ISKCON

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ISKCON — the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, widely known as the Hare Krishna movement — is a devotional Hindu organization founded in New York City in 1966 by A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, an elderly Bengali teacher who had arrived in the United States the previous year with little money and a commission from his own guru to carry the worship of Krishna westward. Within a few years storefront temples, saffron robes, and the public chanting of the mantra Hare Krishna, Hare Rama had become one of the more visible faces of the period’s new religious ferment.

The elm in Tompkins Square Park, New York, under which Prabhupada and his followers chanted in October 1966; the city later marked it with a plaque. — David Shankbone, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The voyage and the storefront

The man the movement calls its founder-acharya was born Abhay Charan De in Calcutta on the first of September, 1896, and educated at the city’s Scottish Church College in the years of the British Raj. In 1922 he met Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati, the formidable monk-reformer whose Gauḍīya Maṭha had set out to preach Krishna devotion in a modern, organized, deliberately anti-hereditary key; eleven years later he took formal initiation, and in 1959, with his business ventures behind him and his family life dissolved, he entered the renounced order of sannyāsa as A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami. Bhaktisiddhanta had charged him with a task that must have seemed quixotic for a man already in his sixties: to carry the teaching to the English-speaking world. In September 1965 he sailed from Calcutta on a cargo steamer, the Jaladuta, suffered two heart attacks at sea, and stepped onto a Brooklyn pier with roughly seven dollars and several trunks of his own English translation of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa. He was sixty-nine, alone, and unknown.

By the spring of 1966 he had rented a small storefront at 26 Second Avenue on Manhattan’s Lower East Side — its faded sign, Matchless Gifts, was left hanging — and there, among the artists and drifters of the neighborhood, he began to lecture and to chant. On the thirteenth of July, 1966, the society was incorporated under the laws of New York State. That summer he led the chant in the open air of Tompkins Square Park, under a tree the city later marked with a plaque, and the sound drew the curious. The timing was providential: a Western generation was casting about for an unmediated experience of the sacred, and here was an old monk offering one in the simplest possible form — a name, sung aloud, on a string of beads. Within a decade the movement had spread to more than a hundred temples across the world, sustained by young converts who shaved their heads, donned robes, distributed books on the street, and remade their lives around the discipline of the holy name.

A succession, not a founding

The movement does not present itself as new. It stands within Gaudiya Vaishnavism, the tradition of ecstatic Krishna devotion that crystallized in sixteenth-century Bengal around the saint Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, whose followers hold him to have been Krishna himself, taken human form — and, in the tradition’s deeper reading, Krishna robed in the longing of his beloved Radha so as to taste his own sweetness from the devotee’s side. ISKCON understands itself not as the launch of something but as the latest authorized link in a single paramparā, a chain of disciplic succession reaching back through Chaitanya to Krishna at the beginning. Prabhupada is, in this self-understanding, neither innovator nor founder of a doctrine but a faithful carrier — the man through whom the unbroken line entered the West intact. The lineage runs concretely through his own master Bhaktisiddhanta and Bhaktisiddhanta’s father Bhaktivinoda Ṭhākura, the nineteenth-century Bengali magistrate who recovered Chaitanya’s birthplace and reframed the tradition for a literate, English-reading age; ISKCON is the twentieth-century mission limb of that revival, not its root. The parent bhakti of Bengal supplies the theology; ISKCON supplies the global reach.

This insistence on continuity is doctrinally load-bearing. To receive the teaching only through an authorized succession is, for the tradition, the very condition of receiving it truly: the Bhagavad-Gītā itself opens its fourth chapter by declaring that the knowledge was handed down through a chain of teachers and lost when the chain was broken. ISKCON reads its own existence as the repair of such a break for the wider world. The doctrinal substance carried down that chain is not Prabhupada’s own composition but the inheritance of Chaitanya’s great systematizers, the Six Gosvāmīs of Vrindavan, whose sixteenth-century Sanskrit works — Rūpa Gosvāmī’s analysis of devotional emotion as a structured aesthetic of love, Jīva Gosvāmī’s metaphysics of the inconceivable, Sanātana’s recovery of the sacred geography of Krishna’s pastimes — fixed the architecture the modern movement transmits. Prabhupada’s own books, distributed by the millions on streets and in airports, were conceived as that same inheritance made portable: not new revelation but the old teaching rendered into English and pressed into the hands of strangers, with book distribution itself understood as the central missionary act, an extension of the public chant onto the printed page.

