The Vānaprastha Adventure, Installment 43
Part One of The Vānaprastha Adventure offers principles, guidelines, suggestions, śāstric statements, Purāṇic examples, and instructions from Śrīla Prabhupāda. But what about now? How have devotees taken up the vānaprastha āśrama and lived as vānaprasthas today? For this we have Part Two. Here you’ll find twelve personal stories of contemporary devotees who have retired from family life and taken up the life of vānaprasthas.
They’re at different points along the vānaprastha journey and have undertaken it from different directions. One has completed his vānaprastha life and moved on to sannyāsa. Two others left this world, surrounded by kīrtana, while the writing of this book was still in progress.
I don’t agree with every view they express. But then again: I skipped directly from brahmacārī life to sannyāsa, whereas they have lived a life I have only talked about. So they speak from experience.
I am grateful to each of them for sharing their stories and realizations.
There are more vānaprasthas I interviewed, and more I would have liked to have interviewed. But I’ve been slow to finish this book, and at some point we have to say, “Enough. Let’s get the book out.”
Vaikuṇṭha Dāsa and Jāhnavī Devī Dāsī
Before vānaprastha
I first spoke with Vaikuṇṭha and Jāhnavī about vānaprastha life in February of 2022 in Alachua, Florida. I had heard they were moving towards the vānaprastha āśrama, so I was keen to speak with them (along with their friends Devārṣi Dāsa and Nirmalā Dāsī, who were moving in the same direction). I later had the opportunity to speak with Vaikuṇṭha again in Honolulu in January of 2025. (His wife was at that time away in Māyāpur.)
Vaikuṇṭha was born in Cape May, New Jersey, in 1957. When I interviewed him in 2025 he was sixty-seven, going on sixty-eight. He had first visited the Hare Kṛṣṇa temple on Henry Street in Brooklyn, New York, in 1971, at the age of fourteen, and then after a month or two he found out that there was a temple in Philadelphia, so he started regularly going there. When he was eighteen he had darśana of Śrīla Prabhupāda when Śrīla Prabhupāda came to Philadelphia for the Rathayātrā. In 1978, at about twenty-one, Vaikuṇṭha moved to San Diego and a few months later moved into the temple as a full-time brahmacārī. In school he never went beyond eighth grade.
Vaikuṇṭha lived as a brahmacārī in San Diego for eight years, first doing book distribution for three years, “and then that whole paraphernalia era started,” in which book distributors were pressed into service selling paintings and other items to provide the temples with funds. After three or four years of traveling to sell paintings, in 1984 or ’85 he came back to San Diego to assist the Bhakta Leader and eventually became the Bhakta Leader himself. In San Diego he met Jāhnavī Dāsī, and they married two years later, in 1987.
Jāhnavī Dāsī, four and a half years younger than Vaikuṇṭha, was born in 1961. She was brought up in Del Mar, north of San Diego. When she first met Kṛṣṇa devotees, in San Diego late in 1984, she took to Kṛṣṇa consciousness right away. Early in 1985 she moved into the brahmacārīṇī āśrama and became a full-time devotee.
Sometime after they married, Vaikuṇṭha says, the “zonal ācārya” for the region left active devotional service, the temple’s income plummeted, “and those of us that were still there had to do whatever we could to keep the lights on, so I went back into paraphernalia sales,” mainly selling paintings in the Caribbean along with his wife. In 1991 he and Jāhnavī were called back to San Diego to restart the temple’s Bhakta and Bhaktin Programs, which they headed together for a few years. Then for some years they ran a preaching center in Encinitas, California. After that, Vaikuṇṭha served for some years as the San Diego temple president. But by 2002 Vaikuṇṭha and Jāhnavī had school-aged kids, so the family migrated to Alachua, which had a devotee school the kids could attend.
The family stayed in Alachua till about 2012. Then, Vaikuṇṭha says, “We were noticing as parents that a lot of the kids who had grown up in the dhāma for significant parts of their childhood had some sense of identity as devotees, which kept them close.” So when their children had attended the Alachua school through as many grades as it offered, Vaikuṇṭha and Jāhnavī thought, “We’ll just go to the dhāma for one winter and homeschool them and just let them have immersion in the dhāma to see if they get a little bit of that flavor that these other kids had.” The children fell in love with Māyāpur, so the family stayed. Since Vaikuṇṭha was a traveling salesman, selling paintings as a livelihood, he didn’t have to live in one place and could manage his own time. So he would stay in Māyāpur for three months, then go sell for some months, then come back to Māyāpur.
