Armed with yoga, stand and fight.
—SRI KRISHNA IN THE BHAGAVAD GITA, 4.42
1976
ALONG WITH THE GROWTH OF the Hare Krishna movement came a proliferation of psychologists who delighted in diagnosing why the movement was growing at all. Solemn discussions and learned symposia were held to discuss what could possibly be fueling young people’s passion for such an exotic faith. Why did followers chant for so long and shave their heads? What compelled them to leave their homes and schools for life in a bizarre and foreign culture? A battery of researchers descended on ISKCON temples with analytical tools and the vocabulary of their trade: “subversion mythologies,” “cognitive dissonance,” “alienation.” By such assessments, Prabhupada had not created a Western world branch of Chaitanya Vaishnavism so much as a “revitalization movement” that exploited disenfranchised youth with “abasements, degradations, and profanations of self.”151
Professors of Hinduism, as well, raised doubts over the legitimacy of Krishna consciousness. “Adherents of the Krishna movement here are not really engaged in the same religious worldview or place in the culture as those in India,” wrote one purveyor of Eastern philosophy.152 Another academic wrote that Krishna consciousness was “one of the clearest examples of what was wrong with traditional Hinduism: emotional rather than rational; steeped in polytheistic mythology; laden with rituals centered on material images. . . . One might admire its rich tradition of stories for literary purposes, but few among the educated classes . . . give it credence as a religion worthy of serious attention.”153
“They fall into this easy rhetoric,” proclaimed Sanskritist Leopold Fischer (Agehananda Bharati) at Syracuse University, who condemned Prabhupada’s followers as “hopping ISKCON Hare Krishna jokers.”154 Most such pronouncements were based either on outright ignorance of Vaishnava history or else on interviews conducted in only one or two ISKCON temples, not on rigorous research. That did not stop journalists from quoting them in articles portraying ISKCON as a “cult.”
Prabhupada walked an ideologically thin line. On one side stood academics accusing him of inventing his own version of Vaishnava faith and on the other reporters depicting his students as mentally confused hippies with prayer beads. Military commander that he was, he took the offensive and instructed disciples to prepare a pamphlet titled “The Krishna Consciousness Movement is the Genuine Vedic Way,” containing the transcript of a correspondence with Dr. J.F. Staal, professor of philosophy and South Asian languages at the University of California, Berkeley. Staal had refused to accredit a devotee-organized course on the UC Berkeley campus, telling reporters from the Los Angeles Times that devotees spent too much time chanting to develop an actual philosophy. He proceeded to challenge the very legimitacy of Prabhupada’s Krishna-centered interpretation of the Bhagavad Gita. In their exchange of letters, Prabhupada responded to Staal with a volley of scriptural references to substantiate the practice of chanting as the prescribed yoga for the modern age155 and Krishna as the goal of the Gita’s philosophy.
Some of the strongest antipathy toward Prabhupada’s movement came from irate parents. Confused and frightened by the changes Krishna consciousness had imposed on their families, a growing number of mothers and fathers pinned hopes for their children’s redemption on a radical cure.
IN 1971, TED PATRICK, “THE father of deprogramming,”156 was appointed California’s Special Assistant for Community Affairs. Two months later, Mrs. Samuel Jackson contacted Patrick about her missing son, Billy, who was involved with a cult known as the Children of God. Patrick pretended to join the group to learn how they operated and developed an aggressive method for breaking members’ convictions: kidnapping, sleep deprivation, and verbal confrontation. Patrick’s successes quickly spawned a mini-industry of deprogrammers, willing for the right fee to retrieve wayward sons and daughters from the hands of cultists. In part due to their visibility on the nation’s streets, Krishna devotees often ranked at the top of deprogrammers’ hit lists.
Twenty-one-year-old Merylee Kreshour met devotees during her summer break from college in 1974 and decided to move into the Brooklyn temple. Her mother hired deprogrammers to “liberate her daughter’s mind and to restore her free will” and brought suit against ISKCON of New York, charging that her daughter was the victim of “mental kidnapping.”157 In September 1974, the grand jury instructed the New York district attorney’s office to investigate any alleged illegal activities of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness. D.A. Michael Schwed concluded that, although Merylee had voluntarily accepted the diet and lifestyle of the Hare Krishna religion, the charge of brainwashing held up. The case made headlines worldwide. “The very survival of our movement was at stake,” wrote Tamal Krishna, who was in the thick of the proceedings. “The theological legitimacy of both our beliefs and praxis was being legally challenged.”158
The deprogrammers had not targeted Krishna devotees alone: Any new religious movement in America was fair game. But Prabhupada’s movement posed a more dire threat, since devotees had begun appearing on college campuses and at youth events, which were the traditional arenas for mainstream Christianity. It was this direct challenge to establishment values that precipitated legal proceedings against ISKCON. In newspapers across the United States and Europe, front-page headlines announced that the International Society for Krishna Consciousness was under indictment for unlawfully seducing young people into accepting devotee life.159 In effect, the reports denied Krishna consciousness as a valid religion and condemned bhakti yoga as mind manipulation. News of the trial reached Prabhupada in Vrindavan in November 1976.
