The Autobiography of Bhaktivinoda Thakura: Journal of Vaishnava Studies

Abstract

In the summer of 1985 a package arrived in the mail. At the time, I was living in New Vrindavan, a Krishna community in West Virginia, and I was contemplating a topic for a PhD dissertation. In those days it was common for devotees to live within the protection of an urban temple or a rural religious community to practice a devotional life without the distractions of the outside world. As for me, I’d always had one foot in both worlds, which made my life unnecessarily difficult. To make matters worse my outside world was the world of modern academics, which in some ways can be antithetical to the world of devotion. I was caught between tradition and modernity.