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By Prishni devi dasi

Krishna-kripa dasa is known for his blissful engagement traversing the planet singing the glories of the Holy Name. But three decades ago he began what may appear to be a very different kind service with the Bhaktivedanta Institute: In 1988 he visited the San Diego branch and offered to engage his BA in Computer Science from Brown University, in its scientific preaching mission. The San Diego BI team – Sadaputa, Drutakarma, and Madhavendra Puri Prabhus – invited him in. He soon became a dedicated assistant of Sadaputa Prabhu, working hand-in-hand with him as he published many of his 9 books and dozens of articles on a wide range of topics dealing with science and the Vedic tradition.

Here is the abridged version of Krishna-kripa’s interview sharing his memories of living and working with Sadaputa Prabhu and the Bhaktivedanta Institute during his seventeen years of service.

Prishni: Krishna-kripa Prabhu, I’d like you to start by telling me just briefly how you came into Krishna Consciousness, and then how you met Sadaputa.

Krishna-kripa: I was in interested in spiritual knowledge and checking out different spiritual groups. I used to do TM (transcendental meditation) with one of my friends, and we would play his Radha Krishna Temple album after our meditation – I was really struck by the beauty of the kirtan.

Then in 1978, I went to an anti-nuclear rally in New York and some Hare Krishna devotee gave me a mantra card. Later, when myself and a friend from school went to take the ‘hippy bus’, known as the “Grey Rabbit”, from New York to San Francisco, we had a day to kill in New York and I found this mantracard in my pocket. It mentioned classes in Bhagavad-gita, a book I heard was important for self-realization, so I went to the temple. Then the bus I was going to take broke down, and the devotees said I could stay in the temple for the weekend. The bhakta leader, Niranjana (Swami), said, “The best thing you can do with your time off from school is to stay in the temple and see how much spiritual advancement you can make.” So I lived in the temple for 6 months, but it was too austere for me, so I left. I became vegetarian as a result of living in the temple, and I developed some attraction to the philosophy and the practice.

A year later I met the devotees again in Providence, where I attended college, and I lived sometimes in Kesihanta Prabhu’s preaching center there and sometimes in a college co-op house while I finished school. In 1982 I graduated from Brown University with a degree in Computer Science, and tried to get a job in Providence. Then Adi Keshava Prabhu, a former GBC, came through and hired me as a programmer for his computer business. I worked with him for 6 years. While we were living in Allentown, PA. I realized that I wasn’t feeling satisfied writing accounting software and that I hated business, so I thought, ”What should I do?” Then I remembered how my favorite thing in school was science, and I decided that I should work with the BI.

A lot of senior devotees said that if anybody is going do anything in science it will be Sadaputa Prabhu. So eventually I went to San Diego, where he lived, and I found out Sadaputa had this fired up brahmacariassistant, Madhavendra Puri, who loved hearing and chanting about Krishna, and who was really into science preaching, and was a very friendly person. The devotees did two college programs, one at SDSU and another at UCSD, in San Diego, and they did harinam, so there were all those nice things I liked.

Sadaputa was making videos, and he had this very old technology that would write a frame at a time on the videotape. So while I was there I was able to speed up his operation three times. I realized that my skill in computer science could be used in this BI service. I also appreciated that I was in this nice atmosphere with college preaching, harinam, and serving with this nice friendly brahmacari, Madhavendra Puri. And I was working with Sadaputa Prabhu whom the senior devotees said is the one who’s going to do something serious in science. I was like, “Wow, this is Krishna’s mercy.”

Prishni: What year was this?

Krishna-kripa: 1988

Prishni: And where are you living?

Krishna-kripa: In San Diego I lived with Sadaputa originally, and it was 3 of us: me, Madhavendra Puri and Sadaputa. Basically it was just a two-bedroom apartment, and Madhavendra stayed in the kitchen, which we didn’t really use, and there was the living room, Sadaputa’s room, and I slept in the computer room.

Prishni: Is Sadaputa working independently at this point?

