Attending Krishna's Image by Valpey Kenneth Russell

Author:Valpey, Kenneth Russell
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-134-17545-1
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Kṛṣṇa in mleccha-deśa

“Kṛṣṇa is all-attractive”: a devotional empire expands

A brief account of Kṛṣṇa’s Western migration (and replication) through the establishment and spread of ISKCON (Prabhupāda’s acronym for the International Society for Krishna Consciousness) is now in order. ISKCON’s early history has been documented fairly extensively, but its temple worship – both in its conceptualization and its practice – has been treated only tangentially to other concerns.7

The early phase of ISKCON’s history was dominated by the charismatic presence of Prabhupāda as a personable yet bold preacher of Kṛṣṇa-bhakti.8 In his presence, life for his followers was marked by novelty, simplicity and a measure of spontaneity. It was a time of heady expansion as the number of young followers multiplied rapidly. Prabhupāda’s every word and deed were seen by his followers as enactments of victorious conquest; indeed, followers regarded him as a general leading his troops to destroy the “spell of māyā” with the devotional practices of “Krishna consciousness,” especially the chanting of harināma. Doubtless Prabhupāda was a charismatic figure for his followers, regarded as being “at the boundary of the human and the superhuman dimensions of existence” (Ketola 2002: 181), but those young people who joined his mission in the mid-1960s to mid-1970s in America and Europe saw him especially as an approachable embodiment of sacred tradition.9 His ability to impute Kṛṣṇa-centered living as an all-encompassing worldview to his followers was, he claimed, arising from his faithfulness to the teachings of his own guru. These teachings, in turn, were drawn from the texts Prabhupāda had translated – texts that had been compiled, preserved, and handed down through disciplic succession. In short, following Max Weber’s typology, Prabhupāda was to a large extent an institutional charismatic figure.10 As he said repeatedly of himself, he was a mere representative of his own guru and hence, by the principle of disciplic succession, a “representative of Kṛṣṇa.”11 In that sense, his qualification was to be seen as attainable by others. As he said of himself, “Yes, … I strictly follow the instruction of my guru-mahārāja, that’s all. Otherwise I have no strength. I have not played any magic” (750203mw.haw).

And so, from the beginning, Prabhupāda intended to share his charisma. Kṛṣṇa, as the all-attractive “Supreme Personality of Godhead” should be the central object of attention and devotion, and Prabhupāda should be seen by his followers as Kṛṣṇa’s confidential servant. Moreover, Kṛṣṇa was to be the center of attention and devotion for communities of devotees, not merely for loose collections of individual spiritual seekers.

As we have seen, while still in India Prabhupāda viewed temple establishment as integral to his mission. Soon after arriving in America he sought means to acquire a property convertable for use as a Kṛṣṇa temple, even before any of his sympathizers could be called serious followers, not to mention dedicated disciples or temple priests. Even as “New Jagannātha Purī,” a rented storefront amid hippiedom’s Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, became the first ISKCON “temple” in early 1967 (as the hippie movement came to its

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