Pillars of Success:
The Principles and Practices of
Reform in ISKCON

by Ravindra Svarupa das
 www.rsdasa.com, 2007

Content

Introduction

Personal Background

What is ISKCON?

Historical Roots

New Environment

Obstacles

Inherited

From Within

Failure to Acknowledge Shortcomings

Growing In Spite of Problems

After Srila Prabhupada's Departure

"Guru Worship" to Cover our Own Defects

Analysing Our Problems

Beginning of the "Guru Reform Movement"

Way to the Supersoul: Sadhana

"We have met the EnemyAnd He is Us!"

"Ending the Fratricidal War"

Parallels to Gaudiya Matha Failure

Recognition of Past Mistakes

Most Important: Personal Reform

"Best Men" not Good EnoughWhy wasn't I any Better?

Introduction

"A devotee, therefore, should execute his devotional services with
full energy, endurance, and confidence. He should perform his
scheduled duties, he should be pure in heart, and he should serve in
association with devotees. All six of these items will lead the
devotee to the path of success. One should not be discouraged in the
discharge of devotional service. Failures may not be detrimental; they
may be the pillars of success."

Light of the Bhagavata, 43

In October of 1984 I became active in what was later to be known
within ISKCON as "the guru reform movement." Over the next two years I
wrote a series of widely circulated papers that attempted to
understand and rectify some failures in ISKCON. As things turned out,
I became a leader of the reform movement. At the annual meeting of the
Governing Body Commission in March of 1987, the reform effort reached
a denouement of sorts. Four of the most powerful leaders of ISKCONall
simultaneously sannyasis, initiating gurus, and GBC membersresigned
or were removed from office, each under a noisome cloud of scandal.

These and other depredations had shrunk the GBC to fifteen members. At
the same time, the GBC had empowered an outside "Committee of Fifty,"
all senior disciples of Srila Prabhupada, to interview and evaluate
each of the remaining GBC members and to share its findings with the
body. That being accomplished, the GBC then requested that committee
to place before the GBC the names of some devotees as prospective new
members. (The GBC added new members by a two-thirds vote.)

My name was among those proposed, and I was voted onto the body. I had
wanted to return to my services of writing and scholarship with the
Bhaktivedanta Institute and the Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, but I fell
unwittingly under the sway of a fairly well-established law: If you
lead a successful revolution, you are condemned to become part of the
government. There is no doubt that in the activities of reform I had
to criticize many devotees whodeviations and shortcomings
notwithstandingharbored an inviolable seed of devotion to Prabhupada
and Krishna. Having to serve on the GBC was only a fitting punishment
for my offenses.

Although I prefer the contemplative to the active life, it is true
that my active engagements with the guru reform movement and later the
GBC have repeatedly produced bumper crops of material to feed
contemplation. I should explain that in my case reflecting on the Hare
Krishna movementin that mode of critical self-awareness inculcated in
academiaformed, from the beginning, an important component of my
involvement with it.

Personal Background

In 1971 I had moved with spouse and children into a fledging temple-
community in Philadelphia, thereby committing our joint and several
futures to Prabhupada's movement. It was indeed an act of faith, but
it is a fact that faith seeks ceaselessly to understand, and I strove
daily to comprehend more fully just what I had done, what adventure I
had embarked on. The understanding that gradually took shape was
composed of three closely inter-related dimensions; and these three,
eventually, were also to provide me with the features of certain broad
principles for reform. I shall call them the historical, the personal,
and the social.

Prior to my joining ISKCON I had seriously pursued academic study in
religion and philosophy. Although the limits of the merely academic
impelled me to refuge within a living spiritual tradition, I could not
simply shed my prior formation. And so it was with a certain thrill
that I realized that, having joined the Hare Krishna movement, I was
granted the closest, real-time access to a kind of event that
fascinates scholars of religion: a religion transplanting itself from
it's natal culture.

I had once studied the movement of Christianity from its original
Jewish milieu into the cosmopolitan Mediterranean world of the pax
Romana. Now I recognized a parallel: in Prabhupada's ISKCON, Gaudiya
Vaishnavism being lead from it's Bengal cradle-land into the modern
global civilization of the pax Americana. I didn't have just a "ring-
side seat" to this event; I was in the ring.

I was committed. I had committed more than this life to the mercies of
ISKCON. I had committed my very soul. In spite of my predilections for
the long historical perspective, I was anything but a disinterested
observer. My own personal stake in the success of Srila Prabhupada's
endeavor had an individual as well as social dimension. As an
individual, I had committed myself to the enterprise of becoming a
pure devotee. Prabhupada had succeeded in convincing a coterie of
idealistic American youth that sainthood was a feasible vocation, a
"live option," and I was one among them.

