CHAPTER THREE

In 1969 he journeyed to London, and by 1971, Hare Kṛṣṇa had been recorded on hit records by former Beatles John Lennon and George Harrison. By then the mantra had been heard by hundreds of millions of people, and the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, formed in New York in 1966, had spread to six continents. How could an elderly Indian swami in a foreign land, with no money, no support, no friends, and no followers, achieve such phenomenal success? The story that follows includes eyewitness accounts and excerpts from Śrīla Prabhupāda-līlāmṛta, the authorized biography of this extraordinary saint, written by one of his intimate disciples, Satsvarūpa Dāsa Goswami.

The arduous sea voyage from Calcutta to Boston was finally over. The lone passenger aboard the cargo ship Jaladuta, a sixty-nine-year-old Indian holy man, had been given free passage by the owner of the Scindia Steamship Company. His Divine Grace A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupāda arrived at Commonwealth Pier on September 17, 1965.

For thousands of years kṛṣṇa-bhakti, love of Kṛṣṇa, had been known only in India, but now, on the order of his spiritual master, Śrīla Prabhupāda had come to awaken the natural, dormant Kṛṣṇa consciousness of the American people.

On his arrival day onboard the Jaladuta, he wrote in his diary the following words:

In 1922, Śrīla Prabhupāda’s spiritual master, His Divine Grace Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvatī Ṭhākura, had requested him to spread the teachings of Lord Kṛṣṇa, including the Hare Kṛṣṇa mantra, to the West, and now, after a lifetime in preparation, Śrīla Prabhupāda was ready to begin.

After landing in America with the Indian rupee equivalent of eight dollars, he spent his first seven months in the United States with a family in Butler, Pennsylvania, with an Indian yoga teacher in Manhattan, and later, with the help of friends, in a bare rented office in the same part of the city.

By the summer of 1966, he had found a larger location more suited to propagating the Hare Kṛṣṇa mahā-mantra and the ancient science of Kṛṣṇa consciousness. That summer Prabhupāda had met a young man named Harvey Cohen, who offered him an old artist-in-residence loft in lower Manhattan’s Bowery.

Here, a small group of young Bohemian types would join Śrīla Prabhupāda every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday evening for chanting Hare Kṛṣṇa and classes on the Bhagavad-gītā. Although not yet incorporated or known by its present name, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness had been born.

Few of Śrīla Prabhupāda’s guests, whose interests included music, drugs, macrobiotics, pacifism, and spiritual meditation, knew very much about what they were chanting or exactly why they were chanting it. They just enjoyed it and liked being in the presence of the man they affectionately called “Swamiji.” These musicians, artists, poets, and intellectuals, most of whom had chosen to live outside of mainstream society, felt that by chanting Hare Kṛṣṇa they were taking part in something mystical and unique.

Śrīla Prabhupāda led the solo chanting: Hare Kṛṣṇa, Hare Kṛṣṇa, Kṛṣṇa Kṛṣṇa, Hare Hare / Hare Rāma, Hare Rāma, Rāma Rāma, Hare Hare. The melody was always the same – a simple four-note phrase, the first four notes of the major scale. Prabhupāda led the kīrtana with small three-inch-diameter hand cymbals he had brought with him from India. He would ring them in a one-two-three, one-two-three fashion. Some of his followers clapped along with him, and some joined in with small finger cymbals of their own. Others sat in yoga postures, hands outstretched, chanting and meditating on this novel transcendental vibration. Guests would sometimes bring other instruments, including guitars, tambouras, flutes, tambourines, and a wide variety of drums.

After a few months some of Śrīla Prabhupāda’s followers secured for him a better place to live and spread the chanting of the holy name. The new Second Avenue location on the hippie-filled Lower East Side included an apartment for Śrīla Prabhupāda one floor up and a ground-floor storefront, which he would use as a temple. Within a few weeks, the small sixty-by-twenty-five-foot storefront was packed with young people three nights a week. Gradually the storefront took on the appearance of a temple as visitors began to bring tapestries and paintings for the walls, carpets for the floors, and amplification equipment for Śrīla Prabhupāda’s lectures and kīrtanas.