“Parents are saying we should be investigated,” said Gopal Krishna, one of his leading disciples in India. “They say we are not real Hindus.” That was not a bad thing, Prabhupada replied, if properly understood. “Krishna says, ‘In all forms of life I am the seed-giving father.’160 Why should he be simply for Hindus? In the pictures, Krishna is embracing the calf,” he argued. “He does not embrace only the gopis. He is equal to everyone. We are not Hindu.” The Bhagavad Gita described the soul passing from childhood to youth and then to old age and from there into a new body. Was this journey of the soul limited to Hindus?
“We embrace everyone,” he said, “otherwise we would not have come to Western countries. We are actually spreading universal brotherhood. Krishna is the father, and everyone is our brother. We include even the animals, trees, plants—we are claiming all our fallen brothers to become Krishna conscious.”161
In addition to branding devotees’ lifestyle as brainwashing, the case sought to discredit Krishna worship itself as invention and without roots. “Now that we have become important, our enemies are trying to suppress us,” Prabhupada said. “We should not be afraid. Krishna advised Arjuna to fight, and we shall fight to the best of our ability. Take signatures from Indians that this is a genuine Indian cultural movement. It is based on Bhagavad Gita, which was spoken many years before other religious literature. The Buddhist or Christian or Jewish literature cannot be counted more than two thousand years or a little more than that. Krishna’s movement is coming from millions of years ago. But even in recent history, it is five thousand years old.162 Present this in the court. You have to fight.”
His assistant, Hari-sauri, later described that up to this time, Prabhupada wanted to retire and write and had been delegating management responsibilities to his Governing Body Commissioners, “but on this court case he was not going to take a backseat. His began exhibiting a vigor and enthusiasm I’d never seen before.”163
Prabhupada asked that all leaders of the movement assemble in his Vrindavan quarters. He would not allow ignorance or prejudice to stop his mission, and the leaders of his society needed to rally. The real issue, he told them, was that a devotee’s life of “simple living and high thinking” challenged capitalism’s propaganda for consumption and indulgence.
“Their whole Western civilization is threatened,” he said. “Theoretically, if people give up meat-eating, smoking, gambling, intoxication, and illicit sex, then their whole civilization is finished. And the most dangerous point is that young people are taking part.” This wasn’t brainwashing, he said, just common sense. He asked Hari-sauri to tell the gathering about similar charges brought against the movement in Australia.
“The Sydney city council tried to have us banned,” Hari-sauri said, “but they lost the case after spending thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours trying to get rid of us. A newspaper reporter interviewed a psychiatrist and asked why there had been such strong reactions to a few people singing and dancing in the street. The psychiatrist said it was because city-dwellers felt threatened by our simple lifestyle.”
“Just see,” Prabhupada commented. “This whole Western civilization is threatened. So you have to fight with all the resources that we have got. Brainwashing? Actually, you have no brain. We are giving you a good brain. That is our mission. Tell them like that. Expose them.”
Prabhupada derided the charges as ludicrous. He had not kidnapped anyone. He presented Bhagavad Gita “as it is,” and people were responding. Why paint him with the same brush as scammers and false prophets? As a child growing up in Calcutta, he had witnessed such pretenders take advantage of his father’s charitable nature by begging alms in the name of God but then using the money to support their sex and drug habits. The science of bhakti lived at the opposite extreme from such hypocracy.
“It is not a so-called religion,” he said. “It is a culture for the benefit of the whole human society. That was Chaitanya Mahaprabhu’s mission. People are in darkness. The Vedic injunction is tamaso ma jyotir gamayah: Come to the light.164 The first ignorance is thinking this one lifetime is everything, one hundred years at most, so let us eat, drink, and be merry because then everything is finished. The professors think like that, the politicians think like that—so our first business is to convince people: Your life continues after death.”
Krishna consciousness was nothing he had invented, he repeated. The knowledge has been there all along in the ancient Sanskrit texts. “Therefore I am working so hard on these translations. This is my life and soul, according to the order of my Guru Maharaj. Hold a meeting among the Gaudiya Vaishnavas here in Vrindavan, and I will explain the position.”
