‘You Cannot Have Varnasrama Unless You Grow Your Own Food’: Tapahpunja Prabhu on The Maha Podcast

In the sixth episode of The Maha Podcast, the Prabhupada disciple traces his road from the 1968 Columbia University occupation to the farm, calls home-grown food the foundation of varnasrama, and accuses ISKCON’s leaders of failing devotees during the pandemic. He also says an intelligence agency once placed an operative inside an East Coast temple.

NEW VRINDABAN, West Virginia — The Maha Podcast released a 55-minute interview with Tapahpunja Dasa on 8 October 2026.^[1] In it he argues that ISKCON cannot build the varnasrama society Srila Prabhupada asked for unless devotees grow their own food. He also makes accusations that ISKCON’s leadership has not answered: that a CIA staff officer worked inside the movement in the early 1970s, and that leaders who encouraged COVID-19 vaccination owe devotees an apology.

Who is Tapahpunja Dasa

According to the episode description, Tapahpunja Dasa is a disciple of Srila Prabhupada. He was raised on a farm in northern Michigan and joined ISKCON at New Vrindaban in 1974, where he began growing organic produce. Since then he has worked to promote and teach daiva-varnasrama-dharma.^[1] The host introduced him as “the farmer of America”. The interview was recorded on the farm, apparently in his workshop, and the host said the team had arrived unannounced and “caught him in his work clothes”.^[1]

From the Columbia strike to Berkeley

Tapahpunja Dasa said he grew up in a family of trade-union activists who were not religious. By the age of 15 he was absorbed in the civil-rights movement and the opposition to the Vietnam War. He described himself in those years as “a professional agitator”: not a student at Columbia University, but an anti-war activist who, with three others, walked unannounced into the university president’s office. There they demanded an end to research done for the Institute for Defense Analyses, and they threatened a strike.^[1]

He said the strike that followed shut the university down. For 11 days students and Harlem residents occupied seven buildings. His was Mathematics Hall, which he called “the nerve center”, and Harlem residents fed the occupiers by filling boxes lowered on ropes. He recalled a fight with pro-war students who tried to starve one building out, and the police clearance that ended the occupation with about 700 arrests. He said he never returned for trial: “Maybe there’s still a warrant out.”^[1]

Meeting the devotees

In 1969 he moved to Berkeley, where he wrote for the underground press and saw devotees chanting on the campus for hours, five days a week. At first he used his articles to mock them as a warning to readers who were not serious about “the revolution”. Yet he said he could see that “they have found something that I don’t have”.^[1]

The turning point came at a Sunday rock concert he was compering in a Berkeley park, opposite City Hall. Devotees asked to chant on stage. He refused until the act before them, a naked poet, made the request hard to turn down. While they chanted he slipped into the crowd and began chanting himself:

“I had this cathartic experience where I felt like a glass jar or bubble fell over me and I was hearing the chanting really clearly and I started crying … It was Lord Caitanya going, ‘You’re such an idiot. I’m going to actually show you if you’ll listen what the real revolution is. It’s a change of heart.’”

Tapahpunja Dasa, The Maha Podcast #6, 8 October 2026^[1]

Repeated arrests led him to leave the area. He went back to Michigan and farmed six acres a friend lent him. A visitor who had been asked to leave a temple, but had read Srila Prabhupada’s books, read Krishna book to him by the campfire and told him he was “in maya”. That visitor also gave him a Sri Isopanisad, which Tapahpunja Dasa said went through him “like an electric current”. The two hitchhiked about 60 miles to the Detroit temple, where, he said, the brahmacaris had a book bag on him within two days. He was soon distributing Back to Godhead at stoplights in Toledo, Ohio. He dated this to “like 1973”, a year before the 1974 date in the episode description.^[1] He credited book distribution for his own path, telling the hosts: “thanks to you guys, … your book distribution.”

“You cannot have varnasrama unless you can grow your own food”

Tapahpunja Dasa recalled the regret Srila Prabhupada expressed shortly before his departure, that he had not established farm communities and varnasrama. He argued that the two cannot be separated:

“The reality is you cannot have varnasrama unless you can grow your own food … Food sovereignty is your grip on freedom … If you’re dependent on the outside for where you’re getting your bhoga, you’re a kept animal and you’re going to be sick.”

