History of Gaudiya Vaishnavism (6)

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
tai gaur vimande so in the last class we discussed about the dramatic expansion of Krishna consciousness under the stewardship of Shila Prabhupada just as dramatic was the expansion during his manifest presence with us it was almost as much traumatic for the followers of Shila Prabhupada when he departed from the world in 1977 of course Shila Prabhupada had prepared them for his imminent departure by inviting them to take up responsibilities right from 1968 onwards when he said I am an old man, I can pass away anytime, please carry on this Krishna consciousness movement and Shila Prabhupada created a system for management, the GBC he gave his own example of how to live and then he gave an example of how to leave from this world so Shila Prabhupada did practically all that was possible for an individual to carry on the legacy during his own lifetime and to set up the framework for it to be continued after him in general when a charismatic leader departs the movement that he has founded faces a great crisis and for many movements that are personality cults the crisis can be fatal His Holiness Jaidwaj Maharaj has given a series of lectures called Unity in Perversity not diversity but perversity the idea is that many times his devotees were a little disturbed why ISKCON was having some problems and this and that then he gives an analysis of what happened after the departure of Buddha in Buddhism, Buddhism got split into two there was Mahayana and Hinayana Hinayana is also called Theravada Buddhism and that split continued till today after Jesus Christ departed through crucifixion his movement was almost devastated but it was his followers who somehow on the 40th day after his departure got the conviction that Jesus had not died like an ordinary mortal but he has been crucified, he has been raised from the grave and then they got a feeling of the presence, the spirit of God came over them and empowered them so their response to the demise of Jesus was critical for the subsequent spread of Christianity but nonetheless there was a lot of confusion about what exactly were the teachings of Jesus and what he had said and what he had done so even today there are books like The Historical Jesus which point out how the historicity of Jesus, the historical accuracy of many of the incidents involving Jesus are strongly questionable in the Bible only there are two books so one book says how Jesus was very peaceful and composed and he said when he was about to be crucified forgive them for they know not what they do but in another book it is described that Jesus was actually very scared and practically he did not speak anything during the last moments and then just before he died in pain he said oh father why have you forsaken me and saying this he passed away so now these two depictions of Jesus are radically different Christian theologians try to explain it by saying that even a devoted soul may at times be overwhelmed by the near death situation so Luke portrays Jesus in a very positive way Mark portrays Jesus in a very not negative but a fearful way so this is just one example which indicates that leave alone the teachings but even the incidents become a matter of debate probably the worst succession crisis that has happened in the major religions was after the death of Mohammed to a large extent Mohammed was Mohammed had to use a lot of violence and the people around him were people who were quite violent themselves so it does seem from the historical evidence that he appointed one particular person he considered Ali as among his most trustworthy associates and to a large extent Ali was supposed to become his successor but at that time there were other people who sort of conspired against him and took over the power and there were so many of the Imams and the leaders who were practically killed at that time so like this in general whenever the charismatic leader departs there is chaos that results and in general most organisations which are personality cults within one generation of the departure of the charismatic leader the whole organisation crumbles into debris now in the case of Shila Prabhupada there were both positives and negatives the positive was that Shila Prabhupada’s words were quite well documented because the devotees right in the beginning from 1966-67 they realised that we should record everything and although the Veda base is not a complete record of what Shila Prabhupada said but it is still quite a large record and it is much much larger than what we have of any of the earlier personalities that I talked about so at least to some extent what Shila Prabhupada spoke is unambiguous of course that is not all that he spoke but a large part of it and of course there can be interpretations of what he meant by what he spoke but at least at a ground level what he spoke is clear but there were also negatives in the sense that the generation gap between the founder and his successors has never been as great in religious history as it was between Shila Prabhupada and his successors Jesus was about the same age as his followers, maybe a little older, Muhammad was older and his followers were more or less a little below his age or of his age, they were all more or less capable of becoming successors but in the case of Shila Prabhupada he was he was almost an 80 year old man and his oldest leaders were around 33 or 35 so and as if that was not challenging enough, the age gap but Shila Prabhupada arguably expected higher levels of spiritual dedication and mental renunciation than all the other previous teachers especially in an environment which was far more provocative than what was there in the past so from the point of view of organisational history, the transition of ISKCON from Prabhupada to the post-Prabhupada phase was a recipe for disaster because of the high standards expected, because of the