If you have a deep connection with Prabhupada as a devotee, then you have a deep connection with ISKCON, because one’s loyalty to ISKCON is not like some loyalty to a company, it’s a manifestation of loyalty to Prabhupada. So whenever you talk about ISKCON, in your mind and in your heart, you are just talking about devotion to Prabhupada. If you stay in ISKCON, you work in ISKCON – you stay with Prabhupada, you work with Prabhupada. Of course, for people who leave ISKCON, I don’t think they are leaving Prabhupada, and I don’t think we should blame them for that, but in your heart, you feel that if I leave ISKCON, I am leaving Prabhupada, because Prabhupada is ISKCON, Prabhupada is everything to me, and ISKCON is Prabhupada’s baby. Prabhupada has left us his baby, I am leaving, I am giving you this baby. This is my heart, I am giving you my heart, this is what is dear to me. So that is how you should see his relationship with Prabhupada and ISKCON. They are the same. One’s devotion to Prabhupada means one’s devotion to ISKCON, and one’s devotion to ISKCON means one’s devotion to Prabhupada. Taking care of ISKCON was like taking care of Prabhupada’s body. You shouldn’t see any difference. This is a very, very important idea because every organisation has problems, every organisation has challenges, every organisation has leadership that doesn’t always act properly or in the way we would expect. You should come to this siddhanta. It’s like Prabhupada said, “ISKCON is my body.
A lot of times when we talk about ISKCON, people think it’s just an organisation, and organisations have so many problems, and I’m devoted to Prabhupada, but not to ISKCON. We should never make that distinction. It should be very clear that if you criticise ISKCON, you are criticising Prabhupada. If you love Prabhupada, you will work to make ISKCON better. This is really important because as ISKCON grows there will always be people who will make this distinction – I am devoted to Prabhupada but I just don’t like ISKCON, I don’t like what the movement is doing, I don’t like where it’s going, I don’t like the leadership. And that may all be true. It’s not that you should like where everything is going, but we shouldn’t leave because we should see ISKCON as Prabhupada. You can’t leave Prabhupada because you don’t like the way things are going, you have to make it better. I think that is the first point. That we should not differentiate between ISKCON and Prabhupada. You can’t leave ISKCON without leaving Prabhupada to some extent. If you have a very deep connection with Prabhupada. And one is dedicated, totally fixed in service to Prabhupada no matter what, than that connection to Prabhupada is one’s connection to working in ISKCON.
The depth of one’s relationship with Prabhupada is a manifestation of the depth of one’s Krishna consciousness, because they go together simultaneously. Your connection with your spiritual master, your connection with Krishna and Krishna consciousness, and your depth of bhakti are not different. Someone can say, my guru is this and that, but I love Krishna, I love ISKCON but I’m leaving, I love Prabhupada but I’m leaving ISKCON. It doesn’t really work that way. It’s synergistic, it’s holistic. If you have one, you have them all. Everything in terms of one’s behaviour, one’s devotion, everything should be centred around Prabhupada as the hub. And everything – one’s Vaishnava behaviour, one’s devotion to ISKCON, one’s willingness to be GBC even though one may not like certain circumstances of service, but one accepts service because one’s heart is Prabhupada and one knows what Prabhupada wants.
What should deeply concern us is that Prabhupada is not the centre of ISKCON, and that means that the position of diksha-guru has eclipsed two things: One, that Prabhupada is the primary centre of focus and attention. (We do guru puja every day, we read his books… I didn’t mean it that way.) I meant in every sphere, on every level – where we get our instructions, where we feel our strongest connection, how we understand how we are liberated, and that everything is from Prabhupada, everyone else just brings you to Prabhupada. Everyone else is small. Prabhupada is the sun [and] we are little rays. That has been eclipsed. It should be extremely disturbing to us. In fact, it should concern us 24/7, I would say. We should talk about it so much because you should feel that if Prabhupada doesn’t really become the centre in everybody’s life and heart, then in future generations Prabhupada’s position, Prabhupada’s teachings, everything about Prabhupada will be lost and other gurus, other acharyas will dominate the landscape of ISKCON and Prabhupada will be sidelined. You might think, “No, that is not going to happen. No, this is a real concern and many senior devotees are very worried about it. If you ever hear devotees talking about staying in ISKCON, staying with Prabhupada, Prabhupada in the centre, it all comes out of that concern.
