I NTRODUCTION TO S ECTION

The merchant vessel pulled into Boston harbor to deposit its unusual passenger, an exotic charismatic public preacher hailing from foreign shores. Religious leaders John Winthrop, Ann Lee, and George Whitefield had tread the same ground, as had the native born Cotton Mather and Henry David Thoreau. The Indian swami (monk) A.C.

Bhaktivedanta Prabhupada, who arrived by steamboat from Calcutta at 5:30 AM on September 17, 1965, had a similar mission: to introduce what to America was a new religious perspective, and to create a model religious community. No less so than Winthrop, who so famously declared the Puritan intention of founding “a city upon a hill” for the whole world to see, Bhaktivedanta hoped to establish in America an ideal religious society, albeit one predicated on Hinduism rather than Christianity. Like Whitefield, the Indian swami traveled from city to city spreading his gospel, speaking on streets, in theatres, and anywhere else he could attract crowds.1

In doing so, Swami A.C. Bhaktivedanta Prabhupada founded the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, known to members and scholars by its acronym ISKCON and more popularly as the Hare Krishna movement.

Bhaktivedanta arrived in America with very few personal possessions. His suitcase contained changes of clothing, a letter of introduction to an Indian family in Pennsylvania, 40 rupees in Indian currency, dried grains for making his own vegetarian food, reading material, a diary, and an umbrella.2

More importantly, as far as the swami was concerned, he brought two hundred three-volume sets of his own English-language

translation of the Indian devotional classic, the Srimad Bhagavatam, a central religious text in the Hindu sect that Bhaktivedanta followed. Besides his personal effects and the text he hoped to disseminate to American converts, Swami Bhaktivedanta carried one other item: a stack of five hundred single-page pamphlets to promote the Bhagavatam

and his mission of spreading it. The pamphlet itself suggested the purpose of the Indian monk’s mission. First, it described Bhaktivedanta himself and the book that he carried. With a large photo of A.C. Bhaktivedanta at its center, the pamphlet declared, “‘Srimad Bhagwatam’ [Bhagavatam] // India’s Message of // Peace and Goodwill // Sixty Volumes of Elaborate English Version by // [photograph] // Tridandi Goswami A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami.” Next, it explained how the swami had arrived in America, in doing so fulfilling the additional role of reflecting Bhaktivedanta’s sponsorship, namely the steamship company that had donated his room and board for the swami voyage’s as well as paid for the printing of the pamphlet. In a large font, it declared, “Carried by the Scindia Steam Nav. Co., Limited // Bombay.” Finally, the pamphlet explained why Swami A.C. Bhaktivedanta had traveled to America, and why he hoped to distribute his books in the United States: “All over the world for scientific knowledge of God.”3

From his first moments in America, the founder of the Hare Krishna movement carried a physical statement on science, religion, and the relation between the two. ISKCON, its founder declared, possessed “scientific knowledge of God.”

This pamphlet revealed a fundamental assumption of Swami A.C. Bhaktivedanta Prabhupada, one that shaped the religious movement that he founded: human beings could know God scientifically, and could teach this process to others. Bhaktivedanta insisted that anyone who investigated with an open mind would find a more perfect

explanation for human life and the universe itself in his Krishna Consciousness movement than in any other religious or scientific option. However, at other times he declared that the religion he brought to America, a sect of Hinduism known in India as Gaudiya Vaishnavism, itself represented a science. While at other moments

Bhaktivedanta thundered against science as wrongheaded, immoral, and arrogant, all of these positions represented a single overarching view of science and religion in the Hare Krishna movement: that Western science had failed, and that a more religiously-attuned alternative, that proffered by the Hare Krishna movement itself, needed to replace it.