Tapahpunja Dasa, The Maha Podcast #6, 8 October 2026^[1]

Holding up a bottle of canola oil, he criticised temples that cook with seed oils instead of the ghee Srila Prabhupada wanted. He told the hosts that food grown on poisoned soil is not fit to offer, and he rejected the idea of Krishna as “a vending machine” that turns any ingredient into prasadam once prayers are said. Offering to Krishna, he said, begins with “the preparation of the soil”, and the pujari is “the recipient of a series of activities on the farm that make it offerable”. He described asking a group of 30 South Indian students from a Chicago technical institute whether their families had farmed, whether they feared losing their jobs to artificial intelligence, and whether they would consider farming. According to him, all of them said yes.^[1]

He also went further. He described chemtrails, fluoridation, Wi-Fi and “microwave energies” as deliberate poisoning meant to calcify the pineal gland, so that people “cannot even think about spiritual life”. He read Bhagavad-gita 16.8–9 as Krishna’s explanation of why such things are done.^[1] He warned that ISKCON’s festivals and small farm projects with “two cows and a couple of grihastha families” are “irrelevant” to Western people, who do not see in them “something that they can relate to”.

Claims of infiltration

Tapahpunja Dasa said that for two and a half years he read Srila Prabhupada’s books daily to a friend who had been a CIA staff officer and was blinded by a war injury. When he joked that the Hare Krishna movement was too strange to be infiltrated, he said the friend laughed and told him:

“We penetrated your movement in the early 70s in one of your big East Coast temples with one of our staff people.”

Tapahpunja Dasa, quoting a former CIA officer he did not name, The Maha Podcast #6^[1]

He said the friend had not known the man personally but had read his briefings. He added that the man later left, and that he himself knows who it was, as do “a lot of devotees”, but would not name him. He linked the alleged operative to the sale of ISKCON’s 12-storey building on 55th Street in New York. He recounted that when devotees told Srila Prabhupada of plans to sell it, Prabhupada struck the floor with his cane and said, “No means no.” He said this exchange can be found on YouTube.

The pandemic and a demand for an apology

Tapahpunja Dasa said the pandemic response showed that the institution had been “infiltrated”. He said that during the pandemic he and others had “begged” administrators, at his own community and elsewhere, to let devotees discuss alternatives on devotee social-media sites before deciding on vaccination. He described COVID-19 as “the seasonal flu weaponized” and called the vaccines “poison” that he said leaves men sterile and women infertile. He also linked them to deaths among senior devotees, to what he called “turbo cancer”, and to cases of long COVID that he said he sees around him.

He criticised a COVID section on the website of the GBC’s strategic-planning team. He recalled it carrying about 20 short testimonials from doctors, sannyasis and senior devotees in favour of vaccination, followed by a scroll saying that ISKCON neither endorsed nor opposed it. “You think we’re stupid?” he asked. The host, who described himself as second-initiated, joined in:

“So you made a mistake … Aren’t you going to take responsibility? … If you own it, that’s when our respect for you increases. If you don’t, I’m sorry. You’re losing your respect.”

Host, The Maha Podcast #6, 8 October 2026^[1]

Tapahpunja Dasa said he saw “a lot of devotees” lose trust in the leadership over the issue. He also criticised ISKCON’s engagement with the United Nations and the World Economic Forum, saying leaders treat “the very people that orchestrated” the pandemic “like they’re friends”.^[1]

What ISKCON’s leadership said at the time

As of 12 October 2026 the GBC website had posted nothing on the episode. ISKCON’s position at the time of the vaccine rollout was set out by the GBC Executive Committee on 26 February 2021:

“First and foremost, we note that this is an individual devotee’s decision whether or not to take the vaccine. There is no prohibition or any directive given by the GBC or any other ISKCON authorities in this regard.”

GBC Executive Committee, statement on the COVID vaccine, 26 February 2021^[2]

The statement recommended that devotees “thoroughly educate themselves on the relevant details”.^[2] Earlier that month, ISKCON News had announced an online session, moderated by Vraja Vihari Das, with two devotee physicians, Madhavananda Das (Dr Ajay Sankhe) and Shyama Gopi Dasi (Dr Shivangi Agarwal), meant to help devotees “make informed choices” about the vaccines.^[3]

What comes next

Near the end, Tapahpunja Dasa showed the hosts a building he said he had conceived but not built, called the “Bhu-mandala cottage”. He said it is modelled on Sukadeva Gosvami’s description of the structure of the universe in the Fifth Canto of the Srimad-Bhagavatam, chapters 19 to 26. The host called the interview “impromptu” and said future episodes will cover what Srila Prabhupada taught about farming and the cottage project.^[1]

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Sources

1. The Maha Podcast, “The Maha Podcast #6 Ft. HG Tapahpunja Prabhu”, YouTube, 8 October 2026. youtube.com/watch?v=T1_K6OWUUSY
2. GBC Executive Committee, “GBC EC Issues Official Statement on the COVID Vaccine”, ISKCON News, 26 February 2021. iskconnews.org/gbc-ec-issues-official-statement-on-the-covid-vaccine
3. “What Devotees Need To Know About the COVID-19 Vaccinations?”, ISKCON News, 6 February 2021. iskconnews.org/what-devotees-need-to-know-about-the-covid-19-…