Krishna-kripa: Well no, he’s working with Drutakarma Prabhu, who lived in another apartment. And every day they would get together and talk about their project, Forbidden Archaeology. Drutakarma and Sadaputa had done Origins magazine. Ramesvara Prabhu produced that in LA in 1984. Then they decided they would write a full-length book about every topic discussed in Origins, and the first one they tackled was human evolution.

We also did a video called ”Mind and Brain” which deals with how you can’t make a mechanistic model of consciousness. So this was all in 1989 or 1990 or so, and then Forbidden Archaeology was typeset. It was published in 1993. I was given the task to typeset this 960-page book, with 141 illustrations.

Prishni: So at this point in San Diego, you’re living in an apartment going regularly to the temple program, and Sadaputa is giving classes every other Wednesday. And did he have an office set up at the apartment?

Krishna-kripa: Yes, basically his room was his office.

Prishni: And he and Drutakarma worked together there?

Krishna-kripa: They each worked in their own apartments, but they were collaborating. They would talk about the arguments and how to present counter arguments. Drutakarma would read to Sadaputa what he’d written, and Sadaputa would suggest how to better phrase it and which things to stress. I mean they really wrote it together – it was definitely a team effort. The actual writing was pretty much done by Drutakarma, but they talked about it every day. So every argument that was there; Sadaputa went through it with him and gave him ideas about how to argue the cases. So it was something they really did together.

Prishni: What was your role in all this?

Krishna-kripa: Sadaputa would give me things to do. Like with simple 2-D animations, he described exactly how he wanted them, then I would do them, and then I would go back and show him, and he would make suggestions. And then, for the book illustrations, he would explain how he wanted it done: maybe just scanning something from a book, or sometimes he would sketch it on paper, and I would just do it on the computer.

Prishni: What else did he produce while he was living in San Diego?

Krishna-kripa: One thing he produced was Vedic Cosmography and Astronomy.

Prishni: That’s a great book!

Krishna-kripa: That came out in 1989, and of course, Alien Identities (Parallels: Ancient Insight into Modern UFO Phenomena) he did there too, because that came out in 1994. Madhava Best did the typesetting for that, and he wrote a program to do indexes.

Prishni: What did you think of Vedic Cosmography when you read it?

Krishna-kripa: I thought it dealt with a lot of issues, doubts, that devotees have and presented things in a logical way. One of Sadaputa’s arguments that I really liked was about whether we went to the moon or not. He said: Just like you can go to a certain address in New York City, but if you just have the 2 dimensions and you don’t have the 3rd, you could end up in the basement instead of the penthouse apartment – there was quite a difference between the two. So we could have the 3 dimensions of the moon right, but we could be wrong in the 4th dimension. Therefore if we go to the basement of the moon, it can appear rather different, trashed out, when compared to the heavenly Puranic descriptions.

Prishni: Yes, that’s an extremely powerful argument actually.

Krishna-kripa: And it’s creative and logical, so it’s a good argument. I still use it.

Prishni: Any other people he would collaborate with in San Diego?

Krishna-kripa: He had a long-term relationship with Narendra S. Goel, from Wayne State University in Detroit. So they would publish things together for NASA.

Prishni: Yes, I believe they co-authored many NASA-funded research papers on satellite remote sensing.

Krishna-kripa: They worked on that, on and off, for over 20 years. And they also did a lot of research together on movable finite automata.

Prishni: Didn’t Sadaputa write a textbook with him on that topic?

Krishna-kripa: Yes, that was published in 1988. And they went to a conference in Hungary, where some of that material from it was used – that was 1987 or so.

Prishni: Did you have any involvement yourself in that aspect of his work? I know he did a lot of papers on biological automata.

Krishna-kripa: I just helped with the BI video on that topic, “Models of Natural Selection,” and later on he thought of ways to make it better. So I helped integrate, edit it, put little changes in.

Prishni: How was Madhavendra Puri assisting Sadaputa and the BI?

Krishna-kripa: He was a disciple of Ramesvara Prabhu, a sankitan devotee who collected to support the program. And Madhavendra also did a lot of the research for Forbidden Archaeology. He also wrote letters for permission to reprint copyrighted material in the book.