Prabhupada called us to a kind of heroism of risk, of commitment, and
of sacrifice in an ultimate "war against maya." Prabhupada taught that
this consummate victory was granted only to those prepared to
subordinate all other concerns to the service of this single ultimate
concern. When I took initiation from him, I pledged myself to this
principle. Yet I could not carry out this pledge by myself; I required
favorable grounds. That was ISKCON, painstakingly crafted by
Prabhupada himself, placed by him in late twentieth century America,
to nourish and foster my personal pilgrimage toward pure service to
God.

ISKCON harbored a further significance: ISKCON was itself my service.
Even as ISKCON nurtured me, I was bound in turn to nurture ISKCON.
Assisting Srila Prabhupada in his mission was both my obligation and
my saving grace. His mission was to deliver throngs of fallen souls
through propagation of the sankirtana yuga-dharma, effecting thereby
"a respiritualization of the entire human society." In this effort,
ISKCON was both his means and his end. In the bhakti sankirtana
movement, as Prabhupada taught it, saving myself and saving the world
entailed each other. ISKCON was the context for both.

What is ISKCON?

Historical Roots

Bhakti is at once personalistic and social, for it is a philosophical
truth that the personal and the social cannot be separated. What a
"person" is can be fully manifest only through interactions with other
persons. This principle is exemplified at the highest ontological
level in Krishna, whose supreme personhood entails that He is also
supremely social. The fullness of the Godhead entails that the
supreme, transcendental absolute is equally the supremely,
transcendentally relative.

Krishna, therefore, is never alone but always in the company of His
devotees. He is constituted by relationships, and many of His proper
and eternal names include those of His nearest and dearestas, for
example,

    * Radha-kanta  Radha's sweetheart,
    * Yasoda-nandana  Yasoda's darling boy,
    * Partha-sarathi  Charioteer to Prtha's son,

and so on. For this reason, bhaktidevotional serviceis preeminently
a social activity, and that social principle attains its fullest
exfoliation in the idea of sankirtana, the congregational
glorification of God's name, fame, activities, and so on. Therefore,
Prabhupada's founding a society of devotees was not simply a tactical
expedience; it was a metaphysical necessity.

The effort of Prabhupada, then, was to establish the community or
communion of devotees, a communion that, out of the natural
overflowing of its own joy, would be ever-increasing. That communion
is one in which certain kinds of personal transactions would take
place among the devotees; by them, the devotional consciousness of the
participants would ever increase; and, in a spirit of compassion for
those suffering outside this community, the members would always be
initiating others into their circle to share in the felicity of their
communion.

Prabhupada, however, was not inaugurating this society de novo, from
scratch. Inducted into ISKCON, we became part of a sampradaya (the
brahma-madhva-gaudiya-sampradaya, to be precise), a venerable
historical community whose task, generation after generation, was
properly and correctly to receive a spiritual culture, attain full
formation and realization through it, and pass it on complete and
sound, free from any adulteration, to the next generation.

Although Prabhupada came to us in the West as a solitary figure (an
anomaly we shall examine later), he was the repository of a vastly
rich tradition of teachers and students, who studied, composed,
taught, and practiced volumes of theology, commentary, drama, poetry,
and song. When we became Prabhupada's students, he was initiating us
into the teachings and practices of that tradition, to become its
heirs.

Here, then, was quite another way the historical past came to be known
by meas age-old tradition, received and transmitted through
authority.

New Environment

It is the outstanding national trait of Americans to be without
tradition. A nation of migrants, the United States could realize more
thoroughly than Europe the Enlightenment project of a radical break
with the past, of wholesale rejection of traditional political and
spiritual authority, of the reinvention of humanity from the ground
up. In America, tradition and traditional authorities are reflexively
viewed with skepticism, suspicion and even hostility.

Rootlessness is the national style, and the ability to perpetually
reinvent oneself through a series of discrete identities is
practically the national ideal. It is, unfortunately, the world's
future, as indigenous communities and traditions are dissolved by the
solvent of the ever-spreading pax Americana, to survive only in the
travesty of the theme park and the multi-media "experience."

At first, AmericanI should say modernrootlessness was an important,
even necessary, condition for the beginning of ISKCON; very soon, it
became one the greatest impediments to its development and
continuance. The contrast between the condition of modern America and
the "Vedic" culture of tradition and authority, of continuity and
conservation, that Prabhupada was attempting to transplant could
hardly have been greater. With growing amazement, I gradually got
sight of the immensity of Prabhupada's endeavor. It was breathtaking.

I also came to see that Prabhupada was very well aware of the
overwhelming difficulty of his undertaking. Seeing him immersed in
that endeavor gave me new appreciation for certain of his oft-repeated
sayings, such as "Impossible is a word found in a fool's dictionary,"
and for his injunction to "shoot the rhinoceros" (meaning that if you
are to attempt something, you might as well make it something
formidable).

As Prabhupada explained in a 1971 letter to Balavanta dasa:

"We should always be enthusiastic to try for shooting the rhinoceros.
That way, if we fail, everybody will say, 'Never mind, nobody can
shoot a rhinoceros anyway,' and if we succeed, then everyone will say,
'Just see, what a wonderful thing they have done'."

