ISKCON / Prabhupada

The International Society for Krishna Consciousness, universally known as ISKCON or the Hare Krishna movement, began with a single elderly man arriving in New York Harbor in September 1965 carrying seven dollars, a trunk of translated scriptures, and a mission handed to him by his own guru three decades earlier — and grew, within just over a decade, into a confederation of more than a hundred temples spanning six continents, making it one of the most successful cross-cultural transplantations of an Indian devotional tradition in modern history.

Thirty-two years of preparation before the mission began

A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada was born Abhay Charan De in Calcutta in 1896 to a devout Vaishnava family, and as a young man became involved in Mahatma Gandhi's independence movement before a pivotal 1922 meeting redirected the course of his life: an encounter with Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati, a prominent leader within Gaudiya Vaishnavism — the same devotional tradition founded by Chaitanya Mahaprabhu and discussed at length elsewhere on this site. Bhaktisiddhanta asked the young Abhay to carry the teachings of Krishna to the English-speaking world, and Abhay formally became his disciple in 1933, spending the following thirty-two years preparing for that eventual mission while building a career and family in India.

A perilous voyage at sixty-nine

In August 1965, at the age of sixty-nine — an age at which most people would consider a major international undertaking behind them rather than ahead — Prabhupada boarded a cargo ship, the Jaladuta, bound for New York, the only passenger aboard, carrying a suitcase, an umbrella, dry cereal, roughly seven dollars in Indian currency, and boxes of his own translated books. The voyage was genuinely dangerous: he suffered two heart attacks during the crossing. On arriving in New York in September 1965, he spent his first year struggling largely alone, booking small speaking engagements at yoga studios and bohemian lofts, chanting with a hand drum in public parks, and relying on the temporary hospitality of sympathetic strangers.

From Tompkins Square Park to a global movement

By 1966, Prabhupada had settled in Manhattan's Lower East Side, delivering regular public lectures on the Bhagavad Gita and leading public chanting sessions in Tompkins Square Park that began drawing the attention of countercultural youth caught up in the era's spiritual searching. He formally incorporated the International Society for Krishna Consciousness in New York in July 1966, and over the following two years opened temples in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Montreal and Santa Fe. In 1967, the first Ratha Yatra festival held outside India took place in San Francisco — a direct extension of the same chariot festival tradition centered on Jagannatha, discussed elsewhere on this site's God carousel, now transplanted to American soil.

Fourteen circuits of the globe in eleven years

Over the remaining eleven years of his life, Prabhupada is recorded as having circled the globe fourteen times, lecturing, translating scripture and personally establishing temples and communities on six continents, while initiating more than ten thousand disciples into Krishna consciousness. His translation and commentary work during this period was extraordinarily prolific, producing English-language editions with detailed purport of the Bhagavad Gita, the Srimad Bhagavatam and the Chaitanya Charitamrita — the same three core scriptures discussed in depth elsewhere on this site's Scriptures page — making these foundational Gaudiya Vaishnava texts accessible to Western readers for the first time in a systematic, complete form.

A childhood horoscope that predicted his mission

Devotees often point to a detail from Prabhupada's own infancy as an eerie foreshadowing of his later life: an astrologer who prepared his birth horoscope reportedly predicted that when the child reached the age of seventy, he would cross the ocean, become a great teacher of religion, and establish 108 temples — a prophecy his followers regard as having been fulfilled with striking precision, since Prabhupada departed for America at sixty-nine and went on to establish well over a hundred ISKCON centers before his death in Vrindavan in November 1977 at the age of eighty-one.

A living institution today

Today, headquartered in Mayapur, West Bengal — the birthplace of Chaitanya Mahaprabhu — ISKCON operates more than eight hundred temples and centers worldwide, governed by the Governing Body Commission established under Prabhupada's own direction to ensure the movement's continuity after his passing. Its core practices remain those Prabhupada himself taught from that first year in Tompkins Square Park: public congregational chanting of the Hare Krishna mantra, deity worship, and the study of Bhagavad Gita and Srimad Bhagavatam, extending Chaitanya Mahaprabhu's sixteenth-century sankirtan movement, discussed elsewhere on this site, into a genuinely global, multi-continental devotional tradition.