There is no one dearer to me than one who teaches devotional service.
—SRI KRISHNA IN THE BHAGAVAD GITA, 18.68–69
THE FIRST TIME Bruce Scharf sat on the floor across from the Swami, the twenty-three-year-old college student attempted to explain his identity crisis. He had been a star athlete in high school, but he preferred listening to jazz and reading poetry. While his macho father hunted and fished, Bruce read Plato. He had tried psychotherapy after his father’s third divorce. He had seen a lot of the world while working on a Caribbean freighter. Currently, he was enrolled in a university course called “Oriental Literature.” But he had no idea who he was.
“You are part and parcel of Krishna,” the Swami said. “In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna describes that all living entities are his eternal fragmental parts.73 And Krishna is the Supreme Personality of Godhead. Being part and parcel of Krishna, your duty is to serve him, to think of him, to worship him, and to love him. Now chant Hare Krishna. As soon as the chanting stops, maya comes.” Scharf noted that the Swami’s eyes were looking past him with an expression of longing. He turned to see what was prompting such an emotion. On the wall hung a painting of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu dancing in kirtan.
Before the Swami’s morning classes, Scharf carried a heavy Akai reel-to-reel tape recorder down the stairs from apartment 2-C, across the courtyard and into the temple room. There was a pattern to these classes. The Swami started with a ten-minute kirtan. Then he had students chant one round on their beads. He took his own beads out of their cloth bag and draped them around his neck, and students followed along as the Swami held his beads outward with both hands, closed his eyes, and chanted the Hare Krishna mantra on each bead. Occasionally, he opened his eyes to glance at the attendees and offer a nod of encouragement. Then he lectured, and Scharf recorded the class. When the class ended, Scharf carried the tape recorder back up to the apartment, and a small group of disciples sat with the Swami and listened to the lecture he had just given. It occurred to Scharf that replaying his own words was not ego on the Swami’s part: He was appreciating Krishna’s teachings, even if they came out in a class he himself had given.
Sometimes people attended these lectures just to challenge the Swami. “What about Camus?” a guest asked.
“What is his philosophy?” the Swami asked.
“Camus says that everything is absurd, and that the only philosophical question is whether to commit suicide.”
The Swami shook his head at such a tragic view of life. “That means everything is absurd for him,” he said, “because he does not know the soul. The soul cannot be killed. The material world is absurd, but there is a spiritual world beyond this one.” His ability to unravel sophisticated ideas with a simple phrase aroused emotions in his students that they couldn’t name. They might have described the sensation as relief from life’s uncertainties, combined with reassurance in discovering their eternal spiritual nature. Discussions often ran late into the night. Most visitors came and went, but some stayed because the Swami peeled back layers of illusion and permitted them to glimpse their own immortality. Just chant, he told them, and everything will become clear. They took the message to heart and chanted while riding the subway or walking to work.
A VISITOR PUT THE SWAMI in touch with Steven Goldsmith, a lawyer who offered to help incorporate the Swami’s society as a non-profit, tax-exempt organization. Paperwork in hand, Goldsmith arrived at the Second Avenue storefront one evening in mid-July 1966. At the Swami’s invitation, Goldsmith explained to people who had gathered for class that their signatures and addresses were needed. The Swami called some by name, “Bill, you can give your address—and Raphael, you can give yours.” Others, including Michael Grant and his partner, Jan, stepped forward to become the first trustees of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness.
For those who cared to read them, ISKCON’s articles of incorporation revealed the Swami’s plans for America: to educate people in “the techniques of spiritual life”; to propagate “a consciousness of Krishna, as it is revealed in the Bhagavad Gita and Srimad Bhagavatam”; to bring members together by developing awareness that each soul is “part and parcel of the quality of Godhead”; to teach congregational chanting; encourage “a simpler and more natural way of life”; and to achieve these many goals by publishing and distributing books and magazines. In recognition of this formalizing of the Swami’s movement, followers had taken to calling Matchless Gifts “the temple.” Externally, it remained a dusty storefront with a few hand-me-down decorations, but for them it had become beautiful and sacred.
A group of students came up with a plan to surprise their teacher. They took down the filthy curtains that lined the back wall, washed them at a nearby laundromat, dyed them purple, and tacked the newly cleaned and colored curtains behind the platform where the Swami sat to give class. Along the walls, they hung posters from India, tapestries, and a large painting of Radha and Krishna executed in a somewhat abstract style by one of the regulars. One visitor contributed an Oriental rug from his suburban home. By late afternoon, they had finished remodeling the Swami’s platform with wooden riser, pillows, flowers, and candlesticks. Then, when everything was ready, they waited for him to arrive for evening kirtan and class.
