Prabhupāda smiled. Looking around the kitchen, he saw against the window a poster: “The Spiritual Master of the Holy Name is Coming to Boston.” It was a photo of Swamiji with a list of speaking engagements at various universities. As Prabhupāda read it his face brightened. “You have given me a full month’s engagement!” he said. Then he walked leisurely out of the kitchen, leaving Satsvarūpa anxiously trying to hurry lunch without burning anything.

Prabhupāda entered his room and took a seat at the low desk, leaning his back against the pillow. “Why don’t you take some rest now?” Jadurāṇī suggested.

“I rested on the plane,” Prabhupāda replied.

“Well,” Jadurāṇī persisted, “you could rest some more.”

Prabhupāda turned his head slightly away from her and said softly, “I am not meant for resting all day and night.”

Prabhupāda asked to see Satsvarūpa. Gaurasundara went to fetch him but returned saying that Satsvarūpa couldn’t come; he was too busy cooking.

When Prabhupāda’s lunch finally arrived, the devotees in his room excused themselves and left Prabhupāda alone. Most of the devotees – including several guests and visitors from New York – having stayed up all night preparing Swamiji’s apartment, fell asleep on the floor in various rooms throughout the apartment. Prabhupāda could hear their snoring, and after finishing his lunch he went out and looked from room to room without waking anyone. In the living room, he sat down on the couch, and soon the devotees awoke and joined him.

Prabhupāda began talking about Kṛṣṇa in Vṛndāvana. “Vṛndāvana,” he said, “is the kingdom of Rādhārāṇī. In Vṛndāvana, if someone wanted to visit me” – he looked behind him down the long hallway toward the door at the rear of the apartment – “they would call ‘Jaya Rādhe!’ ” Prabhupāda called out loudly, as if he were a visitor at the back door. “And I would call back” – he looked again toward the rear door – “ ‘Jaya Rādhe!’ Kṛṣṇa is very strict, and Rādhā is very nice. A woman, unless she is unnatural, is very soft-hearted and very kindhearted. And Rādhārāṇī is not unnatural.”

Later Jadurāṇī apologized to Swamiji for foolishly complaining to him in the car. He had said to her, “Don’t worry, I won’t stay long,” but actually she wanted him to stay permanently. She didn’t want him to think that his presence was an inconvenience. She had complained because she was in anxiety about neglecting the service that Prabhupāda had directly given to her. Whenever Satsvarūpa gave her service to do other than painting, she would become confused about the priority. Prabhupāda heard her patiently, clearly understanding the heart of her inquiry. “The direct order of the spiritual master,” he said, “is the most important thing to do, except in an emergency.”

Prabhupāda’s first college lecture engagement in Boston was at Northeastern University. It was noon, and the paved campus, in the center of downtown Boston, was busy with thousands of students. Prabhupāda, accompanied by a small band of his disciples, moved gravely through the crowds.

At the entranceway to one of the main buildings was a large bronze statue of a dog, a husky, Northeastern’s mascot. Prabhupāda became amused. Some of the older disciples knew that Swamiji was sarcastically humorous about Americans’ attachment to their dogs. Because now people have no interest in God, he would say, therefore they have become devoted to dog. Instead of worshiping G-O-D, materialistic people had become enamored with D-O-G and considered him man’s best friend. Some of Prabhupāda’s disciples had told him strange stories of how Americans pampered their dogs so much that dogs sometimes sit at the dinner table with their masters or receive their master’s property through the master’s will. Pausing silently, regarding the almost deified form of the dog, Prabhupāda scored an unspoken criticism of Western values.

About two hundred students and a few teachers crowded into the pews of the small chapel. While Prabhupāda sat cross-legged on a cloth-covered table, Satsvarūpa led the kīrtana, playing on a one-headed drum.

After the kīrtana, Prabhupāda leaned forward to the microphone: “Thank you for giving me this opportunity to glorify the Supreme Personality of Godhead.” And he began to lecture about the three aspects of the Absolute Truth, which he compared to the three aspects of the sun: the sunshine, the sun globe, and the sun-god. Although the Absolute Truth is one, some persons see Him as impersonal, all-pervading light; some see Him as the localized Supersoul in the heart of all beings; and some see Him as Bhagavān, the Supreme Personality of Godhead. Prabhupāda’s talk was very philosophical.