THE ODDS OF WINNING THE New York case were stacked against him. He was taking on powerful adversaries, a tidal wave of negative press, and a State Supreme Court wary of “cults” masquerading as religions. Even Indians who grew up with Krishna worship all around them struggled to differentiate between true devotion and its shadow.165 A proper grasp of bhakti theology took years of study, so how could even the most dispassionate of courts be expected to recognize its authenticity? Since his arrival in America twelve years before, Prabhupada had struggled to legitimize devotion to Krishna. The success or failure of that effort, at least in the eyes of the New York Supreme Court, came down to this one litigation, and despite failing health, he rallied his energies.
Residents of Vrindavan entered his room in the Vrindavan temple compound, bowed respectfully, and sat. “Come with me and fight,” he told them, “because there is a world fight now. The liquor manufacturers, gambling houses, cigarette factories—theoretically, if this movement is successful, then the whole civilization is finished. This is not a bogus movement. It is taking a stand. These young people have taken it seriously, so our opponents are making a strong party to fight us.”
He had started alone and without help, he said, but his credit was presenting the Bhagavad Gita without change. He urged everyone to chant Hare Krishna because chanting revived awareness of the immortal self. Nothing more than reviving this knowledge of the soul was needed to set the world back on track. But entrenched powers were conspiring against him, since that message threatened to derail the entire apparatus of consumer culture.
“Combine together in Vrindavan,” he urged. “Fight. Without fight, where is life? Krishna’s whole life was fighting from the very birth. His father carried him across the river to Gokula,” he said, “and he fell down in the Yamuna.”
THE STORY WAS TOLD in the Krishna Book that despotic King Kamsa had heard a prediction: His sister Devaki’s eighth child—Krishna—would bring him down. Kamsa imprisoned Devaki and her husband, Vasudeva, and murdered each of the newborn babies. When their eighth child was born, Vasudeva escaped and carried baby Krishna in a basket across the Yamuna River. Raging winds blew the divine infant into the water. Vasudeva struggled to rescue Krishna and brought him to safety on the other side. Once across, he sheltered his son in the home of Nanda and Yashoda, leaders of the cowherds.
“Just born,” Prabhupada said, “and the struggle had already begun. Then at Yashoda and Nanda’s house, so many demons came daily to kill baby Krishna. So this fighting means they are feeling the presence of the Krishna consciousness movement. Had it been an insignificant thing, there would be no question of fighting.”
From the outset, his purpose had been to present bhakti yoga, devotion to the Supreme Being, not as a religious sentiment but as the inherent nature of all life. “Try to convince them that it is not just a kind of faith,” he wrote to a disciple in Egypt. “In every religion there is a glimpse of the idea of God. This movement is explaining what God is.”
ADI KESHAVA, the twenty-two-year-old president of the New York Krishna temple, was co-defendant in the New York Supreme Court case against ISKCON. His mother, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), put him in touch with ACLU board member William Kuntsler (1919–1995), whose defense of the Chicago Seven166 in the late Sixties had prompted the New York Times to label him “the country’s most controversial and, perhaps, its best-known lawyer.”167
“Kuntsler and his crew were pretty much useless for our purposes,” Adi Keshava recalled. “There was already enough controversy without adding his reputation to the case.” It was Gene Harley, a young lawyer in the ACLU offices, who drew Adi Keshava’s attention.
“Harley had a righteous sense of justice. He sat me down and said, ‘This case is virtuous.’ He saw clearly that no one had the right to interfere with a person’s freedom of religion. But that was the challenge: to establish Krishna consciousness as a bona fide religion.”
The irony of proving Krishna consciousness to be a religion, when Prabhupada was emphatic that it was not, prompted discussion. On the one hand, bhakti yoga was the only yoga that did not end with the body: Devotion was the inherent nature of the soul. It had no point of origin in historic time, as did the world’s many religions. On the other hand, zealots seeking to destroy the Krishna consciousness movement based their prosecution on that very assumption: The movement, they argued, had no standing in history. It had no provenance as did authentic religious traditions and was therefore an invention.
While bhakti defined the eternal nature of life, evidence thousands of years old attested to bhakti’s antiquity in India. It was this dimension of his movement—its antiquity in historic time—that would be their best defense. Once his movement gained historic legitimacy, devotees would be empowered to speak about its deeper dimension: the part that originated in transcendence.
Prabhupada, always ready with an apt analogy, compared their game plan to using a thorn to remove another thorn. They would use bhakti’s history to prove it lived outside history.