He entered through the side door of the temple room, stopped, looked around, and raised his eyebrows. “Oh!” he said with a broad smile. “Krishna consciousness is expanding.” He stepped up onto the newly decorated platform and sat. Then he stared at them one by one, with a grave expression that acknowledged their achievement at elevating a rented storefront to a functioning Krishna temple.
Some attendees resented the changes, in particular the raised dais. It was inappropriate, they said, to elevate someone to such a place of worship. “Why can’t you sit on the floor like us?” one of them groused. “It’s the Catholic Church all over again.”
Next to the dais was a slop-sink and a toilet. The Swami pointed and said, “I can sit and speak to you here—or there, on the commode. Shall I give class sitting on the commode?”
Ten years later a professor studying the evolution of Krishna consciousness in the West would propose that the renovation of Matchless Gifts in 1966 marked a transition from storefront to formal Vaishnava math, and that the raised and decorated dais signaled the Swami’s ascension from “father and friend to guru and spiritual master.”74 The impact of that shift would happen over time. For now, one year into his mission and on or off the dais, he was still their Swamiji.
THE STUDENTS DESIGNED A HANDBILL with the temple address and an invitation that read, “Practice the transcendental sound vibration Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare, Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare—International Society for Krishna Consciousness, Meetings Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.” Poet Allen Ginsberg, who lived not far from Matchless Gifts, received one of the handbills in the mail and drove up unannounced in July 1966 with his partner Peter Orlovsky. Ginsberg was forty and at the peak of his fame as poet laureate of the counterculture. He had spent several months in India and was already familiar with street chanting.
Students brought Ginsberg upstairs to apartment 2-C, where he touched the Swami’s feet in the customary gesture of respect in India for a holy person. Ginsberg presented the Swami with a gift: a harmonium, the hand-pumped keyboard instrument frequently used in kirtans. Students explained that Ginsberg was a prominent literary figure, and the Swami nodded in appreciation. Ginsberg droned on the harmonium and chanted Hare Krishna to a jolly melody. When he finished, the Swami smiled.
“You are an influential man,” he said. “I request you to chant this Hare Krishna at your poetry readings and other public functions. Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gita, ‘Whatever actions a great man performs, all the world pursues.’ Chanting Hare Krishna can purify the world.”
Ginsberg listened and nodded. “Do you really intend to make these American boys and girls into Vaishnavas?” He appreciated the Swami’s missionary spirit but wondered whether Krishna worship might not be a little too esoteric for New Yorkers.
“Yes,” the Swami replied, “and I will make them all Brahmins.”
“Brahmins?!” Ginsberg blanched.
There had never been Western Brahmins before, in part because the role of a Brahmin had no counterpart in Western religions. More than a priest or pastoral counselor, a Brahmin in the Vedic or ancient Indian sense was a performer of sacred ceremonies, a spiritual teacher, and a conduit between God and man. To qualify as a Brahmin required years of study and mastery of ritual, beginning in childhood. So powerful were authentic Brahmins that in India’s remote past some had even been warriors and kings. Ginsberg was familiar with a few of these warrior-priests from the epic story the Mahabharata: Dronacharya, Kripacharya, Parashurama. But these were revered exemplars from the pantheon of Vedic spiritual leaders—not stoned hippies from the streets of New York. He shook his head and marveled at the Swami’s daring.
“Well. Good luck, Swamiji,” he said.
SUMMER TURNED INTO FALL, and one September afternoon the Swami led his band of chanters up Second Avenue and east to the intersection of First Avenue and Avenue A. They entered Tompkins Square Park, one of the only green spaces on the Lower East Side, sat under a tall elm tree, and chanted Hare Krishna. The Swami motioned to his students to stand and dance. A tall, thin boy raised his arms and danced as the Swami had taught: left foot over right, right over left. Charles Barnett, wearing big red chanting beads around his neck and a black turtleneck against an early fall chill, followed. Bruce Scharf stood next, determined to dance for as long as his teacher sang. People strolling through Tompkins Square Park heard the music and gravitated to the circle of Krishna chanters. A few joined in with guitars, flutes, a bass drum, and orchestra cymbals.
