Śrīla Prabhupāda-līlāmṛtavolume 5

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.

Let There Be a Temple opens in 1971 in India. Śrīla Prabhupāda has already firmly established the Kṛṣṇa consciousness movement in the West, and his leading disciples are now expanding it while he is traveling the globe. This fifth volume of Śrīla Prabhupāda’s biography chronicles Śrīla Prabhupāda's triumphant return to India, where with a small band of American and European disciples he launches an ambitious campaign to revive his countrymen’s spiritual concerns in an atmosphere of encroaching materialism.

Śrīla Prabhupāda plans to construct Kṛṣṇa temples in three crucial locations: Bombay, the sacred village of Vṛndāvana; and Māyāpur, the birthsite of Śrī Caitanya Mahāprabhu, inaugurator of the Hare Kṛṣṇa movement some five hundred years earlier.

In Bombay Śrīla Prabhupāda wages an agonizing battle to claim a rightfully purchased plot of land from a deceitful landowner. In Vṛndāvana he appeals to suspicious residents to support his disciples as they struggle to erect the Krishna-Balaram Mandir. And in Māyāpur he secures land near the war-torn border of Bangladesh and begins his most expansive project: a Vedic city centered on the three-hundred-foot-high Mayapur Chandrodaya Mandir.

So vast is Śrīla Prabhupāda’s vision that even some of his intimate followers become skeptical. Yet Śrīla Prabhupāda's down-to-earth determina­tion and resourcefulness bring about magnifi­cent results for his beloved Lord Kṛṣṇa.