Obstacles

Prabhupada understood the obstacles, but he remained ever confident,
and instilled the same confidence in others. His ability to convey a
sense of unshakable confidence in himself and his mission attained its
impressive power because it was evidently part and parcel of a simple
and deep humility. The confidence of Prabhupada reposed, of course, on
supernatural foundations, on firm dependence on Guru and Krishna, and
therefore it held impervious to all failures and setbacks. "So I don't
think there is any cause of discouragement," he wrote in 1969 to
Vrndavanesvari, "because we are working on a different platform."

Inherited

Yet at every minute Srila Prabhupada was wrestling with failure and
setbacks. Indeed, as I was gradually to learn, when Prabhupada single-
handedly conducted Caitanya's mission to the West, he did so as the
sole undebilitated survivor of a monstrous spiritual failure in India,
the foundering of his spiritual master's mission and institution, the
Gaudiya Matha. He came to America like a survivor paddling away from a
colossal shipwreck.

Even from the beginning of his Western mission, Prabhupada was
carrying on in the face of massive failure and discouragement in the
generation previous to us. He noted this, for example, in a letter of
1972 responding to a disheartened Guru dasa:

"Do not be depressed. All along my godbrothers gave me only
depression, repression, compressionbut I continued strong in my duty.
So never mind there is some discouragement, continue with your work in
full enthusiastic Krishna Consciousness attitude of service."

From Within

Prabhupada's own movement also soon provided him with ample reason for
discouragement. From the very outset there was trouble: his authority
was challenged; his position compromised; his instructions distorted,
neglected, or selectively followed; his teaching molded to various
fancies; his assets misused, mismanaged, and misappropriated; his
standards broken; his dependents neglected, exploited, and abused. And
the worst of this was committed by men Prabhupada entrusted with
responsible positions.

Prabhupada traveled continuously around the world, grappling with
problems. Each day his mail washed up to him a jumbled deposit of
scandals, failures, and disappointments. Internal weaknesses and
shortcomings turned the eleven years of Prabhupada's personal
supervision into a concatenation of crises.

Failure to Acknowledge Shortcomings

It is a noteworthy feature of ISKCON during that time that there was
hardly any frank and open acknowledgment of the problems among the
members. Even though almost any of us could provide impressively
detailed accounts of a plethora of scandals and failures, a weird sort
of schizoid compartmentalization allowed us to maintain the conviction
that we as a society were pure and transcendental and that, almost by
definition, we could do no wrong.

Scandals and failures tended each to be viewed as discrete and
anomalous, and they were rarely surveyed as a whole to alarm us with
the picture of a chronic condition, a pervasive pattern, a trend. We
became so captivated by our own dazzling ideals that we were blinded
to our actual behavior. We could have benefited by accepting some of
the devastatingly accurate criticisms leveled against us by the anti-
cult movement, but unfortunately the anti-cultists called for the
destruction of ISKCON. Their condemnations were indiscriminate and
sweeping, and they in no way wished us well. As a result, they simply
fostered the very bunker mentality they condemned and only fed the
self-righteousness of the devotees.

Growing In Spite of Problems

Yet given all that, it was more than possible to flourish spiritually
within ISKCON. True, when I moved into a temple of little over a dozen
residents, it was a shock to discover the extent of the struggle with
spiritual weakness that went on daily. It was a test to undergo the
difficulties of human relations within a small tightly-knit, high-
demand, high-intensity, religious community, especially one nearly
bereft of the human comforts of social or psychological
compatabilities. Nevertheless, one could, if one wanted, negotiate all
the individual and group minefields, and not only advance in Krishna
consciousness, but also deliver it effectively to others.

In fact, I could do neither of those things at all outside of ISKCON.
If, on my worst days, I found myself thinking that the devotees I
lived with were fools and rascals, I always reminded myself that
without these fools and rascals, I could make no advancement in
Krishna consciousness. I had better learn to appreciate them. We were,
all of us, fools and rascals; nevertheless, Prabhupada still enabled
us to do miraculous things, rendered all the more miraculous in light
of the character of the performers.

After Srila Prabhupada's Departure

Thus, it was not until after the demise of it's Founder-Acarya in 1977
that ISKCON as an institution had to acknowledge and come to terms
with its failures and shortcomings. At firstwith the lineage
apparently handed over securely by Prabhupada to eleven hand-picked
successor-acaryasISKCON set out with great panache, leaping off with
the boyish ebullience of Siegfried bounding down to the Rhine, horn
blaring.

Yet it was not long before ISKCON had to confront, at last, its own
shadow, as over the decade intractable failures and shortcomingsabuse
of authority, enjoyment of position, attachment to material pleasures,
and the like emerged within the group of initiating gurus. The
movement was forced to begin facing, frankly and openly, the gap
between its ideals and its actual achievements. We had attained the
condition for real progress.

