Worship of Srila Prabhupada is "apa-siddhanta"?
June 12, 2013 — CANADA (SUN) — The last in a study of the confluence of three separatist movements: the DOM, ISKCON Inc. and Ritvikism.
Conclusion by Rocana das (Sampradaya Sun)
As this series comes to a close, we'd like to recap some of the essential points and summarize the current landscape. As the banner image for this series indicates, we see that three independent separatist movements in ISKCON have merged: ISKCON Inc., the DOM, and the Ritviks. That's not to say that all Ritviks consider themselves part of this confluence. There are Ritviks who are not in favor of the Long Island lawsuit, and others who do not accept the DOM as an absolute instruction for 10,000 years. For the most part, however, the Ritvik movement is marching forward under all three of these banners.
[PADA: The Prabhupadanugas / ritvik movement is moving forward under the banner of worship of the pure devotee Srila Prabhupada, and not the bogus post-1977 "GBC guru" successors. There may be some differences on side issues, but the overall issue is -- all these groups do NOT believe that Srila Prabhupada appointed eleven -- or any other -- guru successors; And as such, HE intended to be the guru for ISKCON himself, for the indefinite future. Therefore our banner is, lets worship Srila Prabhupada and follow his process.
All of us "groups" agree to a singular point, his books are the current source of divyam jnanam that destroys sins (diksha) for ISKCON. NOTE: Rocana has never identified ANY source of diksha for his movement? Nor will he, despite our asking him for 35 years. Rocana says that Srila Prabhupada's books are not potent any longer because he and his books are -- post samadhi, posthumous and postmortem. Rocana is thus the founder father of the "Church of postmortem."
Rocana thus agrees with Tamal who says, Srila Prabhupada's books no longer have the potency to enlighten people with divyam jnanam, because "in our tradition" we need to worship a live body. Rocana thus has not told us -- what is the source of diksha in his scheme then? And where does Krishna say we need to "worship a live body" to attain Him? Rocana never tells us where Krishna said this? Rather, Krishna's idea is, the material body is a lump of ignorance, and only a fool would worship such a temporary object? There is no "tradition" of the worship of a live body in ours -- or in any other -- bona fide religion?
Apparently Rocana has no source of diksha at all, so he is now saying basically that -- "zero" is the source of divyam jnanam. Perhaps that is why he has zero followers? As for the July 9th letter, the will, the letters, the May tapes, the DOM, the 1977 conversations and so on, these are all supporting documents, they are not the main theme of our dissenting movement in themselves.
Rocana also says he is upset that the ritviks have even been given access to all the above mentioned documents, he is another person who wanted these documents to be suppressed and hidden -- as does the bogus guru clique. That means, Rocana never wanted any of these documents to be seen, discussed or forwarded by -- anyone? He sides with the GBC who wants to HIDE these documents. This is sometimes called the mushroom siddhanta, keep people in the dark and feed them manure.
Nor apparently has Rocana wanted the poison issue to be forwarded by us, because we are the people who did that? We should not have any access to the words of our guru? Sorry, ROCANA simply wants people to remain in ignorance and have no access to the documents of Srila Prabhupada. Rocana and his "group" never would have known about all these documents, unless we had forwarded them in the first place, many years ago. This is an amazing admission on Rocana's part, he never wanted us to have these documents, because he wanted to suppress the words of the pure devotee, as do the bogus GBC gurus, who are also upset we got these documents as well.
Anyway! The main theme of the Prabhupadanugas is -- to take shelter of his vani -- and his books are the primary source of that vani. All these "dissenting" groups agree on this main principle. As a matter of fact, even "inside ISKCON" folks like Bhakti Caru swami and others are preaching our idea, that Srila Prabhupada is the main focus, and we can all access him through his vani (books).]
ROCANA: In Long Island, the GBC is battling the Ritviks not only for control of the temple, but of Srila Prabhupada's original New York corporation, ISKCON Inc., which is tied to the BBT and MVT trusts.
Rocana thus agrees with Tamal who says, Srila Prabhupada's books no longer have the potency to enlighten people with divyam jnanam, because "in our tradition" we need to worship a live body. Rocana thus has not told us -- what is the source of diksha in his scheme then? And where does Krishna say we need to "worship a live body" to attain Him? Rocana never tells us where Krishna said this? Rather, Krishna's idea is, the material body is a lump of ignorance, and only a fool would worship such a temporary object? There is no "tradition" of the worship of a live body in ours -- or in any other -- bona fide religion?