Digressing, Prabhupāda began talking more about the sun. He said that on the sun there was a presiding deity, Vivasvān. “You can’t disbelieve it,” Prabhupāda said. And he quoted the Mahābhārata that on the sun are living entities with bodies of fire. Just as certain living entities have bodies adapted to living in water, so there are living entities that live in fire.

The big noonday crowd listened politely. Prabhupāda concluded his half-hour lecture by explaining God, the Supreme Being, as the origin of the material (external) and spiritual (internal) energies. We living entities, although spiritual, have marginal position; all of us in this material world are covered by the external energy. The prayer of “Hare Kṛṣṇa” means, “O my dear Lord, I am Your part and parcel eternally, but some way or other I have fallen in this ignorance of material energy. Kindly lift me up to the spiritual energy.”

Although Prabhupāda invited the audience to stay afterward and speak with his disciples, when the bell rang, the lecture abruptly ended, and most of the students immediately left the chapel to make room for the next group of students. It was the academic factory; class was over, and Swamiji and his followers should now leave.

As Prabhupāda was walking down the hall, the wife of one of the college administrators joined him, walking at his side and chatting pleasantly and effusively, assuring him that everyone at the university was very glad he had come. She walked with him to the door and then shook his hand. Turning to Satsvarūpa, she exclaimed that everything had gone beautifully, that Swamiji had spoken wonderfully, and that she would send the hundred-dollar honorarium in the mail. Feeling excited and successful, the devotees accompanied Prabhupāda to the car. Riding back to his house, Prabhupāda agreed it had been a successful engagement.

The Boston University engagement in spacious Marsh Chapel was poorly attended. Despite thousands of students riding the trolleys and going in and out of the luncheonettes and big gray buildings that lined both sides of Commonwealth Avenue for blocks, only half a dozen came to Marsh Chapel to hear Swamiji. The devotees, pained and embarrassed, criticized Satsvarūpa for the turnout. Even the onstage arrangements were poor, with Prabhupāda seated on a too-high, rickety table.

Yet without hesitation, Prabhupāda held a full program, beginning with a kīrtana that lasted almost an hour. He requested Brahmānanda, visiting from New York, to give an introductory speech. Then Prabhupāda spoke, his voice reverberating over the sound system throughout the cavernous empty chapel.

After the lecture, Prabhupāda called for questions. A boy, standing at his seat and shouting to make himself heard, asked, “Is this advaita philosophy?” A challenge. The devotees could tell that this student had come with his own ideas about yoga and “advaita.”

“Do you know what is advaita philosophy?” Prabhupāda asked.

“All is One,” the boy replied. “Just as the rivers enter into the ocean, so we all enter into the Ultimate Oneness.”

Śrīla Prabhupāda replied that although the river goes to the ocean, its place in the ocean is not permanent. Again that water evaporates into the sky, forms clouds, and falls back onto the land. To argue that spiritually everything becomes one as the rivers go to the ocean, then the boy would have to accept the actual conclusion: the water again falls back onto the land. Similarly, those spirit souls who try to merge into the Absolute must again fall back into the material world. Prabhupāda thoroughly defeated the impersonal notion of oneness. The boy sat down silent. There were no other questions.

Talking with his disciples afterwards, Prabhupāda said sarcastically, “People today do not even know how to ask a good question. These impersonalists always ask the same hackneyed question about the river going into the ocean.”

On the way back to the temple, some of the devotees continued to grumble about Swamiji’s having to go to an engagement with such a poor turnout. Brahmānanda warned Satsvarūpa that the next engagement had better not be like this one.

Prabhupāda was well aware of the worldwide prestige of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Many Indians went there to study. It was, in fact, an Indian organization that invited Prabhupāda to speak. When Prabhupāda arrived in the evening, he found over a hundred people waiting in the carpeted, luxurious student lounge where he was to lecture. Some students were sitting on the floor, while others sat on the leather-upholstered couches and chairs scattered casually throughout the room.

Although it was time for the lecture to begin, the devotees had still not arrived with the paraphernalia. There was no flower garland for Prabhupāda, no painting of Kṛṣṇa, and no sign with the mahā-mantra. The audience waited.