So profound was ISKCON's denial, its concealment of its own problems
from itself, that many reacted initially as if these problems among
leaders were some shocking brand-new phenomenon. They contrasted the
prelapsarian paradise of ISKCON under Prabhupada with the now
hopelessly degenerate society, devoid as it is of the salvific
presence of any "maha-bhagavata." Some awaited eagerly the emergence
of a new "selfeffulgent acarya" who would restore us to our lost
purity. There are those who still await the coming of such a savior,
while there are yet others who proclaim to have found him manifest in
the person of some particular devotee, usually this or that elderly
Indian sannyasin.

"Guru Worship" to Cover our Own Defects

Yet even in Prabhupada's presencethe all-acknowledged "maha-
bhagavata"ISKCON regularly failed to live up to its own ideals.
Moreover, it was during Prabhupada's presence that ISKCON devotees
were most successful at maintaining their concealment; only after
Prabhupada was gone did the concealment begin to break down. It has
taken longest for those failures enacted during Prabhupada's own
presence to attain admission to consciousness. Seeking the reason for
this delayed recognition has led me to face an uncomfortable fact: It
was Prabhupada's very presence that had gradually begun to function
for many devotees as an instrument of concealment and denial.

It was natural for us to identify ourselves to some extent with
Prabhupada as the living embodiment of our ideals and to see him as
the very personification of ISKCON (so that his purity became ours).
This helped us maintain our ideals and our enthusiasm to attain them
even in the face of setbacks and adversity. However, such a
relationship turns unhealthy if I engage in the worship or adoration
of an ideal precisely in order to compensate for personal failures
become chronic, for weaknesses accommodated to. In such cases, my self-
respect no longer resides in the heroism of my struggle, for I have
given up on the struggle, without acknowledging that I have done so.

Now, as a substitute for dealing honestly with my failures, I identify
intensely myself with my savior-figure. My disowned anxieties about my
true condition and the psychic tensions of concealment find release as
adulation, one that reveals its origin in falsity through its
strident, driven character. In such cases, worshiping a guru becomes a
substitute for becoming Krishna conscious. Thus we have the too
familiar phenomenon in ISKCON (then and now) of fanatical followers
and so-called "guru groupies."

This pathological submergence of self into an all-powerful, idealized
savior-figure is, of course, one of the phenomena that gives rise to
the notion of a "cult." It is a sure sign of arrested spiritual
development disguising itself as true religion.

Analysing Our Problems

The point is that the difficulties that precipitated the guru reform
movement are intimately connected with psychological patterns and
styles of relationships that began to establishing themselves from the
beginning. These are grounded in the inability of many devotees to
acknowledge and deal fruitfully with their own spiritual shortcomings
and failures, or, in traditional vocabulary, their inability to
execute the process of anartha-nivrtti (the eradication of "unwanted
things" from the heart).

This general, widespread failure, which pervades the institution and
has even shaped some structural features of it, is the root debility,
of which the guru crisisthe "crisis of succession"is simply a highly
visible symptom.

It is my conviction that any real reform has to address effectively
the root debility. Too many of us have tried to fix the symptom while
ignoring the local manifestation of the disease, including the
manifestation within our own hearts. Too many have tried to purify
ISKCON as a substitute for purifying ourselves. This kind of behavior
is the disease, not the cure.

Beginning of the "Guru Reform Movement"

In 1979 questions about the gurus' position had burst out in major
eruptions at ISKCON centers at Vrindavan and Juhu Beach, ejecting over
the rest of the movement thick fascicles of photocopied papers. In May
of 1980 the GBC body was forced to convene an "extraordinary general
meeting"an emergency meeting in Los Angeles to find immediate
responses to controversial behavior on the part of Hamsadutta Swami
(abuse of power, drugs, sex, crime), Jayatirtha Swami (LSD, as it
would turn out), and Tamal Krishna Goswami (extreme autocracy).

A mere three months after sanctioning these gurus, the GBC issued a
philosophical position paper defending the position that the current
gurus were to be understood as maha-bhagavatas. In any case, by 1981
the GBC had to remove Hamsadutta from his position, and it did the
same with Jayatirtha in 1982. By this point, most senior devotees
believed that guru failures and abuses were going to continue, and the
GBC could not control them.

This growing anxiety finally found institutional articulation at a
routine meeting of the North American temple presidents and sannyasis
in September of 1984. The thirty-five voting members present polled
themselves and discovered that 94% of them believed that "there are
fundamental and compelling problems with the guru institution as it
presently exists in ISKCON."

The group called a second meeting in November to pursue this issue
further, and, in spite of a good deal of reluctance, I was persuaded
to the meeting. Much to my surprise, I found myself becoming greatly
enlivened and encouraged by the association and the commitment of the
devotees. I realized, with a shock, that quite unconsciously I had
fallen into a state of despair about ISKCONand about myself as well.
I was in a spiritual slump, and the meeting was waking me up. At this
gathering I was asked to conduct research to determine just exactly
what had gone wrong with the way the position of the guru had been
institutionalized in ISKCON. I agreed to take the job.