The Swami stood and gave a brief talk. He thanked the audience of onlookers—mothers with baby strollers, old folks on benches, neighborhood residents and passersby—for joining in the kirtan. “Hare means, ‘O energy of the Lord,’ ” he explained. “Both Krishna and Rama are names of the Lord. The chanting emanates from the spiritual platform and is the best process in this age for reviving our dormant Krishna consciousness. Thank you very much,” he concluded. “Now please chant with us.”
The following week Ginsberg showed up and joined them on the grass. “I had been running around singing Hare Krishna but had never understood exactly why or what it meant,” he told a reporter. He was moved, he said, by the Swami’s humility in choosing the Lower East Side for his Krishna consciousness mission.
ATTENDANCE GREW AT THESE SUNDAY chanting sessions in Tompkins Square Park.75 One Saturday, Ginsberg arrived with a group of friends including downtown notables, fellow beat poets, actors, and playwrights. The group sat on the grass and joined the chanting. A reporter from the New York Times, hoping for an interview, interrupted his chanting. The renowned poet declined. “A man should not be disturbed while worshiping,” Ginsberg said.76
The public chanting prompted a spate of newspaper articles.
The New York Times, October 10, 1966
Swami’s Flock Chants in Park to Find Ecstasy by James R. Sikes
Sitting under a tree in a Lower East Side park and occasionally dancing, 50 followers of a Hindu swami repeated a 16-word chant for two hours yesterday afternoon to the accompaniment of cymbals, tambourines, sticks, drums, bells and a small reed organ.
Repetition of the chant, A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami says, is the best way to achieve self-realization in this age of destruction.
. . . many in the crowd of about a 100 persons standing around the chanters found themselves swaying or clapping hands in time to the hypnotic rhythmic music.
“It brings a state of ecstasy,” said Allen Ginsberg, the poet, who was one of the celebrants.
THE SIXTIES WERE, in the words of one commentator, “a generation given over to some of the noblest causes and some of the most indefensible nonsense in history.”77 Yet if there was one defensible byproduct of an often nonsensical time it was music, and the Swami’s chanting of Hare Krishna fit right in. Thanks to his father’s insistence that he receive musical training, he was a one-man band with a strong singing voice and a virtuoso’s skill on the single-headed bongo, which was the temple’s only drum in those early days. A New York percussionist once commented, “The Swami gets in some good licks.” Visitors to the storefront temple brought guitars, horns, metal clappers, anything that made noise and added flavor to sessions that often lasted past midnight. The sound of kirtan spread as jazz musicians picked up the melodies of the Hare Krishna mantra and weaved them into club sessions. Irving Halpern, an instrument maker and frequent attendee at the Swami’s kirtans, noted, “Whenever a new musician would join and play their first note, the Swami extended his arms as though he had stepped up to the podium and was going to lead the New York Philharmonic. I mean, there was this gesture—the pick-up—that every musician knows when someone else wants you to play with them.”78
A year later James Rado and Gerome Ragni’s rock musical Hair debuted off-Broadway with a finale that featured the Hare Krishna mantra, and the popularity of chanting grew. Some newcomers mistook the pleasure of chanting for a new kind of drug-induced high. “When I chant,” one girl told the Swami, “I feel a great concentration of energy on my forehead. Then a buzzing comes through, and I see a reddish light.”
“Just keep chanting,” he reassured her. “It will clear up.”
LIKE MANY OTHER YOUNG PEOPLE of the era, nineteen-year-old Judy Koslofsky felt estranged from most everything, and, like many in that philosophically confused era, took comfort in the popular idea that she was herself God. In her closet, she kept a few outfits that helped her feel more God-like, including a long beige dress and black cape. One Sunday afternoon, walking through Tompkins Square Park dressed in God-clothes and on the way to visit her boyfriend, Judy heard music from the middle of a crowd of onlookers. She gently pushed her way through the crowd, and there was the Swami sitting on an Oriental rug beneath a large elm tree, eyes closed, playing one half of a bongo drum and chanting. Around him, young people danced barefoot. An hour later, at the end of their chanting session, she followed the group back to Matchless Gifts, across the small courtyard, and up the stairs to the Swami’s apartment. He sat on the floor behind his makeshift desk and greeted guests as they came and went. Then he turned toward Judy. It was, she recalled, “as though he could look into my very soul.” Still, she thought, since she was God, the Swami was obviously just recognizing her greatness.
