Iskcon Revival Movement (IRM): As with all our articles in this section, the one below was first published in the IRM’s official magazine Back To Prabhupada (issue 26). BTP is being distributed for free to ISKCON devotees and people interested in Srila Prabhupada’s teachings worldwide. If you would like to receive BTP at your home, simply send us your full name and street address via the following email address: irm@iskconirm.com.
If you have any questions, comments or criticisms, please do not hesitate to write us. We welcome all correspondence and are looking forward to hearing from you.
Thank you & Hare Krishna
Readers’ questions and challenges
“Do you have a bullet-points one page summary of what’s wrong with the ISKCON guru system today and what are your proposed solutions? I heard there are many devotees all over the world who support your efforts. Is it possible to know who they are? P.S. Please don’t put me on your mailing list. Thanks.”
– Akrura Das, Gita Coaching – `Helping Devotees Succeed ISKCON London’
Editor replies:
What’s wrong can be summarized in one bullet point, and does not require a whole page:
• What’s wrong with the ISKCON guru system?: Never authorized by Srila Prabhupada.
Furthermore, we can also provide a one bullet point solution, and a one bullet point reason for enacting the solution:
• Solution: Run ISKCON according to the orders Srila Prabhupada gave, including the ritvik system.
• Why?: Because spiritual life means to follow the orders of Srila Prabhupada.
You claim you help “devotees succeed”: How can they succeed unless they obey Srila Prabhupada?
And how can they do this unless they know what Srila Prabhupada ordered?
And how can they know this, if like you, they do not wish to know what he ordered by ensuring they stay off our mailing list?
Yes, we do have many devotees all over the world who support the IRM, and some are mentioned and profiled in each one of our magazines. So if you want to know who they are, I suggest you start with our magazines, where you will see their letters and personal profiles published.
“By reading BTP I have come to the conclusion that what you people are doing is not only wrong but worse than what a criminal does, because the criminal will also get some chance to go back to Godhead after suffering in hell. But you people will not get any chance of coming out of the hellish planets.”
– Bonomali Roy, Kolkata, India
Editor replies:
There are definitely some persons who will be condemned to hell, and these are persons who commit spiritually criminal activities. Here are some examples of these activities, highlighted courtesy of an ISKCON “guru”:
“Several decades of scandals have slashed the perceived value of ISKCQN’s product especially in regards to gurus and leadership. [..] We have seen gay priests, megalomania, paedophilia, murder.”
(HH Jayadvaita Swami, ISKCON Studies Conference, 2007)
Clearly, such activities are not those of bona fide gurus. And it is their destination which is hell:
“By a false display of religious sentiments, they present a show of devotional service while indulging in all sorts of immoral activities. In this way they pass as spiritual masters and devotees of God. […] To mislead the people in general they themselves become so- called acaryas […] These rogues are the most dangerous elements in human society. […] They cannot, however, escape the law of the Supreme, who has clearly declared in Bhagavad-gita (Bg. 16.19-20) that envious demons in the garb of religious propagandists shall be thrown into the darkest regions of hell […] these pseudo-religionists are heading toward the most obnoxious place in the universe”
(Sri Isopanisad, Mantra 12, purport)
Such a fate does not befall the IRM, which simply protects others from such rogues.
“I very much appreciate one thing with the ritviks: their attachment to Srila Prabhupada. Unfortunately I very much object to:
– Their incomplete philosophical understanding: giving a great importance to diksa is next to ritualistic mentality; this is a very neophyte understanding. What is much more important than diksa is SIKSA: What are you doing with your life after receiving diksa?
– Their tendency to continually criticize and blaspheme the vaisnavas: an advanced devotee (like the 6 Goswamis) is free from criticism spirit and NEVER blasphemes another vaisnava.”
– Caitanya Nitai Das, France (translated from french)
Editor replies:
You write that an “advanced devotee is free from criticism spirit’ and yet you have criticized us for:
1) An incomplete philosophical understanding.
2) Very neophyte understanding and ritualistic mentality.
3) Always continually criticizing and blaspheming.
Further, you say that siksa is much more important than diksa, but why then is it impossible for such an important person as Srila Prabhupada to occupy such an unimportant position?
