Is ISKCON a Cult?

I got message from a person claiming to do an expose/article on ISKCON and Prabhupada for a major newspaper and website. They were told about this website by a friend, after reading it the person wrote and asked me “Is ISKCON a cult?” This is my reply.

I think your question is debatable. As a former member of ISKCON I believe it is a cult in the definition of cult you supply:

“A religion or religious sect generally considered to be extremist or false, with its followers often living in an unconventional manner under the guidance of an authoritarian, charismatic leader.”

The Hare Krishna or Chaitanya Gaudiya Vaishnava religious tradition, or sampradaya, began in the 16th century founded by Sri Chaitanya Mahaprabhu who is considered by the tradition’s followers to be an incarnation of God in human form. This tradition is followed by many millions of people since that time in India, but mostly in the states of Bengal and Orissa where Chaitanya was born and lived for most of his life. (Satya Sai Baba or Amma Amritanandamayi or Swaminarayana followers (all large influential traditions in India) consider their gurus to be incarnations of God in human form, this is common in many Hindu religious traditions).

Sri Chaitanya was an immensely popular religious leader, he is categorized as a religious reformer due to his preaching against the caste system as not being based in authentic Hindu scripture. He started a huge bhakti revivalist movement which affected all of India in the 16th century. He was the most popular religious leader of his day and had a huge impact on the course of popular Hinduism. The Hare Krishna mantra was incorporated into practically all the religious traditions within Hinduism because of his charismatic appeal to the masses and to the leaders of most all the various religious sects comprising Hinduism. Krishna bhakti (devotional yoga) became very popular and widespread due to him. Today in India, Krishna worship is the most popular form of Hinduism, a great deal of that is due to Sri Chaitanya’s influence in the 16th century.

In 1918 for the first time in it’s history there was started a large religious organization from the Chaitanya tradition in India. For the first time this branch of the tradition introduced the initiating of monks into the celibate monastic swami order. Previously the tradition did not do this and still to this day only that branch (Gaudiya Math (pronounced – Maat or Mutt)) and it’s offshoots initiate monks into the swami order. They printed a lot of books and started many temples all over India. The founder of that organization was named Swami Bhaktisiddhanta Saraswati Thakura. One of his disciples, a Bengali businessman named Abhay Charan De, was asked by his guru in the 1930’s to take the tradition to the west. This was because he could speak english and he was financially well off.

After his guru’s death in the late 1930’s Abhay Charan De eventually entered into the swami order in 1959 as A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami. He added the initials of his birth name at the front of his swami name because he thought it sounded fancy. He had various publications and he had attempted to start a new religious organization after the breaking up of his guru’s organization. None of it was very successful. So he decided to go to the west and try his hand at bringing the tradition to America. In 1965 he took a freighter to America with no money and just a bag of his books – a few english translations of some of the tradition’s main scriptures which he had begun working on shortly before leaving India. He ended up in the lower east side of Manhattan, The Bowery, right next door to Greenwich Village, which at that time was the headquarters of the Bohemian movement in America – beatniks, hippies, artists, musicians, etc. He started chanting in Tompkins Square Park – and the rest is history. Within a few years he had thousands of full time disciples, temples all over the world, celebrity followers, and Hare Krishna had become a household word.

He taught that the guru is to be seen by his disciples to be “as good as God”. Never to be questioned as to the truth of his words, always to be worshipped and revered as you would do so for God.

He taught that Indian culture was the “only civilized culture in the world”, and that the rest of the world was “demonic” culture.

He taught that women should not be educated beyond reading and writing, that their place was to be housewives because when they are educated and enter the workforce and are given equal rights – society is seriously harmed.

He taught that women are generally less intelligent then men and not as capable to understand deep spiritual truths. He was vehemently anti-feminist. His teachings on women were similar to fundamentalist Islam.

