Books, the First Step in Making Devotees
By H.H. Jayapataka Swami
(Delivered as a speech during the Book Distribution Seminars in Sridham Mayapur, Gaura Purnima Festival 2007)
There is a lot of discussion about core preaching, such as book distribution, harinama, prasada distribution. But right from the very beginning, Prabhupada also spoke about making devotees among the people neighboring our temples. And Srila Prabhupada certainly did house programs. He wrote [1 June 1969]: “The boys and girls from the neighborhood coming to help the temple activities is the good result of our attempts. The temple center is started just to present example to the neighboring residents how they can make a small temple in each and every home.”
Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakura said to develop Navadvipa-dhama and the parikrama, to print books and distribute them, and to do Nama-hatta preaching. We all know about the book part, but we don’t often hear about the Nama-hatta part of it. He said that Nama-hatta will help to develop the holy dhama, help to distribute more books. So this was the original strategy.
Once I was walking with Srila Prabhupada in Los Angeles, and he told me he stopped at a corner and looked at a church and said that in the future our ISKCON temples would be like churches, that there will be a few devotees living in them and many people practicing from their homes and coming on the weekends and festival days.
But I don’t want to bore you with congregational development issues too much, since we’re here for discussing book distribution, but that’s what happening today. In many temples the congregation is giving the manpower for book distribution. And we see that the brahmacaris and the matajis who are fully in the temple life, who are more into book distribution, they can enliven the congregation on how to present Srila Prabhupada’s books.
I just got a call from America, from Houston, where we have seven Bhakti-vriksha groups. I was told that because one of the members of a group happens to be a manager at Wal-mart, they got permission to set up a book table and a bake sale outside the Wal-mart. (The devotees from Russia may not know what a Wal-mart is it’s a big store, supermarket; they sell everything, literally everything you can imagine, they sell it.) Thousands of people go on weekends to the Wal-mart. The congregational devotees are planning this. They started it only a few weeks ago, but it’s already quite successful. The last day they distributed seven hundred dollars worth of books not bad.
I don’t know lately, but in Russia we used to have book tables outside the subways. So now these tables are coming back. In Atlanta there are many Indian stores, so in the future we can sell at an Indian store every weekend; they don’t mind, because anyway, many Indians are coming. But being in front of Wal-mart, with just regular people coming, is a step forward.
In Delhi they were number one this year in the marathon. Gopala Krishna Maharaja told me that forty to sixty percent of book distribution was done by the congregation. One month a year they get everyone. Some time back in Bangalore we had different Bhakti-vriksha groups competing with each other in distributing books. They got so competitive that when the marathon was over they wanted to keep going they were really into it. So this is the new future.
The other very important thing is that we need people-friendly book distribution; it’s one of the things the GBC discussed. We don’t want to just get the quantity out; we’re concerned about the quality, to make friends with the people. If they feel good about you, if they like you, if you’re kind to them you don’t change them up or do some special tricks to get somebody to take the book even if they don’t take the book this time, next time maybe they’ll buy it. We should still be friendly with them, give them a card, or whatever.
The idea of people-friendly book distribution is that we want to have a system where they write if they like what they read or if they’re moved by it either to the book distributor, or if that’s too much burden for the book distributor, to a local central office that follows up on them. Usually they like to hear from the same person “Oh, I met this person, nice person!” Just like I’ve met congregational people who still remember who gave them the first book. You are introducing, you’re giving them Krishna. They read the book and that’s going to be the beginning of their spiritual life. Often the book distributors are the vartma-pradarsaka-gurus, the gurus that show the way, by giving them Prabhupada’s books. So it’s an important responsibility. We should focus on the quality of how we relate with people. We should get the name of the friendly ones, the interested people, and we should keep them on the mailing list. They may also get more books “Oh, I read that book. I want to get another one!” We need to cultivate them so that in the future they can also become devotees, they can also become distributors and help us spread the Krishna consciousness movement.
Book distributors are meeting thousands of people every day, all over the world. Every seven seconds someone gets a book. I don’t know how many that works out to be in a month, but it’s a lot of people you get in contact with. We want to set up things so that people are cultivated and trained.
We had a long discussion a book distributor gives someone a book, invites him to come to the temple, and then he goes to the temple and nobody receives him, nobody makes him feel welcome. From the books we want to make devotees. Some people become devotees we have many of those stories just by getting the books. But a lot of people get the book, and if they’re not treated nicely, they are delayed in their ability to take up Krishna consciousness maybe not eternally, but for a while they are delayed. So we’re trying to help temples to be trained in hospitality, trained in cultivation.