And these are just your contradictions! In addition, there are at least 3 errors of fact:
1) A wrong understanding of our position in regards to diksa.
2) A wrong understanding in regards to what diksa is.
3) A wrong understanding in regards to what constitutes blasphemy.
And all this in just 3-4 sentences! Again we see how anyone who attacks our position is unable to do so without contradicting themselves or stating errors of fact.
“I was upset by your piece (BTP 24, page 5) regarding same sex marriage. It is true that Srila Prabhupada condemned it – he also said that women were mentally inferior to men etc. We do him no service by digging up these types of statements. As a transsexual having difficulties in the movement I find statements like these worrying.”
– Jennifer Wood, Lancashire, England
Editor replies:
The issue of digging up statements only arises if statements are suppressed to begin with. By definition, ISKCON and the GBC are supposed to be Srila Prabhupada’s faithful representatives. It behooves them, therefore, to always represent Srila Prabhupada’s views accurately, without any subtraction or change. Otherwise they will be guilty of effectively suppressing Srila Prabhupada's actual teachings. In your letter, by truthfully accepting what Srila Prabhupada stated rather than denying it, you have understood this point.
If those leading ISKCON today wish to give opinions different from Srila Prabhupada, they should simply leave ISKCON, since ISKCON was founded by Srila Prabhupada specifically to represent his teachings.
In not faithfully repeating Srila Prabhupada&’s teachings, whilst claiming to represent him, it is ISKCON’s representatives therefore, who are doing the greatest disservice, not those who seek to defend his teachings from such mis-representation. And the IRM will always seek to protect Srila Prabhupada&’s teachings from such mis-representation, wherever it may be found, regardless of the prevailing winds of “political correctness” and any consequent dent in our popularity, since the only person we are interested in pleasing is Srila Prabhupada.
Krishna Kant Prabhu is very good at logically defeating ISKCON’s ritvik bashers, and I am very grateful to him for that, but I have two burning questions for him:
1. He said above, “the only person we are interested in pleasing is Srila Prabhupada,” so why does he disobey the following directive from Srila Prabhupada in all of his printed publications, including BTP magazine?
(Letter to Jadurani, 31 December, 1971)
Leaving off the diacritics in printed publications supposedly representing Srila Prabhupada, IMHO, is symptomatic of “fringy” consciousness, not Krishna consciousness.
2. If he is actually sincere about getting the truth “out there,” why is BTP magazine not available as a free download on his http://www.iskconirm.com/ website? To me, this makes no sense, and seems like a very miserly policy.
In most ways Krishna Kant’s IRM is something for the Prabhupadanugas to be proud of, but in some ways it’s an embarrassment. Perhaps a little tweaking is in order.
Dear Pratyatosa pr, pamho all glories to Srila Prabhupada!
Your constant endeavour to attack Krishnakant and IRM might be a topic for internal istagosthi. This is a public forum where all kind of readers first of all want answers to their questions. Just like when Prabhupada wrote thousands of letters to his disciples answering their questions. Even Prabhupada’s letterhead did not contain diacritics, what to speak of his letters. This does not mean that you reject Prabhupada’s letters as fringy embarassement? Hopefully not!
IRM is working on this and there was never any foreboding that BACK TO PRABHUPADA magazine would go on for so many years. So hopefully ISKCON will soon get back on track and not go on producing more fallen acaryas. Then there will be no IRM required anymore and you won’t be agitated to read Sanskrit terms without diacritics.
ys
Kunti dd
BTP 37 has diacritics. I guess the font needs to be changed, cos it doesn’t look quite right, as it is.
Pratyatosa prabhu can perhaps advise IRM on this?
Bhakta Hugh says: BTP 37 has diacritics. I guess the font needs to be changed, cos it doesn’t look quite right,…
Great! Better late than never!
Is #37 the latest?
In what way do they not look right?
In any case, there are dozens of Unicode fonts available as free downloads on http://pratyatosa.com/?P=41 .
For an example of how to add the diacritics automatically, click the “Sample 6” button followed by the “Add diacritics” button.
And if you put the cursor in the text box and type K;r;s;na you get Kṛṣṇa.