He taught that the only way to attain “Krishna consciousness” – which meant the attainment of the highest level of the yogic path within the Hindu theological paradigm i.e. moksa or mukti or samadhi – was to follow his teachings and his organization. If you didn’t follow him then you were “hallucinating” if you thought you could become “Krishna conscious”.

He taught that sex for any reason other then procreation was a sin and would result in bad “karma” – for which you would be punished by God.

He taught that any form of inebriation was sinful, including caffeine.

He taught that only vegetarians were not sinful when it came to diet, except if you were a “Kshatriya” – one of the major 4 castes in the caste system. A Kshatriya is supposed to denote a person who is a ruler, or warrior. He taught that they are allowed to eat meat when they train to fight by hunting animals. They were then allowed to eat the meat of the animal they killed. He gave his disciples permission to hunt and eat meat in training for combat. Anyone else who eats meat in any other circumstance is committing a grave sin.

He taught that it is his mission and the mission of his organization to literally “take over the world” and then to enforce his teachings on everyone through a theocratic dictatorship advised by a panel of “Brahmins” who are experts in his teachings.

He taught that black people would be better off being slaves, and society would be better off with black people as their slaves as well.

He taught that all non-Krishna related media, including music, literature, TV, radio, newspapers, cinema, etc, were full of “demonic” “nonsense” and were a waste of time and were off limits to all his followers – unless they used it to preach and proselytize.

He taught that children should go to schools where they would learn his teachings and not much else because the most important thing in the world for everyone was to learn his teachings and live by his rules, and follow the lifestyle he taught as perfect. This includes (for children as well) rising every morning for religious services starting at 4:30 a.m and going on with chanting and scripture study until around 7:30.

He taught that the moon was further away from the earth then the sun.

He taught that the moon landing was a hoax because the “demigods” who lived on the moon in another dimension (which was lush with vegetation) wouldn’t allow humans to land there.

He taught that the modern scientific descriptions of the universe – the cosmology taught by modern science – is a fraud, and that the real structure and makeup of the universe is that which is found in ancient Hindu cosmology e.g. there is only one sun in the universe, all the stars are actually planets, there are beings living on the sun, there is an ocean of yogurt and an ocean of milk, an ocean of ghee, and an ocean of liquor and an ocean of sugarcane juice – surrounding the earth, etc.

He taught that his movement was the “only hope for humanity”.

His movement, ISKCON, is believed by many of his followers (those that still have full faith in him and his teachings and his organization) to be the pure presence and full incarnation of God on earth – really the only truly spiritual society on earth – and the last best hope for mankind.

Swami Bhaktivedanta is taught as being perfect in every way, in everything he ever said or did was perfection, and to question any of it will result in excommunication if you don’t keep it to yourself and make an issue of your dissent. No dissent is allowed for any length of time. If you dissent you will be told the errors of your ways, if you dont’ accept that you are wrong, or at least keep your dissent to yourself, then you will be excommunicated until you repent.

ISKCON grew very large, very fast, tens of thousands of young people left and leave their lives behind and join the ashrams (monastery/commune) for various periods of time. Most stay for short periods; from a few months to a few years. A much smaller number stay for 5 – 10 years, a much smaller amount for 10 – 20 years, and somewhere around 3% stay without ever leaving.

For the first 10 years or so, the membership and congregation was almost exclusively western people, from all types of backgrounds. There is a myth that they were all drugged-out hippie dropouts who were brainwashed at a vulnerable time into joining a Hindu cult. In the first few years that was true to one degree or another. Most of the members who joined in the first couple of years were drugged-out hippies from the New York and California counterculture underground scene. But after 1968, after George Harrison became a renowned follower of Swami Bhaktivedanta, and after they started to publish and sell a lot of books, interest in ISKCON came from all types of people. From artists, musicians, students, professors, businessmen, models, actors, school teachers, scientists, yogis, Hindus, and everything in between.

