A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada

The theology Prabhupada carried west is not Hinduism in general but one specific school. Gaudiya Vaishnavism, stemming from Chaitanya in sixteenth century Bengal, holds that the absolute is personal, that Krishna is that person rather than one form among many, and that the relationship of loving service is the highest condition of the soul rather than a preliminary to absorption into an impersonal ground. It is explicitly opposed to the non dual reading of Vedanta on that point, and Prabhupada's commentaries argue the case constantly.

His method of transmission was textual. Each verse in his editions is given in Sanskrit or Bengali, in roman transliteration, with a word by word gloss, a translation, and then a purport, an interpretive essay applying the verse. The purport is where the teaching is done, and it is unusually direct about disagreeing with other translators.

His Bhagavad Gita As It Is is the work that reached furthest; the title states the claim, that the text is being presented without the accommodations he thought other translators had made to modern taste. His larger project was a complete rendering of the Bhagavata Purana, on which he was working when he died in 1977, and which his disciples completed on the pattern he had set.

He also placed the chanting of the maha-mantra at the centre of practice, on the traditional Gaudiya ground that the divine name is not a symbol of the deity but the deity present in sound, which is why public chanting became the movement's most visible activity rather than an adjunct to it.

He arrived in New York in September 1965 on a cargo ship, an elderly man with a trunk of his own printed volumes and very little money. He chanted in Tompkins Square Park in the Lower East Side in 1966, attracted a first group of followers from the counterculture then forming there, and registered the International Society for Krishna Consciousness in July of that year. Within eleven years there were temples on several continents, farm communities, restaurants, a publishing house and large temple projects in India at Vrindavan and Mayapur.

The pace created a governance problem that he addressed while alive. In 1970 he established a Governing Body Commission, a standing collective authority intended to manage the society's affairs, on the reasoning that an institution should not depend on a single person. He did not name one successor. Shortly before his death in 1977 he authorised a group of senior disciples to initiate, and how far that authorisation extended became the central dispute of the following decade.

What followed was contested and in places painful. Several of the initiating gurus fell from their positions, authority was repeatedly reorganised, and the society has publicly acknowledged serious failures in the residential schools it ran for children in that period and acted on them. E. Burke Rochford's sociological study of the movement across three decades documents the sequence in detail.

The books outlasted the crises. They remain the movement's working scripture, and their distribution, which he treated as the primary activity rather than as fundraising, is still the measure it applies to itself.