Month: January 2022

Krishna Kshetra Swami – teacher, writer, and traveller – is a disciple of His Divine Grace A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, Founder-Acharya of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON).

He has served as a missionary, temple priest (pujari), and counselor for bhakti-yoga practitioners from the time of his formal initiation in 1972. From 1972 to 1976 he was based in Germany, the Netherlands, and Denmark; then he began to participate in Vaishnava missionary activities in central Europe. Almost every year, from 1978 to 1995 he visited India on pilgrimage.

In 1995, as coordinator of a research group, he compiled and published Pancaratra-pradipa (in 2 volumes), a manual for Caitanya Vaishnava temple worship. He also served ISKCON’s GBC as the minister for Deity worship from then until 2005.

In 2004, after eight years of university study (resuming his interrupted studies from 1972), he received a Ph.D. degree from the University of Oxford (St. Cross College), for his dissertation on Caitanya Vaishnava image worship, now available from Routledge Publishers as Attending Krsna’s Image: Caitanya Vaisnava Murti-seva as Devotional Truth (2006), as a book in the Routledge Hindu Studies Series.

Krishna Kshetra Swami is now a Research Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies. He also teaches at Bhaktivedanta College, Radhadesh, since 2002. He recently taught survey courses in Indian religions and Asian religions in the Religion Department at the University of Florida, Gainesville. Beginning in September 2007, he began teaching at Chinese University of Hong Kong — courses in Indian religion and culture. After a full year of teaching, he then continued to teach one semester per year for the next four years. Since then, he has been giving lectures at several universities in the People’s Republic of China.

Amidst academic work he also travels extensively, teaching about spiritual life, as comprehended in the Vaishnava devotional (bhakti) tradition coming from Sri Caitanya.

These are the countries in which he has studied, taught, counseled, and participated in spiritual community-building:

Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, China, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Italy, Macedonia, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Norway, Peru, Poland, Rumania, Russia, Singapore, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Trinidad, United Kingdom, United States, Yugoslavia.