ISKCON's Ideological Defeat Four years ago well-known ISKCON commentator Krishna Kirti Dasa (HDG) produced a very insightful critique demonstrating that ISKCON has been defeated ideologically. Not in a contest in which our leaders have fought the good fight, but were overwhelmed by the superior forces of the enemy. No. Would that it were true. Instead, the defeat has come, again, from the inside, as ISKCON's (mis)leaders themselves have been the very agents of the failure. Is it due to their not fully understanding the ideology and the need of protecting it, or due to their willfully undermining it?
The obvious question is if they did understand it why have then not protected it? And since, as will be clearly shown below it has been defeated, why have those, who have those chosen to protect it failed in their responsibility? We fully agree with these conclusions drawn by Krishna Kirti Prabhu as we have expressed elsewhere on these pages. Although Krishna Kirti credits ISKCON's ideological conquest to our Western cultural roots our opinion however, as you will read further in this section, is that this has all been skillfully manipulated by cunning adversaries, the Kamsas and their Putana agents acting from within the society. What else can be the reason? Incompetence? Cultural conditioning as Krishna Kirti suggests? If either is the case the entire GBC body have shown themselves to be incompetent to protect the ideological purity of Srila Prabhupada's mission and should resign at once. We do not expect that that will happen and so we find it necessary to Start the Hare Krishna Movement Again! It is our very strong opinion the the Hare Krishna Movement is meant to provide an ideological alternative to modern society, for the purpose of giving shelter to those who are materially exhausted. In the current state of affairs that is not possible since the leaders have not understood this point and done the needful. The conclusion of KK's essay is reproduced below, and the entire lengthy essay can be found here. We recommend that you read it in its entirety. But as it is very long and since the conclusions are the most pertinent for our present purposes, we present them here as the minimum material to be read. Our comments are within square brackets [ ] and in red. Krishna Kirti Dasa: Victory If ISKCON’s internal conflicts have been fundamentally ideological, then victory means that one of the warring ideologies has finally come to predominate over the others. In a recent essay, long-time ISKCON observer and well-wisher Dr. Thomas J. Hopkins thinks that ISKCON’s ideological battle is about to begin, or at least come to occupy the forefront of ISKCON’s struggle to settle its enduring questions of authority and identity. Hopkins writes, There are still many problems to be faced, however, not the least of which is defining ISKCON’s identity more clearly in terms of both its past history and its future goals. This is not primarily an organisational issue to be solved by management decisions, but rather a basic theological concern that can only be resolved by intensive intellectual effort and spiritual insight over a period of time. At stake are ISKCON’s fundamental values and basic commitments, the core identity or self-identity that must be understood and accepted by all of its members before the central mission can be properly carried out.[1] Although Hopkins may turn out to be right, there is presently more reason to believe that the ideological battle has already been won. The ideological victor is Western culture, with its attendant ideologies, and the reasons to believe this are to be found in ISKCON’s present state of cultural alignment and in statements made by intellectuals who have the ear of ISKCON’s management. Here are some of the most significant signs: 1. The proliferation and widespread use of modern psychology within ISKCON. Twenty years ago, it was an unchallenged dogma that bhakti-yoga was both the best means and sufficient in and of itself to mitigate any material or spiritual problem. Today that has changed. Over the years, a significant number of devotees have returned to universities in order to acquire advanced training in modern psychology and therapy. These therapists in turn have ministered to a growing number of devotees who live outside of ISKCON centers. Their services, programs, and seminars have become quite popular, and they are for the most part based on the humanistic approach to psychology. Not only do the new devotee therapists provide counseling to other devotees, they promote life skills and self-improvement. Furthermore, some ISKCON leaders have recommended making the training offered by these devotee therapists mandatory for ISKCON leaders. Two important ISKCON offices primarily rely on modern psychological theory and practice: the Child Protection Office and the North American Grihastha Vision Team. 2. The high value ISKCON