Apparently Rocana has no source of diksha at all, so he is now saying basically that -- "zero" is the source of divyam jnanam. Perhaps that is why he has zero followers? As for the July 9th letter, the will, the letters, the May tapes, the DOM, the 1977 conversations and so on, these are all supporting documents, they are not the main theme of our dissenting movement in themselves.
Rocana also says he is upset that the ritviks have even been given access to all the above mentioned documents, he is another person who wanted these documents to be suppressed and hidden -- as does the bogus guru clique. That means, Rocana never wanted any of these documents to be seen, discussed or forwarded by -- anyone? He sides with the GBC who wants to HIDE these documents. This is sometimes called the mushroom siddhanta, keep people in the dark and feed them manure.
Nor apparently has Rocana wanted the poison issue to be forwarded by us, because we are the people who did that? We should not have any access to the words of our guru? Sorry, ROCANA simply wants people to remain in ignorance and have no access to the documents of Srila Prabhupada. Rocana and his "group" never would have known about all these documents, unless we had forwarded them in the first place, many years ago. This is an amazing admission on Rocana's part, he never wanted us to have these documents, because he wanted to suppress the words of the pure devotee, as do the bogus GBC gurus, who are also upset we got these documents as well.
Anyway! The main theme of the Prabhupadanugas is -- to take shelter of his vani -- and his books are the primary source of that vani. All these "dissenting" groups agree on this main principle. As a matter of fact, even "inside ISKCON" folks like Bhakti Caru swami and others are preaching our idea, that Srila Prabhupada is the main focus, and we can all access him through his vani (books).]
ROCANA: In Long Island, the GBC is battling the Ritviks not only for control of the temple, but of Srila Prabhupada's original New York corporation, ISKCON Inc., which is tied to the BBT and MVT trusts.
[PADA: That was the GBC's choice, they wanted this lawsuit. And we are told the GBC guru party has already wasted more money on lawyers -- than the Long Island building is worth. That means, they do not want temples that worship Srila Prabhupada. They want to be worshiped themselves, and they will go to extreme measures trying to keep their bogus pooja going on, even at great monetary expense.
And meanwhile, we are told some of the poor oppressed devotees in some "GBC managed" temples are not getting proper health care, never mind some ISKCON cows were sold for slaughter, because the leader's money is going to buy lawyers, and not to take care of the citizens of ISKCON. All this helps make more and more people totally disgusted with the GBC's guru program every day.]
And meanwhile, we are told some of the poor oppressed devotees in some "GBC managed" temples are not getting proper health care, never mind some ISKCON cows were sold for slaughter, because the leader's money is going to buy lawyers, and not to take care of the citizens of ISKCON. All this helps make more and more people totally disgusted with the GBC's guru program every day.]
ROCANA: In Bangalore, Madhu Pandit is waging his own war against ISKCON (reg. Mumbai 1971), but that battle is really over control of assets, not philosophy on diksa initiation.
[PADA: Wrong. Madhu Pandit said he simply wants Srila Prabhupada to be the guru at these centers. It is all about the initiation issue. The Bangalore "property" is only an issue because that is where people are worshiping Srila Prabhupada as their guru, and the GBC finds that "not acceptable." In other words, anyone who does not want to worship the bogus GBC's illicit sex with men, women and children guru programs is banned, beat, sued and is sometimes -- assassinated. That has been their pattern since 1977, and Bangalore is simply the current focus of that pattern.]
ROCANA: Nonetheless, Madhu Pandit appears to be making Ritvikism the centerpiece of his settlement discussions, and Ritvik-vada serves as a very good foil in that regard.
[PADA: Correct, Madhu Pandit wants people to worship Srila Prabhupada and not the GBC's "illicit sex with men, women and children" messiahs program. It is a great argument, and should be the centerpiece argument, because it cannot be defeated i.e.: we do not want people to worship the GBC's illicit sex messiahs project, because it mis-represents what Srila Prabhupada is teaching, and it degrades the human society into animal life.
For that matter, there are no religions, or religious people anywhere on earth, who are as bogus as the current GBC's gurus, i.e. those who promote the worship of illicit sex, drugs and so on, as the activity of God's successors and gurus. The current GBC guru's policy of worship of debauchees is simply not acceptable to human society, or even in cats and dogs society. Even animals do not worship illicit sex.