Probably in the future we should come up jointly with a guidebook how to make that first contact the most positive; because when you distribute a book you’re starting a lifelong relationship between these persons and the Krishna consciousness movement. And they’ll read the book, they’ll remember, “The person I met was really nice.” Srila Prabhupada said his books are mainly distributed by the devotees, and devotees make a very deep impact on people, because devotees are special.
In our Congregational Development Ministry we want to work in harmony with the book distributors, because you make so many contacts. We teach preachers about the Vamanadeva Approach: three steps (Trivikrama means three steps). First there’s contact, then cultivation, and then care and commitment. The first one is the contact. Who contacts new people a lot? Book distributors are among the devotees who contact most new people. If they are friendly, if they’re interested, we should get their name and address, their email. Take that trouble, because in the future that person might become a devotee. Once we have the address, then there should be the teamwork of the congregational preachers in your temple. If the book distributors don’t have the time to cultivate people because they’re out distributing books, we should at least send the contacts one form letter saying, “I met you on the corner of 5th Avenue and Broadway (or whatever), and I hope you liked the book I gave you. You appeared interested in the philosophy. I may be traveling, but I have a friend that I want to introduce you to.” And then give the name of the person who may contact them, so that it’s connected; because otherwise, if suddenly the new person comes out of the sky-blue, it’s more difficult. You get the contact, but someone has to follow up and cultivate. If you have the time to cultivate yourself, great; otherwise, someone should cultivate, someone should answer their questions, should encourage them, and should invite them to some program.
“Krishna.com” [the BBT website] approached me they get a lot of people buying books over the internet, approaching them, and sometimes they send them to the temples so they were asking whether they could send them to Nama-hatta groups; they wanted to get the list of Nama-hatta groups. We don’t have a worldwide list yet so many groups out there that we don’t know. (One lady stood up yesterday at our Russian congregational development conference and said, “We have a group! But we are not recognized yet; nobody asked us to send in our address.”)
Should we have a central record of all Nama-hattas around the world? Right now we’re just asking the yatras for the numbers; we don’t ask them for the addresses. This year we got 1,300 Nama-hattas in the world, 905 Bhakti-vrikshas, and 180 counselor groups. If all of them can distribute books, then we’d be doing pretty good. But there are more groups than that that’s just what was reported probably we have two or three times that much. A lot of places don’t report yet.
Back to the three steps: we take it from contact, cultivation, and the next one is putting the persons under some more intensive care, so they also take a commitment to Krishna consciousness, and eventually they may also distribute books whether once a week, or twice a week, or whether sastra-dana [www.sastradana.com], where they themselves buy books and give it out to their friends or they sponsor for some institution or something.
Some of our former temple devotees, former full-time book distributors, now they’re married and living with their family but they still distribute books. Being married and living outside the temple doesn’t mean you can’t distribute books. In Lord Caitanya’s movement of congregational chanting of the holy name, everybody, either a priest in the temple or not, is part of the same community, and part of our culture is to distribute books.
I want to thank you all because you’re helping to make so many devotees. We’re giving you a gift, one copy of our magazine, Congregational Development Journal, the issue with the article on sastra-dana book distribution. This is our website [shows the address: www.namahatta.org], if you like to share some information. We could have a special blog on book distribution through the congregation. How many of you are congregation? How many of you live at home and distribute books? [Some raise their hand] Not so many, about thirty percent in this group.
I went to Siberia, to the Barnaul Festival, and I asked the devotees, “How many of you live in a temple?” And nobody raised the hand. I thought maybe the translator didn’t understand, so I asked again, “How many of you live in a temple?” And nobody raised the hand. And when I asked a third time and they said, “Maharaja, we have one temple in Siberia, and of the five devotees that live there, none came. We all live at home. There are brahmacaris, ladies, grihasthas, everyone, and they’re also distributing books.”
So this is the phenomenon now in ISKCON. Our congregational devotees can engage in book distribution and also in making devotees, like Srila Bhaktivinoda Thakura did. We find that all the congregational saints, like Srila Bhaktivinoda Thakura, they were also distributing books. He sent books all over the world. He wrote books in the night and preached in the afternoon.
I want to thank you. My time is up. Try to remember: take the contact, if possible take part in the the cultivation, and we hope that in the future we can take care of all the people. We hope that we can get the temples trained up to be able to follow up with cultivation and care, and make more devotees for distributing books, for spreading Krishna consciousness, and for going back to Godhead.