In anxiety, Satsvarūpa asked Prabhupāda, “Can you begin without the painting?” Looking at the large, momentous gathering, Śrīla Prabhupāda said simply, “Painting is not important.” He sat on the plain wooden platform and, since the musical instruments had not arrived, asked one of the devotees to play the Hare Kṛṣṇa album. Prabhupāda sat clapping his hands in time and listening.

Prabhupāda spoke boldly, challenging the very concepts underlying MIT. Where in this big university, he asked, is a department for studying the technology of the soul, for understanding that principle which distinguishes a living body from a dead body, that principle which when present in the body gives life and when absent brings death? Where is the science to study this all-important principle of life? Although scientists consider life to be merely chemicals or electric impulses, he argued, still they are unable to assemble the chemicals and produce life. Why? There is no department in this university for answering this question, and therefore people are in ignorance. They don’t know the self or the next life or the purpose of human life beyond animal activities. This science, however, is taught in the Bhagavad-gītā.

After the lecture there were many questions. “What is the symbolism,” one student asked, “of that object behind you on the stage?” Prabhupāda turned and beheld a bare U-shaped metal stand – compliments of the janitor – for holding the painting of Kṛṣṇa that never arrived.

“This?” Prabhupāda frowned. “I do not know what this is. This is some kind of technological symbol.”

Another student asked, “Why do you wear that marking on your forehead?”

“Why do you wear that necktie around your neck?” Prabhupāda snapped back, annoyed with the question. The student sat down, looking at his necktie, and Prabhupāda explained to him that questions about why people dress a certain way are trivial, especially considering the gravity of the present subject matter.

When the question-and-answer period ended, Satsvarūpa stood and briefly addressed the students, inviting them to attend other college lectures by Śrīla Prabhupāda or to come hear him at the temple. “Wherever a saintly person goes,” Satsvarūpa said, “becomes a tīrtha, or holy place. And now for the month of May, Boston is a tīrtha, so please take advantage of it.”

As Śrīla Prabhupāda was leaving with his disciples, a group of Indian faculty members and students came and stood around him, speaking rapidly, challenging him. One student, espousing the philosophy of monism, asserted that the highest expression of the Absolute Truth was that “All is One.” Prabhupāda tried to make him understand that simply oneness was a rudimentary idea, because from that “one” come so many variegated manifestations. But the man would not accept defeat, and Prabhupāda became excited arguing with him. Taking the man by the shirt collar, Prabhupāda shouted, “You say everything is one! But is this cotton shirt the same as a cotton ball? Why don’t you wear a cotton ball instead of this shirt?”

The Indian technologists surrounded Prabhupāda, raising their voices and arguing, while Prabhupāda’s disciples looked on anxiously. Govinda dāsī warned the devotees about Swamiji’s health, and Brahmānanda and the others smoldered at the offensive Indians. This wasn’t the way to speak with a sādhu.

Meanwhile, a devotee reported that Prabhupāda’s car had broken down, and someone ran out into the street to get a taxi. The arguing continued. When a taxi finally arrived, a few disciples pushed through the arguers, insisting, “Swamiji, please, your taxi is waiting. It can’t wait any longer. You have to go.” And they disengaged their spiritual master from the mass of arguing technologists. Prabhupāda considered the evening a success.

Some of the devotees who had seen the poor attendance at Prabhupāda’s Boston University lecture feared the same thing might happen at the Harvard School of Divinity. So they suggested Swamiji wait at his apartment while they went ahead to the lecture hall to see how many people would gather. When they saw a decent number gathering, one of them phoned Satsvarūpa that Swamiji should come. Meanwhile at the lecture hall, Joseph Matthews, a graduate student in Vaiṣṇavism, addressed the audience, describing from the mundane academic viewpoint the history of the Caitanya movement.

Prabhupāda, arriving half an hour later than scheduled, led the audience in kīrtana and began his talk. He praised the Harvard students as fortunate, citing that according to Vedic literature, aristocratic birth, good education, beauty, and wealth are the four chief material opulences. Compared to others in the world, he said, the students at Harvard had all these opulences. If, however, they could increase their good fortune by adding Kṛṣṇa consciousness, then that would be their perfection. For example, gold is certainly very valuable. But if gold were to have a pleasant fragrance, then it would be even more valuable. Similarly, if these materially fortunate persons could add the spiritual fortune of Kṛṣṇa consciousness to their life, then that life would be successful.