now places on post-doctoral education. Twenty years ago or more, the status of anyone who came to ISKCON, devotee or not, would have mattered little in terms of their prior educational achievements, with the exception of those trained in the hard sciences. Nowadays the PhD is practically a must-have in order to be taken seriously as an intellectual within ISKCON. Higher education in the humanities and social sciences has now become fashionable. When a number of influential ISKCON leaders used time and resources available to them to earn their own PhDs, many of their disciples followed suit. ISKCON higher education projects, such as the Bhaktivedanta College of New Mayapur, France, have sought accreditation and affiliation with established universities so that members of their program can earn credentials recognized by the university system. Even ISKCON’s conservative members have found the pull of a university education and the PhD difficult to resist. 3. ISKCON’s lack of its own internal economy. For some time now, ISKCON has not possessed any significant means of generating its own economic resources that can be used for its mission or for maintaining its full-time members. It instead relies on the donations and patronage of life members and former temple residents. Now that most of ISKCON’s initiated members reside outside of an ISKCON temple, ISKCON’s cultural “center of gravity,” as Rochford described it, has shifted outside the institution. Because their needs, demands, expectations, and attitudes toward religion are in many ways more significantly shaped by the outside world than by ISKCON, ISKCON leaders have found themselves accommodating their demands and expectations, if only for the sake of ensuring their continued patronage. ISKCON in the Western countries cannot have its own alternative culture and life-style quite simply because it cannot afford one. 4. ISKCON’s social and political commitment to gender equality. Although this primarily covers women’s rights and status within ISKCON, it also covers the issue of homosexual and other queer relationships as receiving institutional recognition, support, and encouragement. ISKCON has been following a pattern of development very common among mainstream Protestant Christian denominations in the West. These denominations have followed a pattern of opening up their institutional and spiritual positions to the equal inclusion of women and later moving toward opening the same positions for those who are in active homosexual relationships. Although in each of these denominations this pattern of development has unfolded over several generations, within ISKCON this pattern is unfolding much quicker. In 2004, only four years after the GBC endorsed policies granting equal social and political rights for women, some senior ISKCON leaders publicly proffered that ISKCON also grant some measure of public recognition and encouragement for non-married, binary homosexual relationships—referred to specifically as “gay monogamy.” Although there is evidence that a number of ISKCON’s top leaders have found the recommendation questionable, ISKCON’s top leadership as a whole has not objected. Indeed, after three years, ISKCON’s GBC has offered no public rebuttal or censure of the recommendation. This indicates that ISKCON has been gradually coming in line with mainstream secular values and attitudes towards sex. 5. An increased emphasis on worldly activities. ISKCON was formerly quite “other-worldly” in its outlook and emphasis on spiritual as opposed to pious activity. Over the years, activities like book distribution declined and more conventional forms of religious outreach like food distribution increased. Although within ISKCON the food distributed must be sanctified (prasadam), the shift towards activities that mainstream society would likely have more sympathy with suggests a program of accommodation with the outside world. An increased emphasis on worldly education in ISKCON’s primary and secondary school systems also seems to reflect this increased emphasis on worldly activity. Some influential ISKCON members as well as scholars both within and outside of ISKCON have made statements that underscore the conquest of Western culture. One sign of this is the shift in emphasis away from confrontation with ISKCON’s Western host culture. In the book The Hare Krishna Movement: Forty Years of Chant and Change, ISKCON devotee and director of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies Shaunaka Rishi Das is quoted thus: "The greatest jewel in the crown of ISKCON is the deity worship. . . but the devotees don't yet know it. . . Krishna, Lord of senses, is worshipped with the senses. It is deity worship rather than book distribution or any other activity that that [sic] is the real jewel of ISKCON."