Dear Śrīla Prabhupāda,
Please accept our most humble obeisances at the dust of your merciful lotus feet.
You appeared to carry out a highly urgent and divine mission. Your spiritual master, Śrīla Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī Ṭhākura, inspired and instructed you to preach the message of Śrī Caitanya Mahāprabhu in English, and from your very birth there were predictions that you would cross the ocean, become a great preacher of religion, and establish temples around the world.
But predictions alone do not change the world. You did.
Leaving behind family and comfort, you accepted the life of a renunciant in Vrindavan. From 1959 to 1965, in your small rooms at the Rādhā-Dāmodara temple, you prepared yourself for the impossible task ahead through prayer, writing, translation, and deep absorption in the holy name. We have heard how you would cry out loudly while chanting through the night and beg the previous ācāryas, Śrīla Rūpa Gosvāmī and Śrīla Sanātana Gosvāmī, for the strength to fulfill your guru’s order.
From that surrender came a spiritual revolution.
What the Six Gosvāmīs established in Vrindavan, you carried to the entire world. Within only a few years, temples appeared across the globe, devotees learned Deity worship and saṅkīrtana, and millions of your books in a wide range of languages began changing people’s lives.
In September 1973, you visited Stockholm, and in one of your lectures you said: “We have got the method of Deity worship. Here we have not yet established, but we worship the picture of Lord Caitanya and guru … The Deity worship is done by guru himself … His disciples are engaged. He is always showing, ‘Do like that. Do like that.’ Or sometimes, if he cannot, the guru shows how to do it. That is the business of guru.”
In April 1977, your disciples had found a property just south of Stockholm. They sent you a letter in which they presented it to you, along with an aerial photograph. You wrote back in May 1977: “I am very pleased to know that our activities are going nicely in Scandinavia … The place as you have described it that they are thinking to get sounds very nice.”
That place was Korsnäs Gård, the estate you named “New Rādhā-kuṇḍa” because it already had a pond on the property. By your mercy, this quiet rural place became an integral part of your worldwide mission. Everything here is an extension of your meditation, your desire, your creativity, and your unparalleled preaching spirit.
Three years later, Śrī Śrī Gāndharvikā-Giridhārī were installed here with great joy and celebration. Their names connect this place directly to Śrīla Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī Ṭhākura’s own Gāndharvikā-Giridhārī Deities in Calcutta, where They greeted each sheet of transcendental literature that rolled off the letterpress your Guru Mahārāja had established.
Today, before Śrī Śrī Gāndharvikā-Giridhārī and beside Their kuṇḍa, your servants are gratefully engaged in your publishing service, Deity worship, and preaching. From this old estate, now a wonderful temple, a vibrant dhāma, a center of intense study of your works and teachings, print-ready files of your books are sent to printers around the world. From New Rādhā-kuṇḍa, with love.
Translators, proofreaders, designers, programmers, researchers, layout artists, audiobook narrators, logistics experts, all devotees and volunteers, across the globe, are taking part in this ecstatic book production program.
And once the books are printed, your amazing book distributors, highly committed and courageous, carry those books into towns, cities, and villages, placing them into the hands of people whose spiritual lives are just about to begin.
May New Rādhā-kuṇḍa always remain your home and office. On your behalf, we invite everyone to come and assist in spreading your teachings all over the world. More and more titles. More and more languages. We need helpers to keep up with your ever-expanding success.
Your slightly sleep-deprived and happy servants at
The Bhaktivedanta Book Trust and ISKCON New Rādhā-kuṇḍa