After Prabhupāda’s talk, Mr. Matthews thanked him for his discourse on Hindu philosophy. But immediately Prabhupāda interrupted: “Actually, we are not Hindu.” And Prabhupāda explained the universality of Kṛṣṇa consciousness.

As the meeting broke, some interested students came forward for more discussion with Swamiji. One Sanskrit student asked, “How can a brahmacārī be expected to understand the Gīta-govinda, since it deals in so many intricacies of man-woman relationships and love affairs?”

Śrīla Prabhupāda replied, “Only a brahmacārī can understand Gīta-govinda, because it is not about mundane sexuality. It is the highest spiritual technology of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa.”

Prabhupāda was especially pleased about his Harvard lecture. The next morning Satsvarūpa went to see him with a check for $125 from Harvard. “That was a very good meeting last night,” Prabhupāda said.

It seemed to the devotees accompanying Prabhupāda from one speaking engagement to another that they were the real audience, the ones to whom Prabhupāda was speaking. It was for them that he had come to Boston, more than for the two hundred students who sat in the chapel at Northeastern until the bell rang, or the technologists in the lounge at MIT who left after the lecture for the movies and the bars. Prabhupāda was setting the example of how to preach. It was for them – the ones who would have to carry on the mission in his absence.

From morning until night, Prabhupāda spoke about Kṛṣṇa. Although yogīs sometimes take a vow of silence to avoid useless, frivolous talk, he said, one who knows Kṛṣṇa wants to speak twenty-four hours a day. “When you love God, you want to tell others about Him. And automatically you write volumes and volumes of books.”

Of course, many times in the day Prabhupāda was actually silent, alone in his room. But that “silence” was also Kṛṣṇa conscious. Sometimes Govinda dāsī would peek in and find him reading the Sanskrit Bhāgavatam commentaries, chanting on his beads, or dozing briefly at his desk after lunch. Sometimes he would sing verses from Caitanya-caritāmṛta or walk around the apartment with his hand in his bead bag, chanting to himself and observing his assistants.

Govinda dāsī: In Boston Swamiji would sing for hours from Caitanya-caritāmṛta or Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam – just singing with the most feeling all by himself in his room. And I would peek in the keyhole to see how he was. Sometimes I would go in and check on him when he would pause. I would try not to disturb him – “Just checking.” I would just go in to see if he needed anything. Sometimes I would peek in and simply think, “Who is he? Nobody knows who he really is or where he really came from or how great he really is.” Especially in Boston I began to feel very strongly that he was such a great personality and that I was viewing only a very, very minute glimpse of him, and that actually much, much more was going on than I could realize.

A devotee might go in to ask Swamiji what he wanted for lunch or to check on his travel schedule or to get advice on some business item, but the talk would almost invariably turn to Kṛṣṇa conscious philosophy once matters at hand had been dealt with. What Swamiji wanted for lunch might bring him to talk about what Kṛṣṇa liked for lunch, or how great devotees went without eating, or how the modern-day civilization was demoniac for killing helpless cows. And whoever entered Prabhupāda’s room might find himself being pressed to argue against the existence of God and then be defeated by Prabhupāda. Or Prabhupāda might start talking – even to a disciple who came to replace a burned-out bulb – about how he wanted to one day introduce the Kṛṣṇa conscious social order, varṇāśrama-dharma, all over the world.

Sometimes a lone devotee sitting with Prabhupāda as he spoke so profoundly would feel guilty: “If instead of talking just to me he were translating his books, then everyone could benefit. I shouldn’t be taking up his time in this way.” Once Jadurāṇī expressed the sentiment, “Swamiji, maybe you should save your strength for translating.”

“If you love someone,” Prabhupāda replied, raising his head back while looking at Jadurāṇī, “you like to hear him speak.”

More often, however, once a devotee got into Prabhupāda’s room he wouldn’t leave until Govinda dāsī came in, dropping broad hints or pointing to her watch and signalling from the doorway. In fact, the devotees took up so much of Prabhupāda’s time that Gaurasundara and Govinda dāsī complained to Satsvarūpa. Swamiji was being disturbed more in Boston than he had been in any other place, they said, and he was getting very little translating done. Alarmed that Boston was becoming inconvenient for Swamiji, Satsvarūpa agreed to restrict devotees from seeing Prabhupāda in his room. He informed the devotees that they could accompany Prabhupāda on his walk, but that they should not follow him back to his house.