So yes, this is our main argument, we do not want to have a society that worships less than animal life as its messiahs. Why is this a foil? And why does Rocana think our objecting to the worship of debauchees as Srila Prabhupada's successors is "a foil"? This mean Rocana is trivializing the worship of the pure devotee as some sort of foolish side track and foil issue?]
ROCANA: Madhu Pandit and company have already formed an independent movement: they have established their own Governing Body Commission, with individual GBC's elected by a network of some 30 Ritvik temple presidents in India, who have themselves been elected by local congregations. Although the Bangalore Ritviks embraced the DOM for purposes of justifying their GBC elections, the process they employed is not the same as the one spelled out in the DOM, and we are told that Madhu Pandit no longer has any real interest in the DOM.
[PADA: Again, the DOM is a supportive document. The main idea of establishing Srila Prabhupada as the acharya is what we are ALL interested in. And that is going on in Madhu Pandit's organization. Maybe some of the details are not all agreed upon, but the main principle is agreed upon among all the Prabhupadanugas.]
ROCANA: Nimai Pandit and the Long Island Ritviks have embraced the DOM for the long run, having welded it onto the ISKCON Inc. articles of incorporation. While Nimai Pandit was involved in helping Madhu Pandit to organize the Bangalore-run GBC elections process, his current process of establishing GBC's under ISKCON Inc. is apparently being done completely independent of the Bangalore Ritviks. Before his parting of ways with Madhu Pandit and Bangalore, Nimai Pandit described the plan for scaling the GBC elections process up worldwide in his article, "GBC Elections in Bangalore - Update" [46]:
"After the elections in India, ISKCON, Inc. will conduct elections in other regions in the world to elect GBC members from those regions. All these members from different regions will together constitute the Governing Body Commission of ISKCON. We expect that in each region, the leaders in that region will come together in an istagosthi format, with three members of the Trustee board of ISKCON, Inc appointed as an Election Commission Committee, to discuss and decide on the election policy for their region. The election policy will include the qualification of the temples that can be part of ISKCON, the qualification of their Temple Presidents, the ballot, how many GBCs to elect from that region, how many zones in the region, when will the elections be held, where, regional election commissioners, Independent observers, etc. "
[PADA: This is a sound foundation as a blueprint for moving forward. Rocana has never presented his idea of what he would do to manage the society?]
ROCANA: At least at this juncture, it seems unlikely that the ISKCON Inc. GBC's and the India Ritvik GBC's will work cooperatively together, nor do we expect the India Ritvik GBC's will ever make themselves subordinate to the ISKCON Inc. GBC's.
[PADA: It really does not matter if all the groups are united on general management principles, because all the ritvik programs of all stripes are going to worship the pure devotee Srila Prabhupada. Some of them will cooperate on certain management processes, and some will not, but the main focus of "who is going to be worshiped" will be united.]
ROCANA: Nara Narayana is now divorced from both Madhu Pandit and Nimai Pandit, and is working primarily with Gaurangasundara and the so-called 'Prabhupadanugas'. But the Ritvik/Prabhupadanugas are also experiencing dissention in the ranks under the ISKCON Inc. umbrella, and we can expect to see another breakaway group that will likely disassociate itself from both the ISKCON Inc. and DOM groups, carrying on simply as the Prabhupadanuga Ritviks, with a focus on the book change issue.
[PADA: None of these dissenters are breaking away from the original core issue, that we need to establish the worship of HDG Srila Prabhupada.]
ROCANA: In all cases, the new GBC bodies are being seated around a new constitution, and both the Bangalore and Long Island Ritviks are in process of writing, or organizing to write their own constitutions. Several other groups are also in the process of writing their own constitutions, and some of them are preparing to re-constitute a governing body.
[PADA: OK, and should we not be working on a re-constituted GBC?]
ROCANA: Clearly, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness has entered a new era -- and a predictable one, at that. We have been saying for many years that if the GBC does not remediate itself and address the myriad problems in ISKCON, the society will fracture into many disparate groups. The stronger ones among them will develop into parallel ISKCONs, by whatever name, each presenting a version of Krsna Consciousness as they believe Srila Prabhupada instructed it. The range of variation will be significant, as we can already see just in the realm of guru-tattva.