Now let me explain why this concern exists for those of you who joined ISKCON after Prabhupada left. When Prabhupada was here, of course, there was only one guru. I just want to give you a picture of the landscape of ISKCON when Prabhupada was here. Very, very rarely there would be a recording of a lecture by someone other than Prabhupada, and that meant it was very rare for anyone to hear a lecture by someone other than Prabhupada, because there weren’t any, and if there were, you know, not that many people would be interested. Let’s say I recorded a lecture and people said, “Hey, that’s a nice lecture, can I hear it?” It would go around, but there was no digital media, so you would actually have to get a tape and you would have to copy that tape onto another tape. So it would be like the 3rd or 4th generation cassette recorders. And you copy it through the speakers […] not that you would have copy machines. Even if you had copy machines, every generation got worse. It just wasn’t good equipment. So all the tape services came after Prabhupada left, that’s when the gurus had their own tape services. So during Prabhupada’s time it was very rare that you would ever hear anybody’s recorded lectures, just because they weren’t available and there wasn’t much interest in hearing them. There was Prabhupada, and Prabhupada lectured every day, and there was a tape ministry. So everywhere you went, everywhere in ISKCON, in everybody’s cassette player, in everybody’s walkman, in every temple, there were lectures by Prabhupada. Now there were kirtans. There were Vishnujana Swami kirtans, there were a few albums made by devotees (Radha Krishna, like that), but there were probably only four or five other recordings at most, by other devotees, and there were numerous recordings of Prabhupada.
So generally, in any temple you would visit, you would hear kirtans and bhajans of Prabhupada. Of course, he was the guru, so everybody wanted to hear that. Lectures by Prabhupada, conversations of the morning walk, room conversations… That’s what everyone listened to, and all the news you got was about who and what? Where is Prabhupada, what is he doing, what is he saying? That was ISKCON until Prabhupada left. So there was no question of keeping Prabhupada at the centre. You didn’t have to keep him, he was the centre. There were only his disciples, he was the centre of their lives. There was no competition that somebody else was somehow dominating the attention of the devotees. I mean, there were devotees who were powerful, who were attractive, you liked to listen to them, you liked to listen to their kirtans, but they were just sunbeams compared to Prabhupada. They all saw them as just little rays of Prabhupada and nothing compared to Prabhupada. So there was no question that they could ever eclipse Prabhupada or ever eclipse Prabhupada. It wouldn’t happen. Prabhupada was the only guru, there were no other gurus.
The idea was that whatever Srila Prabhupada does as an acharya, we should copy. He is teaching us how to live by his example. So then one thought, or many, not everybody, but those who seemed to be running ISKCON, making the decisions locally and internationally, thought if Prabhupada is gone, now we have 11 new gurus, they have to do what Prabhupada did, because Prabhupada set the example. So what did Prabhupada do? Every day he had guru puja, he had his own rooms, he had his own cooks, he had his own seats, he had his own car… And whatever his disciples could do in their power to facilitate Prabhupada’s service, to make his life comfortable, they would do. That was the philosophy. So now, instead of Prabhupada being the centre, the new gurus who were now following in Prabhupada’s footsteps… Not all of them felt this way, but the movement was pushing that this is how it should be done, so they convinced them all to do it. I would say most of them bought it, but some didn’t because it felt very uncomfortable and wrong. But that is what the movement did and that was the ignorance. They thought: Prabhupada is gone, there is an absence, we have to replace him and we will replace him with these new acharyas. They thought that because Prabhupada had appointed them, he had transferred his shakti, so now they were all way above everybody else. There was a lot of confusion. They didn’t understand. They thought Prabhupada made these people gurus because they were pure devotees, he gave them his shakti, now we have to somehow replace Prabhupada with them. Let me try to explain psychologically what I think happened. I think the loss was so deep that they needed someone to sit on a vyasasana that they could honour and worship, because they didn’t feel they could exist without Prabhupada. So they thought we will put someone else up there, he will be the guru, and even for us as Godbrothers he will be a strength for us. Even some of the appointed leaders started to say “Well, now if you want to be connected to Prabhupada, you have to be connected with me, you have to work with me, you have to worship me”. It got very, very crazy.