Way to the Supersoul: Sadhana

Back in Philadelphia, I concluded that the only way I could
responsibly conduct research on such a loaded subject was to attempt
to entrust myself to the guidance of Supersoul, the indwelling guide
and director of intelligence. I feared more than anything else my own
stupidity. I was the Straw Man, and I needed a brain. I decided to
entrust myself to Prabhupada's instructions for attaining direction
from Supersoul.

Thus, as a remedial measure, I undertook to rigorously restore my
sadhana to a strict level. I defined good sadhana as chanting the holy
name while trying assiduously to avoid offenses. In this way, I would
be in a position to receive intelligence from Krishna whenever He
chose to give it. Prabhupada's instructions were as potent as they are
simple:

"In all spiritual affairs, one's first duty is to control his mind and
senses. Unless one controls his mind and senses, one cannot make any
advancement in spiritual life. Everyone within this material world is
engrossed in the modes of passion and ignorance. One must promote
himself to the platform of goodness, sattva-guna, by following the
instructions of Rupa Gosvami [in the first verse of Upadesamrta], and
then everything concerning how to make further progress will be
revealed."

Preface, Nectar of Instruction

It seemed that this was as pertinent for guidance of the entire
movement as it was for personal guidance. As my sadhana became strict,
my spirits picked up, and my despair over the fate of ISKCON began to
evaporate like fog. And everyday I thought hard about what had gone
wrong in ISKCON. Then a breakthrough came.

One evening some of us who had attended the meeting in Towaco were
discussing strategy. Sesa dasa, the temple president, was there, as
well as Mahakrama Swami, who had been elected vice-chairman in Towaco.
He was also the regional secretary for Satsvarupa dasa Goswami, the
initiating guru and GBC for our area.

"We have met the EnemyAnd He is Us!"

Although Satsvarupa Maharaja would later publish an influential book
called Guru Reform, his initial reaction to the nascent reform
movement had been filled with misgivings. He did not interfere with
our participation, yet he had publicly expressed strong reservations
about the Towaco meetings, questioning the suitability of politics to
deal with spiritual issues. After our strategy meeting broke up that
night, Sesa took me aside and warned me: "You know, you should be
really careful about what you say around Mahakrama! He reports
everything back to Satsvarupa Maharaja. You should know that."

I was stunned. I thought: "Here we are supposed to be the reform
party, and we think we can save ISKCON, but we cannot even trust each
other. How will we be any better?" It was during the sleepless night
that followed that I came to realize that the "guru problem" was
merely a symptom of a disease, with which we were all infected. The
polarity of "us-and-them" was wrong. I remembered the famous motto of
Pogo, the newspaper-comic opossum: "We have met the enemyand he is
us!" Any effort at reform that did not begin with myself and with our
"side" would be superficial and counterproductive. It would indeed be
mundane politics.

"Ending the Fratricidal War"

Ideas flooded into my head, and in the morning I began intensely
discussing them with Kundali dasa and others and setting them down on
paper. Addressing my god-brothers and -sisters, I began by asserting,

    "The root of all problems now facing ISKCON is that we, the
disciples of Srila Prabhupada, have not yet established proper
Vaisnava relationships among ourselves. While Prabhupada was here with
us, we did not enjoy such relationships, and our spiritual master
plainly told us that our greatest fault was our tendency to quarrel
with each other."

And then I went on to commit to writingfor the first timemy honest
perceptions of life in ISKCON:

    "A society of devotees in which proper Vaisnava relations are not
yet the norm is called a kanistha-adhikari society. Its distinguishing
characteristic is contentiousness arising from envy. Envy is a product
of false ego. Because of false ego, the members are unable to
establish spiritual friendship among themselves. Instead, they vie
with each other for prestige, power, and perquisites. Intensely
desiring the honor and respect of others, the contentious neophyte
pretends to be more advanced than he actually is. He tries to conceal
his shortcomings and fall downs, and in so doing he develops a
secretive mentality and holds himself back from entering into open and
honest relations with his Godbrothers. Because he cannot reveal his
mind in confidence, he remains aloof from real fellowship.

    "He strays from the path of devotional service, but his peers do
not help him. For he thinks that if he allows someone to preach to
him, he implicitly admits his own subordination. Therefore he cuts
himself off from hearing and becomes impervious to instruction or good
advice. Because he has many secret misgivings about himself, he
becomes eager to find the faults of others; that way he reassures
himself of his own superiority in spite of his many unacknowledged
weaknesses.

    "Spiritual immaturity often leads a kanistha-adhikari to identify
spiritual advancement with organizational advancement. He thinks that
attaining prestige, power, and the perquisites of office is evidence
of spiritual advancement. Lacking the assets for real spiritual
achievement, he substitutes organizational elevation, which he can
attain through his cunning or political prowess. He therefore competes
intensely with others for high office, and he comes to believe
implicitly that one achieves a spiritually elevated state only by
becoming victorious over others. In this way material competition
becomes institutionalized in kanistha-adhikari societies."

