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International Society for Krishna Consciousness is *** currently the largest Gaudiya Vaishnava institution in the world.

Philosophical and historical context
a.	Vedas, b.	4 sampradayas c.	Madhva

Caitanya Mahaprabhu
ISKCON's belongs to the spiritual lineage that traces back to the founder of Gaudiya Vaishnavism, Chaitanya Mahaprabhu (1486-1534) and then on to Madhva (1238-1317).

a.	acintya bhedabheda b.	followers

A.C.Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada
ISKCON founder A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada was born in Calcutta on September 1, 1896 as Abhay Charan to the family of Gour Mohan De, a cloth merchant of a respected merchant community. His parents, devout Vaishnavas, raised the boy in orthodox Hindu values and devotion to Krishna. In his adolescence, Abhay Charan studied at the prestigious Scottish Church College but, as an avid supporter of the Indian independence movement, refused to accept his graduation diploma. While still in college, Abhay Charan got married and, upon completion of education, went on to start a successful pharmaceutical business. In 1922, he met Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati (1974-1937), a renowned Gaudiya Vaishnava leader, founder of the Gaudiya Matha, who suddenly enjoined Abhay: "You are an educated young man. Why don’t you preach Lord Caitanya Mahaprabhu’s message throughout the whole world?" The meeting convinced Abhay Charan to dedicate his life to the mission of Chaitanya under the guidance of Bhaktisiddhanta, culminating in diksha (formal initiation) into the Gaudiya Vaishnavism that he received from Bhaktisiddhanta in 1933 with the name "Abhay Charanaravinda Das". While maintaining his business career and family obligations, Abhay Charanaravinda became increasingly involved with the activities of the Gaudiya Matha.

Bhaktisiddhanta was confident that, if explained properly, the philosophy and practice of Vaishnavism would appeal to intelligent and sensible people. However, despite considerable financial investments and efforts, the Gaudiya Mission in the West failed to attract more than just very few serious practitioners. The failure prompted Bhaktisiddhanta to focus on the Western mission during his final address at a gathering of thousands of disciples and followers at Champahati, Bengal, in 1936. In his speech Bhaktisiddhanta restated the urgency and importance of presenting Chaitanya's teachings in the Western countries despite all social, cultural, and financial challenges and said, looking at Abhay Caranaravinda in attendance, "I have a prediction. However long in the future it may be, one of my disciples will cross the ocean and bring back the entire world".

On 3 December 1936, answering a letter from Abhay Caranaravinda who was inquiring about how he could best serve his guru's mission, Bhaktisiddhanta wrote back:

"I am fully confident that you can explain in English our thoughts and arguments to the people who are not conversant with the languages of other members. This will do much good to yourself as well as your audience. I have every hope that you can turn yourself [into] a very good English preacher if you serve the mission to inculcate the novel impression to the people in general and philosophers of [sic] modern age and religiosity."

Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati died soon after, on January 1, 1937. His death, followed by a virtual collapse of his Gaudiya Math due to infighting, prompted Bhaktivedanta Swami to make several attempts to establish an offshoot of the Gaudiya Math mission in India on his own and to propagate Chaitanya's teachings in the English language, both with little success.

In 1939, in recognition of Abhay Charanaravinda's literary and spiritual accomplishments, his fellow disciples of Bhaktisiddhanta conferred upon him the title "Bhaktivedānta" (literally, "one who has reached the pinnacle of knowledge and devotion"). After separating himself from the family in accordance with the Hindu tradition of vanaprastha, in 1959 Abhay Charanaravinda accepted Vaishnava monastic vows, sannyasa, with the name Abhay Charanaravinda Bhaktivedanta Swami, or A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami, seeing formal renunciation as a necessary step towards fulfilling his guru's order of establishing and leading a worldwide preaching mission..