Prabhupāda’s kīrtanas were lively and captivating, with numerous guests spontaneously rising to their feet, clapping and dancing. Śrīla Prabhupāda, always conducting the kīrtana (group chanting) in call-and-response fashion and playing a small African bongolike drum, would accelerate the chant faster and faster, until after about half an hour it would reach a climax and suddenly end. Chanting along with Śrīla Prabhupāda in this small room on Second Avenue, guests found themselves transported into another dimension, a spiritual dimension, in which the anxieties and pressures of everyday life in New York City simply did not exist. Many soon caught on that chanting Hare Kṛṣṇa was an intense and effective form of meditation, a direct means of communion with something greater than themselves, no matter what their conception of the Absolute.

Śrīla Prabhupāda initiated his first disciples in September of ’66, at which time about a dozen students vowed to chant a minimum of sixteen rounds a day on their beads. This meant reciting the sixteen-word mantra 1,728 times a day, a meditation that would take them between one and a half to two hours to complete.

Prabhupāda’s flock soon began to print and distribute invitations and leaflets such as this one:

Another invited America’s youth to

In the mornings Śrīla Prabhupāda would lead the devotees in one round of japa (chanting on beads). After chanting with Prabhupāda, the devotees would chant their remaining sixteen rounds on their own.

The celebrated American poet Allen Ginsberg, accompanying the kīrtana on his harmonium, had by now become a regular at the evening chanting sessions at the temple and in nearby Tompkins Square Park. In a 1980 interview published in Śrīla Prabhupāda’s biography, he recalled his experiences.

Allen: I liked immediately the idea that Swami Bhaktivedanta had chosen the Lower East Side of New York for his practice.... I was astounded that he’d come with the chanting, because it seemed like a reinforcement from India. I had been running around singing Hare Kṛṣṇa but had never understood exactly why or what it meant.... I thought it was great now that he was here to expound on the Hare Kṛṣṇa mantra – that would sort of justify my singing. I knew what I was doing but I didn’t have any theological background to satisfy further inquiry, and here was someone who did. So I thought that was absolutely great.... If anyone wanted to know the technical intricacies and the ultimate history, I could send them to him.... he had a personal, selfless sweetness like total devotion. And that was what always conquered me ... a kind of personal charm, coming from dedication ... I always liked to be with him.

The chanting of Hare Kṛṣṇa seemed to spread in an almost magical way, and as time went on, the number of people attracted to it increased exponentially. Even in this unlikely New York setting, the mantra seemed to have a life of its own. Whether it was the melody, the beat, the sound of the words, the look of the devotees, or Prabhupāda’s humility or serenity, nearly everyone who then came in touch with the chanting of Hare Kṛṣṇa responded favorably.

In December 1966, Śrīla Prabhupāda would explain on his first record album, the LP that introduced two of the Beatles, John Lennon and George Harrison, to Hare Kṛṣṇa, that “the chanting Hare Kṛṣṇa, Hare Kṛṣṇa, Kṛṣṇa Kṛṣṇa, Hare Hare / Hare Rāma, Hare Rāma, Rāma Rāma, Hare Hare is not a material sound vibration, but comes directly from the spiritual world.”

Prabhupāda’s Tompkins Square Park kīrtanas were spiritual happenings that are now legendary. Hundreds of people from all walks of life took part; some as observers and some as eager participants, chanting, clapping their hands, dancing, and playing musical instruments. Irving Halpern, one of many local musicians who regularly participated, remembers the scene.

Irving: The park resounded. The musicians were very careful in listening to the mantras.... I have talked to a couple of musicians about it, and we agreed that in his head this Swami must have had hundreds and hundreds of melodies that had been brought back from the real learning from the other side of the world. So many people came there just to tune in to the musical gift, the transmission of the dharma. “Hey,” they would say, “listen to this holy monk.”

People were really sure there were going to be unusual feats, grandstanding, flashy levitations, or whatever people expected was going to happen. But when the simplicity of what the Swami was really saying, when you began to sense it – whether you were motivated to actually make a lifetime commitment and go this way of life, or whether you merely wanted to place it in a place and give certain due respect to it – it turned you around.

