Vrindaban Days: Memories of an Indian Holy Town
This excerpt is taken from the 1990 edition of Vrindaban Days: Memories of an Indian Holy Town (ISBN: 0-932215-20-3, Library of Congress Catalog No 88-90871), published by Palace Publishing.
About the author: –
Hayagriva Swami was born Howard Wheeler in 1940 in Pensacola, Florida, and was raised in the South. He attended the University of North Carolina, The New York School for Social Research (A.B., 1963), and New York University (M.A., 1964). Until 1971, he taught English at Ohio State University. In the 1960's and 1970's, as editor of Back to Godhead magazine, Bhagavad-gita As It Is The Nectar of Devotion, Srimad-Bhagavatam (30 volumes), Chaitanya-charitamrita (17 volumes), and many other books, he conferred extensively with His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada., and set a high literary standard for all ISKCON Press and Bhaktivedanta Book Trust publications.
His definitive editing of Bhagavad-gita As It Is helped earn it critical acclaim and fame as the most widely distributed Bhagavad-gita in history, with over 20 million copies in print. Traveling with Srila Prabhupada in America, Europe and India, he recorded hundreds of Prabhupada's lectures, and compiled them into small, popular booklets. In Back to Godhead magazine, his articles and essays proclaimed the braod cultural base of Krishna consciousness and served to link Vedic philosophy with Western transcendentalism, particularly in American literature. In 1968, he helped found the New Vrindaban Community in West Virginia, and until 1973 served as President of New Vrindaban.
In 1976, in Hawaii and Los Angeles, his conversations with Prabhupada formed the basis of a major work in comparative philosophy: Dialectic Spiritualism: A Vedic View of Western Philosophy. His intimate chronicle of Prabhupada's founding of the movement, The Hare Krishna Explosion, has been hailed as a classic of socio-religious history. In Vrindaban Days, he draws on his experiences from a dozen journeys to India over the past 22 years.
In March, 1989, he was bedridden with spinal cancer, and doctors gave him six months to live. He left this mortal world on August 31, 1989, while working on his last book, Die Before You Die, which is to be published posthumously.
Just before his death, Hayagriva Swami wrote: "I pray to Lord Krishna and Srila Prabhupada to always engage me in Their service. I pray that wherever I go — be it heaven or hell — that I never forget the lotus-eyed Lord of us all."