Bhaktivedanta Swami spent twelve years in Vrindaban, the North Indian holy site Krishna's childhood, preparing for his Western mission: he studied the Gaudiya Vaishnava canon as well as wrote and published his English translation and commentaries on the Bhagavata Purana. Unlike his predecessors Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati and Bhaktivinoda Thakur, who pivoted their efforts to spead Gaudiya Vaishnavism in the Western world around the persona and precepts of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, Bhaktivedanta Swami shifted the thrust of his presentation to Krishna as the sole central figure of Bhagavad Gita, Shrimad Bhagavatam and Chaitnya's own teachings. Aiming to transplant the entire religio-cultural tradition of Gaudiya Vaisnavism to rest of the world outside of India, Bhaktivedanta Swami reckoned that his emphasis on Krishna would make his mission in the West far more straightforward and evidently authentic.

Understanding that his advanced age – seventy at the time of his journey to the United States – would leave him with little time for the fulfillment of the mission, Bhaktivedanta Swami focused his efforts on four primary areas:
 * 1) to translate into English and comment on the essential Vaishnava scriptures;
 * 2) to educate and train a core of dedicated followers;
 * 3) to establish an organization to preserve and propagate the mission, and
 * 4) to conduct a worldwide organized and sustained preaching effort.

Scholars studying ISKCON establishment during the early stage attributed its survival and success by and large to Prabhupada's persona that combined exceptional leadership and managerial acumen, conviction, charisma and intellectual persuasiveness with exemplary personal character and behavior. [more in Hopkins, 1983, 127-128]

Establishment in the United States (1965-1968)
Bhaktivedanta's choice of "International Society for Krishna Consciousness" (ISKCON) as the official name for his organization, registered in New York City on *** June 1966, reflected his strategic preference

Prabhupada coined the term "Krsna consciousness" as a gloss of a poetic Sanskrit line  meaning "to be absorbed in the mellow taste of executing devotional service to Krishna" composed by his midieval predecessor Rupa Gosvami in his Padyavali, but used it throught his writings and teachings as a "Vedantic" equivalent of a more traditional Krishna bhakti to denote the entire range of experience of Krishna.

In 60s-70s ISKCOn followers attracted significant and often critical public attention with their street chanting, public distribution of books and pamphlets and dubious fundraising methods.

Global spread (1968-1977)
a.	America

b.	Europe

India
After ISKCON successfully gained a firm foothold in the West, Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada returned with his Western followers to India to re-establish the mission of Gaudiya Vaishnavism there. He received an overwhelmingly favorable reception by the general public and the social gentry alike and was able to open major temples in the Vrindaban in North India and Mayapur in West Bengal – both preemintent sacred places for Gaudiya Vaishnavas – as well as in the India's business metropolis, Bombay.

Brooks on reception

Post-Prabhupada period (1977-present)
a.	Zonal acaryas (1977-1986) b.	ISKCON Reform c.	Social integration (Obama, Thatcher, Putin)

Current status
Goes mainstream

India is "ISKCON's most receptive and expansive field" Western disciples became gurus to thousands of Indians.

Currently the largest Gaudiya Vaishnava institution in the world.

Brooks

Philosophy and practice
Graham M. Schweig observed that Bhaktivedanta Swami had established ISKCON theology on the basis of two "mahāvākyas", foundational principles he had distilled from the Gaudiya Vaishnava corpus:
 * 1) "Krishna, the Supreme Personality of Godhead",  a conflation of the standard Sanskrit term bhagavān ("God") with kṛṣṇas tu bhagavān svayam ("Krishna is God himself"), a statement from the Bhagavata Purana (1.3.28) considered seminal for the entire Gaudiya Vaishnava tradition;
 * 2) "devotional service", an insightful English rendering of the Sanskrit term "bhakti".

See Das 1998: 149. Das summarizes three uses of the term by Prabhupāda: “ ‘Vedic 1’ approximates most closely to what the Western classical Indologist would understand by this term; ‘Vedic 2’ refers to texts containing what is to Prabhupāda Vedic thought and which are hallowed inasmuch as they are derived from Vyāsa; and ‘Vedic 3’ is a narrower application of ‘Vedic 1’, referring only to the Sahitās (as contrasted to the Upaniads) and thus continuing an ancient usage of the term."