huge generation gap because of the immature and sometimes impious background of the subsequent leaders and it is to the great credit of ISKCON that and of course the first generation leaders of ISKCON that ISKCON has not only survived but has also, at least in several parts of the world, flourished so the first major challenge that any organisation faces or any movement faces the movement may not yet be organised from the departs, any movement faces so movement basically indicates some kind of action whereas organisation indicates that there is some sort of structure, hierarchy and coordination such that Prabhupada often uses the Krishna Consciousness movement where ultimately we are meant to move and get things done and the organisation is also for that particular purpose but organisations can sometimes become become the storehouses for the vested interests and the status quo and then the movement practically dies out and just the organisation stays so in that sense, the word movement and organisation, although we sometimes use them equivalently, they are not always equivalent and organised religion has got a lot of bad names the Catholic Church has a very dubious history of of huge political machinations and conspiracies and corruption and the like of course not everything in the Catholic Church is negative the Catholic Church also has its positives in what it has accomplished for Christianity, but in general organised religion has its problems so in general when a charismatic founder departs then there are two ways that the movement can continue one is called the transfer of charisma and the second is called the routinization of charisma so the transfer of charisma means a successor has more or less similar charisma to the leader, it may not be as much, generally it will not be as much at least not in the eyes of the equals of the charisma of that particular successor but if that leader has charisma then he can become the next charismatic leader and continue the movement but in most cases the successor can never match or even continue the charisma of the founder and so what happens is often called as a routinization of charisma routinization of charisma means that a body or an institution is created and that institution becomes the representation or representative of the founder and no one person has the authority but that body, that forum becomes the supreme authority now traditionally Hinduism has been personality centred not personality cult in the sense that personality cult conveys a negative connotation in the sense that that personality does not have any predecessors and that personality does not have any successors that person just appears and by his charisma attracts people so we can have that in sports, we can have that in movies, you know it’s not that in sports or in movies in entertainment, there are people who become very famous, very charismatic they may be in the material sense but it’s not that they inherited any authority from a previous person and not that they hand over the authority to the next person so personality cult means there are no generally speaking there are no predecessors and there are no successors the followers adulate that particular person as the one and only with no historical context but still so Hinduism and the eastern religions in general both Hinduism and Hinduism, they are not personality personality cults but they are still personality centred traditional way of continuing any matha has been that the mathadipati appoints a successor so Madhacharya he appointed not one but twelve successors and then they have the pariyaya where the Udupi centrality is worshipped by the different different leaders of the different groups so like that, the traditional way was that the charisma is the Indian way of doing things or the eastern way of doing things is to is the transfer of charisma and then depending on the competence and the potency of the successor, the movement can go on the the way of the Abrahamic religions is the routinization of charisma in general, the pope is surely the topmost authority in the catholic church but still there is a whole body and the pope is not considered to be the personal saviour of the followers nor is the bishop of a particular church considered to be the saviour of the people who are coming to the church so neither the pope nor the bishop have the relationship of a spiritual master and disciple that is there in the Vedic context so they certainly have to have some charisma if they are going to attract people but their primary authority, but they are a part of a body of how things move forward so now for theoretical purposes we can separate the two we can talk about transfer of charisma and routinization of charisma but actually in reality it’s not so black and white because even when there is routinization of charisma, the movement will continue only when within the body there are some people who are charismatic and even when there is transfer of charisma there has to be some amount of routinization because there will be different groups and not all of the groups will be able to accept one charismatic leader except the successor as a unquestioned leader so whenever we have any analytical categories to describe any historical or sociological or psychological you remember these are the categories in which academicians try to explain religion historical, psychological, sociological and of course pseudoscientific so whenever we apply any analytical categories or historical, sociological psychological phenomena the analytical categories are never like digital logic this or this, one or zero they are more like analogue systems there is a succession there is a smooth, there is a continuum which moves from one extreme to the other extreme so now Srila Prabhupada and Bhakta Chandra Thakur were the first in our sampradaya to sort of organise Gaudiya Vaishnavism in a structured way so as I had mentioned earlier the protestant