It wasn’t until the middle part of the 1970’s that Indians began to embrace ISKCON in large numbers in the western countries. By the early 1980’s ISKCON was the main religious and cultural center for Indian nationals outside of India. Simultaneously after Swami Bhaktivedanta died in Nov 1977, 11 of his disciples split up the world into 11 zones where they each wielded the same power as Swami Bhaktivedanta had over ISKCON. Membership by the western disciples of Swami Bhaktivedanta started to diminish rapidly after that. Many didn’t like that the new guru/leaders had taken absolute power for themselves and were demanding to be treated the same way as Prabhupada was treated. Many others were just no longer interested in devoting themselves to ISKCON with Swami Bhaktivedanta no longer in control. There was an exodus over 10 years where some 80% – 90% of Swami Bhaktivedanta’s disciples who were still in ISKCON when he died (around 2500-3500) left the organization. The leaders didn’t care. ISKCON had turned into 11 separate zones centered around 11 gurus who each had hundreds to thousands of new disciples who worshipped them as “good as God”. That left them to run their zones as they saw fit. They were happy to be rid of their fellow godbrothers who could undermine their divine authority over their new disciples.

ISKCON had turned into a confederation of guru cults. In the latter part of the 1980’s some of the senior members from the early days led a reformation after a few of the 11 gurus got into trouble and left the movement. The new rule was that anyone could become a guru in the organization if they gained a mandate from the ruling elite – the governing body commission – the GBC. ISKCON has been run ever since with a dichotomy between gurus who rule over their zone versus rule by the GBC, often the two overlap. The amount of power and influence by gurus varies in ISKCON. There are some gurus who are very powerful with thousands of disciples and millions of dollars at their disposal, they rule with absolute power over many temples and areas of the world with no interference from the GBC. There are other gurus who have just a handful of disciples and don’t have much power or much money and are totally beholden to GBC power.

ISKCON started in India in the 1970’s and quickly rose to a position of pre-eminence in Hindu society. They have many huge architecturally impressive temple complexes, which are among the most popular in India. Whenever there is a major Hindu holiday the major Indian media outlets advertise ISKCON temple programs more so then any other religious group. They have a lot of support among the Hindu political and financial elites from the older generation. Probably you could categorize ISKCON as one of – quite possibly – the most influential religious organization in India today for the elite sections of Hindu society. A lot of that has to do with how ISKCON became the “home away from home” for most of the Hindu diaspora in the 1970-90’s due to there being no other Hindu temples in most places in the world. For some 30 years from the late 1960’s-1990’s if you lived in any major city in the world more often then not you could find only one fully functioning impressive Hindu temple to go to for worship – ISKCON. That translated into a lot of influence in India because the Hindu diaspora often came from the elite and wealthy sector of Hindu society in India who could afford to leave India and live in more costly countries.

I don’t see this trend continuing for much longer. As the older generation of elite Hindu society becomes replaced by the newer generations who have been raised with western values and cultural mores, it is likely the influence of ISKCON will lessen due to many of their teachings and attitudes being seen as anachronistic and out of touch with reality. How many educated high class Hindus of the new generations will want to be seen as associated with overt sexism and misogyny, racism and outdated cosmology, antisocial attitudes and behavior, celibacy and teetotalism – and the worship of fanatic fundamentalist caucasian “gurus”? Time will tell.

Meanwhile ISKCON is planning their most ambitious temple complex in India to date. Swami Bhaktivedanta wanted to build a temple dedicated to teaching ancient Hindu cosmology – as being literally true – in order to replace modern scientific cosmology, which he considered to be a fraud and without merit. To implement that desire, ISKCON is in the very near future going to build a fabulously beautiful and immensely huge temple on their property at their world headquarters in Mayapur, Nadia, West Bengal. As self defeating as it sounds – if you want to convince people that you are not crazy – ISKCON is seriously intent on pushing forth the idea of ancient Hindu cosmology as superior to modern cosmology in the hopes of converting people to their belief system.