Devotees distributing books their whole lives, and questions about the future of our movement

Months ago, I published an article entitled The invisible wall that most of us hit sooner or later in spiritual life. Here are some further developments on the topic, touching two practical questions

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Two months ago, I published an article entitled The invisible wall that most of us hit sooner or later in spiritual life, discussing difficulties we find after the initial enthusiasm wanes and we have to negotiate the difficult process of cleaning the heart and giving up material attachments while remaining committed to spiritual practice.

Here are some further developments on the topic, touching on two practical questions.

The first point is about book distribution. This is something that may appear distant for many of us, but it is something at the forefront in the context of temples.

Often, book distribution is offered as an easy way back to Godhead: just keep distributing, and all problems will be solved by Lord Caitanya’s mercy. Sounds like a good deal, except that it is not so simple.

It is true that Śrīla Prabhupāda once said that if a devotee continues distributing books his or her whole life, he or she will go back to Godhead. What we often fail to consider is what this entails. Book distribution is a very challenging service. To do it long-term, we need to develop really good foundations in our spiritual life.

Book distribution is not a replacement for a weak sadhana or lack of philosophical understanding, nor does it fix impersonalism, individualism, and so on. In some contexts, it can even exacerbate these problems if they are not addressed maturely.

When we start in book distribution, we usually act on the ego platform, doing it as a way to prove ourselves and extend our dominance to a new field. I’m such a great person and a great devotee, so why not prove this to everyone by becoming a champion in book distribution? There are two problems with this idea, however: the first is that this is not exactly a transcendental platform, and the second is that often things don’t go as planned. This is exactly what makes book distribution so difficult: it forces us to acknowledge we are not as great as we previously thought, and it is very hard for the ego to take it. Even when we somehow succeed, we still need help to get out of the ego platform and start to really distribute books as a selfless service to Kṛṣṇa.

Another point is that to be able to distribute books for one’s whole life, we need to acquire some serious, very solid foundations in our spiritual life. How many devotees do you know who have been distributing for more than 10 years? Maybe a few. More than 20 years? We will struggle to name more than one or two. How many do you know who continued distributing regularly, six times per week, until the end of their lives? It’s very rare to find even one name. Even amongst disciples of Śrīla Prabhupāda, who are the cream of the cream, this is very uncommon.

Some see book distribution as just a selling business, karma yoga at best, but this is also incorrect. This is the view of the sahajiyās in Vṛndāvana. Prabhupāda had another view: book distribution as another form of kīrtana, a manifestation of the real nature of the soul, as a servant of Kṛṣṇa. Just as all the souls in the spiritual world are fixed in always glorifying the Lord in their own ways, a devotee may become fixed in distributing books that speak about Him. The difficulty is that this platform is not so easy to attain, and dedicating our whole life to book distribution demands us to reach a very high level of spiritual realization. We are speaking about Ruci level at the very least, if not Āsakti or Bhāva. This is guru level.

Without such a deep spiritual realization, we may be able to manage it as long as we are young and unmarried, but it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain in older age, as physical and psychological difficulties mount. Would you continue distributing books if it became clear that it is destroying your body? A pure devotee could decide to continue, understanding that, anyway, we all die one day, and it is better to be killed by Rama than by Rāvaṇa, but how many of us would follow this path? Normal human behavior is to stop when the price becomes too high.

Apart from the body, there is the mind. As we become older, there is more and more discomfort and pain, and it comes to a point where the mind simply can’t take it anymore. Unless one is really on a transcendental platform, beyond identification with the body and mind, in the platform the soul moves and the body just follows, the tendency is that the mind will eventually win, and we will seek a peaceful retirement.

Apart from all of this, there is the family dimension, which adds a whole set of complications. Unless one is fixed as a celibate, the need for taking care and providing for a family may also push him or her out of book distribution.

I was distributing for a number of years and went through these stages. At some point, I realized I was not transcendental. Now I’m here typing this article seated on a chair, instead of carrying a stack of books for nine hours per day. If we look around, we can see that most of the devotees who distributed books seriously at some point in their lives went through these stages and eventually found other services. Although it is technically possible that a very determined devotee may decide to literally distribute his or her whole life, and it is true that such a devotee will probably go back to Godhead on a red carpet, in practice it is very rare, because the challenges are real.

Yet another point is that if a devotee indeed reaches such a level, there may be other services where he or she may be more urgently needed. As we become older, our capacity of distributing books is reduced because of physical limitations. Up to a certain point, it may be possible to compensate for it by improving quality, but everything has a limit. Eventually, one may be useful as a teacher, mentor, or even as a spiritual master. We can imagine what our movement would be like if all disciples of Śrīla Prabhupāda had decided to just focus on distributing books to the end of their lives, instead of accepting other functions.

In other words, distributing books during our whole lives may be good on a personal level, helping us to develop our attitude of service, while at the same time avoiding all the undesirable things that plague most other positions. However, this is very difficult to do, and when we think on a collective level, this may not be the best.

A second point I touched on in the first article was about Kṛṣṇa Consciousness as a form of spiritual culture instead of a closed ideology.

The way Śrīla Prabhupāda found to establish our movement in the beginning was through temples. New devotees would come to live in the temples and would be trained in spiritual life, relearning from the ground up how to dress, how eat, how to behave, and so on. This is surely desirable and can be greatly beneficial. There are two challenges in this model, however: the first is that the training new devotees receive in the temples is not always the best, and when it is not properly done, it can be even damaging in some senses. The second problem, more pressing, is that there are not many people nowadays willing to live in temples. This is 0.01% of the population, at best.

Śrīla Prabhupāda himself saw this trend, seeing congregations established around the temples as the future of our movement. Once, when devotees acquired a church, Prabhupāda instructed that devotees could perform programs on the stage in front of the altar and keep the benches, so people could come and sit comfortably. He tried to coach leaders at the time to move in this direction, but since the temple model was still flourishing at the time, not everyone could foresee it.

Now, times changed. In most places of the world, we can’t depend on devotees going to live in the temples as a model to grow our movement. We need to find ways to teach people to follow Krsna Consciousness and dedicate their activities to Krsna, according to the precepts of the Gītā, without having to go through this process of learning a whole new culture. We need to present Kṛṣṇa Consciousness as a process that can sit on top of different cultural paradigms people will already subscribe to, instead of a whole new cultural framework that people have to fit into. In other words, a spiritual culture that can be accepted without demanding profound changes in terms of superficial behavior. A process of internal change instead of mere external dress.

One may question how people can learn Krsna Consciousness without the initial training in the temple, which is required for learning the basics of spiritual practice and philosophy. However, the reality is that 99% of devotees already have to learn in this way or another. The question is to identify challenges these devotees face and find ways to assist them in developing their practice and understanding, instead of insisting on a model that fits just a small percentage of them.

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