In this way, Vaikuṇṭha and Jāhnavī’s son and daughter, Balarāma and Vṛndāvanī, grew up as devotees. In 2020 Vṛndāvanī married the leader of an ISKCON project in Ypsilanti, Michigan, and by 2025 Balarāma was a senior at St. Johns College and applying for graduate school.
While Vaikuṇṭha and his wife were in America for Vṛndāvanī’s wedding, the COVID epidemic hit, so they were pinned down in America. For two years they stayed in Alachua, where they still had a house. Then they sold the house and were ready to move back to San Diego but were persuaded to go to Hawaii to help there (where her elderly mother also lives). They were now moving towards vānaprastha life.
Into the unknown
Vaikuṇṭha said, “For us it was such an unknown, really unknown. We were just thinking, ‘Okay, now our kids are grown up, and we’d like to try to be a little more able to serve the mission in whatever small ways we can.’ That was kind of the idea.”
Jāhnavī said, “It sounds easy and good in Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam class, but to put it together in our world, economically—you know, life is just complicated. . . . A lot of us hanker to go deeper in our spiritual life—to hear more and. . . But to make it all work is just not so easy.”
Vaikuṇṭha says, “I think a lot of people in my generation are thinking about this stuff, but it’s hard because this is the āśrama that really didn’t get fleshed out in the early days. Everybody was young. ‘Become a brahmacārī, a brahmacārīṇī. Okay, you’re renounced—become a sannyāsī.’ And everyone became gṛhasthas, ninety-nine percent. But for vānaprastha we had to wait. So that talk with you [in Alachua in 2022] was really helpful because some of the things you shared from your research really made a lot of sense—one of which was that it was a temporary window and if you had those desires. . . You know, you can feel energetic at any given moment in your life, but that can change really quickly. My father died of a heart attack at forty-three. So you just never know, right? And dementia can set in. . . It’s normal. Nothing wrong. It’s what happens when the body ages.
“And we’re already late. Most of us joined in our twenties perhaps. And I was thirty, I think, when I got married. So I was already five years late. We didn’t have children for seven years—we were mostly just doing service—so I was thirty-seven when we had our first child. And we had two. So my son turned twenty when I was sixty-one. The clock has pushed back a little bit for a lot of us, I think, from the traditional five, twenty-five, fifty [for gurukula, marriage, vānaprastha]. So we’re already kind of behind. Once you’re in your sixties it’s not if [I die], it’s when. Of course, it was never ‘if,’ but the ‘when’ becomes real prominent.
“So the idea of trying to get re-engaged in service while you can became. . . We wanted to anyway, but unless you have a little fire under you—a reason to pursue it. . . We were quite lucky just because. . . What I found, interestingly enough, was as soon as we expressed even the slightest interest in getting more involved in sevā institutionally, there were a lot of opportunities. And it was really just seeing what opportunity might be the best fit for us. And that’s important too because if it fits for the husband and the wife in this type of vānaprastha. . . There’s a purport [in the fourth canto] where Śrīla Prabhupāda is describing the classical Vedic [system], and then he says, ‘But the International Society for Krishna Consciousness is now spreading and we’re opening temples all over the world, and people can come and just spend the rest of their life living simply and serving.’ And I was so happy to read that because the austerities are important but Śrīla Prabhupāda always seemed to stress that we’re a preaching mission and our austerities may look a little different.
“That concept, I think, is really important for us because so many of us from the ’70s and ’80s, what to speak of the ’60s—we got a lot of good training. There was a period where most people becoming devotees moved into temple āśramas, and you got a lot of training. You got a few years of good training, solid training. My not just falling off the deep end while working outside for twenty years, I totally believe, was because I was habituated to getting up and chanting sixteen rounds of japa. That made a huge difference, because there were times when all I really had going was following the principles, chanting japa, and offering my food—and reading. I was just traveling around selling things. But with those basic practices you have an anchor—those four things. When you have that training as a young person and it becomes very much a part of you, then it’s natural that if you go back into those situations everything’s right there. It’s like riding a bike.
“That’s why this idea of going back to a project in ISKCON, if one is so inclined, and saying, ‘Hey, if there’s an opening we’d really like to help’ can be really valuable for a lot of people that have that training. Because the other thing you have—and I’m not trying to toot our horn—is that when you’re dealing with younger devotees who are perhaps contemplating entering gṛhastha life and you’ve been a gṛhastha for thirty or forty years—you know, you have a little bit of wisdom. Whether it’s from the hard knocks and the mistakes or it’s from things going okay or whatever, you have something to share. That’s what I’ve noticed being here [in Honolulu] and dealing with younger devotees. Sometimes you can give a little advice and people are happy to get it, because they know that you’re a little older and that you’ve been through these stages of life and you can give a little bit of confidence. And I’ve seen it be helpful.
