurus who let their disciples worship them as God. “These ‘gods’ are very cheap,” he used to say. One day, after someone had asked, “Are you God?” Śrīla Prabhupāda replied, “No, I am not God—I am a servant of God.” Then he reflected a moment and went on. “Actually, I am  not  a servant of God. I am  trying  to be a servant of God. A servant of God is no ordinary thing.”
In the mid-seventies Śrīla Prabhupāda’s translating and publishing intensified dramatically. Scholars all over the world showered favorable reviews on his books, and practically all the universities and colleges in America accepted them as standard texts. Altogether he produced some eighty books, which his disciples have translated into twenty-five languages and distributed to the tune of fifty-five million copies. He established one hundred eight temples worldwide, and he has some ten thousand initiated disciples and a congregational following in the millions. Śrīla Prabhupāda was writing and translating up to the last days of his eighty-one-year stay on earth.
Śrīla Prabhupāda was not just another oriental scholar, guru, mystic, yoga teacher, or meditation instructor. He was the embodiment of a whole culture, and he implanted that culture in the West. To me and many others he was first and foremost someone who truly cared, who completely sacrificed his own comfort to work for the good of others. He had no private life, but lived only for others. He taught spiritual science, philosophy, common sense, the arts, languages, the Vedic way of life—hygiene, nutrition, medicine, etiquette, family living, farming, social organization, schooling, economics—and many more things to many people. To me he was a master, a father, and my dearmost friend.
I am deeply indebted to Śrīla Prabhupāda, and it is a debt I shall never be able to repay. But I can at least show some gratitude by joining with his other followers in fulfilling his innermost desire—publishing and distributing his books.
“I shall never die,” Śrīla Prabhupāda once said. “I shall live forever in my books.” He passed away from this world on November 14, 1977, but surely he will live forever.
Michael Grant (Mukunda dāsa)