Within a year of arriving in the United States, the swami had created a small religious community in Manhattan, at first in borrowed space on the Upper West side of the city, and later in his own rented quarters in the more bohemian lower East Side. The exotic Hindu street preacher attracted crowds as he publicly chanted the mantra

(meditative prayer) that his particular sect of Hinduism upheld as most central. The words of the mantra, “Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare, Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare” gave a name to the group of mostly

countercultural followers who flocked around Bhaktivedanta. Before long the media paid attention to this new group of “Hare Krishnas,” as they had been dubbed. When reporter Jerry Erber of the small newsweekly National Insider asked followers of Bhaktivedanta if the Krishna Consciousness espoused by their International Society was a “religion, a cult, a philosophy, or what?,” they responded to him by not only equating their practice to science, but invoking scientific analogies and language. “Krishna Consciousness is not a religion but rather a science,” one explained. “According to this science we are samples of God.” Bhaktivedanta himself appealed to science in order to defend the legitimacy of

the group. When Erber asked if the small size of his following concerned him, the swami responded, “a science is a science no matter how many followers it has.”4

From its earliest days, observers, followers, and leader alike all understood the religion of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness with reference to science and scientific terminology. For example, the first mainstream publication to discover the Hare Krishnas, the New York Times, featured in its October 1966 the poet Alan Ginsberg, whom the Times cited as an authority on the group. Ginsberg, a spokesman for the counterculture, explained Bhaktivedanta’s religious teaching using both religious and scientific language, alluding to the biological changes that accompanied the chanting of the Hare Krishna mantra, or prayer. Ginsberg explained, “[i]t brings a state of ecstasy. For one thing, the syllables force yoga breath control; that’s one physiological

explanation.”5

In this, the first mainstream publication on the Hare Krishna movement, a publicly recognized figure—though certainly not a scientist—employed explicitly

scientific terminology, the “physiological explanation,” to explain a central ISKCON ritual.

Science and religion remained a central concern of Bhaktivedanta and his International Society for Krishna Consciousness. Through pamphlets, books, regular articles in the movement’s glossy magazine, speeches, and more ephemeral materials, Swami A.C. Bhaktivedanta and the American converts who became fellow devotees of the Indian God Krishna emphasized the place of science in their religious system. Like the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, which preceded ISKCON in missionizing America, the Hare Krishnas understood themselves as possessing a

believed science supported their religious positions and contentions. Unlike the

Unificationists, however, the Hare Krishnas took a very dim view of Western science and technology, openly and explicitly rejecting both Western science and America’s science establishment as irredeemable and fatally flawed. ISKCON declared that it offered an alternative: an Indian, spiritual, textually-grounded, science that was neither Western, materialistic, nor empirical, yet nonetheless both more fully explained the world and better served humanity’s moral and religious needs than conventional science. The Hare Krishna movement looked to their formulation of an alternative science in order to

Note: This section makes use of a number of Sanskrit terms, all of which must be transliterated into roman characters. The leaders and members of ISKCON sometimes use variant transliterations of Sanskrit words, for example “Bagawatgita/Bhagavad-Gita” and “Krishna/Krsna.” While I have not changed direct quotations, I have provided a bracketed explanation when the transliteration of a Sanskrit term strongly varies from the conventional academic norm. In all cases I have avoided the use of diacritical marks, which are more likely to confuse than elucidate the reader untrained in Indology or philology.

1

Bhaktivedanta arrived in Boston, passed through Customs and Immigration, spent two days there, and then continued on the ship to its final destination of New York City, where he began his mission in earnest. See Satsvarupa dasa Goswami, Planting the Seed, New York City 1965-1966, vol. 2, Srila Prabhupada-Lilamrta: A Biography of His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada (Los Angeles: Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, 1980), 4-7.

2

See Satsvarupa dasa Goswami, A Lifetime in Preparation, India 1986-1965, vol. 1, Srila Prabhupada-Lilamrta: A Biography of His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada (Los Angeles: Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, 1980), 287. For more on A.C. Bhaktivedanta’s journey to America, see Satsvarupa dasa Goswami, Planting the Seed, 1- 5.

3

Satsvarupa dasa Goswami, A Lifetime in Preparation, 173. 4

Jerry Erber, “New Indian Religion Sends You Higher Than LSD!: Secrets of Krishna Consciousness ” The National Insider, 23 April 1967, 11.

5

Ginsberg, as quoted in James R. Sikes, “Swami’s Flock Chants in Park to Find Ecstasy,” New York Times, 10 October 1960, 24.