The personalist quarrel

Its theology is firmly devotional rather than monistic. Krishna is the supreme person — svayam-bhagavān, God in his own original form rather than an avatar or expansion of some prior deity — distinct from the countless souls who are his eternal parts and parcels. The soul is an individual and permanent reality; it does not dissolve at liberation but recovers its constitutional role as a lover and servant of God. The goal of life is therefore bhakti, loving service, not the extinction of personhood in an undifferentiated absolute. On exactly this point Gauḍīya teaching has long defined itself against the non-dualism that treats the personal God as a lower, provisional appearance of an impersonal reality, and ISKCON inherits the quarrel in its sharpest form, naming the rival position Māyāvāda and treating its denial of the eternal person as the great error. The metaphysical settlement the school offers is subtle: Krishna and the soul are acintya-bhedābheda, simultaneously and inconceivably one and different — one in spiritual substance and in the soul’s utter dependence, different in that the lover never becomes the beloved. Difference is not the obstacle to union but its precondition, for only two can love. Set beside the modernizing monotheism of the Brahmo Samaj, which stripped the divine of image and form, ISKCON moves in the opposite direction entirely: toward a God supremely personal, embodied, named, worshipped in form, and approachable through emotion rather than through abstraction.

The architecture of practice

The practice is built on the holy name. Devotees chant the sixteen-word, thirty-two-syllable mahā-mantra — Hare Kṛṣṇa, Hare Kṛṣṇa, Kṛṣṇa Kṛṣṇa, Hare Hare; Hare Rāma, Hare Rāma, Rāma Rāma, Hare Hare — softly on a strand of beads in private and aloud in congregational kīrtana in the temple and the street. The mantra’s three names address Krishna, his pleasure potency Radha (Hare, in the vocative), and Rama, a name read here both as Krishna’s own and as the avatar the Vaishnava tradition reveres; the verbal form descends from a short minor Upanishad, the Kali-Santaraṇa, and was made the public banner of the movement by Chaitanya himself, who chanted it through the streets of Bengal against the prohibition of the local magistrate. The conviction beneath the practice is that in the age of kali — the present, degenerate epoch in the Hindu reckoning of the ages of the world — the sounded name of God and God himself are not different, so that to utter the name attentively is already to be in his presence. Congregational chanting is held to be the yuga-dharma, the religious work proper to this age, replacing the elaborate sacrifice and austerity of earlier eras with something a child can do.

Congregational kirtana, the call-and-response chanting of the holy names that ISKCON holds to be the religious practice proper to the present age. — via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.5)

Around this center stands a discipline of life. The convert accepts four regulative principles: a strict vegetarian diet, with food first offered to Krishna and then taken as sanctified prasāda; abstention from all intoxicants, including coffee and tea; abstention from gambling; and abstention from sex outside of marriage entered into for the begetting of children. The day is shaped by early rising, deity worship of the consecrated images installed in the temple, and study — above all of the Bhagavad-Gītā, which Prabhupada issued in 1968 and completed in 1972 as a heavily glossed edition, Bhagavad-gītā As It Is, that remains the movement’s standard text, and of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, the vast Krishna scripture whose translation he never finished and whose later cantos his disciples completed after his death. The deity in the temple is not an emblem of God but, in the tradition’s understanding, God’s own willing descent into a worshippable form; the cooking, dressing, and serving of the deity, like the chanting, are conceived as direct service to a present person. The whole of it rests on a settled metaphysics of rebirth: the soul transmigrates through bodies under the law of karma until devotion lifts it free, restoring it at last to Krishna’s eternal abode, the pastoral heaven the tradition calls Goloka.

The crisis of the succession

After Prabhupada’s death in November 1977 the society passed through the turbulence that besets a charismatic movement when its single irreplaceable center is gone. The founder had, months before, named eleven senior disciples to act as ṛtvik — officiating representatives who would conduct initiations on his behalf. Within months of his passing the Governing Body Commission, the managerial council he had established in 1970, resolved at its meeting in Mayapur, India, that these eleven were now themselves initiating gurus, each assigned a geographic zone over which he held near-absolute spiritual authority. The arrangement, later called the zonal acharya system, in effect multiplied the founder’s unique role elevenfold, and it failed badly. Several of the new gurus fell into scandal or left; the concentration of authority bred abuses; longtime members departed in disillusion. Through the 1980s and after, reform dismantled the system, widened the circle of those permitted to initiate, subordinated the gurus to the collective oversight of the Governing Body Commission, and shifted the movement toward a more institutional and less personally charismatic model of authority. The dispute over what Prabhupada had actually intended — and in particular whether he meant the ṛtvik arrangement to continue after his death rather than to yield living gurus — split off a dissenting ṛtvik movement that holds Prabhupada to be the sole dīkṣā guru of the society in perpetuity, a contention ISKCON’s central institutions reject.