And that was interesting, too, the different ways in which people regarded the kīrtana. Some people thought it was a prelude. Some people thought it was a main event. Some people liked the music. Some people liked the poetic sound of it.

After the kīrtanas Śrīla Prabhupāda usually spoke for a few minutes about Kṛṣṇa consciousness, inviting everyone back to the temple for a Sunday afternoon “love festival” of chanting and feasting, a weekly event that soon became a tradition that continues today. The October 10 edition of the New York Times described the Tompkins Square Park kīrtana with the following headline: “Swami’s Flock Chants In Park To Find Ecstasy.”

At the same time, New York’s avant-garde newspaper The East Village Other ran a front-page story with a full-page photograph of Śrīla Prabhupāda standing and speaking to a large group of people in the park. The banner headline read “SAVE EARTH NOW!!” and in large type just below the picture, the mahā-mantra was printed: “HARE KRISHNA HARE KRISHNA KRISHNA KRISHNA HARE HARE HARE RAMA HARE RAMA RAMA RAMA HARE HARE.” The article admired the chanting and described how Śrīla Prabhupāda “had succeeded in convincing the world’s toughest audience – Bohemians, acidheads, potheads, and hippies – that he knew the way to God.”

The newspaper story described how a visit to the temple at 26 Second Avenue would bring “living, visible, tangible proof” that God is alive and well. The story quoted one of Śrīla Prabhupāda’s new disciples:

Finding it superior to the euphoria from any kind of drug, he said,

Early in 1967, several of Śrīla Prabhupāda’s disciples left New York and opened a temple in the heart of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, home for thousands of hippies and “flower children” from all over the country. Within a short time, Śrīla Prabhupāda’s temple there had become a spiritual haven for troubled, searching, and sometimes desperate young people. Drug overdoses were common, and hundreds of confused, dazed, and disenchanted young Americans roamed the streets.

Haridāsa, the first president of the San Francisco temple, remembers what it was like.

Haridāsa: The hippies needed all the help they could get, and they knew it. And the Rādhā-Kṛṣṇa temple was certainly a kind of spiritual haven. Kids sensed it. They were running, living on the streets, no place where they could go, where they could rest, where people weren’t going to hurt them.

I think it saved a lot of lives; there might have been a lot more casualties if it hadn’t been for Hare Kṛṣṇa. It was like opening a temple in a battlefield. It was the hardest place to do it, but it was the place where it was most needed. Although the Swami had no precedents for dealing with any of this, he applied the chanting with miraculous results. The chanting was wonderful. It worked.

Michael Bowen, an artist and one of the leading figures of the Haight-Ashbury scene, recalled that Śrīla Prabhupāda had “an amazing ability to get people off drugs, especially speed, heroin, burnt-out LSD cases – all of that.”

Every day at the temple devotees cooked and served to over two hundred young people a free, sumptuous multi-course lunch of vegetarian food offered to Kṛṣṇa. Many local merchants helped to make this possible by donating to the cause. An early San Francisco devotee recalls those days.

Harṣarāṇī: People who were plain lost or needed comforting ... sort of wandered or staggered into the temple. Some of them stayed and became devotees, and some just took prasāda [spiritual food] and left. Just from a medical standpoint, doctors didn’t know what to do with people on LSD. The police and the free clinics in the area couldn’t handle the overload of people taking LSD. The police saw Swamiji [Śrīla Prabhupāda] as a certain refuge.

Throughout lunch, devotees played the New York recording of Śrīla Prabhupāda chanting the Hare Kṛṣṇa mantra. The sacred sound reinforced the spiritual mood of the temple and helped to ease the tensions and frustrations of its young guests.

Sunday, January 29, 1967 marked the major spiritual event of the San Francisco hippie era, and Śrīla Prabhupāda, who was ready to go anywhere to spread Kṛṣṇa consciousness, was there. The Grateful Dead, Moby Grape, Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service – all the new-wave San Francisco bands – had agreed to appear with Śrīla Prabhupāda at the Avalon Ballroom’s Mantra-Rock Dance, proceeds from which would go to the local Hare Kṛṣṇa temple.