Prishni: What about Alien Identities?

Krishna-kripa: If Alien Identities wasn’t completely finished in San Diego, then it was almost finished. But it actually came out while we were in Alachua. It was 1994.

Prishni: So that’s when you moved to Alachua?

Krishna-kripa: Yes, the end of May 1994. Drutakarma and I, we drove from San Diego to Alachua, and Sadaputa met us there. We purchased a double-wide mobile home for the BI. So the 3 of us moved into there: Drutakarma, Sadaputa and me. We were all brahmacaris. We had gotten a certain amount of funding for the BI just before we left San Diego, so we hired Devamrita devi dasi as our secretary. She and Sadaputa got married shortly after this. Then Drutakarma went to LA and further developed the forbidden archaeology theme, and Sadaputa got more into the whole Mayapura Vedic temple and planetarium proposal, and the idea of the exhibits for that project. He began working on The Mysteries of the Sacred Universe book, and then Tamraparni joined the team, along with Indupati, who did the amazing 3-D graphics.

Prishni: I have one question: Vedic Cosmography and Astronomy and Mysteries of the Sacred Universeoverlap in many ways. Do you know why Sadaputa decided to publish a second book on cosmology?

Krishna-kripa: Because there actually was a lot of material that wasn’t in the first book, like that whole thing he discovered about how the geocentric orbits match up with the boundaries of the oceans and the islands of Bhu-mandala. And of course many of the cross cultural connections. Then we have the CD with it, which is interesting. The beautiful thing about that video is that it shows you visually how these things work that are there in the Bhagavatam, which are otherwise hard to visualize. Actually, the astronomy stuff was for the planetarium exhibits, so the book was sort of crucial, because to do exhibits you have to understand about the universe.

During this time, Devamrita would often invite us, the people who worked with Sadaputa, who liked conversing with Sadaputa, to their home for prasadam every once and a while.

Prishni: Oh, the famous pizza parties!

Krishna-kripa: Yes, and Yamaraja, he worked at the BTG and did book layouts, and Tamra and Sthita-dhi-muni.

Prishni: Now when did Sthita-dhi join the crew?

Krishna-kripa: You’ll have to ask him, but the most amazing thing was that after working as our secretary he was actually inspired to go back to school in science and get a PhD. He just seemed like an ordinary sort of Joe to me, not obvious academic material. He was the temple commander in Philly while I was there, and then he became Sadaputa’s Bhaktivedanta Institute secretary. Then he got involved in studying the history of science academically. It was very inspiring, actually.

Prishni: And how do you feel about Sadaputa at this point?

Krishna-kripa: I see him as a success story, in that he tried to use his intelligence to carry out the order of Srila Prabhupada that his “Ph.D.’s get together and make a model of the universe.” No one else seemed to think it was possible, but because Sadaputa worked on it with such determination, he was given amazing insights, you know, just like Prabhupada himself was given amazing empowerment simply because he decided to try to preach Krishna Consciousness in the West: He tried to come to America, He tried to talk to people, He tried to sell books, He tried to print books. And because He tried and Krishna wanted it done, Krishna gradually gave him success. And so in that little particular piece of the mission that Sadaputa was given – that he tried to endeavor in that way – Krishna gave him some success. It was exciting being a part of that, with all these new discoveries. I was excited to send out the review copies and get the reviews back.

Once I got a review about the UFO book: “This is the most honest UFO book ever written!” And it’s so powerful because people who are true believers, they bend all the information to show it’s true, and the debunkers bend all the information to show it’s false. But Sadaputa just wanted to show how it matched up with the Vedic literature, so he just presented whatever was there and presented the Vedic material, then showed the parallels. He didn’t actually want it called Alien Identities, he wanted to call it Parallels, offering a comparative study of various folklore traditions with Vedic accounts. It was Drutakarma’s idea to call it Alien Identities and Advaita Candra’s to market it to the UFO crowd.

