Śrīla Prabhupāda-līlāmṛta tells the story of a remarkable individual and a remarkable achievement. The individual is A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda: philosopher, scholar, religious leader, saint. The achievement is the revolutionary transplantation of a timeless spiritual culture from ancient India to twentieth-century America and the world.

Planting the Seed, the second volume of this multivolume biography, tells the story of Śrīla Prabhupāda’s first year in America, a year of struggle against enormous odds. We encounter Śrīla Prabhupāda as he travels alone from Calcutta to New York City aboard a steamship, carrying with him only the Indian equivalent of eight dollars, having no institutional backing, no moral support, but a bold determination to do the impossible. It is also the story of an explosive era in the modern history of the Western world – an era of sweeping revolt, largely by the younger generation, against a society losing its soul to the ideology of materialism and mass consumerism. Into this turmoil of mid-sixties America suddenly came an elderly, golden-skinned, saffron-robed holy man from India, bringing with him a vision of a new kind of society – a bold vision calling for the radical transformation of human consciousness and human civilization from materialism to the loftiest spiritual and ethical idealism. The seed he planted took immediate root in the fertile countercultural soil of New York's Lower East Side. From there the seed sprouted and blossomed into an international spiritual movement that has had a profound influence on the contemporary world.

The research team assembled by the author traveled throughout the world to gather thousands of hours of interviews with hundreds of people who knew Śrīla Prabhupāda; diaries and memoirs from his students; and more than seven thousand of Śrīla Prabhupāda’s letters. Then the author and his team distilled this voluminous firsthand source material into a rich composite view of Śrīla Prabhupāda, a dazzling and colorful picture of one of the most remarkable lives of our times.