I also could propose a path of reform:

    "Fortunately, however, the kanistha stage is followed by the
madhyama stage. A kanistha-adhikari advances to the madhyama platform
by means of sadhana-bhakti. Sadhana-bhakti, pursued diligently and
attentively, destroys false ego, and as long as the neophyte devotees
attend to their sadhana they can be sure of elevation to the higher
stages. There is, however, no other assured means of advancement, and
habitual negligence in sadhana is therefore fatal to progressive
spiritual life.

    "Furthermore, when a neophyte devotees has risen to the madhyama
platform, sadhana is absolutely necessary to maintain him in that
position. If he becomes slack in sadhana, he rapidly reverts to the
neophyte condition. Therefore, the essential prerequisite for both
creating and sustaining a madhyama society is intense common
commitment to sadhana."

Further on, when I described this grass-roots process of reform, I
expanded upon what I felt were the pervading social and individual
deficiencies in ISKCON:

    "One special advantage to this revolutionary project for the
regeneration of ISKCON is that it need not wait on the action of the
GBC. It can be initiated in each temple immediately. It can be started
by one devotee, and then spread by progression to two, three, and on
and on. Thus there can be many centers of reformation, and they will
each widen until all of ISKCON is included.

    "Any devotee who wants to institute reform must begin with
himself. The prerequisite for coming to the madhyama stage is to be a
strict follower of the regulative principles of devotional service.
Spiritual fellowship cannot flourish if anarthas are not being
relentlessly uprooted by daily practice.

    "Therefore, every devotee who wants to help in the reformation of
ISKCON must first carefully review his own spiritual condition and his
personal devotional practice. If he is careless in observing
regulative principles and slack in sadhana, he must immediately take
up the process of rectification. This entails attending the complete
morning program in all alertness, with especial concentration on
attentive, offense- avoiding japa.

    "By this effort, a devotee may quickly remove all his
accommodations to sense gratification and undertake the deliberate
dismantling of his false ego. A devotee of the reforming party should
recognize sense gratification and false ego as the two great
impediments to Vaisnava fellowship. They are the mortal enemies of
ISKCON, and he should resolve to conquer them.

    "Having undertaken whatever personal reformatory measures are
required, the reforming devotee should then undertake the
rectification of his relationships. Most devotees will discover that
few, if any, of their relationships are satisfactory. The devotee will
probably see that he has almost no confidential friends, and that he
does not and cannot trust most of his associates.

    "He is conscious that many of his associates have made
accommodationssometimes quite extensive to sense gratification.
Indeed, he has participated in many meetings in which the faults and
shortcomings of those not present have been thoroughly examined. Yet
the established patterns of relationships are such that while everyone
is free to talk about, no one is free to talk to them. In this
situation, devotees find themselves standing helplessly by as they
watch one of their associates sink deeper and deeper into maya until
he finally bloops; no one is able to come to his aid. As the failing
devotee falls further and further away, the criticism of him
intensifies, but no one helps.

    "Nor can the devotees work together effectively, because they have
no way of working out the inevitable differences that arise in any
collective effort. When one devotee transgresses against another, the
offended party will either respond in wrath or else retreat into
wounded silence (complaining, however, vociferously to others). He
does not know how to approach the other devotee and openly resolve
their differences. He is unable to reveal his mind without giving
offense.

    "Under these conditions, a great stockpile of resentment builds up
in time, and the atmosphere is filled with sullen undercurrents of
hostility and mistrust, relieved only by periodic outbursts of anger.
In this uncongenial climate, devotional relations become more and more
burdensome, and materialistic people start to seem relatively nice.
The devotees find themselves living in deepening isolation from one
another, each enthroned in a well-fortified ivory tower of false ego.
They learn to get along by avoiding each other. These are some local
conditions that arise in the milieu of fratricidal strife."

I called the finished paper a "preliminary proposal," and gave it the
title "The Next Step in the Expansion of ISKCON: Ending the
Fratricidal War." My realizations were quite personal; I had conducted
no surveys nor much textual research on the guru question. So,
tentatively, I mailed photocopies to three or four devotees to get
their responses. (Remember that at this timeNovember, 1984facsimile
machines were not yet in common use; it was photocopying, then
ubiquitous, that carried the reform movement.)

What happened next astonished me: within two weeks strong responses
some of them very personalbegan flooding in from devotees all over
the world. Chain-photocopying had geometrically propagated the paper
swiftly throughout ISKCON. Devotees called to complain that I had left
them off my mailing-listI had to explain that the paper had published
itself.

Clearly, I had struck a nerve. The response was overwhelmingly
favorable. However, Ramesvara Swami, the head of the North American
BBT, was outraged, and he charged me with the worst of malefactions:
because I was discouraging the devotees, I was hurting book
distribution. This I worried about until the Christmas mail delivered
a store- bought card from Los Angeles displaying on front the words
"Good Job!" and "Thank you!" inside. It was signed by Ramesvara
Swami's biggest book distributors"Mothers Kaumadaki, Jagaddhatri and
friends too shy to write their names"who added the message:
"Dandavats for your 'Preliminary Proposal' for ISKCON. At last some
hope!!"