[2] Srila Prabhupada’s books contain innumerable criticisms of modern civilization. No matter how nicely these books are distributed, at some level distributing them is necessarily confrontational. A shift in ISKCON’s emphasis away from book distribution toward Deity worship significantly avoids confrontation with ISKCON’s Western host culture and ends ISKCON’s primary identity as a preaching mission. Furthermore, the direction of intellectual and religious change in ISKCON has significantly been from the direction of Western culture to ISKCON but not significantly from the direction of ISKCON to Western culture. In her recent essay “For Love of Krishna, Dr. Anna S. King observes that within ISKCON, "scholarly devotees whose faith is undisputed have for a decade or more been applying perspectives derived from the wider society—postmodernist, feminist, pluralist, textual-historical, etc.—to Prabhupada's transplanted and literalist tradition ( e.g. Goswami and Valpey 2004)."[3] This statement is also interesting because of the opposition King sets up between “perspectives derived from the wider society” and “Prabhupada’s transplanted and literalist tradition.” This opposition is significant because the perspectives King mentions (and others she implies) variously emphasize the subjective point of view more so than literalist traditions. The opposition is between the subjective and the objective, between humanism and theism. As an example of a non-literalist Western perspective applied in the context of ISKCON, King specifically refers to an essay by Tamal Krishna Goswami and Krishna Kshetra Das. Their essay suggests ways ISKCON and its members can move away from “naïve realism”—unsupportable by a one-to-one correspondence with the world of empirical facts—and move towards an understanding of their religious tradition that is more consistent with modernity.[4] Although the essay is concerned with answering outsider critics, it is more focused on resolving insider doubt about the tradition itself—doubt that the authors suggest underlies many of ISKCON’s most significant internal conflicts.[5] In order to resolve these doubts and internal conflicts, Goswami and Das have recommended adopting a higher degree of subjectivity than what Srila Prabhupada’s own literalism would allow for. They state [bold emphasis added]: "ISKCON members often inadvertently distance themselves from Narottama Das’s verse [sadhu-shastra-guru bakya, hridaye koriya aikya], failing to recognize that the living practitioner, as a recipient of tradition, is the implied “final arbiter” among these three representatives of traditional authority. Indeed, the practitioner is not simply a passive recipient of tradition; rather, through active engagement, she or he participates in and inevitably reinvents tradition."[6] This notion of the practitioner being the implied “final arbiter” (final interpreter among other interpreters) and being an active agent that “inevitably reinvents tradition” stands in stark contrast to Srila Prabhupada’s notion of the practitioner as a submissive recipient of tradition. In his introduction to Bhagavad-gita As It Is, Srila Prabhupada describes the method of submissive acceptance through the analogy of taking medicine: If we want to take a particular medicine, then we have to follow the directions written on the label. We cannot take the medicine according to our own whim or the direction of a friend. It must be taken according to the directions on the label or the directions given by a physician. Similarly, Bhagavad-gita should be taken or accepted as it is directed by the speaker Himself. Srila Prabhupada also described himself as such a submissive recipient. Indeed, he considered that to be his specific qualification. " If I have any credit in this connection, it does not belong to me personally, but it is due to my eternal spiritual master, His Divine Grace Om Visnupada Paramahamsa Parivrajakacarya 108 Sri Srimad Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Gosvami Maharaja Prabhupada. If personally I have any credit in this matter, it is only that I have tried to present Bhagavad-gita as it is, without any adulteration."[7] Goswami and Das, however, respond to anticipated objections to their alternative notion of the practitioner as a fourth, implied authority who inevitably reinterprets and reinvents tradition. To the objections that our proposed reassessment of guru and sadhu will wither before the stipulations of Narottama Das’s third source of authority, namely, shastra, our basic claim is that interpreting scripture is a perpetual process of reappraisal by the reader or hearer. Practitioners must admit this openly for tradition to serve a vital, liberating function in their lives. That for the disciple the guru is the central interpreter and that sadhus are secondary interpreters cannot obscure the fact that the “end user,” the practitioner, is the final interpreter. As “Protestant” as this may sound, it simply recognizes that although scripture maintains boundary structures to delimit those qualified to interpret, the very nature of print culture and mass distribution democratize the system.