Japa Transformations

Almost thirty years since the publication of his first book on japa, Japa Reform Notebook, Satsvarupa dasa Goswami has produced yet another volume solely dedicated to the subject of the improving chanting of the holy names and is drawing from his experiences on the retreats in his bhajana-kutir in Delaware, when chanting extra number of rounds and rising early. In his Foreword to the new book, Krishna Ksetra prabhu of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies recalls the impact of the Japa Reform Notebook: “The book was seen as quite radical or even inappropriate. How could a senior devotee, revered as a renunciant and as an adept spiritual teacher, so openly communicate his own personal challenges in the practice of chanting Hare Krishna? Yet others were enlivened to see that a frank discussion of the challenges to pure chanting was being aired… As in the previous book, Goswami locates himself as both a student and a teacher, as one who continues to learn from his own guru and who aims to help others benefit from what he learns. In this book he asks readers to spend time with him as he questions the extent and depth of his own successes and the meaning of occasional apparent setbacks in practice as he takes one through a sustained personal meditation on the eight verses of the Siksastakam, Sri Caitanya’s verses that encapsulate his teachings.”