h h jayapataka swami
Jayapataka Swami was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin as Gordon John Erdman II to Gordon John Erdman and Lorraine Erdman (Golich).[5] He attended St. John’s Northwestern Military Academy and Brown University.[5] There, as a fresh enrollee, he was influenced by a guest lecture on the life of Buddha that he lost all interest in his studies and began searching for a spiritual teacher.[5] After some time of searching, he concluded he would have to go to India to find his teacher.[citation needed]
Before leaving for India, Gordon came across some Hare Krishna devotees, doing kirtan and distributing Back To Godhead magazine. Shortly after he visited the San Francisco ISKCON center, where he met Jayananda das who introduced him to the Ratha Yatra. His first service in ISKCON was to help build the Ratha Cart. From there he traveled to Montreal, Quebec, Canada where he met Srila Prabhupada. John took his first initiation in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, and was given the name ‘Jayapataka dasa’.[5] Soon after he was awarded 2nd initiation in New York.[citation needed]
While in Montreal, Jayapataka dasa was engaged in the service of printing books and dispatching them to other ISKCON temples around the world. Later, on the instruction of Srila Prabhupada, Jayapataka went to Toronto to open a temple there.[5] When Jayapataka dasa took over the Toronto center as president he wrote to Srila Prabhupada enquiring about his service and was told by him to go to India.
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Steven J. Rosen, also known as Satyaraja Dasa (born 1955), is an American author. He is the founding editor of The Journal of Vaishnava Studies and an associate editor of Back to Godhead, the magazine of the Hare Krishna Movement. He authored more than 20 books on Vaishnavism and related subjects.including Black Lotus: The Spiritual Journey of an Urban Mystic (2007), which is the life story of Bhakti Tirtha Swami.
Steven J. Rosen has a strong view on vegetarianism and has written Diet for Transcendence: Vegetarianism and the World Religions (1997, previously published as Food for the Spirit) and Holy Cow: The Hare Krishna Contribution to Vegetarianism and Animal Rights (2004). In the former volume, he systematically explains the practice of vegetarianism in various religious traditions, such as Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and Judaism, with special attention to the philosophical schools of India. In the latter, citing the devotee-scholar Bhaktivinoda Thakur (1838–1914) and the Hindu savant Sivaya Subramuniyaswami (1927–2001), he looks at early Vedic tradition, animal sacrifices, and the innovative contributions of the Hare Krishna movement.