One aspect of the BI is they wanted to make Krishna Consciousness accessible to people with a science background. But the UFO people are generally not OK with the science people, who see them as pseudoscientists. So to associate with those people discredits you as a scientist – that’s the big problem. Sadaputa was interested in empirical evidence supporting the reality of the Vedic worldview. He was interested in using the methodology of science to support Vedic conclusions and to defeat non-Vedic conclusions, rather than simply making Krishna Consciousness popular with scientists.

Prishni: What else did Sadaputa do in Alachua when you were with him?

Krishna-kripa: Well, Ganapati Maharaj, who travels in the US between Chicago and Tucson, would go to various college campuses selling Sadaputa books in addition to Prabhupada’s books. And he thought that if we’d complied a book of Sadaputa’s Back to Godhead magazine articles it would be easier for the students to grasp, because some of the published works are sort of technical, even for students. So we made this book called God & Science that was mostly a compilation of the BTG articles. That came out in 2004 and was basically the last book we did in Alachua.

Prishni: Now, one book we haven’t talked about is Maya: The World as Virtual Reality.

Krishna-kripa: Oh I forgot about Maya. That came after Mysteries, right before God & Science.

One of the things I liked about that book is a certain piece of empirical evidence that Sadaputa quotes from a study by Ring and Cooper, both psychologists. They did a study on congenitally blind people who had near-death experiences. In those experiences, they were not only able to see, even though they had never seen in their whole lives, but they saw 360 degrees around the object rather than just seeing the front. That’s evidence that the sense of sight exists beyond the organs of sensory perception, just as in Lord Kapila’s Sankhya philosophy from the Srimad-Bhagavatam. That was powerful for me to see.

Another thing that was interesting to me was when Indupati asked Sadaputa, “There’s so many far out things in the Vedic literature that we can’t really make sense of, how is it you can accept them?” And Sadaputa answered, without any hesitation: Because the Vedic literature offers a worldview that can explain so many things in human experience in a very comprehensive way.

Prishni: So let me ask you one final question: Who is Sadaputa to you? You worked with him more than anyone else, you were so close to him.

Krishna-kripa: Well, I see him as somebody who was impressed with the philosophy of Krishna Consciousness and Srila Prabhupada’s presentation of it, and who surrendered to engage his particular talent in service and got different realizations because of that sincere service. I see him a very truthful person, a very honest person, so sometimes it may have been difficult for him to deal with people who were less straightforward and honest than himself.

He really made me understand how there’s actually some real cheating going on in science in defense of materialist theories, and that was really powerful to me. He found through his own personal research so many examples of empirical evidence supportive of Vedic ideas, that for somebody who’s brought up thinking science is everything and expects empirical evidence to support all things real, it’s just so reassuring to encounter this vast quantity of evidence supporting the Vedic worldview and undermining the materialistic so-called explanations. This was so helpful for me, being somebody who loves science and the scientific method.

He was a real hero who made it possible for many people to become devotees. And people who have faith in empirical evidence from any source will always appreciate Sadaputa’s work.

Other project news: The Richard L. Thompson Archives is pleased to announce that his first book, Mechanistic and Nonmechanistic Science, is now available on Amazon in a new printing. Bala Books initially published this work in 1981, followed by the Bhaktivedanta Book Trust later that year. Meanwhile the full text has been continuously available as part of the Bhaktivedanta Archives VedaBase. For a list Sadaputa’s books presently available, please view the Richard L. Thompson Amazon author’s page.

With all six of Sadaputa’s works now back in print, we are now working on a commemorative edition of some of the Bhaktivedanta Institute’s early publications intended for the 1977 Vrindavana Life Comes From Life Conference. This book will feature the original Monograph Series, Numbers 1–3. Numerous other historical documents will also be included from these pioneering days of the Bhaktivedanta Institute, which featured a unified effort under Prabhupada’s leadership. We would like to incorporate memories of those who participated in the production of the Monographs and other supplemental materials, and/or in the original Vrindavana Life Comes From Life conference held in October 1977. Please contact me at the following email addresses if you have something you would like to share.

Transcribing Bhaktivedanta Institute oral history interviews as well as lectures continues as well. If interested, please contact Prishni dd at: prishni108@gmail.com or rlthompsonarchives@ivs.edu.