LAWYERS FOR THE PROSECUTION leaked a rumor to the New York police that Adi Keshava was a flight risk, and on the pretext of needing information, police called him in. He arrived in devotee garb. Once inside the door, two police officers pushed him to the floor, braced his neck with their boots, handcuffed him, and threw him into a holding tank. Over the next several days, police moved the young devotee from one jail to another to avoid detection by the press. As they escorted him into one downtown facility, an enterprising photographer snapped away. A photo of Adi Keshava in orange robes and handcuffs ran in the next edition of Time magazine. In prison, he met Big Mac, a sympathetic guard with a big stomach and blond Afro.
“You don’t want to be in that funny dress,” Big Mac told him. “Not in here. Tell ’em you’re concerned for your safety, and you want your own cell.”
Adi Keshava managed to get himself transferred to a cell closer to a phone. He placed a few calls, and Harley and other ACLU lawyers secured his release on bail. The next day he booked a ticket to Delhi and arrived in Vrindavan to consult with his spiritual master.
PRABHUPADA’S ENERGY HAD BEGUN TO abate, age and constant travel beginning to take their toll on an octogenarian, but seeing Adi Keshava revived him, and they launched into a discussion about how to defend Krishna consciousness in court. There were two options: attack the charges on their legality or pursue a first amendment defense of freedom of religion. The choice was obvious. Adi Keshava was to wear full devotee dress, with shaved head and tilak face marking, and he was to appear in court with the entire library of Prabhupada’s scriptural commentaries.
“This will be a high point for our movement,” Prabhupada predicted.
Adi Keshava described that the press were attempting to bias public opinion against Krishna worship by saying devotees were austere zombies who spent nothing for their own comfort. Prabhupada took it as a compliment.
“They are correct,” he said. “We don’t go to restaurants, we don’t go to cinema, and we don’t spend lavishly for dress.” Then, looking around the room at disciples sitting on the floor, he added, “Or furniture,” eliciting a chuckle from his audience. “We live very simply. Whatever funds we have, we print books. Which point do they find faulty? Our only business is to establish Krishna as the Supreme Personality of Godhead.”
DISCIPLES AROUND THE GLOBE rallied to build a defense by securing documents of support from scholars and dignitaries. Giriraj, president of the Bombay temple, enlisted Indian industrialists and prominent citizens to write letters certifying that Prabhupada’s movement was genuine. In America and Europe, other disciples solicited the academic world, and sympathetic professors responded with endorsements, appreciations, and positive reviews of his books. Before leaving India for the West, Prabhupada had persistently approached heads of state, educators, and leading industrialists for such endorsements. In those days, reponses to his letters were few and far between. Now, responses poured in by the hundreds. It seemed that all the letters he had been waiting for since the 1940s were descending in a flood. Excerpts from some of the best endorsements were compiled into a brochure, “The Krishna Consciousness Movement Is Authorized.”
“There is little question,” wrote Professor Thomas Hopkins, who had first met Prabhupada when he was still “Swamiji” in 1966, “that this edition is one of the best books available on the Gita and devotion. Prabhupada’s translation is an ideal blend of literal accuracy and religious insight.” Scholar of South Asian languages and civilization, Edward C. Dimock at the University of Chicago, commented, “By bringing us a new and living interpretation of a text already known to many, he has increased our understanding manifold.” Regarding Prabhupada’s Srimad Bhagavatam, Professor Garry Gelade wrote from Oxford University, “This is a work to be treasured. No one of whatever faith or philosophical persuasion who reads these books with an open mind can fail to be both moved and impressed.” Bruce Long of Cornell University’s Department of Asian Studies wrote that publication of the Bhaktivedanta edition of Chaitanya Charitamrita was “a cause for celebration among both scholars in Indian studies and lay-people seeking to enrich their knowledge of Indian spirituality.” Lawrence Shinn, professor of religion at Oberlin College, summed up the sentiments of many by writing that “the best feature of the Hare Krishna movement is that it is providing scholars with excellent translations of the rarest books on Krishna Bhakti.”
Nice words from a few scholars did nothing, however, to appease irate parents whose offspring had taken to Krishna consciousness. The father of a Chicago temple devotee incited his friends to harass book distributors in O’Hare International Airport and petitioned the city council to withdraw ISKCON’s permit for public assembly. Reverberations were felt nationwide. Devotees who had bid on a property in San Diego found their offer summarily rejected. There were reports of devotees being beaten up in Montreal and Chicago. Deprogrammers celebrated.
