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.

A Lifetime in Preparation, the first volume of this multivolume biography, tells the story of the first sixty-nine years of Śrīla Prabhupāda’s life, a period of patient and transcendent determination as he prepared for a mission that would later be crowned with astounding success.

A Lifetime in Preparation begins in Calcutta in 1896 with the birth of Abhay Charan De (Śrīla Prabhupāda) and brings us a close view of the pet child, the student, the political activist and supporter of Mahatma Gandhi's nonviolent noncooperation movement for Indian independence. The high point of Abhay Charan's early life, however, is his meeting with Śrīla Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī Goswami, a Bengali scholar and holy man organizing a dynamic Vaiṣṇava religious movement throughout India. They meet, a vigorous debate ensues, and Abhay Charan agrees to give up his political activism for a life of spiritual activism – a life which blossoms years later when, renouncing family and business, he takes up the life of a sādhu, a renounced holy man. From that point on, he fully focuses his attention on the mission entrusted to him by Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī: the respiritualization of human society.

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.