[PADA: Rocana has never explained what his guru tattva idea is, at all? He has said all along that there is always a living guru, but he has never named that living guru, which clearly means he -- lied and bluffed when he said -- he has one to promote. He has no guru to promote at all.
He says out idea of worship of the pure devotees is wrong, but he has not told us, what is his better idea? Apparently he wants us to -- worship nothing? He never says? I told him if he identifies his living guru, we can then study the words of his living guru, but he has never presented even one sentence from his living guru? So apparently, his living guru also cannot speak, in addition to the fact he has no name, no body, no books, no temples and so on? In other words Rocana would rather the mass of people have no guru at all, rather than Srila Prabhupada as their guru. This is called atheism, no God is better than worship of God. Rocana's guru tattva is atheistic.]
ROCANA: Like Bangalore and Long Island, the various GBC's being formed will not likely work cooperatively, at least for the foreseeable future. Perhaps 50 years from now the shattered society will again unite under a single banner, but for now the lines of division are becoming even deeper.
One of the interesting trends we see as the various separatist movements develop is the establishment of governance structures that employ a model of centralization, while simultaneously preaching an emphasis on decentralization, as Srila Prabhupada did. As we have demonstrated, the ISKCON Inc./DOM movement is a perfect example. The extreme opposite of this has also manifested, in the form of a small breakaway movement that is emphasizing decentralization, and is in fact so 'decentralized' there appears to be little differentiation at all in the philosophy or demographic it represents: it is 'one size fits all', everybody welcome. In many ways, that's what the GBC/ISKCON already is.
[PADA: The current ritvik movement is a loose confederation, ok, and what is the problem with that? Better to have a loose federation than a giant single entity, which can be sued and closed down from a single attacker?]
ROCANA: Another active front in the Ritvik campaign that we have not yet mentioned in this series is the proliferation of Ritvik-vada in China.
[PADA: OK, well at least we have a program in China, Rocana has none, in China or anywhere else.]
ROCANA: Although less is heard about the movement in China, it has been going on for years with the support of Jitarati das. This branch of the Ritvik family has gotten very actively involved in the original books movement, but along with proliferating Ritvik-vada, it is also helping to distribute other compromised practices going on in the Indian and western Ritvik temples.
One example of this was given in a story Nara Narayana Vishwakarma dasa told about his travels to China a few years ago with his son Kuvalesaya dasa. Jitarati das had invited the two to join him in China, to visit and encourage the Prabhupadanuga centers there to remain with Srila Prabhupada, and not to be subverted by B.V. Narayana Maharaja, who had made great inroads into China at the time. Nara Narayana was disturbed by the fact that the Chinese devotees in Guangzhou, while devoted to Srila Prabhupada, were playing "horrible kirtans and bhajans instead of Srila Prabhupada's Kirtans". When he asked why they were doing so, their response was: "Well, these bhajans are sent from Bangalore, so that is why we consider them authentic and bona fide."
[PADA: Right, but at least we have devotees who are chanting some kirtana or other, Rocana has none. either? At least we have a program.]
ROCANA: So despite the common notion that being "Ritvik" or "Prabhupadanuga" means dedicating oneself to Srila Prabhupada's original program, without change, in fact the Ritvik influence is beginning to look more and more like the GBC/ISKCON every day: promoting demigod worship in the temple, encouraging mantra / kirtan rock bands, etc., etc.
[PADA: The main program in Bangalore is on their web cam, there are no real major problems there that I can see.]
ROCANA: As Jitarati and the Bangalore Ritviks are pushing their movement into China, Nara Narayana and associates (primarily Gaurangasundara dasa of Jaipur) are pushing the DOM movement into Russia and Eastern Europe. Glorifying the results of these efforts, Nara Narayana reports that with his assistance, the DOM has now been placed in all of the European and Eastern European Prabhupadanuga Temples, and Gaurangasundara has put the DOM into almost 40 temples in Russia, and they have held at least one GBC election.
[PADA: Right, well the DOM is an important document.]
ROCANA: We have shown in great detail in this series the fallacy of the DOM position being promoted by Nara Narayana and Gaurangasundara dasa -- it is little different than spreading bogus bhajan and kirtan into China, or conducting demigod worship in Sunnyvale, California. Likewise, the ISKCON Inc. movement is built on a concocted platform, and in fact, a highly offensive platform of changing without authorization Srila Prabhupada's transcendental 1966 New York corporation.