NEW YORK TIMES REPORTER Francis X. Clines established his reputation as a literary journalist in the mid-1970s as the author of a long-running column, “About New York.” Born in 1938 of second- and third-generation Irish stock, Clines’s working-class worldview captured the colorful and varied life of city-dwellers, the rich and the poor, the unknown, and the influential. His feature titled “Religious Freedom vs. Parental Care” appeared on November 1, 1976. He began by laying out particulars of the case against Krishna consciousness, explaining that the Queens district attorney, Michael Schwed, had charged that Merylee Kreshour was brainwashed by her religious leaders, a victim of “mind control” at age twenty-four.
“The case is an extraordinary one,” Clines wrote, “because . . . it poses one of the country’s founding issues, religious freedom, against one of its perpetual concerns, parental care. And in the process it seems to get at whatever disturbing suspicions ordinary passers-by might have at the sight of the distracting, monkish, bands of religious believers who stand like happy aliens in the middle of the city’s great commercial tides of pedestrians.”
Clines quoted Schwed as saying, “The thing that frightens me is that a group like this or any other group can use mind control to create an army of zombies or robots who could undermine the government and law enforcement.”
But, Clines observed, “one era’s ‘captive’ can be a later era’s saint,” noting that Francis of Assisi and Thomas Aquinas stirred resistance from disappointed parents when they launched their saintly careers. Clines closed his column with a statement by Merylee Kreshour herself. “I’ve never felt healthier or happier,” she said. “The purpose of life is to inquire into absolute truth. That’s what I’m doing.”
In late November 1976, Prabhupada spoke with disciples in his room at ISKCON’s Krishna Balaram Temple in Vrindavan. How tragic, he said, that their opponents failed to ask why the great souls of history encouraged the building of character and not the building of skyscrapers. Were they brainwashed to choose a simple life over ostentation and wealth?
“So-called educated people,” he said, “are thinking how to get money and enjoy life. And to get money, they’ll do anything—black money, white money, yellow money.” He smiled, remembering the poverty and isolation of his early days in New York and the controversy his mission was now generating. “In the beginning I was hopeless, thinking who will hear this movement?”
The bottom line was simple. It didn’t take a university degree to understand the difference between the body and the soul. But acknowledging a soul meant acknowledging at least the possibility of a Supreme Soul, and many people found that threatening to their sense of an independent existence. The fact that Krishna was not a threatening divinity was irrelevant: People’s experience of religion was so tragic that even a heartless, purposeless universe seemed preferable.
BY FEBRUARY 1977, deprogrammers had extended their power base to include Christian and Jewish organizations. Krishna consciousness was draining churches and temples of future members, deprogrammers warned, and conservative religionists listened. In one city, 500 rabbis convened in a show of unity against Krishna consciousness. In Phoenix, an angry father donated $100,000 to help build a citywide deprogramming center. Similar deprogramming offices were opening in Canada, England, France, Australia, and South America. A center in Tucson prompted a long article in Newsweek, favorable to the cause of “rescuing” devotees from their own “religion.” Two states legalized the practice of deprogramming and awarded tax-exempt status to its offices. By early 1977, at least one devotee had been kidnapped from each of the many Krishna temples across America.
Prabhupada’s disciples fought back and won an injunction in California against abductions, but despite the occasional victory in battle, they were losing the war. Prabhupada’s movement had been implicated in court cases before, but those had mostly been about the legality of methods. For example, did distributing books in airports constitute a First Amendment privilege? This was the first time a suit was being brought over the content of bhakti philosophy.
IN FEBRUARY 1977, Adi Keshava again flew to India from New York to report on developments in the case and explain for Prabhupada why deprogramming had gained legal status. The courts were comparing his disciples to addled old people, he said.
“When a man gets old and becomes senile,” Adi Keshava described, “he may have money but not be competent to use it. So the courts have sanctioned a law that empowers family members to take charge of such a person. The law says anyone who is of unsound mind or body and who may consequently be fooled by artful and designing persons can be put under conservatorship. Now they are applying this law to us.”
“This is their new tactic,” Tamal Krishna added, “getting the courts to declare that their kidnapping is legal.”
“If it is legal,” Prabhupada said, “then what can I say? America’s liberty is gone.”
“That’s why certain other lawyers are alarmed,” Tamal Krishna said. “It’s becoming like Russia.” Krishna devotees had been portrayed as a sect in the distasteful company of Moonies, Children of God, Jews for Jesus, Charles Manson, Patricia Hearst, Scientologists—the smorgasbord of Sixties fanaticism—and public sentiment was growing against them.
Adi Keshava had undergone physical abuse by police and humiliation in the press. Prabhupada examined the orange robes that hung down over his disciple’s thin frame. “Don’t go into court with any other dress,” Prabhupada said. “Preach there with this dress. First of all, make them understand the living force. That can be practically experienced. A machine may be complicated, but without a person to push the button, it has no value. Everything is done by a living being. Yayedam dharyate jagat.168 The universe is like that. Krishna is maintaining. Who can deny it?
