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.

This second volume begins in 1971. In the West, Śrīla Prabhupāda had firmly established the Kṛṣṇa consciousness movement, which his disciples were expanding in his absence. This volume chronicles Śrīla Prabhupāda’s triumphant return to India and his plans for constructing temples in three crucial locations: Bombay, the center of India’s wealth and business; Vṛndāvana, the sacred village where Lord Kṛṣṇa lived and sported; and Māyāpur, the holy birth site of Śrī Caitanya Mahāprabhu, who had inaugurated the Hare Kṛṣṇa movement some five hundred years earlier.

These are vigorous years spent building a spiritual society in India and establishing centers around the world where people could contact the ancient, orthodox faith of India in their own cities. In this volume, Śrīla Prabhupāda circles the globe repeatedly, speaking out on timely issues and defending his budding religious society against “brainwashing” charges in America and shady business practices in India.

Śrīla Prabhupāda wanted to unite two worlds, the “lame man” of India and the “blind man” of America. “A blind man can carry a lame man,” he said, “and together they can walk. Similarly, the combination of Indian spirituality and American technology can benefit the whole world.” His principal means of accomplishing this feat was to publish his books – annotated translations of India’s spiritual classics. Under his guidance, the Bhaktivedanta Book Trust was organized, and by 1977 it had produced and distributed more than sixty million volumes of Śrīla Prabhupāda's writings.

A final tour of India in 1977 took Śrīla Prabhupāda, eighty-one and in failing health, to the colossal Kumbha-mela religious festival, to Hrsikesha, and finally back to his beloved Vṛndāvana. The time for his passing had come, he said. As his anguished disciples flooded Vṛndāvana from all corners of the world, Śrīla Prabhupāda presented them with the greatest challenge – and the greatest lesson – of their young spiritual lives.