Time, Place and Circumstances

Before I proceed I’ll let you know why I am writing this. A few days back I was attending an evening Bhagavad Gita class and a devotee asked a question. Which is about today’s position of ISKCON compare to Srila Prabhupada’s time (founder acharya of International Society for Krishna Consciousness)?

Some things I have heard from the Vaishnava gurus came to mind:

So, what is the difference between Prabhupada’s time and now? As I see Prabhupada never compromises with the Siddhanta in the name of time, place and circumstances moreover he did some temporary adjustments without compromising Siddhanta. One example that comes to mind is – in initial days in western countries it was difficult to find the Tulsi beads for chanting so Prabhupada told his disciples to buy any beads and chant.

But today we can see a high number of ISKCON leaders compromising the Siddhanta in the name of time, place and circumstances. Whoever tries to oppose them he or she was pressurized to step back and be at least privately if not grossly and publicly shamed as an aparadhi, we have many living examples for this. One incident I want to share a few months back there was an ISKCON leaders meeting held in Ahmedabad, Gujarat where food(which must be Prasadam) was actually bought from some karmis and nobody opposed that.

This is a gross mistake what to speak of speaking apasiddhanta and running a whole sub-organization based on apasiddhanta.

So, the same way there are a lot of things like that in above case if leaders don’t follow the basic rules then who will care?

This brings to mind what Srila Prabhupada said that ISKCON has no fear from outside but from inside. Nowadays some ISKCON leaders also want female diksha guru which is not according to sastra but they are bringing their gross feminist ideology shamelessly to the audiences for them to see. Karmi food eating etc, are but hints of the degradation which will lead to complete destruction of the society. And which is already in place with ISKCON’s total embrace of feminism.

If we really want to stop this, we need to strictly stick to the sastra and Prabhupada’s teachings and ISKCON leaders can play a major role in it.

A real sadhu is that who speaks from sastra, not his ideology or feminism or change his words according to the audience. He must say what he has heard from Srila Prabhupada and the previous acharyas.

We can make little adjustments following the footsteps of Srila Prabhupada but we should never compromise the siddhanta. If in our vaishanava society the leaders really want to be the leaders then they must have considered what Srila Prabhupada wants. Karmi food, female diksha guru, feminism, mundane welfare etc, is not that. In fact, it is the opposite of what Srila Prabhupada wants – it is maya.