churches which were proselytising quite successfully at least vigorously in Bengal and then later on all over India during the time of Bhakta Chandra Thakur and afterwards also so they were quite well organised and our acharyas felt that if we have to spread we also need organisation in one sense in Kalyug the challenge is great for spiritual leaders because in earlier ages the organisational aspect was taken care of by kshatriyas and the knowledge dissemination aspect was taken care by brahmanas and these two roles were well divided and when there was cooperation between the two then both the organisation would go on well and the knowledge dissemination would also go on well but now because the kshatriyas at least those who are playing kshatriya roles the government administrators and other powers to be have very little spiritual inclination and the social ethos does not allow spiritual dissemination to happen very conducively because of the idea of secularism so therefore the spiritual organisations themselves actually is gone has to have leaders who blend both roles, who play both the roles of knowledge disseminators and organisers and Srila Prabhupada himself did both and Srila Prabhupada said that we want brahmanas with the kshatriya spirit so that is a challenge when two roles have to be blended because the kshatriya role to some extent brings passion and involves a lot of interaction with the material energy and the brahmana role requires goodness and it requires to some extent minimisation of the interaction with material energy so this is a challenge that is practically unprecedented that we as devotees and especially our leaders have to face in playing two roles at the same time so of course Srila Prabhupada was not involved in the hands on management except for the early days but still he was always available for his managers and all major managerial decisions were ultimately referred back to him for final approval if the GBC body had taken the decision or for the decision making itself if the GBC body had not been able to arrive at a decision so now when Srila Prabhupada departed in one sense Srila Prabhupada blended both this transfer of charisma and routinization of charisma he appointed the GBC as the highest body and he told that the GBC will work by democratic means there will be voting and then the GBC members can elect more GBC members by a majority vote whenever they feel that others are qualified so this having a sort of forum is routinization of charisma but along with that he also appointed gurus who would and they were in one so the GBC was his organisational successor or in one sense the managerial successor and the gurus were his spiritual successors but interestingly Srila Prabhupada said that the gurus are under the GBC so if the GBC is a managerial successor the GBC has authority over the gurus who are the spiritual successors so it was a little confusing system and initially after Srila Prabhupada departed the gurus made their own sort of guru board and they considered that to be a lead group higher than the GBC also and they used to take all the final decisions but eventually it was found that that was not what Srila Prabhupada’s desire was and so then the guru that particular sub-forum within the GBC of the gurus alone that was disbanded so now currently in the GBC the gurus and the non-gurus they all sit on the same pedestal they all are treated as equal members and the gurus votes count as much as the non-gurus vote in the GBC so after Srila Prabhupada departed the GBC had to take over the management of ISKCON and especially for the first decade after Srila Prabhupada’s departure there was considerable upheaval but overall after that things started stabilising and during Srila Prabhupada’s times our movement spread primarily in America there were significant successes in Europe also but as I said the successes in Europe were more in terms of mass outreach rather than grassroots solidification so many people became sort of attracted through George Harrison and through the music but as far as solidification and becoming a large number of devotees that happened primarily in America so during Srila Prabhupada’s time America was like the powerhouse of ISKCON and that’s why we will see that among the first generation leaders of ISKCON most of them are western-bodied of course we should not see Vaishnavas from a material point of view but when we are looking at it from a historical perspective we can just note these facts without giving them any undue importance so the primary leadership of ISKCON during Srila Prabhupada’s time and after him was largely American-bodied or at least western-bodied and during Srila Prabhupada’s time ISKCON in India had a lot of public visibility but limited recruitment there were several reasons for this, last time I mentioned how the Indians could accept the followers the western western Hare Krishna devotees as evidences of the glory of their own culture but there was no way that they could accept these young Hare Krishna devotees as their own spiritual teachers that was one reason that Srila Prabhupada spent a lot of time in India solidifying our movement but overall the number of followers, committed followers that we got during Prabhupada’s time was less so there are many reasons for that, historically speaking at that time there was a cold war between Russia between USSR and USA and India although it was a part of the non-alignment movement nominally it was a part of the non-alignment movement but it was to a large extent aligned with USSR to some extent because Pakistan was getting support from USA so India needed some super power support and because of that in general everything American was seen suspiciously and even I was accused of being CIA agents and the sensation that was created by seeing western people wearing dhoti kurta and sarees was of course also accompanied by suspicion about the motives of these people