What started happening in ISKCON, there was a shift from a focus on Prabhupada to focus on the present guru who was a zonal guru, who one would call acharya, they gave him names Vishnupada, Acharyadeva, Acharyapada. It was like the whole nine yards. […] Prabhupada was not his initiated name, that was a title that was given to him as guru. Actually he had to tell his disciples to give it to him but that was our ignorance. So they had titles, they had very, very opulent quarters, just like Prabhupada, amazingly opulent and in many cases, their quarters were nicer than Prabhupada’s. And their Vyasa-pujas started being nicer than Prabhupada’s. Everything started shifting and this created this huge alienation because many of the Godbrothers started feeling like this is not the movement I joined. That was Prabhupada centric, now it’s this guru centric. And so this alienation that one felt on the first day that this Guru sat on the Vyasasana it just continued. So you had devotees who were being alienated and then you had other devotees who were saying “No, this is the way it is supposed to be. This is good”. There were a lot of good results, a lot of people were inspired (the ones who liked them), they had a lot of power, they could do a lot of things, they got a lot of disciples, easy for the disciples – one guru… You probably know the history, but one by one gurus started having trouble because they had misserved their position. They were imitating Prabhupada and shastra says if you imitate the great devotees it’s like drinking poison. Of the eleven, I think seven had fallen away due to either not being able to maintain strictly the principles or maybe you could say not being able to maintain, in the broader sense, strictness. They just couldn’t maintain their position. They have either fallen down breaking one of the regulative principles, or come close to it, or being challenged to do it. They just couldn’t maintain their position because it was not the position Prabhupada intended.
It peaked around 1986. The Godbrothers had practically formed a revolution. There were various revolutions going on to reform this; guru reform. There was a meeting in New Vrindavan, and it was like a historic meeting at that time, and the Godbrothers just spoke out, “This is nonsense, you’re imitating Prabhupada. This is wrong. You are destroying the movement. You have eclipsed Prabhupada. You have pushed him out. Let me tell you something. This will sound strange to you, but it will help put this into perspective. In the 1980s, devotees of a particular zonal acharya guru would only listen to that guru’s lectures, kirtans. If you got initiated, you could only get initiated by that guru. If you asked, “Do you ever listen to Prabhupada?” the devotee would say, “No.” And that devotee would be shocked, like, “Oh, I never thought of that. We don’t do that.” Now you might say, “But Prabhu, that’s the way it is in ISKCON now. It’s normal”. Yes, it’s a normal, serious problem. That’s how leaders and gurus, although you can be a guru and they give lectures, and you listen to them, and the gurus will even say, “Please listen to this lecture I gave, it’s really important,” and you think, “Why are you giving a lecture every day if you want us to hear Prabhupada?” Well, because that’s what Prabhupada wanted us to do, but he didn’t want us to overshadow him. He didn’t want us to write books to eclipse his books, to give lectures to eclipse his lectures. So I’m just giving you my perspective as a Prabhupada disciple who came to ISKCON in 1969 and saw this change, it was like this is unprecedented. There was never a time in the history of ISKCON when it wasn’t just Prabhupada, his books, his kirtans, his words. You might say, well, today it can be like that. That’s true, but it has gone too far in the other direction. It has to be enough that you have to listen to enough of Prabhupada’s lectures, you have to listen to his bhajams, you have to have enough because he is the centre. And then the other problem was that the disciples were thinking their guru was on the level of Prabhupada.
They weren’t really making a distinction, liberated, if Prabhupada made us guru he is, they are starting to think all these 11 gurus are descended, even though they were all hippies. They were like no, that was just their Lila. It was distorted. They’re all descended, transcendental… And if that’s the case you could easily understand Prabhupada. Anyway, the point I am trying to make is that they were eclipsing Prabhupada. The focus was moving away from Prabhupada, so you could say, “But you can’t eclipse Prabhupada,” but you can if you shine the light on someone else whom you are eclipsing. Prabhupada is eternally self-effacing, but we don’t see that so much because the light is being shone on these other people. Everybody around 1986 and the ’80s felt that they had made a big mistake by having these people imitate Prabhupada, and basically it’s like the whole movement is centred around these eleven people. They give all the power, they have all the resources, they have all the men, the money, the control… And it was like what happened in ISKCON, where Prabhupada was at the centre, where the resources were equally distributed, nobody had any special powers, everything was managed by a GBC? Now these gurus were unmanageable, they had whole zones and powers of GBCs, how could they control them? Then there is this whole guru reform movement with temple presidents and then finally GBCs were questioned, gurus were questioned […]. Things have got better, but still, to this day, the vestiges of that have not been removed. Even for new devotees who become gurus, although they’ve grown up with it and they’re more conscious of not doing it, but still within the culture many of us have enough Prabhupada in the centre. The devotees just do not understand Prabhupada’s mood and mission.