Books
A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami's Prabhupada textualized the tenets of ISKCON's philosophy and practice in his English translations and commentaries on the canonical texts of Vaisnavism: Bhagavad Gita and Srimad Bhagavatam, as well as the principal scripture of Gaudiya Vaisnavism, Krishnadasa Kaviraja’s medieval Bengali classic Chaitanya Charitamrita. He also wrote several summary studies of important Vaisnava texts. Bhaktivedanta Swami emphasized that his books were his primary legacy that encompassed everything he had to teach his followers to successfully continue his mission after his death.

Impelled by his guru Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati's request and an earlier prediction of the global spread of Gaudiya Vaisnavism by Bhaktivinoda Thakur and by Chaitanya Mahaprabhu, Bhaktivedanta conceived of his translations as "blueprints for global spiritual change" rather than mere literary artifacts for entertaining selected Western intellectuals.

Bhaktivedanta Swami produced the first three volumes of his Srimad Bhagavatam translation and commentaries between 1962 and 1965, prior to his journey to the West, which, he felt, sufficiently equipped him for his mission. Consequently, he brought two hundred sets of the Bhagavatam with him onboard the Jaladuta cargo ship to New York City on his first visit.

Since the time of his arrival in the United States Bhaktivedanta Swami continued translating Shrimad Bhagavatam and other Vaishnava texts, which were published by his Bhaktivedanta Book Trust and sold to the public by ISKCON followers through what came to be dubbed as street sankirtana. Prabhupada maintained a disciplined daily routine of translating (usually around midnight) even while continuously traveling to most regions of the world, lecturing, esteblishing ISKCON temples and centers, initiating and counselling disciples, and managing his growing institution. By the time of his death in November 1977, Bhaktivedanta Swami managed to produce over fifty volumes of translations and commentaries of Gaudiya Vaishnava classics in twenty-eight languages that were distributed by the millions. The corpus of his teachings also includes sixty volumes of transcribed lectures, thirty-seven volumes of conversations, and five volumes of correspondence four hunderd pages each, available both in print and electronic format.

Faced with the daunting task of transposing the entirety of the intellectually intricate and culturally sensitive Gaudiya Vaishnava philosophy and practice into the Western context, Bhaktivedanta Swami realized the need to convey it in a form relevant to the modern world while staying true to its core values and tenets. This is how he described the challenge in one of his very first commentaries on the Bhagavata Purana (1.4.1) written way before his journey to the West:

"Personal realization does not mean that one should, out of vanity, attempt to show one's own learning by trying to surpass the previous acharya. He must have full confidence in the previous acharya, and at the same time he must realize the subject matter so nicely that he can present the matter for the particular circumstances in a suitable manner. The original purpose of the text must be maintained [italics in original]. No obscure meaning should be screwed out of it, yet it should be presented in an interesting manner for the understanding of the audience. This is called realization."

Bhaktivedanta Swami's translating and commenting style resembles a traditional exegetical pattern of Sanskrit commentaries: each verse is first reprodiced in their original Sanskrit Devanagari or Bengali script, then followed by a complete Roman diacritical transliteration, then each word is again transliterated and glossed in an English lexical study, followed by a literary English translation of the entire verse and, finally, followed by a “purport”, or Bhaktivedanta Swamis own commentary, that explicates the verse's meaning. In compiling his commentaries, which came to be collectively known as "The Bhaktivedanta purports",}} Bhaktivedanta interwove canonical Vaishnava Sanskrit commentaries on the text, most notably those of Shridhara Swami, Jiva Goswami , Vishvanatha Chakravarti and Bhaktivedanta's guru Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati with his own reflections on both the words of his predecessors and on a number of philosophical and practical issues as he saw relevant to the particular discussion at hand.

