Interviewer: How many centers in the United States?
Prabhupada: About forty.
Devotee: Forty or fifty.
Devotee (2): Fifty with the farms.
Interviewer: How are those supported? Do they support themselves?
Prabhupada: That is Kṛṣṇa consciousness.
Interviewer: I beg your pardon?
Prabhupada: That is Kṛṣṇa consciousness.
Interviewer: The way they support themselves?
Prabhupada: Yes, Kṛṣṇa supports.
Interviewer: Kṛṣṇa supports?
Prabhupada: Yes. We do not know what we shall eat tomorrow, but we have no insufficiency. Rather, neighbors they are grudging that these people do not do anything and they live so comfortably. Sometimes they ask...
Interviewer: How does Kṛṣṇa support them?
Prabhupada: That is Kṛṣṇa consciousness.
Interviewer: He mediates through physical things, does he?
Prabhupada: Everything belongs to Kṛṣṇa.
Interviewer: Yes.
Prabhupada: So Kṛṣṇa is within you. So if Kṛṣṇa dictates, "Give him three thousand dollars," you'll give me. That's all. That actually it is fact. Yesterday Mr. Coleman came? He gave me a check for three thousand. I never asked him.
Devotee: Who? Mr. Coleman?
Devotee (2): Coleman.
Prabhupada: So we are immediately depositing for our Vṛndāvana and Māyāpur scheme. So Kṛṣṇa sends money. We do not bother what will happen tomorrow. But we are very nicely maintained by Kṛṣṇa's grace. That is Kṛṣṇa consciousness. And Kṛṣṇa says teṣāṁ nityābhiyuktānāṁ yoga-kṣemaṁ vahāmy aham. Find out this verse.
ananyāś cintayanto māṁ
ye janāḥ paryupāsate
teṣāṁ nityābhiyuktānāṁ
yoga-kṣemaṁ vahāmy aham
(BG 9.22)
Interviewer: A question: you are now the leader and the spiritual master. Who will take your place?
Prabhupada: That Kṛṣṇa will dictate who will take my place.
Interviewer: Kṛṣṇa will tell you that?
Devotee (2): You want that verse, Srila Prabhupada?
Prabhupada: Yes, yes.
Devotee (2): This is the translation of what the Sanskrit...
Prabhupada: No, you can read the Sanskrit also.
Devotee (2):
ananyāś cintayanto māṁ
ye janāḥ paryupāsate
teṣāṁ nityābhiyuktānāṁ
yoga-kṣemaṁ vahāmy aham
(BG 9.22)
"But those who worship Me with devotion, meditating on My transcendental form—to them I carry what they lack and preserve what they have."
Interviewer: They still have to go out and ask occasionally?
Devotee: It's not that we sit back and wait for Kṛṣṇa to send it to us.
Devotee (2): No, we're very industrious.
Prabhupada: We don't sit down idly.
Devotee: God helps those who help themselves.
Prabhupada: We are not idle preachers, we are working. All, very hard, more than the karmīs.
Devotee (3): These men, they go out to engage people in taking our books maybe twelve hours a day sometimes, ten hours a day, without any salary.
Prabhupada: I am now eighty years old, I am working twenty-four hours. I think I work more than my young disciples (laughter).
Devotee: Oh yes, definitely.
Prabhupada: I work at night.
Devotee (3): It is hard to keep up with Srila Prabhupada.
Devotee (2): Very difficult.
Prabhupada: We are not idle creatures.
Devotee (3): We are publishing his books and sometimes he is ahead of us by seventeen volumes.
Interviewer: How do you spend your days? You do an awful lot of traveling I understand.
Prabhupada: Traveling is going on throughout the whole world and wherever I go, at night I write books.
Devotee: Translates.
Prabhupada: Translate. And daytime I meet devotees.
Devotee: Manage.
Prabhupada: Manage.
Interviewer: You arrange the marriages?
Devotee: Manage.
Prabhupada: They have to ask me, final decision is taken from me. From all over the world, from all over the world letters are coming some problem, some problem, some problem. Although I have got about twenty secretaries, still they have to consult, I have to give them advice.
Devotee (2): In the evening Srila Prabhupada goes to bed at ten o'clock and gets up at eleven-thirty to begin translating.
Interviewer: You just sleep a couple of hours, then?
Prabhupada: No, one and a half hour.
Interviewer: That's it?
Prabhupada: Yes. Of course in daytime I take rest two hours. So in this way altogether about three to four hours. Our philosophy is not that you sit idly and God will send everything, no, not like that. We know God will send everything, still we work. Without God's sanction nothing can come. But we must be qualified to receive the favor of God. That is our philosophy.
Interviewer: Are you surprised at the way this organization has prospered?
Prabhupada: What do you mean?
Devotee (2): Are we surprised at the way the movement has expanded and prospered in just a few short years.
Prabhupada: No, it is not surprising, it is natural. If you do, just like if you do business in proper way there will be profit. Similarly, as it is enjoined in this book of knowledge, if you do like that it will expand, it will prosper. Two plus two equal to four. Mathematical calculation. If you make two plus two, it will become four. It will neither become three nor five. So here it is said, you have read the, that "One who is engaged twenty-four hours in My service, so I, yoga-kṣemaṁ vahāmy aham (BG 9.22), I supply whatever he requires and I protect whatever he has got." So if you actually serve Kṛṣṇa, then everything you want, it will come.
(Interview with Newsday newspaper, July 14, 1976, New York)
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