[PADA: Rocana has no unchanged movement for us to compare the "bogus ritviks" to? Rocana has no movement, no kirtana, no books, no temples, no nothing going on.]
ROCANA: Whether it is Bangalore or ISKCON Inc., the DOM movement or the Prabhupadanugas, if there is apa-siddhantic Ritvik-vada at the core, then the preaching will suffer.
[PADA: Saying that Srila Prabhupada is the guru is -- apa-siddhanta? OK, what should we be saying insteed?]
ROCANA: No matter how concise a constitution may be, no matter how many new GBC's are appointed to office, when instructions like the July 9th Letter, the Direction of Management and the Topmost Urgency are misunderstood and the Founder-Acarya's purpose is misrepresented, there is no possibility of returning to His Divine Grace's pure preaching mission. Changing the philosophy and offering convoluted versions of historical documents will not take us back to 1977. What's needed is a revival of the real ISKCON -- the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, As It Is.
[PADA: As it is, except Rocana wants the kingdom of God, without God. He wants ISKCON, but not Srila Prabhupada to be the guru for ISKCON. This is not the original ISKCON. We want the original, worship of Srila Prabhupada is the original idea. And Rocana says our preaching is not effective, except every day he writes "How The Ritviks Are Bogus PT. 357." All he ever writes about is, us? He never writes about any other program, except us. If we are not effective, then why is he writing about us day and night all the time? That means we are having effect, and Rocana is lying when he says we are not. ys pd]
For that matter, there are no religions, or religious people anywhere on earth, who are as bogus as the current GBC's gurus, i.e. those who promote the worship of illicit sex, drugs and so on, as the activity of God's successors and gurus. The current GBC guru's policy of worship of debauchees is simply not acceptable to human society, or even in cats and dogs society. Even animals do not worship illicit sex.
So yes, this is our main argument, we do not want to have a society that worships less than animal life as its messiahs. Why is this a foil? And why does Rocana think our objecting to the worship of debauchees as Srila Prabhupada's successors is "a foil"? This mean Rocana is trivializing the worship of the pure devotee as some sort of foolish side track and foil issue?]
ROCANA: Madhu Pandit and company have already formed an independent movement: they have established their own Governing Body Commission, with individual GBC's elected by a network of some 30 Ritvik temple presidents in India, who have themselves been elected by local congregations. Although the Bangalore Ritviks embraced the DOM for purposes of justifying their GBC elections, the process they employed is not the same as the one spelled out in the DOM, and we are told that Madhu Pandit no longer has any real interest in the DOM.
[PADA: Again, the DOM is a supportive document. The main idea of establishing Srila Prabhupada as the acharya is what we are ALL interested in. And that is going on in Madhu Pandit's organization. Maybe some of the details are not all agreed upon, but the main principle is agreed upon among all the Prabhupadanugas.]
ROCANA: Nimai Pandit and the Long Island Ritviks have embraced the DOM for the long run, having welded it onto the ISKCON Inc. articles of incorporation. While Nimai Pandit was involved in helping Madhu Pandit to organize the Bangalore-run GBC elections process, his current process of establishing GBC's under ISKCON Inc. is apparently being done completely independent of the Bangalore Ritviks. Before his parting of ways with Madhu Pandit and Bangalore, Nimai Pandit described the plan for scaling the GBC elections process up worldwide in his article, "GBC Elections in Bangalore - Update" [46]:
"After the elections in India, ISKCON, Inc. will conduct elections in other regions in the world to elect GBC members from those regions. All these members from different regions will together constitute the Governing Body Commission of ISKCON. We expect that in each region, the leaders in that region will come together in an istagosthi format, with three members of the Trustee board of ISKCON, Inc appointed as an Election Commission Committee, to discuss and decide on the election policy for their region. The election policy will include the qualification of the temples that can be part of ISKCON, the qualification of their Temple Presidents, the ballot, how many GBCs to elect from that region, how many zones in the region, when will the elections be held, where, regional election commissioners, Independent observers, etc. "
[PADA: This is a sound foundation as a blueprint for moving forward. Rocana has never presented his idea of what he would do to manage the society?]