[8] But what would reinterpretation, or reinvention, by the “final interpreter” actually entail? If the patient were to significantly inject his interpretation into the meaning of a prescription (e.g. his “interpretation” would make a difference in dosage) then we have an instance of the patient’s intentions substituted for the intentions of the physician, who originally prescribed the medicine. If the patient believes the words of the prescription now mean “take two tablets once a day” instead of “one tablet once a day,” then the meaning of the words on the medicine bottle now belongs to the patient—their meaning no longer belongs the doctor. Meaning is always there for the words on the label, but the meaning ascribed to them, and hence intentionality, shifts from doctor to patient. The origin of meaning shifts from author to reader. In the same way, if tradition’s “end user” is also granted a significant say in what the words left behind by guru, sadhu, and shastra mean, then it is possible that “legitimate” interpretations of tradition may not necessarily reflect the authorial intent of the guru, the sadhus, or of authors of shastra itself. Indeed, Goswami and Das’s reinterpretation of Gaudiya Vaishnava theology was undertaken especially for the sake of rectifying some of ISKCON’s internal social problems. This purpose appears to have been the starting point for their own reinterpretation of tradition, and arriving at some of their conclusions would have been impossible through Srila Prabhupada’s own approach. "Can our agenda be pushed further? A radical discontinuity with Chaitanya Vaishnava theology within the realm of sambandha might mean, for example, blurring the divide that separates personalists from impersonalists. Traditionally, Vaishnavism has defined itself over and against Advaita Vedanta. . . . [Within Vaishnava tradition] only faint praise is given brahmavadins, while mayavadins are censured with the harshest rhetoric. Indeed, Prabhupada defines his mission in terms of their defeat. . . . For ISKCON, at times this has meant alienating many in its diasporic Indian congregations, who feel confused, if not deeply offended, by what they perceive to be sectarian conflict in ISKCON’s condemnation of revered people, past and present, because of impersonal beliefs."[9] In this example, the authors entertain a “radical discontinuity with Vaishnava theology” in order to avoid “alienating many in its diasporic Indian congregations.” Not only does this suggestion elevate the subject position (the feelings of congregants over tradition), this suggestion is philosophically pragmatic. This example reaffirms the philosophically pragmatic, instrumental notion of truth—truth as a means for changing existing realities. If such radical changes to theology can be accommodated to achieve secondary organizational objectives, then this represents essentially the same pattern of thought that generated the idea that the male sankirtana leader is the eternal husband of the women on his sankirtana party. In both cases, “time, place, and circumstance” has been the implied if unspoken justification. The only significant difference between the two propositions has been their acceptability within the prevailing cultural norms of mainstream society. That this utilitarian, instrumental view of truth seems to be widely employed within ISKCON and in this instance has been advocated by “devotees whose faith is undisputed” is a prominent sign that Western values have prevailed over traditional Vaishnava values. Another prominent sign that Western values have prevailed within ISKCON is that ISKCON’s only politically successful opposition movement, the IRM, is also deeply pragmatic in its doctrine and hence differs little from ISKCON’s status quo. Even though these two statements differ in content, they are nearly identical in form and share a presumption that the prescriptions of shastra and tradition are in essence utilitarian, not normative: The important point is that although the ritvik system may be totally unique, . . . it does not violate higher order sastric principles. It is testament to Srila Prabhupada's genius that he was able to mercifully apply such sastric principles in new and novel ways according to time, place, and circumstance.[10] Vedic life, as extolled in our scriptures, is highly interpretive. Understanding what is truly Vedic is elusive. Srila Prabhupada, taught us about Vedic society and the role of varnashram in elevating society, but he did not practically speaking, engage his spiritual daughters within such a system. They were active preachers, pujaris, cooks, etc. Srila Prabhupada in fact, introduced a new model with new standards; one based on preaching.