“We’ve had a temple-centric model, and so because you’ve lived outside all these years you can feel like you’re totally useless. But when you come back into it you find that some of what you’ve gained can be communicated to people in a healthy way that can help them. Everybody goes through similar stages, and if you’ve already gone through those stages you have something to share.”
A shared outlook
Vaikuṇṭha says that he and his wife, in their approach to vānaprastha life, both have the same outlook. “Coming here [to Honolulu] was totally a joint decision. We really discussed it.” He finds, too, that serving together with his wife confers advantages. “It’s really different for me when she’s here, because. . . Just like this morning: There’s a young lady who comes to the temple sometimes, and she came for the second half of the morning program, and then she was at prasādam. And I try to be nice, and then she started telling me what she was going through. The scene was very public, with all the devotees there for prasādam, so I felt safe in giving her a little bit of time. But I can’t do for her what my wife could do. Some things in the young woman’s life were going a little awry, and she saw the temple as a place of shelter, and—nothing extreme but—we like it when people see the temple as a safe haven for them to go to when they need. And when you have a senior mātājī who can just be their friend, and be their devotee friend. . . We don’t have that here right now, so I’m looking forward to next year when my wife will be here.”
When Vaikuṇṭha and Jāhnavī began moving towards vānaprastha life, did they encounter much opposition? “No, we didn’t,” he says. “We were really lucky. And I think part of it is cause our kids had that time in Māyāpur. So they were like cheerleaders for us. Vṛndāvanī is happily married. Deva-mādhava’s a great husband. And our son had so much training in Gurukula, and he really has a traditional Vedic standard in his mind. So he’s like, ‘Dad, you’re late.’ We had a nice house in Alachua, the biggest devotee community in North America, and he wants to become a family man. So we asked him, ‘Should we try to hold onto this?’ But he was like, ‘No, that’s what’s holding you back.’ They were both really, really encouraging: ‘No, you guys took really good care of us, and we’re grown up now, and it’s nice for you to have a chance to do sevā.’ They were super-encouraging, both of them. So that was really good. And that hasn’t changed. They were both like, ‘Get out of here! You’re late!’
“So that was good for us because. . . On a philosophical level, yeah, these relationships are all illusory and blah blah blah, but as a parent you have a level of attachment, for sure, and so much has happened to devotee children in our movement, and you want them to always feel positive towards Kṛṣṇa consciousness. So when you know that they’re onboard, [that’s great].”
Financial security
On another front, Vaikuṇṭha says, “I was very stupid when it came to finances. I was self-employed, and so when I would do my taxes every year I just thought, ‘Take as many exemptions as you can. Keep as much money available.’ And I never made enough. I was always falling behind, getting in debt, and then I would go out and do something and pay off the debts. And then two years later I’d be in debt again. I was not a good vaiśya. I was acting as a vaiśya, but I wasn’t a good one at all.
“On the one hand we always saw that Kṛṣṇa was taking care of us. We always had exactly what we needed. The kids never felt like they were living in scarcity or anything like that. But we never ‘got ahead.’ I haven’t started Social Security yet, just because if you’re seventy it goes up eight percent per year.1 If I’d taken it right when I was eligible I would have gotten [only] five hundred a month because I hadn’t declared enough income. I should have not taken all those exemptions, but I had no idea. Nobody was advising me. And you think you’re going to live forever, right? (Ahany ahani bhūtāni. . .) So now I regret all that, but it’s too late, so when I retire I’ll probably get about seven hundred a month, and your wife gets half of what you get, so we’ll get about a thousand. That’s part of why having a little place in Māyāpur makes sense. If I live till I’m seventy and I wait till I’m seventy, by that time she’ll be of the age that you take it, and we’ll probably get between us a thousand a month. Of course, Social Security, some say, may go insolvent in 2034, so: We’ll see. Meanwhile, the part of the year that we’re here there’s nice prasādam every day, we have a place to stay and serve. . . .”
Apart from Honolulu: “We’ve been renting an apartment in Māyāpur for twelve or thirteen years. It’s 190 a month. Doesn’t sound like much, but it’s a couple of grand a year. It adds up. And for five years we weren’t even able to go there. Anyway, we’ve kept the place because we had all our stuff there and we were identifying with it. And my wife is there now, and we’ve been able to host some devotees. Now we’ve bought a piece of land in a little development called Gaura Village.” So that’s another place they can go to.