ROCANA: At least at this juncture, it seems unlikely that the ISKCON Inc. GBC's and the India Ritvik GBC's will work cooperatively together, nor do we expect the India Ritvik GBC's will ever make themselves subordinate to the ISKCON Inc. GBC's.
[PADA: It really does not matter if all the groups are united on general management principles, because all the ritvik programs of all stripes are going to worship the pure devotee Srila Prabhupada. Some of them will cooperate on certain management processes, and some will not, but the main focus of "who is going to be worshiped" will be united.]
ROCANA: Nara Narayana is now divorced from both Madhu Pandit and Nimai Pandit, and is working primarily with Gaurangasundara and the so-called 'Prabhupadanugas'. But the Ritvik/Prabhupadanugas are also experiencing dissention in the ranks under the ISKCON Inc. umbrella, and we can expect to see another breakaway group that will likely disassociate itself from both the ISKCON Inc. and DOM groups, carrying on simply as the Prabhupadanuga Ritviks, with a focus on the book change issue.
[PADA: None of these dissenters are breaking away from the original core issue, that we need to establish the worship of HDG Srila Prabhupada.]
ROCANA: In all cases, the new GBC bodies are being seated around a new constitution, and both the Bangalore and Long Island Ritviks are in process of writing, or organizing to write their own constitutions. Several other groups are also in the process of writing their own constitutions, and some of them are preparing to re-constitute a governing body.
[PADA: OK, and should we not be working on a re-constituted GBC?]
ROCANA: Clearly, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness has entered a new era -- and a predictable one, at that. We have been saying for many years that if the GBC does not remediate itself and address the myriad problems in ISKCON, the society will fracture into many disparate groups. The stronger ones among them will develop into parallel ISKCONs, by whatever name, each presenting a version of Krsna Consciousness as they believe Srila Prabhupada instructed it. The range of variation will be significant, as we can already see just in the realm of guru-tattva.
[PADA: Rocana has never explained what his guru tattva idea is, at all? He has said all along that there is always a living guru, but he has never named that living guru, which clearly means he -- lied and bluffed when he said -- he has one to promote. He has no guru to promote at all.
He says out idea of worship of the pure devotees is wrong, but he has not told us, what is his better idea? Apparently he wants us to -- worship nothing? He never says? I told him if he identifies his living guru, we can then study the words of his living guru, but he has never presented even one sentence from his living guru? So apparently, his living guru also cannot speak, in addition to the fact he has no name, no body, no books, no temples and so on? In other words Rocana would rather the mass of people have no guru at all, rather than Srila Prabhupada as their guru. This is called atheism, no God is better than worship of God. Rocana's guru tattva is atheistic.]
ROCANA: Like Bangalore and Long Island, the various GBC's being formed will not likely work cooperatively, at least for the foreseeable future. Perhaps 50 years from now the shattered society will again unite under a single banner, but for now the lines of division are becoming even deeper.
One of the interesting trends we see as the various separatist movements develop is the establishment of governance structures that employ a model of centralization, while simultaneously preaching an emphasis on decentralization, as Srila Prabhupada did. As we have demonstrated, the ISKCON Inc./DOM movement is a perfect example. The extreme opposite of this has also manifested, in the form of a small breakaway movement that is emphasizing decentralization, and is in fact so 'decentralized' there appears to be little differentiation at all in the philosophy or demographic it represents: it is 'one size fits all', everybody welcome. In many ways, that's what the GBC/ISKCON already is.
[PADA: The current ritvik movement is a loose confederation, ok, and what is the problem with that? Better to have a loose federation than a giant single entity, which can be sued and closed down from a single attacker?]
ROCANA: Another active front in the Ritvik campaign that we have not yet mentioned in this series is the proliferation of Ritvik-vada in China.
[PADA: OK, well at least we have a program in China, Rocana has none, in China or anywhere else.]
ROCANA: Although less is heard about the movement in China, it has been going on for years with the support of Jitarati das. This branch of the Ritvik family has gotten very actively involved in the original books movement, but along with proliferating Ritvik-vada, it is also helping to distribute other compromised practices going on in the Indian and western Ritvik temples.
