28.08.2026
File 7. The first Hare Krishna temple in Spain
The first Hare Krishna temple in Spain was a house with a garden in Tiana, twenty kilometres from Mataró, where I lived. The year was 1975.
The devotees who opened it had come from France, and back to France they went. Only one stayed, a brahmachari, a monk, whose name was Padambhuja. He was the first devotee of Krishna I ever saw.
The room was large, with straw mats on the floor, and there were few people. Some hippies with instruments. What struck me was that on coming in they bowed and touched the floor with their heads. Then I ate there, listened to the philosophy and chanted.
We went on Sundays. To be able to help we got there before the feast, in the morning, and my first job was squeezing oranges. That was also my first experience of what they call devotional service.
On one of those Sundays I went home with a certainty. I was fourteen and knew almost nothing, but I knew that: that this was my thing, and that one day I would be a Hare Krishna.
And now the part that doesn’t leave me looking good. Another Sunday we turned up and there was nobody. They had all gone to France. My friend was a little rascal, forced a door, and in we went. We took a mridanga, the clay drum, and two books: a Bhagavad-gītā in French and one about Lord Caitanya in English.
The mridanga broke on us in the train, on the way home.
I stole a drum from the only people who wanted nothing. Because that was what those devotees had, and that’s why they looked to us like beings from another galaxy: they were wholly inside their own thing, with nothing personal to defend. They shone. It seemed as if they read your mind.
Prabhupada was still on the planet, and you could tell.
That Bhagavad-gītā in French was the first one I ever held. Since then I’ve spent forty-five years putting those books into other people’s hands, tens of thousands of them, in the street.
I don’t call that a coincidence. The Gītā says it of itself:
In this endeavor there is no loss or diminution, and a little advancement on this path can protect one from the most dangerous type of fear.
Bhagavad-gītā 2.40. 1972 edition.
I started by stealing one. Not even that was lost.