I was told my points below are not all correct, but not what is wrong, so feel free to point out any mistakes you can reasonably substantiate. My writing was in response to claims that the Abrahamic religions are authentic based on sympathetic remarks about them by Śrīla Bhaktivinoda Ṭhākura and Śrīla Prabhupāda.
Regarding an ācārya like a prophet misses the point. The Abrahamic religions come from prophets making proclamations about spiritual topics that require acceptance regardless of whether they can be understood, whereas an ācārya teaches the Vedas to convey understanding. Śrīla Bhaktivinoda Ṭhākura's practical situation was under Christian colonialism, and Śrīla Prabhupāda preached all over the world as a guest in countries where the Abrahamic religions were dominant, giving both of them a similar reason to avoid discrediting the Abrahamic religions. It leaves us with the responsibility of taking only the milk when it is mixed with water.
If Śrīla Prabhupāda had come to America and only said Kṛṣṇa consciousness is incompatible with Christianity, Judaism, Islam, materialistic science, etc., nobody would have stuck around to start learning Kṛṣṇa consciousness, and he would have been too unwelcome. If those religions were true, there would have been no need for Śrīla Prabhupāda to go around the world teaching Kṛṣṇa consciousness.
The second verse of Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam emphasizes the importance of "completely rejecting all religious activities which are materially motivated," and distinguishing reality from illusion, so this can't be a form of nāma-aparādha. We try to avoid insulting the preachers, but we can't unnecessarily compromise to accept falsehoods as the truth or lesser truths as greater. I begin with the assumption that everyone wants to approach the greatest truth, because in my view the that's more respectable than the alternative.
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KAILASA CHANDRA
PADA: Kailasa does not want our unlimited books sites getting millions of views per month, so people can associate with a pure devotee's words. He says he wants a limited six people guru who has no web sites and no mass preaching. He is envious that millions of people now have access to the books of a pure devotee. Why is Kailasa envious that the mass of people -- unlimited -- can access the words of a pure devotee?
And that is also why he never spends $100 a year to make a free books site himself, he wants to hide the Vedas and make it a limited guru program, just like the babajis. Why is Kailasa making the same idea as the babajis? A limited guru, with no mass preaching, and his limited guru cannot take many disciples or he will be overcome with karma, which is what the GBC is now saying, and he is their parrot.
Yes, the Chaitya guru is sending people to our sites, millions of views per month, and Kailasa is unhappy that Krishna is helping them come to our sites. He is envious of the Vedas, and has been preaching babaji limited guru the whole time. Why is Kailasa envious that unlimited people can access the Vedas? Krishna is guiding people to our sites, and Kailasa is very unhappy with Krishna. Why is Kailasa unhappy with Chaitya guru guiding people to our sites?
He should be happy people are finding Krishna, instead he is angry they are, and he wants to make the Vedas limited to six people, he is abother Radha Kunda babaji imitation. They also say we should not make the Vedas access to the masses. Why is Kailasa always preaching the GBC idea, the babaji idea, and never Srila Prabhupada's? Srila Prabhupada wants unlimited readers, not six people babaji gurus. You cannot even come up with $100 a year, because your program is limited. ys pd
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THE LOST GENERATION
Nila Morril (Son of Badrinarayan Swami)
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to be part of a Vaiṣṇava community in 2026. Not really in terms of rules or institutional policy or who is doing things right or wrong. I mean something deeper than that. What do we actually value?
What do we remember? Who do we see? And what do we feel responsible for carrying forward? My dad leaving this world has made me think about this much more deeply than I have before.
He gave almost sixty years of his life to Śrīla Prabhupāda’s movement. There are many devotees of his generation who did the same thing in different ways. They built temples, preached, raised communities, took enormous responsibility, lived through incredibly difficult periods in ISKCON’s history, made mistakes, learned things, sacrificed things, and somehow carried this movement from something very young into something that now is prominent all over the world.
And that generation is leaving. That’s just the reality. ISKCON is getting older.
More and more of the devotees who personally knew Śrīla Prabhupāda and spent their adult lives carrying his mission forward won’t physically be here much longer.
And I keep wondering what happens then. Obviously the institution continues.
The buildings continue. The festivals continue. The management continues. The projects, meetings, fundraising and preaching continue. But what about the less obvious things? Do we preserve memory? Do we preserve gratitude? Do we preserve relationships? Do we actually remember who carried all of this before it ended up in our hands?
Śrīla Rūpa Gosvāmī describes the exchanges between devotees, dadāti pratigṛhṇāti guhyam ākhyāti pṛcchati bhuṅkte bhojayate caiva ṣaḍ-vidhaṁ prīti-lakṣaṇam
Giving and receiving, revealing one’s mind and hearing another’s, accepting prasāda and offering prasāda … the symptoms of love between devotees.
There’s something about that verse that feels more important to me as I get older.
It’s incredibly simple. Vaiṣṇava culture is relational. It means paying attention to each other. Making time. Reciprocating. Remembering people. Knowing where we came from. And I think there’s another part of this that gurukulis understand in a very particular way. And I say this on behalf of all of us, but especially with deep affection for my generation from the 70s and 80s, who I know have all experienced similar versions of this feeling and who have personally shared with me these thoughts and experiences.