One devotee I had met in Mayapur (she stayed in Mayapur because of the lockdown), I think she had read Prabhupada’s Gita twice and now she was studying something at MIHE or somewhere, tenth canto commentary by Visvanatha Chakravarti Thakura…or something like that. So that sort of thing. You go to a marketplace and there are books you can read that Prabhupada told us not to read. It’s such a different landscape. I have disciples and I quote a verse that every bhakta knew in 1970 and they don’t know it. I say, ‘How could you not know that verse? It means there is a different mood now and we had a mood to learn verses. The mood has changed. This is a concern.
The guru feels I am insignificant, I feel I am nothing, my only credibility is that I am connected to Prabhupada. “I am not taking my disciples back to Godhead, Prabhupada is taking them back to Godhead. I bring them to Prabhupada. Prabhupada does everything and I bring them to Prabhupada. That’s what you should feel within ISKCON, that’s the culture in the heart and mind of the disciples and devotees, if we don’t realise that it’s Prabhupada’s movement, it’s Prabhupada’s teachings, it’s Prabhupada’s power – we’re nothing. We are all useless without it. It is all him. If that’s not instilled in the heart of every single member, then you can fear, and rightly so, that in the future Prabhupada will become like a second-class citizen. He just won’t be as important. He won’t be so central. There will be other people who will rise to prominence. We want gurus to come to prominence, but not at the cost of minimising the reality that all the power they have is Prabhupada’s power and everyone should understand that. Now the problem we see is that when we say this, you are accused of being a ritvik, because what you are saying is very similar to what ritviks say, that Prabhupada is being sidelined, he is being eclipsed by the guru.
I think that as a great glorification not as a criticism because the fact is the ritvik philosophy just went a little bit too far, that Prabhupada will be your guru because the other gurus they did a bad job so let’s just get rid of them. That is not Gaudiya Vaishnava Siddhanta. The Gaudīya Vaishnava Siddhanta is the other gurus will represent Prabhupada, they will bring you closer to Prabhupada, they will put the glasses on you so you see Prabhupada better. That’s the mood of a guru. That if someone can help you get closer to Prabhupada, if he can help you deepen the relationship with Prabhupada, if he can put the glasses on you to help you see better who Prabhupada is, what he is teaching, what he wants, what his mission is, what his heart is, where he wants his movement to be, how you could become a better member of that movement and help him… If he can do that then he has done his job as guru. If he does anything else and make you think that he is someone special independent of Prabhupada, it is a disservice.
The problem is that in ISKCON, because of the zonal culture that we had in 1977 when Prabhupada left, the remnants of that culture, the smell of that culture, still permeates ISKCON to some subtle degree, and it has become a challenge for gurus to communicate that we are nothing and Prabhupada is everything and we are just trying to help you get to Prabhupada in an environment where the guru position is so dominant.
Now here is the problem. ISKCON has tried to educate devotees in this area and it has been a real challenge. It is the area of shiksha guru versus diksha guru, because in the history of Gaudiya Vaishnava the emphasis has not been on diksha, the emphasis has been on guru. And guru could mean diksha guru, diksha guru could mean vartmapradasaka guru. Now in Suresvara Prabhu’s Founder-Acharya series, he makes the point that your basic relationship is with Prabhupada, that’s where it starts, and your guru will help strengthen that relationship. It is not the other way round. Your basic relationship is with your guru and he will help you strengthen that, but your basic relationship is with Prabhupada and your guru will help you strengthen that relationship. That’s a basic principle of his course. And that’s how every guru feels, or at least every guru should feel, and that’s how every shiksha guru should feel, and that’s how every preacher in his country should feel, and that’s how every devotee should feel. What the GBC had decided years ago was that no one coming to ISKCON should choose anyone to be their diksha guru for six months, and in those first six months develop their relationship with Prabhupada.
Now you may be attached to a guru, OK, he can be your shiksha guru, but for the first six months focus on Prabhupada as your guru, develop that relationship. And then choose a guru who can help you develop that relationship. Not that you choose a guru just because he is charismatic or you like the way he chants or you like the way he tells stories or whatever. I’m not insulting anybody. All our gurus are glorious, all our gurus are amazingly powerful, but the point is that you want to accept someone as your guru because you’ve connected with Prabhupada and you see that this guru represents Prabhupada so transparently to you and connects you so deeply with Prabhupada. You want to be connected to him so that you can be connected to Prabhupada.
That’s the culture we want to create and I think you’ll find that even though you may feel that way, not everybody feels that way and that’s a concern.