One example of this was given in a story Nara Narayana Vishwakarma dasa told about his travels to China a few years ago with his son Kuvalesaya dasa. Jitarati das had invited the two to join him in China, to visit and encourage the Prabhupadanuga centers there to remain with Srila Prabhupada, and not to be subverted by B.V. Narayana Maharaja, who had made great inroads into China at the time. Nara Narayana was disturbed by the fact that the Chinese devotees in Guangzhou, while devoted to Srila Prabhupada, were playing "horrible kirtans and bhajans instead of Srila Prabhupada's Kirtans". When he asked why they were doing so, their response was: "Well, these bhajans are sent from Bangalore, so that is why we consider them authentic and bona fide."
[PADA: Right, but at least we have devotees who are chanting some kirtana or other, Rocana has none. either? At least we have a program.]
ROCANA: So despite the common notion that being "Ritvik" or "Prabhupadanuga" means dedicating oneself to Srila Prabhupada's original program, without change, in fact the Ritvik influence is beginning to look more and more like the GBC/ISKCON every day: promoting demigod worship in the temple, encouraging mantra / kirtan rock bands, etc., etc.
[PADA: The main program in Bangalore is on their web cam, there are no real major problems there that I can see.]
ROCANA: As Jitarati and the Bangalore Ritviks are pushing their movement into China, Nara Narayana and associates (primarily Gaurangasundara dasa of Jaipur) are pushing the DOM movement into Russia and Eastern Europe. Glorifying the results of these efforts, Nara Narayana reports that with his assistance, the DOM has now been placed in all of the European and Eastern European Prabhupadanuga Temples, and Gaurangasundara has put the DOM into almost 40 temples in Russia, and they have held at least one GBC election.
[PADA: Right, well the DOM is an important document.]
ROCANA: We have shown in great detail in this series the fallacy of the DOM position being promoted by Nara Narayana and Gaurangasundara dasa -- it is little different than spreading bogus bhajan and kirtan into China, or conducting demigod worship in Sunnyvale, California. Likewise, the ISKCON Inc. movement is built on a concocted platform, and in fact, a highly offensive platform of changing without authorization Srila Prabhupada's transcendental 1966 New York corporation.
[PADA: Rocana has no unchanged movement for us to compare the "bogus ritviks" to? Rocana has no movement, no kirtana, no books, no temples, no nothing going on.]
ROCANA: Whether it is Bangalore or ISKCON Inc., the DOM movement or the Prabhupadanugas, if there is apa-siddhantic Ritvik-vada at the core, then the preaching will suffer.
[PADA: Saying that Srila Prabhupada is the guru is -- apa-siddhanta? OK, what should we be saying insteed?]
ROCANA: No matter how concise a constitution may be, no matter how many new GBC's are appointed to office, when instructions like the July 9th Letter, the Direction of Management and the Topmost Urgency are misunderstood and the Founder-Acarya's purpose is misrepresented, there is no possibility of returning to His Divine Grace's pure preaching mission. Changing the philosophy and offering convoluted versions of historical documents will not take us back to 1977. What's needed is a revival of the real ISKCON -- the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, As It Is.
[PADA: As it is, except Rocana wants the kingdom of God, without God. He wants ISKCON, but not Srila Prabhupada to be the guru for ISKCON. This is not the original ISKCON. We want the original, worship of Srila Prabhupada is the original idea. And Rocana says our preaching is not effective, except every day he writes "How The Ritviks Are Bogus PT. 357." All he ever writes about is, us? He never writes about any other program, except us. If we are not effective, then why is he writing about us day and night all the time? That means we are having effect, and Rocana is lying when he says we are not. ys pd]
So it comes out as the very same eternal debate as theists vs atheists.
ReplyDeleteYou cannot convince atheists. Since creation of universe atheists argue there is no god, god is dead, it is all void, etc. Same here, for present ISKCONites Prabhupada is dead and gone. When Rocana visits Vrindavan he checks Prabhupada's samadhi and concludes, Prabhupada is buried here, he is dead. Whatever you tell such folks, they'll argue that Prabhupada is dead. It is a matter of realization to know that only the body dies. Thats the reason why they falsely pose as mahabhagavat uttama jagat gurus, pure Vaishnavas acaryas. They figure that nobody joins when they tell people that Prabhupada is their guru. Therefore present ISKCON is all the same caliber, I'm this body. Trying to teach such notorious bodily concept kanisthas is like trying to convince an atheist that there is God. Futile attempt. Agreed, they occupied Prabhupada's movement thats criminal.