Adventures Of A Travelling Monk : A Memoir

By Indradyumna Swami

About the book

‘With my time in the Marines behind me, I gradually found myself on a personal quest for answers, a spiritual journey. I had left behind the disciplined life of a soldier and was wandering in search of meaning.’

Deeply affected by the death of his entire platoon in the Vietnam War, Lance Corporal Brian Tibbitts

embarked upon the pursuit of the real meaning and purpose of life. To his dismay, none of the major spiritual and religious texts he read could fully answer his questions, until he found Bhagavad-gita As It Is and met its author, Srila A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami, the founder of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON).

At the age of twenty-one, Brian Tibbitts became his disciple, and at the age of twenty-nine, became Indradyumna Swami when he entered the renounced order of life. Instructed by his spiritual master to ‘preach boldly and have faith in the holy names of God’, he left the USA initially for Paris. What followed over the next five decades was a rollercoaster journey across the globe. From surviving attacks in post-war Sarajevo to being mistaken for a terror suspect in North America to losing his clothes and his way amid the 125 million pilgrims at the Kumbh Mela, his life has been one adventure after another. Inspirational and engrossing, Adventures of a Travelling Monk is a riveting account of the fifty years of Indradyumna Swami’s active service in the Hare Krishna movement.