Dear Śrīla Prabhupāda,
nama oṁ viṣṇu-pādāya kṛṣṇa-preṣṭhāya bhū-tale
śrīmate bhaktivedānta-svāminn iti nāmine
namas te sārasvate deve gaura-vāṇī-pracāriṇe
nirviśeṣa-śūnyavādi-pāścātya-deśa-tāriṇe
Please accept our humble obeisances at your divine lotus feet. All glories to you and to Śrī Śrī Rādhā-Baṅkebihārī, the presiding Deities of Boise.
On Your Divine Grace’s most auspicious 130th Vyāsa-pūjā day, at New Biharvana in Boise we are reflecting upon three anniversaries:
- Sixty years since the establishing of ISKCON
- Fifty years since your disappearance from this planet
- Forty years since we opened the Boise temple
60, 50, 40
In your biography, Śrīla Prabhupāda-līlāmṛta, Satsvarūpa Mahārāja quotes you as you set foot in New York City, in September 1965: “I did not know whether to turn left or right.”
Now sixty years later, one can go to any corner of the world and walk left or right – nay, in any of the ten directions – and one will bump into a devotee quietly walking with a beadbag in his hand, kaṇṭhī-mālā on his neck, and tilaka on his forehead. Or perhaps he’ll have a bright yellow Bhagavad-gītā As It Is in hand, beseeching unfortunate souls to take one. Or maybe your ears will catch the singing of the Hare Kṛṣṇa mahā-mantra. I have personally experienced all of these in my travels throughout the world.
Thanks to your determination and conviction, in sixty years Hare Kṛṣṇa has permeated the entire world:
pṛthivīte āche yata nagarādi grāma
sarvatra pracāra haibe more nāma
In every town and village, the chanting of My name will be heard.
Lord Caitanya predicted it, Lord Nityānanda predicted it, the preceding ācāryas wanted it, and then you, empowered by your guru, Śrīla Bhaktisiddhānta Gosvāmī, fulfilled it. During the last two years, in my travels to the End of the World Route at the southern tip of Chile, next to Antarctica, I was amazed to see Lord Jagannātha-Baladeva-Subhadrā being worshiped and devotees holding their first Ratha-yātrā. Going north, near the Arctic Circle in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, devotees are almost finished building a four-story temple. In the foothills of the Himalayas in Nepal, devotees are distributing books as far north as Muktinath, the place where people go to get liberation.
Ten years after you left us fifty years ago, you had established the yuga-dharma under the ISKCON banner, where the oldest religion had become the newest religion; the eternal sanātana-dharma has been rebranded as ISKCON. From 108 temples now, there are more than 1,008 temples, farm communities, Govinda’s restaurants, and countless bhakti-vṛkṣas. By the time you had left us, you had inspired many of your disciples, who inspired the second-generation devotees. The result of such inspiration is the Śrī Śrī Rādhā-Baṅkebihārī temple in Boise, Idaho.
In Boise, we are now celebrating forty years of the birth of this temple. It is a very small offering to Your Divine Grace, a small cog in the wheels of the giant ISKCON ratha. With your permission and for your pleasure, on behalf of the devotees in Boise, I would like to present to you our salient contributions to ISKCON.
The temple started as a preaching center in 1986 in a 600-square-foot family room under the guidance of four of your exalted disciples: His Holiness Gaṇapati Swami, His Holiness Gopal Krishna Goswami, His Holiness Hanumāt Preṣaka Swami, and His Holiness Badrinārāyaṇa Swami.
Śrī Śrī Rādhā-Baṅkebihārī is the only Baṅkebihārī in ISKCON in the Western hemisphere. Based on Their pastimes in Boise, They are nondifferent from Baṅkebihārī in Vrindavan and the Deity you installed in Nairobi. The temple ceiling is the only ceiling in ISKCON temples that has the entire spiritual sky and material sky painted on it, as depicted on the cover of the Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam, Canto 1.
We celebrated the first Holi in ISKCON in the US in 1987. Your exalted disciple, Cāru Prabhu, picked up on the idea and made it a worldwide phenomenon.
We held our first twenty-four-hour kirtan in ISKCON in the US in the 1990s – an idea picked up from another of your exalted disciples, His Holiness Hanumāt Preṣaka Swami, who had held a twenty-four-hour kirtan in Nashville and then it spread elsewhere.
We conducted the first New Year’s Japathon in Boise, chanting 300,000 names on New Year’s Day, which again was picked up as an annual activity on New Year’s Day in many temples, including Salt Lake City and Naperville, Illinois. Over the years we have now collectively chanted over one million names on New Year’s Day.
We started the homeschooling movement in ISKCON by homeschooling our children based on studying Bhagavad-gītā As It Is and Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam. Right from the inception, our focus was on two areas: to raise Kṛṣṇa conscious children by homeschooling them, and to have a truly international congregation. In forty years, forty-two devotees were initiated, of which one third are Westerners. Our latest effort started three years ago, when we started a Thursday evening Kṛṣṇa Lounge program to attract Westerners.
COVID-19 slowed us down quite a bit, but we are rebuilding and rejuvenating now. We need your blessings to venture into our half century of Kṛṣṇa consciousness in Boise.
Seeking drops of your mercy and shade under your divine lotus feet
in the dry parched desert of Idaho,
Your insignificant servant on behalf of the devotees in Boise,
Anantarūpa Dāsa