Looking at the Cultural Background
91
Srila Prabhupāda's Letter to the  Los Angeles Times
January 14, 1970
Editor  Los Angeles Times
Dear Sir:
With reference to your article in the  Los Angeles Times  dated Sunday,  January 11, 1970 , under the heading "Kṛṣṇa Chant," I beg to point out that the Hindu religion is perfectly based on the personal conception of God, or Viṣṇu. The impersonal conception of God is a side issue, or one of the three features of God. The Absolute Truth is ultimately the  Supreme Personality of Godhead , the Paramātmā conception is the  localized aspect of His omnipresence , and the impersonal conception is the  aspect of His greatness and eternity . But all these combined together make the Complete Whole.
Dr. J.F. Staal's statement that the Kṛṣṇa cult is a combination of Christian and Hindu religion, as if something manufactured by concoction, is not correct. If Christian, Muhammadan, or Buddhist religions are personal, that is quite welcome. But the Kṛṣṇa religion has been personal from a time long, long ago when Christian, Muhammadan, and Buddhist religions had not yet come into existence. According to the Vedic conception, religion is basically made by the personal God as His laws. Religion cannot be manufactured by man or anyone except God superior to man. Religion is the law of God only.
Unfortunately, all the swamis who came before me in this country stressed the impersonal aspect of God, without sufficient knowledge of God's personal aspect. In the  Bhagavad-gītā , therefore, it is said that only less intelligent persons consider that God is originally impersonal but assumes a form when He incarnates. The Kṛṣṇa philosophy, however, based on the authority of the  Vedas , is that originally the Absolute Truth is the Supreme Personality of Godhead. His plenary expansion is present in everyone's heart in His localized aspect, and the impersonal Brahman effulgence is the transcendental light and heat distributed everywhere.
In the  Bhagavad-gītā  it is clearly said that the aim of the Vedic way of searching out the Absolute Truth is to find the personal God. One who is satisfied only with the other aspects of the Absolute Truth, namely the Paramātmā feature or the Brahman feature, is to be considered possessed of a poor fund of knowledge. Recently we have published our  Śrī