The way Bhaktivedanta Swami introduced the traditional Gaudiya Vaishnava theology and practice into the modern philosophical and social environment drew criticism from some scholars and praise from others: the former opined that the customary non-literalism in his translating and commenting style was an interpretive transgression, the latter, to the contrary, lauded Bhaktivedanta Swami's work for his Sanskrit scholarship and the mastery of the "Vedic exegetical tradition…in action", which combined a faithful rendering of traditional religious texts with insights into the original teachings of Gaudiya Vaishnavism useful for religious scholars yet accessible even for readers new to the subject.

BG trial in Russia

Spiritual practice and its goal
While emphasizing the attainment of pure love of Krishna as the goal of devotional practice, Bhaktivedanta Swami consistently supplemented his renditions of the Bhagavata narrative with warnings against misinterpreting such descriptions as mundane dalliances. In so doing, he was attempting to both counterbalance a greater level of sensuality in the West as compared to a traditional Indian cultural setting, and to battle erotic interpretations of Krishna-lila propagated by the sahajiya sect within the Gaudiya Vaisnava tradition and deemed inappropriate by the Gaudiya Vaisnava orthodoxy.

Temples and centers
a.	Mayapur temple ===

Social development
(morphing from exclusive monasticism to congregation; clergy and laity)

Other religions
Commenting on ISKCON's potential for a dialogue with other religions, Lonnie D. Kliever of Southern Methodist University observed that "ISKCON rests on a philosophical tradition that is every bit as sophisticated as classical and contemporary philosophical thinkers in western culture [and] is prepared to participate in interreligious dialogue as full partners in scholarly debate over common questions and shared themes."

Welfare activities


Following the tradition of Hinduism, ISKCON

ISKCON has inspired, and sometimes sponsored, a project called Food for Life. The goal of the project is to "liberally distribute pure vegetarian meals (Prasadam) throughout the world", as inspired by Bhaktivedanta Swami's instruction, given to his disciples in 1974, "No one within ten miles of a temple should go hungry . . . I want you to immediately begin serving food". The international headquarters known as Food for Life Global, established by Paul Rodney Turner and Mukunda_Goswami, coordinates the project. Food for Life is currently active in over sixty countries and serves up to 2 million free meals every day. Its welfare achievements have been noted by The_New_York_Times and other media worldwide.

Public perception
Was in 1970s and 1980s ISKCON was perceived as a cult and is still often seen as a "marginal and often controversial element" in a majority of societies and cultures with the exception of India and few other countries.

Problems of succession
(ritviks, guruship, zonal acaryas)

Crises of leadership
(falldowns, Gaudiya-matha)

Troubled with various crises, especially after Bhaktivedanta's death.

Public controversies
deprogramers

Litigations
(new Vrindavan, Robin George, Gurukulis, BG trial)

Scholarly studies
Ever since its emergence in 1966, ISKCON attracted considerable scholarly attention resulting, over the years, in a number of sociological, historical, philosophical and theological studies. Due to ISKCON's highly visible and somewhat controvercial public profile in the initial years, its early researchers primarily focused on the movement's sociological, political and psychological underpinning, giving only a cursory look to its well-established theological and philosophical foundation..

An in-depth study of ISKCON philosophy was complicated both by the sheer volume of Prabhupada's literary legacy comprising around one hundred and fifty volumes of four hundred pages each, and by what Francis Clooney of Harvard Divinity School observed as contemporary scholars' deliberate aloofness "from the categories such as “true meaning,” “right interpretation,” and “the right way to live one’s life according to the text.”… [and] whether it is, or ought to be, important today in any way that stands in recognizable continuity with the tradition."


 * Three distinct approaches: sociological (focusing on institutional aspects of ISKCON), philosophical (on the movement's teachings) and "insider" – all having their advantages and shortcomings.

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 * Chapters in :

































Periodicals
(sorted by the date of publication)









Popular books




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