I was born into ISKCON. I went to gurukula until I was fifteen years old. This wasn’t a movement I discovered later in life and decided to join. It was the world I grew up in. And I think sometimes people forget what that means. There are gurukulis now in their forties, fifties and beyond who have been part of this movement longer than many devotees who are considered established members of their communities.
And yet I think a lot of gurukulis know what it feels like to be strangely invisible.
You can grow up in this movement, spend your whole life around the temples, Deities, festivals, philosophy, devotees and service, watch your parents give everything they have to it, and make very real sacrifices yourself because of the choices your parents made in service to Śrīla Prabhupāda’s mission, and then still sometimes feel like nobody really understands that you have a history here too.
A younger devotee can meet you and have no idea what you’ve already lived through in this movement.
They may not know what your parents gave up. They may not know what their children gave up with them. And I don’t say that because gurukulis deserve some special status. I don’t think we do. But I do think being seen matters. There is something painful about watching the sacrifices of your parents slowly disappear from the memory of a community while knowing that your own childhood was part of that sacrifice too.
A lot of us didn’t simply watch our parents build ISKCON. We were part of what they gave. Our childhoods were tied to their service. Sometimes that gave us extraordinary experiences, friendships, spiritual impressions and a sense of belonging that I wouldn’t trade for anything.
And sometimes it cost us something. Sometimes children carried things they didn’t choose and couldn’t really understand because their parents believed deeply in what they were trying to build. That history is complicated. But it is our history.
And now something strange is happening. We aren’t the kids anymore.
A lot of us are approaching fifty or sixty. Some are parents and grandparents ourselves.
We have careers, families, communities, decades of life experience and our own relationship with Śrīla Prabhupāda’s movement. But sometimes I think ISKCON still doesn’t really know what to do with the gurukula generation. Are we still the kids? Are we senior devotees? Are we an uncomfortable reminder of parts of our history people would rather not think about?
Or are we actually understood as part of ISKCON’s history and its future?
Maybe all of those things are true. But I do think we have something worth listening to because we’ve seen this movement from both sides. We watched our parents try to build it. We lived inside what they built.
We experienced its beauty and its failures. And now we are old enough to ask what should be carried forward and what should be done differently. That doesn’t make us more important than younger devotees. But our experience matters.
And I think this comes back to the bigger question I’ve been meditating on.
Do we really see each other?
Do we know each other’s histories? Do we know who sacrificed to make the communities we inherited possible? Do younger devotees know the elders standing next to them? Do they know the gurukulis standing next to them?
Do we make room for people who may not have a title or an institutional position but have quietly been part of this movement for all of their lives?
Sometimes I wonder if we can become very good at keeping an institution running while slowly losing some of the culture that made it worth preserving in the first place. I’m not saying that as an accusation. I’m genuinely asking.
My dad doesn’t need another title or another speech. His life already says what it says. But losing him has made some things feel a lot clearer to me. History matters. Gratitude matters. Reciprocation matters. Relationships matter.
Being seen matters.
And maybe part of spiritual culture is revealed by the people we decide are worth remembering, listening to and making room for. So I’m genuinely curious how other Vaiṣṇavas think about this. As ISKCON moves further from its founding generation, and those of us who were once its children increasingly become its elders, what does it mean to preserve not only Śrīla Prabhupāda’s institution, but the heart of the culture he was trying to give us?
PADA: Very heartfelt and sincere line of questions. What is the legacy of ISKCON? Well lets start with me in 1978, when I said we cannot worship 11 conditioned souls as acharyas. And I got into all sorts of trouble with Jayatirtha and his minions for "challenging Krishna's appointed successor."
OK some of his followers wanted to beat me up. I moved off the temple property -- feeling somewhat unwelcomed in ISKCON. Then it became evident that Jayatirtha was having an affair with a female disciple, and he was taking LSD, ecstacy and other designer drugs. And yet all that happened was, the GBC made him a sannyasa and they came to the Manor to tell us he is now "rectified and reformed." But he wasn't and they knew it.
My point at the time is, we cannot have the children of ISKCON worshiping intoxicated womanizers as their messiahs, this is corrupting the morals of minors, never mind some of their messiahs were homosexuals and pedophiles. On the well known principle of "you become what you worship" some of the gurukula kids became homosexuals, and predators of the younger kids. Then BR Sridhar Maharaja was consulted about my complaints, and he said "none should protest," which the GBC slammed at me repeatedly. But yeah, the gurukulis are sometimes called "the lost generation" because -- they are. ys pd
THE POISON ISSUE
BMD: All glories to Srila Prabhupada. I don’t know, Prabhu.
It’s also good that, based on the available evidence, neither the case nor the suspicion stands up. I suppose a lot has changed in the legal provisions or sections of the law over the past 50 years, as nowadays they can examine or analyse everything in much greater detail than was possible back then, given the level of technological advancement at the time.
It would be rather amusing, though, if, fifty years on, these people were locked up in prison, so to speak, in the twilight of their lives. I reckon they’d even present it as some sort of world-changing feat. "Even from prison, the spiritual masters preach Krishna consciousness", as the headline says.
If disgraced gurus or paedophiles were reinstated to their positions, they wouldn’t act any differently this time either. They’d find a way to make them look good, that’s for sure.
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