Thousands of hippies, anticipating an exciting evening, packed the hall. LSD pioneer Timothy Leary dutifully paid the standard $2.50 admission fee and entered the ballroom, followed by Augustus Owsley Stanley III, known for his own brand of LSD.

At about 10:00 PM, Śrīla Prabhupāda and a small entourage of devotees arrived amid uproarious applause and cheering by a crowd that had waited weeks in great anticipation for this moment. Śrīla Prabhupāda was given a seat of honor onstage and was introduced by Allen Ginsberg, who explained his own realizations about the Hare Kṛṣṇa mahā-mantra and how it had spread from the small storefront in New York to San Francisco. The well-known poet told the crowd that the chanting of the Hare Kṛṣṇa mantra in the early morning at the Rādhā-Kṛṣṇa temple was an important community service to those who were “coming down from LSD,” because the chanting would “stabilize their consciousness on reentry.”

The chanting started slowly but rhythmically, and little by little it spread throughout the ballroom, enveloping everyone. Hippies got to their feet, held hands, and began to dance as enormous, pulsing pictures of Kṛṣṇa were projected around the walls of the ballroom in perfect sync with the beat of the mantra. By the time Śrīla Prabhupāda stood and began to dance with his arms raised, the crowd was completely absorbed in chanting, dancing, and playing small musical instruments they had brought for the occasion.

Ginsberg later recalled, “We sang Hare Kṛṣṇa all evening. It was absolutely great – an open thing. It was the height of the Haight-Ashbury spiritual enthusiasm.”

As the tempo speeded up, the chanting and dancing became more and more intense, spurred on by a stageful of top rock musicians, who were as charmed by the magic of the mahā-mantra as the amateur musicians had been at the Tompkins Square kīrtanas only a few weeks before. The chant rose; it seemed to surge and swell without limit. When it seemed it could go no further, the chanting stopped. Śrīla Prabhupāda offered prayers to his spiritual master into the microphone and ended by saying three times, “All glories to the assembled devotees!” The Haight-Ashbury neighborhood buzzed with talk of the Mantra-Rock Dance for weeks afterward.

Within a few months of the Mantra-Rock event, devotees in San Francisco, New York, and Montreal began to take to the streets with their mṛdaṅgas (clay drums) and karatālas (hand cymbals) to chant the mahā-mantra on a daily basis. In just a few years, temples were opening all over North America and Europe, and people everywhere were hearing the chanting of Hare Kṛṣṇa.

On May 31, 1969, when the Vietnam War protest movement was reaching its climax, six devotees joined John Lennon and Yoko Ono in their Montreal hotel room to play instruments and sing on John and Yoko’s famous recording “Give Peace a Chance.” This song, which included the mantra, and a hit single, “Hare Krishna Mantra,” produced in September of the same year by Beatle George Harrison and featuring the devotees, introduced millions to the chanting. Even Broadway’s long-running musical hit Hair included exuberant choruses of the Hare Kṛṣṇa mantra.

At the now historic mass antiwar demonstration in Washington, DC, on November 15, 1969, devotees from all over the United States and Canada chanted the Hare Kṛṣṇa mantra throughout the day and distributed “The Peace Formula,” a small leaflet based on Śrīla Prabhupāda’s teachings from the Vedic scriptures. “The Peace Formula,” which proposed a spiritual solution to the problem of war, was distributed en masse for many months and influenced thousands of lives.

By 1970, when George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord” – with its beautiful recurring lyrics of Hare Kṛṣṇa and Hare Rāma – was the international number-one hit song of the day, devotees in dhotīs and saris, chanting the mahā-mantra with musical instruments, were now a familiar sight in almost every major city throughout the world. Because of Śrīla Prabhupāda’s deep love for Lord Kṛṣṇa and his own spiritual master, his amazing determination, and his sincere compassion, “Hare Kṛṣṇa” had become a household word.