Bahudaka dasa, the chairman of the North American temple presidents
and leader of the reform movement in America, was a little
disappointed. He wrote me that

    "We need solid research to understand what should be the role and
position of guru. With that paper we can push on strongly for real
change. ISKCON as Prabhupada set it up has changed radically and the
primary cause is the serious mistakes being made regarding the
position of guru. How can we establish the importance of sadhana in
our movement when the majority of gurus give the worst example in this
regard?"

As Bahudaka wanted, I did go on to write a further paper about the
misunderstanding of Prabhupada's order concerning the position of guru
in ISKCON. "'Under My Order': Reflections on the Guru in
ISKCON" (August, 1985) became accepted as the position paper of the
reform movement, and the paper's thesis helped lead, two years later,
to the formal dismantling of the "zonal acarya" system.

Parallels to Gaudiya Matha Failure

My investigation of this issue brought home the fact that the
difficulties undergone by ISKCON uncannily paralleled those suffered
by the Gaudiya Matha after the demise of its founder. Bhaktisiddhanta
Sarasvati Thakura had appointed no successor to occupy the chair at
the head of his institution; instead he ordered the institution to be
managed by a "Governing Body Commission," that is, a board of
directors of the kind that runs modern corporate enterprises.
("Governing Body Commission" is in fact the name of the governing
board of the British-established Indian Railways.)

Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakura was attempting to construct a
preaching mission effective in the modern, global context. To do this
he instituted a collection of reforms that rendered his mission
suspect to many formed by and attached to prevailing practices, which
they regarded as sanctified by sacred tradition. The idea of a GBC was
one such innovation. However, it did not prevail. As Srila Prabhupada
recounts it:

"Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakura, at the time of his departure,
requested all his disciples to form a governing body and conduct
missionary activities cooperatively. He did not instruct a particular
man to become the next acarya. But just after his passing away, his
leading secretaries made plans, without authority, to occupy the post
of acarya, and they split into two factions over who the next acarya
would be. Consequently, both factions were asara, or useless, because
they had no authority, having disobeyed the order of the spiritual
master. Despite the spiritual master's order to form a governing body
and execute the missionary activities of the Gaudiya Matha, the two
unauthorized factions began litigation that is still going on after
forty years with no decision.

Caitanya-caritamrta, Adi-lila, 12.8, Purport

According to Bhakti Raksaka Sridhara Deva Goswami (who discussed this
matter during an audio-taped conversation with a group of GBC members
on October 17, 1980), a GBC of thirteen members was formed ten days
after the departure of Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakura, but Sridhara
Maharajawho would not serve on the bodywas dissatisfied with it, and
he and some other senior members prevailed upon the Matha to elevate
Ananta Vasudeva dasa, a brahmacari of brilliant scholastic ability who
had served as Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakura's secretary, to the
position of acarya. In effect, the Matha reverted to an ancient,
tradition model of leadership, in which a single guru, recognized by
all as possessing exceptional spiritual power, is elevated above all
others to rule autocratically at the seat at the head of the
institution. One of Ananta Vasudeva's "principle supporters," B.R.
Sridhara Swami, recollects (referring to himself in the first-person
plural):

"We made him acarya, though a brahmacari, because, next to Prabhupada
[Bhaktisiddhanta Saravati Thakura], he could satisfy us with the
siddhanta, shastric siddhanta, shastric conclusion. He was well versed
[in the Sastra]. It was universally accepted: Next to Prabhupada, he
knows the sastric siddhanta. So we felt indebted to him. And from
early time, we thought the next acarya will be he. That was our
conviction.

Two years after the elevation of "Vasudeva Prabhu," however, someone
stumbled across some "love letters", part of a correspondence between
Ananta Vasudeva and a woman; these letters were brought to B.R.
Sridhara Swami, who concluded, together with some other senior men,
that Ananta Vasudeva could not "do justice to the seat of our Guru
Maharaja" and should step down. Ananta Vasudeva, however, did not
agree, and he and his loyal followers squared off with the others in
protracted, painful hostilities that included systematic
discrimination, much persiflage and on occasion physical assult.

Finally, as Sridhara Maharaja put it, "Prabhupada withdrew from him,"
and Ananta Vasudeva began to preach against Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati
Thakura Sridhara Maharaja says this blasphemy was the result of
Ananta Vasudeva's having committed so many offenses against devotees
and he left the mission. He gave himself sannyasa in Allahabad, and
later took initiation (as Puri Goswami) among the babajis of Radhakunda
 a group highly antagonistic to Bhaktisiddhantaamong whom he
continued as leading intellectual light, even though he eventually got
married. After his abdication, the Gaudiya Matha fragmented into
contending parties over the succession, and the case ended up before
the Calcutta High Court for resolution.

