(Click to enlarge photo of Srila Prabhupada)
"I liked Prabhupada’s humbleness. I always liked his humility and his simplicity. The servant of the servant of the servant is really what it is, you know. None of us are God—just His servants. He just made me feel so comfortable. I always felt very relaxed with him, and I felt more like a friend. I felt that he was a good friend. Even though he was at the time seventy-nine years old, working practically all through the night, day after day, with very little sleep, he still didn’t come through to me as though he was a very highly educated intellectual being, because he had a sort of childlike simplicity. Which is great, fantastic. Even though he was the greatest Sanskrit scholar and a saint, I appreciated the fact that he never made me feel uncomfortable. In fact, he always went out of his way to make me feel comfortable. I always thought of him as sort of a lovely friend, really, and now he’s still a lovely friend.
"That was the thing about Prabhupada, you see. He didn’t just talk about loving Krishna and getting out of this place, but he was the perfect example. He talked about always chanting, and he was always chanting. I think that that in itself was perhaps the most encouraging thing for me. It was enough to make me try harder, to be just a little bit better. He was a perfect example of everything he preached.
"I think Prabhupada’s accomplishments are very significant; they’re huge. Even compared to someone like William Shakespeare, the amount of literature Prabhupada produced is truly amazing. It boggles the mind. He sometimes went for days with only a few hours sleep. I mean even a youthful, athletic young person couldn’t keep the pace he kept himself at seventy-nine years of age.
"Srila Prabhupada has already had an amazing effect on the world. There’s no way of measuring it. One day I just realized, 'God, this man is amazing!' He would sit up all night translating Sanskrit into English, putting in glossaries to make sure everyone understands it, and yet he never came off as someone above you. He always had that childlike simplicity, and what’s most amazing is the fact that he did all this translating in such a relatively short time—just a few years. And without having anything more than his own Krishna consciousness, he rounded up all these thousands of devotees, set the whole movement in motion, which became something so strong that it went on even after he left. And it’s still escalating even now at an incredible rate. It will go on and on from the knowledge he gave. It can only grow and grow. The more people wake up spiritually, the more they’ll begin to realize the depth of what Prabhupada was saying—how much he gave.
"One of the greatest things I noticed about Prabhupada was the way he would be talking to you in English, and then all of a sudden he would say it to you in Sanskrit and then translate it back into English. It was clear that he really knew it well. His contribution has obviously been enormous from the literary point of view, because he’s brought the Supreme Person, Krishna, more into focus. A lot of scholars and writers know the Gita, but only on an intellectual level. Even when they write 'Krishna said…,' they don’t do it with the bhakti or love required. That’s the secret, you know—Krishna is actually a person who is the Lord and who will also appear there in that book when there is that love, that bhakti. You can’t understand the first thing about God unless you love Him. These big so-called Vedic scholars—they don’t necessarily love Krishna, so they can’t understand Him and give Him to us. But Prabhupada was different.
"Prabhupada’s definitely affected the world in an absolute way. What he was giving us was the highest literature, the highest knowledge. I mean there just isn’t anything higher."
(George Harrison, Chant and Be Happy)
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