Satsvarūpa: Following my instruction the next morning everyone stopped at the bottom of the porch; Swamiji alone walked up the steps to his house. When he got to the top step, he turned around to see us all standing there, and he waved to us, “Come on.” Everyone immediately ran up the stairs and joined him in his room.

Feeling guilty that we were taking up his time, I made an attempt to terminate the discussion in his room. Bowing my head to the floor in a gesture of leaving, I announced to Śrīla Prabhupāda, “We will leave you now and let you do your work.” But Swamiji checked me as presumptuous. “You think I am not working now? Do you think this is not work?” He said, “You do not know what work is. This is also work.” And he talked on.

Śrīla Prabhupāda spoke to eradicate the ignorance of whoever would hear him – whether a crowd of thousands or a single disciple in his room. Although he was especially interested in addressing the younger generation – the older was too biased – the number of listeners wasn’t important. After the first meeting in the temple, when the attendance had dropped, Prabhupāda had said that it didn’t mean he should stop speaking. He gave the example of a university in Calcutta that had kept classes open although only two students had enrolled in one course and only one student in another. And this, Śrīla Prabhupāda said, should certainly be the standard with transcendental education; if only one person learned it, he could do good to many others.

Early one morning as Śrīla Prabhupāda walked through the neighborhood of Allston with Satsvarūpa and Gaurasundara, Satsvarūpa mentioned that a famous swami had recently given a talk at Arlington Street Church, where Prabhupāda was also scheduled to speak. “What does he say?” Prabhupāda asked. Satsvarūpa said that he had heard that the swami had said he was God. Immediately Prabhupāda began to argue, destroying the swami’s alleged claim to be God.

“They say they are God and the dog is God,” Prabhupāda began. As he spoke, Satsvarūpa and Gaurasundara walked beside him, sometimes holding back a low tree branch or watching on Prabhupāda’s behalf for traffic at the street crossings. But mostly they were concentrating on Prabhupāda’s words. Satsvarūpa could understand that Swamiji was expending energy just to instruct him, to equip him to defeat such arguments. He tried to remember every word exactly as Swamiji was speaking it.

“If everyone is God,” Prabhupāda continued, “then why is God worshiped all over the world in temples and churches, and why are these ‘Gods’ shoe-kicking each other? Do they know what God is that they say they are God? Do they have an idea of what God is? God is the controller. Are they controlling the universe? Ask them these questions. Are they omnipotent and omniscient? These are qualities of God. If you are God, do you know what I am thinking? – because God is all-knowing. They should not be allowed to say these things. They should be curbed with these questions.”

Prabhupāda punctuated his talk by sudden stops. He was angry. It was as if he were charging his disciples for allowing this nonsense “I am God” talk to go on unchecked. Why didn’t they stop these rascals? He looked at them with eyes flashing. Were they meeting the challenges of the atheists? They should be. They should be fighting. And these were the arguments they should use. They shouldn’t doubt.

“We understand God is vast,” Prabhupāda continued. “We are similar to Him in quality, but we are infinitesimal. If they are God, then how is it they have come to this doggish state? You may be God, but for the present moment they are not God. They will admit that for the present moment they are not God, but that they will become God in the future. But what kind of God is this? And how have they fallen under illusion? That means illusion is stronger than God – that they have come under illusion. So the God then is māyā, or not God. They may be God, but they are not the paraṁ brahman, the supreme God. We have the definition of God – that He is all-powerful. This swami is not all-powerful. If some poor fellow came to him on the street, he could not stop from getting a beating. And if he got a toothache, he would be ruined as God. God is all-wealthy. This swami is begging for money, and he is God? God is all-knowing. They are not even intelligent. To surrender to Kṛṣṇa is intelligent. They are kicking each other, and they are fallen in the conditioned state. And they say they are God! These questions should be put to them. They cannot answer them.”

Prabhupāda continued his walk through a neighborhood of automobile showrooms, hamburger luncheonettes not yet opened, and bus stops crowded with workers who stared at the elderly Swami passing with his young followers.

“The devotees,” Prabhupāda said, “are more interested in talking about Kṛṣṇa and in chanting His name than in arguing. But because so many godless parties come forward and challenge, a Vaiṣṇava must be able to argue on the basis of śāstra and sound logic.”