Sometimes Māyāpur, sometimes the United States
Jāhnavī told me, “My guru mahārāja recommended that we retire at least part of the time in India, because it is less expensive and the people are kind in the holy dhāma. So we’re hoping to spend some time in Māyāpur. Whatever you’re doing there—whatever little you can do—you’re in the dhāma, and you can feel that shelter.”
Vaikuṇṭha added, “Jananivāsa gave one class, and he was saying that in the dhāma even the vegetables you’re growing have that same bhakti-śakti where they want to be offered to Kṛṣṇa. You grow something and you make an offering, and it’s not just your prayers. Even the mangoes themselves want to be offered.”
When I spoke with Vaikuṇṭha in 2025, they were in their third year of serving in Honolulu. He had told the temple president, Kuśa Devī, “We’re going to help but we can’t do full time. We can do six months.” That gives Kuśa Devī a chance to do the things she needs to do in Vṛndāvana and Alachua, he says, and the arrangement has been working out. Vaikuṇṭha and Jāhnavī might have committed to more, but they had promised to help at their daughter and son-in-law’s young community in Michigan as elders for part of the year, and they also wanted to spend some time in Māyāpur.
Handing things over to younger people
Regarding helping with the management in Honolulu, Vaikuṇṭha says, “I’m going to be seventy in two and a half years—less than that. And I don’t mind soldiering on till my seventieth year if needed, but I want to leave here with some thirty-year-olds in charge. Then I would feel like we had some success. I love seeing all of us old people at maṅgala-ārati, devotees who’ve been doing this for fifty-four years and all that, but it’s scary when there’s not a bunch of young people there.”
When young people do take over, what will Vaikuṇṭha and Jāhnavī do?
“I don’t know,” he told me. “I think the torches should have been passed earlier.” Speaking about Śrīla Prabhupāda’s disciples, Vaikuṇṭha said, “Devotees of your level and your age group traveling around giving śikṣā is worth even more than the wonderful management that our senior devotees are able to do. Because management is a young man’s game, you know? It gets frustrating as you get old, and you get impatient: ‘Why do I have to do this?’ And we have Śrīla Prabhupāda’s own example: He was begging all of you to take over these things so he could write his books. And I think this is really what’s going to make the movement grow: young people hearing from the senior devotees who aren’t overburdened with management and who have the time to enlighten us, to enlighten the younger people. I really believe this with all our heart.
“We have to protect Prabhupāda’s contribution—I get that. But you can smother it too. And the wisdom that your generation of Prabhupāda disciples has that can be shared with all of us younger people, and younger than me, is enormous. And the time is running down. So just the inspiration that you can give is in my mind more valuable than the managerial expertise. So I’m really happy to see shifts going on and people stepping down from management, because the more your generation is unburdened so they can preach, the more the movement is going to flourish. And if they can just put that energy into mentoring young people. . . . Because Kṛṣṇa is going to inspire those young people in the heart to take shelter of great devotees. And just as we got trained up and we got engaged and we got inspired and we found spiritual masters and we took on responsibilities, they will too.
“People in their fifties now—in my mind these guys should have been TPs, they should have been GBCs. And they were never offered those opportunities. And not that the posts are even important, but the movement could just grow. Like in Prabhupāda’s time things were really growing because he was empowering people and he was inspiring them. They’d make mistakes and he’d correct them. But I think letting people make mistakes and correcting them might be better than preventing them from making mistakes by not letting them drive the car. I’ve just been noticing for a couple of generations now that there’s really qualified people coming up, but unless the managers go into the higher role of being parivrājakācārya preachers, those spots don’t open, and then those people get jobs and they do something else.
“I was at Alachua, and devotees were going down to do a Rathayātrā in Miami, and when I was talking to them it was their own thing because if they had tried to do it through the temple they couldn’t get authorized. But they had a whole Rathayātrā going on. So now you see all these dynamic projects that are having to be beside ISKCON. I believe in ISKCON with all my heart, but I’m just saying. . . I just think that youth empowerment is to me the most important thing right now in America because. . . nobody’s getting any younger and there’s lots of nice young people around and if they get a decade or so of really good śikṣā and guidance and mentorship and knowing that people care about them and want them to succeed. . .
“When Pañcaratna and Atītaguṇa came through [Honolulu] last spring. . . It’s nice. Sometimes you see older couples and they serve together. And I think there’s scope for that. When they were here, I had some of the younger devotees meet with them, just personally, because here are people living together so many years, they’ve done such nice service, and there’s some value in that, you know? You’re often quoted, whether you know it or not, as at some point saying that ISKCON needs more grandmothers. And I’ve shared that many times in terms of how we need to develop the Vaiṣṇava culture—and much of it is family based. Anyway, we were a generation where the pendulum had swung back because of all that happened to kids. We were a lot more like ‘We’re going to be parents.’ That probably went too far too, but at least in our life I see it’s gradually coming back to the middle, where we want to do service and we’re serving together.”