A graver reckoning came over the gurukula boarding schools, into which many devotee parents had placed their children in the movement’s first decades. Abuse — physical, sexual, and emotional — had gone unchecked at several of these schools in the 1970s and 1980s, and in 2000 former students brought suit in federal court in Texas. ISKCON entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization in 2002, and a settlement approved in 2005 provided roughly nine and a half million dollars to several hundred former students. The episode forced an institutional honesty the movement had been slow to reach, and it remains the darkest passage in its history, soberly acknowledged in its own later accounting.

From convert sect to diaspora temple

Scholarship has tracked a further, quieter transformation. The sociologist E. Burke Rochford, who has studied the movement since the 1970s, describes in Hare Krishna Transformed (2007) a shift over several decades from a counter-cultural convert movement — communal, ascetic, oppositional, often described in its early years as a cult by hostile observers and treated as such by the wider anti-cult reaction of the 1970s — toward a more settled institution. The early devotees aged, married, moved out of the temple compounds into jobs and nuclear families; the communal economy of book distribution gave way to a congregational membership that lives at home and visits the temple on holy days.

The ISKCON temple at Bangalore, illuminated at dusk; in many cities such temples now function as ordinary houses of Hindu worship. — Hemant Meena, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Decisively, the temples filled with a constituency Prabhupada had not principally aimed at: Hindus of the South Asian diaspora, for whom an ISKCON temple is simply a place to see Krishna, hear the scriptures, and keep the festivals — an ordinary house of worship rather than a radical commitment. The movement that began as a Western counter-culture has become, in many cities, the working Hindu temple of its neighborhood, its congregation Indian, its calendar the familiar round of Vaishnava feasts. The great pilgrimage centers it built at Mayapur in Bengal and at Vrindavan, the land of Krishna’s childhood, anchor it now in the geography its theology had always pointed toward.

The main gate of the ISKCON complex at Mayapur in Bengal, one of the movement’s two great pilgrimage centers. — Joydeep, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The Pushpa Samadhi Mandir at Mayapur, the marble memorial shrine of the movement’s founder-acharya. — Joydeep, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

The textual and scholarly record

ISKCON’s own canon is recent and copyrighted: the Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, founded in 1972, publishes Prabhupada’s translations and commentaries — the Bhagavad-gītā As It Is, the multivolume Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam with its purports, the seventeen-volume rendering of Kṛṣṇadāsa Kavirāja’s Caitanya-caritāmṛta, and The Nectar of Devotion, an English condensation of Rūpa Gosvāmī’s Bhakti-rasāmṛta-sindhu. These remain the texts the movement reads. The older devotional scripture beneath them is open: the Bhagavad-Gītā, which ISKCON reads as Krishna’s own direct instruction, exists in many public-domain English versions, among them Edwin Arnold’s verse rendering in the Library.

The movement is unusual among new religious bodies in having attracted a sustained and serious scholarly literature, much of it produced in dialogue with the tradition rather than against it. The standard sociological account of its maturation is E. Burke Rochford’s Hare Krishna Transformed (New York University Press, 2007), which traces the passage from communal convert sect to diaspora-sustained congregation. The fullest collective reckoning with the post-1977 succession and the abuse of the boarding schools is Edwin Bryant and Maria Ekstrand’s edited volume The Hare Krishna Movement: The Postcharismatic Fate of a Religious Transplant (Columbia University Press, 2004), in which scholars and senior devotees write side by side. The settlement of the gurukula abuse litigation in 2005 stands in the public record; the movement’s evolving doctrine of guru authority is set out by its own Governing Body Commission. For the sixteenth-century theology the movement carries, the indispensable academic translation is Edward C. Dimock and Tony K. Stewart’s edition of the Caitanya-caritāmṛta in the Harvard Oriental Series (1999), and the foundational philological history is Sushil Kumar De’s Early History of the Vaiṣṇava Faith and Movement in Bengal (1942).

What began as an unlikely transplant has become, on the evidence, a durable one.

→ In the library: The Bhagavad-Gītā (Arnold, 1885)

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