and one of the challenges that Srila Prabhupada faced was that for his Indian leaders they could not get continuous visas to stay always in India that’s why they had to keep going and coming and keep going and coming and Srila Prabhupada during his meetings with Indian leaders always, this was one of the prominent issues that he brought up so to some extent Srila Prabhupada was disappointed with the lack of commitment among Indians in his movement and the lack of cooperation from the Indian government and Indian community at large within India now because our movement was largely based in America during the Prabhupada and post Prabhupada times so a lot of upheavals happened in America and that’s why the strength of the movement in America got diminished but at the same time within India the movement kept becoming stronger and stronger and now by all standards India is the powerhouse of Iskcon in terms of the number of devotees in terms of financial resources in terms of number of temple residents in terms of book distribution in terms of number of temples built or number of temples existing and maintained so largely Iskcon is now having its greatest success in India and secondly it has a good amount of success in Russia, Ukraine and other CIS states in that sense the succession crisis hit American Iskcon more than Indian Iskcon and most of us we were probably introduced to Iskcon after the whole succession trauma was over and we have seen our first generation leaders our spiritual master and his god brothers in many ways exemplary and inspirational and we have been living in a relatively stable phase of Iskcon but that stability has come after a lot of chaos and it is to the credit of the first generation leaders that despite whatever problems came up so there is a western scholar so he says that Iskcon had a very volatile setting internally and a very hostile environment externally so why volatile internally because there were so many difficulties that some of the leaders faced and so this is professor Larry D. Shinn he says the impressive fact for any careful observer of Iskcon’s history is that it has been able to evolve in a very short time from a charismatic movement to a relatively stable institution in the face of a hostile external environment and a volatile governing structure within so the hostile environment was especially in terms of in America especially there was the brainwashing case and the whole anti-cult movement which created a lot of problems and the volatile governing structure because as I said the whole idea of having both gurus and GVC was sometimes a little confusing for people and for even the leaders sometimes because the gurus traditionally are considered to be absolute authorities but if the guru is an absolute authority then how can the guru be under the GVC and if the gurus are supposed to be representatives of Krishna, if the gurus are supposed to be the spiritual legacy carriers of Srila Prabhupada, how can they be under the manual authority so overall that sort of confusion was there and especially when some of the leaders had problems we will not go into the details of any names of cases over here because we are looking at the broad historical outlines here especially when the leaders had problems and some of them quite a few of them had some problems so that led to questions about the system that Srila Prabhupada had set up so one of the one of the questions that came up was what is known as the Skon reform movement which we know as the Rithvik movement so the Rithviks have their own philosophy which has no precedent in Gaudiya Vaishnavism not only no precedent in Gaudiya Vaishnavism, there is no precedent in the all of Vedic history the idea that one can take initiation from a spiritual master who has already departed and on my website there is an article about this and you can have a look at the article if you are interested, so this explains what all is wrong with the Rithvik philosophy but the point was although there was something it was completely unprecedented still this idea gained ground because the feeling was that there was something seriously wrong with the system as it existed now so to the extent that the followers of Srila Prabhupada whether they be first generation or second generation leaders can actually take up the spiritual responsibility properly, this sort of unusual and and unsubstantiated misconceptions will not come so in general the Rithvik has been strongly countered by the ISKCON leadership but we have to go to the root cause of that, the root cause was not just the idea of philosophical deviation but it was more of the organisational upheavals that happened and the feeling that something is intrinsically wrong and something has to be settled right in that way but overall as I said the movement has succeeded in not only stabilising itself but in spreading quite widely so one of the remarkable successes has been in India in India where we had very committed followers, we now have largest number of followers and especially the credit for this goes to the Indian ISKCON leaders and when we look at the because we have been in India and we are trying to understand the strategies over here the historical patterns and the whole idea of what comprises the historical understanding of Gaudiya Vaishnavism so we will focus on the Indian situation to a large extent.