“The spirit soul is invisible to our material eye, atomic in size,” he continued. “After the destruction of the gross body, which is made up of the senses, blood, bone, fat, and so forth—the subtle body of mind, intelligence, and ego goes on working. So, at the time of death, this subtle body carries the small spirit soul to another gross body. The process is just like air carrying a fragrance.169 Nobody can see where a rose’s fragrance is coming from, but we know it is being done. Similarly, according to the condition of the mind at the time of death, the minute spirit soul enters the womb of a particular mother through the semen of the father. And when the soul develops a particular type of body given by the mother, it may be human, cat, dog—anything.170 According to the infection of the different modes of material nature, we are creating a good or bad body for our next life. But these laws of nature are unknown to the foolish society. They think this life is everything, and when we present the real solution, they say it is brainwashing. It is not brainwashing; it is heartwashing. Our heart is stacked with so many dirty things, so we are trying to wash it. That is our movement: to cleanse the heart.
“And you are helping me,” he said to the devotees around him. “Without your help, I cannot do anything. Thank you very much.”
“This is an opportunity to differentiate ourselves,” Adi Keshava said. “Some people suggested we should stand in alliance with religious groups to concentrate our strength. But I’m not in favor of that.”
“No,” Prabhupada agreed. “We should keep our purity.”
“The judge handling this case,” Brahmananda said, “well, his reputation is that he is the toughest judge in the state. The district attorney deliberately arranged for this judge. It will be a little difficult.”171
“That is our success,” Prabhupada said, “when there is opposition. They don’t oppose other movements, but here they see it as venomous poison: no illicit sex, no meat-eating . . .”
“They didn’t realize your intentions when you first came in 1965,” Tamal Krishna said.
“All their charges are replied in these books,” Prabhupada said, holding up a volume of the Bhagavatam. “Tell our lawyer he must read these books and argue on that. Bring Bhagavad Gita. Bring the entire set of Bhagavatams. From a legal point of view, what I have to say, you have to hear. Then they can give their judgment.”
THE DISTRICT ATTORNEY’S OFFICE arguing the case against ISKCON had misjudged Justice John J. Leahy to be a malleable appointment, someone who would arrive at an expedient verdict of guilt. They had not counted on Leahy’s sharp mind or his commitment to due process. In his modest way, Leahy advocated the Hellenic ideal of the “shining deed,” a heroic act of noble intentions and righteous purpose. From the outset, he sensed something amiss in the prosecution’s arguments and took seriously the massive documentation presented by the defense: The dossier of endorsements attesting to the legitimacy of Krishna worship had reached encyclopedic proportions. There were hundreds of letters, petitions, and telegrams voicing outrage over the charges.
Arguments began. The prosecution introduced experts in the fields of psychiatry, medicine, social work, and religion, along with disgruntled former Krishna devotees and their parents and relatives. Based on their testimony, the prosecution argued that the religious rituals, daily activities, and teachings of the Hare Krishna movement constituted a form of intimidation to maintain control of its members. Members were coerced, the prosecution said, into handing over their freedom of thought along with their worldly possessions.
Adi Keshava arrived in court, and his entrance raised eyebrows. His head was freshly shaved, he wore crisp saffron robes, carried a six-foot sannyasa bamboo staff, and was wheeling a table filled with eighty-four volumes of Sanskrit commentaries. For the next three weeks, he and the defense team presented their evidence and arguments. Then it was over and there was nothing left to do but await the verdict of the court.
PRABHUPADA’S HEALTH continued to deteriorate. As the end of this life approached, he thought of the wife and children he had left behind. He and Radharani had stayed married for thirty-six years, during which time she bore him eight children. Three had died at birth, not an uncommon occurrence at a time when prenatal care was rudimentary and the infant mortality rate was high. Their first child, Sulakshmana, was born in 1921. In her teens, she married, had children, and lived with her family in Calcutta. Their second child, Prayagraj, was born in 1924. During his college years, he became mentally unstable. Prabhupada paid to have psychologists attend to his son in the expensive British wing of a local hospital. For some time, treatments seemed to help, but Prayagraj’s condition returned and he died, homeless, on the streets of Calcutta around the age of thirty. Prabhupada’s middle son, Mathura Mohan, was born in 1932. When Abhay left home in 1951, Mathura Mohan grew resentful of having to assume responsibility for the family’s well-being and broke off contact with his father. The fourth child, a daughter named Bhaktilata, was born in 1937. She, too, resented her father for leaving home, never married, and eventually moved in with her younger brother, Vrindavan Chandra. Unlike his siblings, Vrindavan Chandra, born in 1939, never expressed resentment over his father’s mission. When asked what his reaction had been when his father left for America, he said, “I felt so proud of him.”172
Now, in his final days, Prabhupada requested that his former wife and children receive a monthly stipend, the equivalent then of a middle-class income. The allocation was added to his last will and testament.
