The founder’s scholarship and personal integrity in the way that he exemplified the teachings added to his disciples’ impression that he was a spiritual person. But Acyutānanda, an early disciple, said that he knew his guru was spiritual because following his instructions had a purifying effect. He also liked the way his spiritual father danced with joy instead of merely sitting in quiet meditation. Prabhupāda, who remarked that he had come to America “to make hippies into happies,” trained his followers in an overwhelming amount of detail from his formal tradition to an extent unusual from an Indian guru in America during the 1960s and 1970s. These details augmented the basic teachings of the Bhagavad Gītā and the Bhāgavata Purāna that all souls will always be individuals with the capacity to transcend the incessant round of birth and death and enjoy relationships with Krishna. In his combination of model for and model of, Prabhupāda’s career in America and his status as a representative of a spiritual tradition is a lucid example of Mark Taylor’s observation that theological argumentation is always circular, and “Far from a shortcoming…is taken to be a mark of superior achievement.”
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