One of the marked changes that can be seen since Shila Prabhupada’s time is the change from a confrontationalist to a largely non-confrontationalist approach so if we look at Shila Prabhupada’s writings and talks, Shila Prabhupada will often say, use words like rascals and fools and some of ISKCON devotees thought that because Shila Prabhupada did that, we also have to do that but that alienated a large number of people for several reasons first reason was that they did not have the spiritual advancement and compassion that Shila Prabhupada had they did not have the advantage of old age, which gives Shila Prabhupada that grandfatherly authority in most contexts and most importantly they themselves did not have the exemplary behaviour and after calling others rascals, they themselves were found to be wanting in their behaviour so and overall, if we look at Shila Prabhupada’s approach in general because we have an unbridled Kshatriya within us and our false ego gets us out of delight in whacking other people’s conceptions so we often take on the imagery and the language of war without understanding and assimilating the compassionate purpose of outreach so I’ll repeat this what happens is because we have an ego and especially when we join an organisation which has values radically different from the mainstream culture in the world then there is a sort of insecurity within us, am I doing the right thing and that insecurity we try to cover up by saying that everybody else is wrong and everybody else is fools and rascals and indirectly we are right so now when we do it often the imagery of war they are bad and we are good and they are evil and we are pious and things like that that imagery of confrontation actually is permeated or underlaid with a mission of compassion Shri Prabhupada spoke strongly but he was able to transform hearts of people we speak strongly and we only activate the egos of people and alienate them so we have to present the siddhanta in a uncompromised way we cannot change the contents of the siddhanta but we have to present it in a way that is appealing to people so that normally outreach is like bridge building so imagine we are on one mountain, that is the mountain of Krishna Consciousness and the whole world is another mountain that mountain is of materialistic understandings or misunderstandings now our outreach is meant to build a bridge from one mountain to another so that people can cross over and come to Krishna Consciousness and yes people’s misconceptions have to be questioned and removed but that is only after they have developed some initial faith in Krishna Consciousness so it’s like when we build a bridge and when people come across from that bridge from that side of the mountain to the devotional side of the mountain then we need to break the bridge so that people don’t go back but imagine if we break the bridge before people have come across then what happens? people either stay where they are or sometimes they fall down from the bridge down right below only that means that if you look at Srila Prabhupada’s usage of confrontationalist language and especially value judgemental language in terms of fools and rascals that comes largely in his conversations which were to total committed insiders Prabhupada would go early morning on walks and that was the time when most of his leaders and especially his disciples were there with him and if you look at it this language is minimum in his books which were what he expected to have distributed widely so now if we start using the study that Srila Prabhupada used the words and the language and the metaphors that Srila Prabhupada used with committed insiders we start using that for outsiders then we alienate people we are like breaking the bridge before it is built also so this is one aspect as I said parampara involves both continuation and adaptation or rather we can say adoption and adaptation both are required so the essence of pure devotional service and the core philosophical message has to be adopted as one’s own but its presentation and some of the peripheral aspects need to be adapted so currently within the school also we have what is normally there in every institution there is a debate between the liberals and the conservatives but its very difficult to define anybody within ISKCON as a liberal because the four regulative principles make from the worldly point of view even the most liberal ISKCON devotee an ultra conservative because the whole idea of regulating self gratification and following four regulative principles chanting sixteen rounds very few other organisations ask for this sort of commitment so that’s why that vocabulary has to be used with caution within us because overall ISKCON is strongly sticking to the tradition in terms of the rigidness of the commitments required by the same time there is that ongoing dynamic which sometimes becomes a confrontation about what all in Srila Prabhupada’s legacy is eternal and what is contextual so if we look at Srila Prabhupada’s life himself itself, we will see that Srila Prabhupada was very dynamic as I mentioned last time, Srila Prabhupada had different strategies for different places he focused on Buddhist tradition in America but temple construction in India so the way he dealt with his disciples was also dynamic he dealt with different devotees in different ways and in different situations he for example somebody might say that Prabhupada I am doing my body building I want to have strong muscles Prabhupada would say you are not the body it’s just a waste of time but then there is another Hindi lecture of Srila Prabhupada where somewhere in north India Srila Prabhupada is taken to a Akhada where the people over there are building their bodies and they have a imagery of Hanuman over there Hanuman is considered inspiration for these people in the Akhada and you just look at Srila Prabhupada’s speech, beautiful it is Prabhupada says so all of you are building your body and having strong muscles that is very important because for a good society we need both Brahma and Kshatriyas, so we are providing the Brahmana so you become the Kshatriyas and it is good that you have Hanuman ji over here so along with building muscles strongly like him you should also chant the names of God like him so whenever you are doing sitting up and getting up, sitting down and getting up and every time you are doing this just say Ram Hare Ram Hare Krishna Hare Ram Hare Krishna and Srila Prabhupada was very dynamic in his preaching approach so