“Do you live near here?” the Swami asked politely.
God lives everywhere, Judy reminded herself, and drew out the words of her reply with a knowing nod. “Yeeeess,” she said slowly, “I live veeeery near.” Big mistake.
“Good!” he replied. “Then you will be able to attend our morning programs at seven a.m.”
Judy lived with her parents in the Bronx, a good hour and a half by subway. Nonetheless, she came nearly every day.
Judy studied art at New York’s City College. Her ability to paint earned special attention from the Swami, who looked ahead to a time when there would be temples requiring art for the walls and books requiring illustrations. Gesturing to a print of Krishna on one of the walls of Matchless Gifts, he said, “It should not be taken that Krishna is only a picture,” and then he explained that a picture of God is also God, just as the sound of Krishna’s name is also Krishna himself. “Krishna is appearing as a picture just to give us the facility to understand and approach him,” he said.
Judy set up supplies and canvases in one of the Swami’s rooms, and he guided her in creating transcendental art. One habit Judy and other early devotee artists had to overcome was a tendency to depict Krishna as muscular. “Muscular bodies are in raja-guna,” the Swami said, using the Sanskrit term for a passionate material nature, as might be found in warriors or athletes. “A spiritual body is not muscular. Try again—less muscle and no fat. God is not fat, nor lean. Lean men look like hungry wolves hunting for sex. Krishna is perfect beauty. When we see Krishna, we will want nothing to do with the so-called beauty of the material world. Krishna’s beauty attracts everyone in creation—great demigods, men, women, even plants and animals. His beauty is unlimited. What we call beauty here is but a perverted reflection.”
Judy despaired over the limits of her artistic skills. Krishna deserved a better artist, she chided herself. He deserved someone more qualified to illustrate the spiritual world. The Swami dismissed her hesitations and urged her to focus not on her limits but on the limitless Supreme Being, to suspend her worldly sense of “great” and accept that something greater could guide her.
“You are already a great artist,” he reassured her, referring to Krishna’s promise in the Bhagavad Gita that he will accept any service, however small, if offered with love.79 Besides, to become a famous artist would take many births. “We have to finish our Krishna consciousness in this lifetime,” he said. “We should not waste a single moment for anything else.”80
When his students faced inner turmoil or self-doubts, they turned to him not only as a teacher but as a father figure, and he looked after them as his foster sons and daughters. Busy though he was, commenting on Srimad Bhagavatam and making plans for an international institution, he always had time to hear their troubles or write them a letter to remind them of the healing power of Krishna consciousness. His good counsel was calming, and because he embodied love and devotion to Krishna, they took comfort in his example and were restored to action.
So Judy adjusted her posture, lifted her brush, and began painting again.
ONE OF THE SWAMI’S STUDENTS met a friend coming out of a candy shop on Second Avenue. “Your Swami is in the paper,” the friend said and handed him a copy of the East Village Other, a recently founded anti-establishment newspaper that sold for fifteen cents. The front page was filled with a two-color photo of the Swami, standing in yellow robes in front of the big tree in Tompkins Square Park and speaking to a crowd that had gathered around him. The Swami’s acolytes hurried to the storefront, where others joined him upstairs to show the paper to their teacher.
The East Village Other, October 1966
SAVE EARTH NOW!!
HARE KRISHNA HARE KRISHNA
KRISHNA KRISHNA HARE HARE
HARE RAMA HARE RAMA
RAMA RAMA HARE HARE
An old man, one year past his allotted three score and ten, wandered into New York’s East Village and set about to prove to the world that he knew where God could be found. In only three months, the man, Swami A.C. Bhaktivedanta, succeeded in convincing the world’s toughest audience—Bohemians, acidheads, potheads, and hippies—that he knew the way to God: Turn Off, Sing Out, and Fall In. This new brand of holy man, with all due deference to Dr. Leary, has come forth with a brand of “Consciousness Expansion” that’s sweeter than acid, cheaper than pot, and non-bustible by fuzz. How is all this possible? “Through Krishna,” the Swami says.
The regulars broke out in cheers and applause. The Swami, too, was delighted with the coverage of their chanting party in the park.
“What are hippies?” he asked. Students did their best to explain.
“I’m afraid that many people would consider us hippies,” one student said. The Swami disagreed.
“We are not hippies,” he said. “We are happies. Whatever you once were, Krishna will change you.”