TAMAL KRISHNA hurried to Prabhupada’s room. He bowed down, then stood up with a huge smile and held aloft a copy of The Times of India. The front page displayed an article that had appeared the day before in the New York Times.
“Shall I read it?” he asked. Prabhupada nodded.
Hare Krishna Movement is a Bona Fide Religion
The Hare Krishna movement was called a “bona fide religion” yesterday by the New York High Court Justice who threw out two charges against the officials of the movement of “illegal imprisonment” and “attempted extortion.” The charge had been preferred by an angry parent that his son, as well as another disciple, had been held by the movement illegally and that they had been brainwashed. “The entire and basic issue before the court,” said the Justice in dismissing the charges, “is whether the two alleged victims in this case and the defendants will be allowed to practice the religion of their choice, and this must be answered with a resounding affirmative.” Said Mr. Justice John Leahy, “the Hare Krishna movement is a bona fide religion with roots in India that go back thousands of years. It behooved Merylee Kreshour and Edward Shapiro to follow the tenets of that faith, and their inalienable right to do so will not be trampled upon. The separation of church and state must be maintained. We are and must remain a nation of laws, not of men. The presentment and indictment by the Grand Jury was in direct and blatant violation of defendants’ Constitutional rights.”
The Justice said that it appeared to the Court that “The People rest their case on an erroneous minor premise to arrive at a fallacious conclusion. The record is devoid of one specific allegation of a misrepresentation or any act of deception on the part of any defendant.” The Justice said, “The freedom of religion is not to be abridged because it is unconventional in its beliefs and practices or because it is approved or disapproved by the mainstream of society or more conventional religions. Without this proliferation and freedom to follow the dictates of one’s own conscience in this search for the approach to God, the freedom of religion will be a meaningless right as provided for in the Constitution. . . . The Hare Krishna movement has been under pressure from various groups, and this judgment is expected to stop some of the harassment to which is has been subjected in recent months.
“This is on the front page, Prabhupada,” Tamal Krishna said.
“A big headline?” Prabhupada asked.
“Yes,” Tamal Krishna said, holding up the paper. “You couldn’t pay for an advertisement this good.”
It had been more than a half-century since Prabhupada’s guru, Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati, had asked him to go to America. Now he was back in Vrindavan, having fulfilled that order and ready to die. He had said as much to disciples. The signs were clear to him.
“So,” Prabhupada said, “my mission is now successful. In 1965, I went to New York, loitering in the street. Nobody cared for me, alone, carrying books.”
Prabhupada turned to the guests assembled in his room and asked, “Why should people be kept in darkness? What kind of civilization is that? The knowledge is there, and people should be educated. India should now stand up: ‘Stop this nonsense.’ That is Chaitanya Mahaprabhu’s mission. We are not expecting everyone to do it, but the ideal should be there. Am I right?”
Swarup Damodar, one of his leading scientist-disciples, came from Manipur, a historically religious part of the country. “Most educated people in Manipur accept Krishna consciousness,” he said. “I have seen in the airport—the policemen have tilak.”
“Tilak!” Prabhupada exclaimed. That appealed to him: police displaying their faith on their faces and defending God’s devotees instead of attacking them. “I want to have a small Vaishnava state,” he said. “Let’s have a small, ideal state. If respectable gentlemen take it, oh, it will be a great success, an ideal throughout the whole world. Show their policemen, all with tilak, and marching. ‘Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare, Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare’—we shall train them. Military march.”
They sat and watched in awe of this diminutive volcano of a person who would not stop, even now, envisioning new ways to bring Krishna to the world.
“So let us go, our whole party. I have no other desire. There is no end of it. Work is our life. There is no question of how long. As long as possible. Krishna is giving us good opportunities. It is not a joke: ‘Hare Krishna Movement is Bona Fide Religion’—New York High Court decision.”
“And that senior man in the courts is very old and conservative,” Tamal Krishna said.
“Send him a letter of congratulations,” Prabhupada said. “May God bless you for such righteous judgment.” Then he turned to his disciples. “Now, work very strenuously,” he said. “You are all young men. Somehow or other, this dead horse, you have given life. Otherwise, the last fortnight I was thinking I am dead now. Life can be finished at any time. That is not wonderful. To live, that is wonderful.”