that’s why overall the words of a person don’t represent the totality of the person the person Srila Prabhupada was in one sense quite he used say women are less intelligent quite frequently but if we look at the way he dealt with his women disciples he was very very loving and compassionate and never did any Mataji disciple Srila Prabhupada feel that that he treated them as less intelligent so now what happened with him was that to some extent because of Srila Prabhupada’s strong speech speaking about renunciation and his repeated glorification of renunciation especially of sex pleasure and Sannyas and Brahmacharya and his repeated strong statements against the attachment and bondage of householder life one of the consequences, unfortunate consequences of this was that the generation born within ISKCON was largely neglected the children instead of being seen as gifts of God were seen as products of temptation and that was very unfortunate and that is very non-chaste, non-devotional way of looking at things so because of that we have now the Gurukul where most of the people who most of the children who were born in ISKCON are often keeping ISKCON at arm’s length where they don’t want to associate too strongly with ISKCON and they don’t feel very committed to ISKCON that is because they did not get a sort of loving environment and they did not get the culture of loving and protective home so of course this is a complex issue and the important point was that now as devotees have gone deeper into Srila Prabhupada’s books and there are several devotees who have written Srila Prabhupada’s books on Srila Prabhupada’s direction for Granth Ashram for example and Srila Prabhupada has said many positive and encouraging things about if somebody is going to become a Grantha what all he needs to do, how the children are to be taken care of how the family is to be maintained and Srila Prabhupada was of course very practical and devotional both. So unfortunately some aspects of Srila Prabhupada’s teachings are emphasised and others are minimised or denigrated so we have the phenomenon of the generation born within ISKCON is having a lot of difficulty with ISKCON and if we see the second generation of ISKCON leadership that is coming practically none of the second generation leaders of ISKCON are from those who were born to the first generation leaders of ISKCON all the practically all the second generation leaders are those who were preached by the first generation leaders and no doubt this would be disappointing to Srila Prabhupada of course this is no way to minimise those who have taken up the responsibility of second generation leadership but this is to point out that that if we just take the words of Srila Prabhupada and don’t understand the culture within which Srila Prabhupada was speaking so now if we go back to 19th century and early 20th century English, the word rascal did not have the strong negative connotation that it has now in my website there is an article on extrinsic misconceptions in the Bhagavad Gita so there you can see how Srila Prabhupada is actually using the word rascal in a very compassionate way he is not using it in a value judgemental or a angry or vindictive way so Srila Prabhupada says the only concern of the devotees is that so many rascals are suffering in the concocted civilisation of illusory enjoyment so how can they be saved so our Krishna consciousness movement is made for that saving the rascals so we are not meant to just call rascals rascals but we are meant to save them so the point is that Srila Prabhupada’s usage of language was motivated by compassion whereas we may use the same language and our motivation may be entirely different so that’s why we need to understand what is Srila Prabhupada’s legacy we have to understand the culture in which Srila Prabhupada lived and the culture which Srila Prabhupada transmitted both through his example and through the example of his predecessors so as of now gradually that is happening and to some extent the confrontational approach that Srila Prabhupada used was highly successful in America because the hippies themselves were highly confrontationalist they had the idea that the government, the education system, the religion, the politicians everybody stinks and then they had this idea that all of them were bad and from their point of view along came Srila Prabhupada and he gave them philosophical justification for calling all of them as rascals and that approached Srila Prabhupada very nicely with them but in India there is an overall culture see in the west overall there is a culture of respect is very much lacking as Radhanath Maharaj often quotes the hippies had the idea never trust anyone above 30 or 40 or whatever so in India still there is a culture of respect and anybody who is seen as seen as saintly irrespective of whether that person is saintly or not is accorded a certain amount of respect and sweeping statements of value judgement can alienate a lot of people so apart from the decrease in confrontationalist approach another thing that happened within ISKCON after Srila Prabhupada departed was the shift from a temple based community to a congregation based community in Prabhupada’s time practically devotee meant you lived in the temple if you go out of the temple that means you are blooped the idea that somebody could practise Krishna consciousness outside the temple was not very easily understood or accepted because at that time even the Grahastha stayed in the temples but after Srila Prabhupada departed for some time the Buddhist division went on very nicely in America especially but then gradually as the anti-cult movement became stronger and because of various reasons the appeal of the movement went down one of the reasons was also the excessively aggressive and sometimes deceptive tactics used by the Buddhist to distribute books they alienated a lot of people so what happened was the young American