We see that ISKCON is not going through anything new. It faces the
same issues that broke apart the Gaudiya Matha. The fact that the
Bhaktisiddhanta's disciples could not continue their founder's
visionary reforms demonstrates first of all the sheer difficulty of
the undertaking. It may well take several generations to get it right.
The undertaking is to pass on a spiritual tradition in a sound and
healthy form, its living force undiminished, into the modern world.

This is no small task. Up until now, when the religions of the West
have encountered modernity, they have tended either to remain intact
by withdrawing into the self-protective shell of fundamentalism, or to
become swallowed up and assimilated by the world, to live on only as a
few nostalgic gestures. Does a similar fate await Lord Caitanya's
movement? The task facing Gaudiya Vaisnavas, it seems to me, is to
discover another alternative.

Recognition of Past Mistakes

Awareness of the history of the Gaudiya Matha not only shows us the
difficulty of challenge, but it may save us from the same mistakes or
at least help us rectify those we have made. Any hope we have of
healing fragmentation and isolation depends upon our recognition of
past mistakes. At the beginning of the reform movement, I tried to
show how within ISKCON concealment of failure leads to isolation. This
principle holds as much for relations among communities as among
individuals. Progress in spiritual life, individually and
institutionally, depends first of all on the frank acknowledgement of
shortcoming, errors, and mistakes. Without that, all "progress" is
mere bluff.

At a certain time, Germans found it necessary to put themselves
through a painful process to which they gave the name
Vergangenheitsbewaeltigungthat is, "coming to terms with the past,"
"past" here referring to the period 1933-1945.

ISKCON requires its own Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung. Each devotee needs
to undergo it as an individual, and the society to undertake it an
institution. It is also a necessity for the various present offshoots
and spin-offs of the original Gaudiya Matha. ISKCON is not the only
place mistakes get buried. In those quarters there seems to be a
reluctance to face up to historical failures to serve the order of
Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakura.

Most Important: Personal Reform

The reform movement in ISKCON aimed at establishing the GBC-principle
and subordinating initiating gurus to the GBC authority, based on
Srila Prabhupada's order. To me, however, the most important element
of reform is the personal reform as I envisioned it in my "preliminary
proposal." And it is this project which has, as you might suspect,
proven to be the most intractable.

For devotees in the Krishna consciousness movement, reform must be a
fundamental spiritual practice, inseparable from our cultivation of
the holy name. We must accordingly recognize that reform is a never-
ending enterprise, our daily work. It should never be neglected, nor
should we ever assume that the job is accomplished. Our confession
should be perpetual:

trnad api su-nicena taror iva sahisnuna
amanina mana-dena kirtaniyah sada harih

"One who thinks himself lower than the grass, who is more tolerant
than a tree, and who does not expect personal honor but is always
prepared to give all respect to others can very easily always chant
the holy name of the Lord."

Caitanya-caritamrta, Antya-lila 20.22

At the same time, if we show some perseverance in the matter, always
begging Krishna to destroy our desires to enjoy independently in this
world, Krishna will reciprocate with us and give us guidance from
within. In this way, the devotee becomes acquainted with the
infinitely caring and carefully guiding presence of Krishna, a
presence which becomes the solace of the devotee's heart. And the
devotee can progresses confidently. The devotee is also empowered to
give guidance to others.

"Best Men" not Good EnoughWhy wasn't I any Better?

When I became involved with the reform movement, it distressed me to
see the number of my revolutionary god-brothers who thought that the
problems with ISKCON resolved themselves in to the fact that other
people were not Krishna conscious enough. The other people, in this
context, were those who had become the first initiating gurus after
Prabhupada. Each of them had been a responsible leader under
Prabhupada, and Prabhupada relied much upon them. Prabhupada deeply
appreciated them because they had shouldered the burden of so much
responsibility on his behalf. Whatever their shortcomings, they were
Prabhupada's "best men."

If, in the event, they turned out to be not good enough, then the
question I had to ask myself was: "Why wasn't I any better?" After
all, we are told that the spiritual master's mercy is equally
available to all disciples, without discrimination. Prabhupada did not
play favorites. So the fault was mine: I had every opportunity to be
better, but I did not take it.

I also realized that, despite all their failings, Prabhupada
appreciated the service of these people. I should therefore appreciate
it as well. And it seemed to me that success in reform of leadership
would only come when Krishna became convinced that there were other
people who would be as willing to carry the burden of responsibility
as those who had failed and who would strive more diligently than they
did to become free from impurities.

In sum, the personal qualification for reform is: With a firm vow, we
in ISKCON have to commit ourselves to

   1. purifying ourselves, and
   2. accepting responsibility to care for others.

I am convinced that any devoteeman or woman, senior devotee or new
bhakta, big preacher or humble doorkeepercan, by taking these two
vows, become increasingly empowered by Krishna to save ISKCON. You can
begin today.