Serving together as a couple
When I asked Vaikuṇṭha whether he foresees a time when he might separate from his wife he said, “I’m not really there yet personally. I’m just being honest. I mean, yeah—one of us will die before the other one. But. . . When Guṇagrāhi Mahārāja was still alive, I was visiting him in Vṛndāvana during the last couple of years when he was doing his bhajana. And I mentioned that we were hoping to soon get more involved in sevā again, and he said, ‘Oh, so then you’ll start spending more time apart.’ And I had to tell him that actually we were hoping to spend more time together. Because the nature of our life was we were never together more than six months out of the year for the last ten years, at the most, and probably more like four months, four and a half. So, honestly, it’s been really nice for us to serve together, as a couple. And it’s been without a house and all that—we’re just staying in a little apartment in Māyāpur, a little apartment here—but at this point in time we’re actually enjoying serving together. And we are apart a lot because. . . She won’t be here all the time, as much as me, because she’ll spend time with our daughter, and. . . We’ll be here serving together, but I’ll be here a bit more than her.
“After raising a family together, it’s kind of like, ‘Okay, that part is done, but now we can serve together.’ And I’m finding it very enlivening. It’s hard for me this year because she’s not here, because she can take care of the fifty percent of the demographic of the people that come to this temple that I’m not very effective with at all and I can be a part of that also through her and she also can be a motherly figure even for some of the men because she has those kinds of qualities. They’re all people. And sometimes the feminine influence even for a temple environment can be beneficial. I’ve certainly seen that.”
For the longer term, “Our daughter and son-in-law have offered to someday have a granny flat so we’d always have a place—or she would always have a place if I die sooner.” Meanwhile, Vaikuṇṭha and Jāhnavī are also trying to finish buying that property in Māyāpur to have a little place there. “Again,” he says, “these are things for when you can’t do much anymore.”
Jāhnavī sees no need to hold on forever to a big house. She said, “I’ve found, as I’m getting older, that it’s very hard to take care of it all—the maintenance and. . . I even get bewildered with two rooms now: ‘This is too much.’ My brain is not so thick, and . . . it overwhelms.”
Vaikuṇṭha says, “I don’t see myself going towards sannyāsa or anything. That’s okay. I’m just kind of a simpleton. Obviously anything can happen, but I’m enjoying serving together, and I see it as a stage of life where she doesn’t need as much as she used to and I feel that I’m settling into this routine again, a bit more so, and it hasn’t been hard. Sometimes in gṛhastha life we’d watch a movie together once in a while—things like that—but when you’re more engaged in devotional service again you don’t really need all that stuff. That side of our relationship is winding down slowly and kind of naturally. And it’s not like one of us is trying to go into some really radical renunciation. If anything, she’s more renounced than me. But it seems to be winding down kind of naturally, where we’re serving together and we have affection for each other and we have our children together who we’re very close with. But we’re old people now, you know what I mean?”
You have a lot to offer
For vānaprasthas or prospective vānaprasthas, Vaikuṇṭha says, “Obviously everybody’s a unique individual and everybody’s situation is different. But my advice would be: If you have the desire to be more involved in the institution, it’s really worth pursuing, in my humble opinion, because there’s lots of temples that need help. And don’t underestimate the help that you can give as a mature person who was trained as a devotee and who has lived life with that training. Even if you think, ‘We were outside, and we were working,’ and all that, it’s all there, and the fact that you went on through life chanting Hare Kṛṣṇa and raising a family. . . You have a lot to offer, and ISKCON actually needs mature people to come offer their sevā. And it can be in the areas that you like. Whatever it is that you enjoy doing for Kṛṣṇa, there’s a good chance that there’s a temple near you that could easily engage you. Whether it’s going on weekends or whether it’s actually staying in a temple for periods of time, there’s definitely opportunity, and it’s very fulfilling. And Śrīla Prabhupāda said—I hope to find the purport—that these temples can actually be opportunities for people so inclined to come and serve. I think it’s really important. Our experience has been nothing but encouraging for us, in terms of feeling a meaningful stage of life. It makes you want to do your sādhana better because you’re with the devotees.”
Notes:
1 As mentioned before, Social Security is a US government system of payments for one’s welfare in old age.
This is part of a draft
This is an excerpt from a new book I have in the works—The Vānaprastha Adventure, a guide to retirement in spiritual life. The book should be published this year. Meanwhile I’ll be posting my draft here, in installments.
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