devotees had a lot of passion and in the name of passion they thought that we have to distribute books somehow or the other Srila Prabhupada only once used the word by hook or proof distribute books but immediately after that he was asked later what does hook or proof mean Prabhupada then said that you should use your intelligence and somehow persuade the person to take books but many times instead of using intelligence to persuade the person to take books some deceptive tactics were used to distribute books so because of that the general American public got alienated and then book distribution especially in the 80s came crashing down and when book distribution came crashing down suddenly the temples were short of funds and when the temples were short of funds devotees who were staying in the temples were a little uncompassionately told to leave the temple and fend for themselves and that was very difficult because those devotees had lived for 10-12 years within the movement and they had cut themselves off from the world suddenly they had to go back into the world so that also alienated a lot of people but overall the this resulted in ISKCON spreading wider that it happened in America and it happened especially in India that while a lot of people did join the movement here as full-time devotees a large number of people felt that they did not want to join full-time devotees as become full-time devotees but at the same time they wanted to practise and practise seriously and during Srila Prabhupada’s time there was practically no concept of a weekly congregation programme that concept came almost a decade after Srila Prabhupada departed there were occasional programmes were there but they were more sort of donor cultivation programmes or well-wisher programmes but the idea of systematic cultivation of a congregation of devotees in the religious context the word congregation means any group of religious people who come together congregate means to come together, who come together for religious purpose but in the ISKCON context the word congregation has been redefined and it is largely used to mean devotees were married so the whole idea that there can be devotees who stay outside the temple and who are still committed to practising Krishna Consciousness that took root after in the post-Srila Prabhupada phase of ISKCON and to some extent that is essential for the stabilisation and the widespread dissemination of the movement and its values because in the long run the number of people who are going to renounce the world and become Brahmacharis and Sanyasis is going to be limited of course the more that they will be the primary work force of the movement they will be the people who so I was saying how for the widespread stabilisation and dissemination of the movement the development of a congregation is important because the number of people who are going to renounce the world and dedicate themselves as Brahmacharis and renunciates is always going to be limited and even in the Vedic culture’s vision most of the people will become grahasthas so to create systems by which grahasthas can continue and practise Krishna Consciousness that is very important and among the various successes of ISKCON in the post-Srila Prabhupada generation objectively speaking there is a nice book written by western scholars 40 years of chant and change in that one of the scholars says that that the ISKCON chaupati project is a prime example of a project that was initiated after the departure of Srila Prabhupada and that has become one of the successful projects so this indicates the vibrancy of the movement we have other successful projects also we have the Delhi project also which was initiated by Srila Prabhupada but it was largely developed by post-Prabhupada disciples, we have Tirupati also which was developed after Srila Prabhupada so this is not a self-serving glorification for us but the point is that there are healthy signs the movement is going on in a stable way at least in India it has taken strong roots and the current challenge before ISKCON to a large extent is the ability to maintain the purity and sanctity of its principles while at the same time not alienating the people in the current changing cultural situations so that has been done to some extent by the leaders and that will have to continue to be done by successive generations of leaders so probably when the Vedic planetarium comes up that is also going to lead to some sort of confrontation with modern science in a head-on way because Vedic cosmology is difficult to understand in terms of modern science in fact the Bhagavatam says that even Brahma cannot understand the full universe in full so even if we have Brahmaji in our construction team for making the planetarium still we would have our difficulties so the difficulties are natural and to some extent this challenge with modernity and post-modernity and how we navigate it in a way that doesn’t compromise our connection with tradition at the same time it doesn’t compromise our intelligibility and appeal to the contemporary situation this is what all the Acharyas in the tradition have done and this is what we will also have to do and our seminary is probably one of the projects which is working in this direction during let’s conclude with a couple of points now during the Prabhupada centennial in 1996 and the Prabhupada 108 anniversary celebrations in 2004 there was both a mood of introspection as well as a mood of exhilaration because on one side we have to learn a lot and our movement has learned a lot at the same time it has been significantly successful and the successes have been in terms of the global outreach of Krishna Bhakti the beautiful and appealing standards of deity worship all over the world the huge distribution of the Prabhupada books and a large number of devotees from all over the world who come every year for yatras and god potra festivals and who are practising in their