Month: June 2025

Memories

Srila Prabhupada’s Visit to Boston

One of the early devotees I met at the temple was the artist and musician Marek Buchwald, whom Hamsaduta dasa had recruited in Montreal to design a cover for a reprint of Easy Journey to Other Planets and who had come to Boston to meet Srila Prabhupada for the first time. When Marek arrived—the same day I had met Prabhupada, the day after the Brandeis program—he said, “I could smell the incense from some distance away, and as I came up to the door of the temple and peeked inside, I saw two young women dancing in a circle, one strumming a dulcimer and the other playing small hand cymbals, just dancing around and chanting. I was very conscious that this was some kind of fulfilment, that a story was being fulfilled.

SPPC

Genuine Charisma of the Founder-Acharya

by Caitanya Candrodaya das

Many scholars agree that following the physical departure of His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, his International Society for Krishna Consciousness has passed through what some scholars call the “post-charismatic” period (Rochford, 2007; Ketola, 2008). This period, while necessary for institutional stabilization, has also brought into focus a paradox central to the movement’s identity: many of the externally charismatic successors have proven problematic, whereas the Founder-Acharya himself, who eschewed theatrical charisma, continues to attract, transform, and stabilize the movement even in his physical absence.

Opinion

Part 4: Founder-Acarya and Beyond

Urmila Devi Dasi: Recognising Srila Prabhupada as the Founder-Acarya of ISKCON has profoundly shaped the movement. While acknowledging him as founder is widely accepted, his role as acarya—an ongoing guide, not merely a historical figure—remains more challenging. Staying true to ISKCON’s mission requires adherence to its core principles, while adjusting secondary details according to time, place, and circumstance. Prabhupada himself stated that such adaptation is essential.

Founder Acharya

All Generations Can Stay with Srila Prabhupada

Our worship of Srila Prabhupada is not exaggerated. All Founder-Acaryas in the various sampradayas are accorded similar worship. In ISKCON’s case, although it is true that we are a branch of the Gaudiya Math through Prabhupada’s connection with his spiritual master, and as such, we are also part of one of the four basic lines descending from Krishna, Srila Prabhupada began something that was distinguished enough from the main branch that it became a sub-branch in itself. ISKCON is not the same as the Gaudiya Math and neither did Srila Prabhupada try to make it the same. His purpose was to apply the traditions of Gaudiya Vaishnavism to Westerners in a worldwide movement, and that included making adjustments for cultural disparities between traditional Indian Vaishnava cultural expressions and the lack of them in the West-and so many other adjustments that only a worldwide preacher such as Srila Prabhupada could understand. Those adaptations and adjustments form a part of Srila Prabhupada’s emphasis, and make those who accept and identify wholeheartedly with that emphasis his followers.