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it grow to a worldwide confederation of more than one hundred ashrams, schools, temples, institutes, and farm communities.
In 1968, Śrīla Prabhupāda created New Vṛndāvana, an experimental Vedic community in the hills of West Virginia. Inspired by the success of New Vṛndāvana (now a thriving farm community of more than one thousand acres), his students have since founded several similar communities in the United States and abroad.
In 1975 Śrīla Prabhupāda's magnificent Kṛṣṇa-Balarāma Temple and International Guesthouse opened in Vṛndāvana, India. In 1978 a four-acre cultural complex (including a temple, modern theater, guesthouse, and vegetarian restaurant) opened at Juhu Beach, in Bombay. Perhaps Śrīla Prabhupāda's most ambitious project is a planned city of fifty thousand residents in Māyāpur, West Bengal. Śrīdhāma Māyāpur will stand as a model for the whole world—a microcosm of Vedic life as it was five thousand years ago.
In addition, Śrīla Prabhupāda gave the West the Vedic system of primary and secondary education. The  gurukula  (“the school of the spiritual master”) started only in 1972, but already it has hundreds of students and many branches around the world.
Śrīla Prabhupāda's most significant contribution, of course, is his books. The academic community respects them for their authoritativeness, depth, and clarity, and has made them standard textbooks in numerous college courses. In addition, translations of Śrīla Prabhupāda's books now appear in twenty-five languages. The Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, established in 1972 primarily to publish the works of His Divine Grace, has thus become the world's largest publisher of books in the field of Indian religion and philosophy. A recent project has been the publishing of a seventeen-volume translation and commentary—which Śrīla Prabhupāda completed in only eighteen months—on the Bengali religious classic  Śrī Caitanya-caritāmṛta . In just twelve years, in spite of his advanced age, Śrīla Prabhupāda circled the globe fourteen times on lecture tours that took him to six continents. In spite of such a vigorous schedule, Śrīla Prabhupāda continued to write prolifically. His writings are a library of Vedic philosophy, religion, and culture.