“Krishna is wonderful,” Tamal said.
“Krishna is wonderful always,” Prabhupada said. His hand never left his bead bag. Between sentences, he chanted, the beads clicking gently, the words coming softly, “Hare Krishna Hare Krishna . . .”
THE SUPREME COURT DECISION not only vindicated his movement in America but by extension overturned eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Orientalists’ claims that bhakti was the remnant of a crude and undeveloped period in India’s history. What had taken foreign invaders hundreds of years to bury, Prabhupada had resurrected in less than twelve. Still, he did not think in terms of having completed a mission. Kali Yuga was not over. Science still signed blank checks, promising to soon deliver the formula for consciousness, or a solution to old age and death. People believed the pronouncements and held out hope for a brighter future that would never come.
He had trained his disciples to expand what he had started, yet none felt qualified to do so. They saw clearly that Prabhupada’s love for Krishna was prema bhakti, spontaneous and unselfish. They were beginners who practiced vaidhi bhakti, regulated devotional service, taking baby steps, running behind his giant leaps.
“You can overcome this,” Brahmananda said, voicing the thoughts of all present that surely he could postpone death if he chose. Krishna would help him live longer. “You have all the mystic powers. You can go on living, if you wish to.”
“That is fanaticism,” Prabhupada replied, his voice uncharacteristically soft in these final days. “That is not my magic. My magic is different. Why are you sitting here?” he asked of the disciples assembled around his bed. “Why do you feel a love for this person, Krishna, whom you haven’t even seen? That is my magic—what is in your hearts today.”
WORD WENT OUT TO TEMPLES within hours of his passing on November 14, 1977. My work on French editions of his books had taken me to New York, where some of the press operations were housed. The call from India came in just as snow began settling on the city, the first snowstorm of the year. Trees, scattered around Manhattan like emaciated sentries, sprouted white icy crests. Slick streets made for treacherous driving, and cars slowed to a crawl. New Yorkers being who they were, pushed on, complaining and drenched but resolute. Devotees and congregants arrived at the twelve-story temple on Fifty-Fifth Street—things had grown since the days of Matchless Gifts—bundled against the cold. By the time they unpacked themselves from coats and scarves and assembled into the temple room, the impact of Prabhupada’s passing began to sink in. Some people fainted, others collapsed weeping, and not a few like myself wandered around aimlessly, not knowing what to do. Devotees seated by the altar chanted Hare Krishna, but the pace was slow, and their dolorous voices only added to the weight of the moment. It was not until a few days later that we learned details of his final moments.
HE ASKED TO SEE HIS godbrothers, and several arrived from various maths. His voice had grown weak, and the sannyasis leaned closer to hear what he had to tell them.
“Our Srila Prabhupada,” he whispered, referring to their spiritual master, Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati, “said that we should preach in Europe and America. I tried my best. It is my desire that you all forgive me for my mistakes. When we preach, there may be some disputes, some misunderstandings. Maybe I also committed some offenses like that. Please forgive me.”
“These are all trivial things,” one godbrother replied. “Whatever you did, you did for the well-being of the entire human society. You never did anything wrong.”
“I am a little temperamental,” Prabhupada replied. “I used words like rascal and so on—the Bhagavatam in one hand, a club in the other. Please forgive my offenses.”
Another godbrother reiterated the feelings of all. “You were never offensive. You have saved millions of people around the world. You are savior of the most fallen.”
Disciples arrived in Vrindavan from all parts of the world, and he instructed that everyone be allowed to come into his room, to chant and share these final moments together. By now, his eyesight had failed, and he had not eaten in days. He lay on his bed, no longer able to move—yet even now he continued work on the Srimad Bhagavatam, and all who came witnessed something unforgettable. Pradyumna, his Sanskritist, read verses from the tenth canto out loud. Jayadvaita, head of Prabhupada’s publications office, held a microphone close to Prabhupada’s mouth and captured his whispered commentaries. Prabhupada’s final words came halfway through the tenth canto, at the place where Brahma, the first being, offers prayers to child Krishna.
“Your transcendental body is dark blue, like a new cloud,” Brahma said. “Your garment is brilliant, like lightning, and the beauty of your face is enhanced by your gunja earrings and the peacock feather in your hair. You wear garlands of forest flowers and leaves. Holding a herding stick, buffalo horn and flute, you stand, beautifully, with a morsel of food in your hand . . .”
More than a translation of Sanskrit words, in these final moments Prabhupada described what he was seeing, what he was witnessing in samadhi, in trance of love. Disciples watched and chanted until the final breath left his body.