own way in different parts of the world so if we look at ISKCON’s history from 1966 when it was founded to 2012 46 years now despite whatever difficulties that were there the growth has been remarkable ISKCON has spread very widely all over the world now it has to spread deeply wherever we are we have to make the devotees stronger but the widespread itself is historical and according to one social historian if the way ISKCON has spread in its first 36 years if it spreads even at half of its space in the next 500 years it will become the world’s largest movement of course 500 years are a long time and Krishna and Lord Chaitanya Mahaprabhu will send in every generation responsible leaders and souls will have to take up responsibilities in each generation to carry on the movement when we understand the history of our movement one of the things that it brings to our mind is the sense of responsibility our spiritual master and his generation they have done their role in stabilising and spreading the movement and the responsibility for glorifying Krishna in our generation is on us we can seek strength and inspiration from the previous acharyas but they are not going to glorify Krishna in this generation in their generation they glorified they gave their teachings for all time to come but the responsibility of representing and glorifying Krishna in our generation is entirely upon us and upon us means that everyone of us has to feel not on everyone else except me but on me and when we have that sense of responsibility which is a sacred tradition which has been continued for hundreds and thousands of years we have been fortunate enough to be drafted into the membership of that tradition and now we are also interested in the sacred responsibility of continuing on that tradition and yes it is Chaitanya Mahaprabhu’s mission and he has said that it will spread for 10,000 years and it will spread and in every generation as it is Krishna, Lord Chaitanya Mahaprabhu will send representatives who will take up the responsibility for the movement but in our generation the responsibility is on us and every devotee should feel that if I don’t glorify Krishna then who is going to do it of course we don’t think that we are indispensable but we do think that it is our responsibility to do all that we can to glorify Krishna you know a devotee doesn’t think that this is Lord Chaitanya Mahaprabhu’s prediction he will make it happen no, the Lord’s prediction is the devotee’s responsibility that was Srila Prabhupada’s attitude so if the Lord has made a prediction, fulfilling it is my responsibility and of course if we take up the responsibility Krishna will give us the empowerment and we have seen that happening in every generation whenever any leader takes up the responsibility Krishna gives remarkable empowerment and that connection with the history gives us an understanding of both of responsibility and sensitivity of understanding how we have to stay connected with the tradition at the same time stay accessible and appealing to the contemporary people so I will summarise what we discussed today we started by talking about the post charismatic phase of religious movements and how in general there is chaos and there can be the transfer of charisma or routinization of charisma Srila Prabhupada integrated both by having routinization in GDC and transfer in the successor gurus and then we discussed about how the dynamics of our movement and then its geographical transition of powerhouse from America to India and then some of the modifications that have happened in the approach as well as the sociological patterns in our movement in the approach the preaching has become a little more little less confrontationalist and the congregation has taken root and developed and there are many other things which we could have discussed in the history of our movement itself but we are focussing on broad historical patterns so overall probably what was the most most perilous transition in our movement from the charismatic leader to the next generation that has been navigated successfully and not only it has expanded and carrying on that legacy in our generation is our responsibility Thank you very much Are there any questions? Who? Ok Here we see the problem of say the gurus and the managers yeah there have been sometimes of tensions between Brahmin and Kshatriyas in the Vedic context we have the classic Vishwamitra and Vasishta conflict we have the example of say Maharaj Vena going on the wrong track and the Brahmins chastising him so to some extent conflicts are always a part of history you know we should not have an imagination that life in the material world anytime was peaceful there are always conflicts but there are also systems to deal with conflicts so as of now within ISKCON things are gradually becoming clarified and there is some discussion that maybe in the future the GVC will be divided into two tier two tiers of GVC where the gurus will be in the higher tier where they will be primarily playing an inspirational role and in the second tier there will be managers who will be doing the more organisational work but that sort of standardisation will take some time to evolve organically but overall the principle is clear now that the gurus will be the primarily inspirational role and that is what we see in the practical lives of the disciples that you know every year the GVC meets and passes resolutions but how many of us even come to know about what resolutions are passed but if the guru speaks one word that is circulated so many times among the disciples so the idea is that the inspiration has to come from the person and that’s why the responsibility of every generation of leaders to become mature and to in whatever capacity Krishna has been to become inspirational so it is an evolving dialogue and things are growing forward towards a proper amicable distribution of power okay so we will stop here thank you very much