Another way to type them directly is to use your favorite word processor or text editor. This may be accomplished by installing my oldest son’s DiacWin Unicode program:
http://www.dasya.com/~mbest/freeware/fontsunicode.html
Kunti Devi Dasi says: Your constant endeavor to attack Krishnakant and IRM might be a topic for internal istagosthi.
Dear Mother Kunti Prabhu, please forgive me if I have offended you. I am certainly not perfect, and may not always be as tactful as I should be.
If Krishnakant Prabhu wants to discuss this with me privately, I’m not difficult to contact. My private email address is on almost every web page of my http://pratyatosa.com/ website. If I am guilty of a “constant endeavor to attack Krishnakant” then why hasn’t he or anyone else contacted me privately?
While it’s true that the fact that there were no diacritics in BTP magazine has bothered me for several years now, and I might even have mentioned it once or twice in the distant past, I don’t think it’s fair to accuse me of a “constant attack.” How does an extremely rare reminder of Srila Prabhupada’s instructions over a period of several years constitute a “constant attack?”
All of the ISKCON BBT publications follow Srila Prabhupada’s edict on diacritics, so why does Krishna Kant think that he is exempt?
When my wife, my oldest son and I published Vaikuntha Children and According to Religious Principles in the early 90s, we had to create IBM PC compatible Sanskrit diacritic fonts from scratch! We didn’t even know, at the time, that it was a direct order from Srila Prabhupada to include the diacritics, but we did know that it was the standard for the BTG magazine and for Prabhupada’s books, so we tried to maintain this standard out of a desire to please Srila Prabhupada as best we could.
Once the fonts had been created, the rest was fairly easy, so there is no longer any excuse for not including the diacritics in printed or PDF documents, especially considering the fact that now there is a free program which can automatically add the diacritics to many, many text files in one fell swoop:
http://pratyatosa.com/?P=3o
If you read all of Srila Prabhupada’s comments on diacritics in the VedaBase, you will see that he wanted them in all of his publications even if it meant making photographic copies of each and every Sanskrit word and physically pasting them into the text! Compared to that, we’ve got it extremely easy!
Your servant, Pratyatosa Dasa
On http://www.prabhupadanugas.eu/news/?p=34397#comment-15834 Rukmini Ramana dd said: From begin with BACK TO PRABHUPADA MAGAZINE was meant to reanimate Prabhupada’s original movement.
Krishna Kant Prabhu has done wonderfully. It’s my understanding that his Final Order book was very influential in convincing Madhu Pandit Prabhu, the temple president of ISKCON Bangalore, to become a Ritvik! Great!
But even though he has answered some criticisms above and many more on his http://www.iskconirm.com/ website, my criticisms he simply ignores. Obviously, he has no good answer for them.
I have also criticized BTG for not making their latest issues available as free downloads, but I can understand their motivation. They are trying to sell as many printed copies as possible in order to try to make the magazine self-sufficient. But, why is a free magazine, such as BTP not available as a free download? It doesn’t make any sense. Even though the older issues of BTG are available as free downloads, as far as I know, no issue of BTP is available in that way. Why?
Making something available for downloading on the Internet costs practically nothing. There are thousands of free downloads available on my http://causelessmercy.com/ website, yet that website only costs me approximately one US dollar per month! So what is Krishna Kant’s excuse? He is already maintaining his http://www.iskconirm.com/ website. Adding the Back to Prabhupada magazines as free downloads would not cost him one penny extra, so why not do it?
Aren’t we trying to make the truth available to as many people as possible?
“Our presenting this matter in adequate language, especially a foreign language, will certainly fail, and there will be so many literary discrepancies despite our honest attempt to present it in the proper way, but we are sure that with all our faults in this connection, the seriousness of the subject matter will be taken into consideration, and the leaders of society will still accept this, due to its being an honest attempt to glorify the almighty God. When there is fire in a house, the inmates of the house go out to get help from the neighbors, who may be foreigners, and yet without knowing the language, the victims of the fire express themselves and the neighbors understand the need, even though not expressed in the same language. The same spirit of cooperation is needed to broadcast this transcendental message of the Srimad-Bhagavatam throughout the polluted atmosphere of the world. After all, it is a technical science of spiritual values, and thus we are concerned with the techniques and not with the language.”
(SB 1.5.11)