[11] The first statement is from The Final Order, which argues for a doctrine that has been officially declared a heresy in ISKCON, and the second statement was made by some of ISKCON’s senior women devotees and represents a view that enjoys much popularity within ISKCON. The second statement does not bring charges of heresy. Both statements claim that Srila Prabhupada established something new and unprecedented and that the new thing he established is to be practiced indefinitely. Both rely fundamentally on the pragmatist notion of time, place, and circumstance—explicitly in the first statement and implicitly in the second—and both have the effect of either discounting or obfuscating tradition or significant sections of Srila Prabhupada’s own life-work, his books. In the first statement, evidence from previous acharyas is discounted. As long as ritvikism supposedly follows “higher order sastric principles,” tradition need not be consulted. Tradition and the statements of previous acharyas are rendered irrelevant. In the second statement, wide swaths of Srila Prabhupada’s own teachings themselves become incomprehensible. The word “varnashrama” (varnasrama) occurs more than 1000 times in Srila Prabhupada’s published works, but if understanding it is “truly elusive,” then that leaves much in Srila Prabhupada’s life work that is incomprehensible. If varnashram is incomprehensible, then it becomes impossible to implement Srila Prabhupada’s order that varnashram be established within ISKCON. In both statements, using a pragmatic mode of reasoning for non-trivial issues has had the effect of overriding and undermining the very authority these statements claim to represent. Another prominent sign of victory for secular Western values within ISKCON comes from Rochford’s book Hare Krishna Transformed, wherein he notes that Srila Prabhupada’s authority in ISKCON “no longer was absolute:” "The debate about women’s roles and place in ISKCON led to critical questioning of Prabhupada’s scriptural commentaries, as well as his overall authority as Krishna’s pure representative. The fact that the leadership failed to act decisively on Prabhupada’s behalf [when his authority was being openly challenged] was an acknowledgement that his authority no longer was absolute. Given ISKCON’s increasingly pluralistic membership, it was perhaps inevitable that Prabhupada’s teachings would be questioned, especially in light of their past misuse resulting in the abuse of devotee women and children. As one ISKCON leader expressed it, “There is irreducible diversity within ISKCON. It is a mistake trying to find the straight line. What is important is whether a devotee fits within the boundaries of Prabhupada’s teachings.” Yet as these teachings become reframed as guides for thought and action, in place of being “absolute truths,” traditionalism will continue its march to the margins of ISKCON. As it does, the goal of creating a viable cultural alternative to mainstream American culture will cease to exist."[12] If Rochford’s assessment is accurate, then Srila Prabhupada and his legacy are further away from ISKCON’s center than at any other time in its history. Western culture has emerged victorious from ISKCON’s internal struggles, and its champions now have the privilege of writing ISKCON’s constitution. [1] Thomas J. Hopkins, “ISKCON’s Search for Self-Identity,” The Hare Krishna Movement: Forty Years of Chant and Change, Ed. Graham Dwyer, Richard J. Cole, (London: I.B. Taurus & Co. 2007) 186. [2] Anna S. King, “For Love of Krishna,” Ed. Dwyer and Cole 151. [3] King 167. [4] Tamal Krishna Goswami and Krishna Kshetra Das, “Re-Visioning ISKCON,” The Hare Krishna Movement: The Postcharismatic Fate of a Religious Transplant, Ed. Edwin Bryant, Maria Ekstrand (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004) 418. [5] Goswami and Das use Bhaktivinoda Thakura’s essay “Sri Krishna Samhita” as a starting point for developing exegetical methods that they hope will appeal more to the modern mind. Bhaktivinoda Thakura wrote “Sri Krishna Samhita” especially for the bhadralok, a Bengali term used variously to refer to those in 19th century Indian society with a modicum of (Western) education and who to some degree or another had adopted Western (especially British) values. Sri Krishna Samhita attempts to build a case for the respectability of traditional Vaishnava religion through appealing to empirical and consequentialist ideologies, which significantly informed the values of the bhadralok. ISKCON’s members, of course, are Westerners or are significantly Western-educated and thus appear to nicely resemble the bhadralok. Goswami and Das use this essay as evidence for the authority of their recommendations. [6] Goswami and Das 422. [7] Srila Prabhupada, Bhagavad-gita As It Is, Preface. [8] Goswami and Das 424. [9] Goswami and Das 420 – 421. [10] Desai 31. [11] Email: Meeting of senior Vaishnavis. Feb 18, 2004, Mayapura. [12] Rochford 160. |
