Hinduism, Vaisnavism, and ISKCON: Authentic Traditions or Scholarly Constructions?
This paper will examine some problems in understanding the terms “Hinduism,” “Vaisnavism,” and “ISKCON,” and enquire into the usefulness of these terms in understanding Indian religions, with particular reference to ISKCON. Two broad scholarly opinions have been developed with regard to
“Hinduism.” One, an essentialist view, regards Hinduism as a single, great tradition of many interrelated parts stemming from the revelation (sruti) of the Veda. The other view regards Hinduism as a nineteenth-century construction to which no social or religious entity refers.
In discussing some of the issues relevant to this, I will herein argue that “Hinduism” is an important concept, especially in regard to Hindu self-perception. Within this loose designation, the Vaisnava tradition is one current; and ISKCON must be understood in the context of that tradition. Inevitably when a tradition moves from one cultural and geographical location to another, transformations of
the tradition occur and questions of identity and authenticity are raised. This paper concludes with some thoughts on the issues facing ISKCON in the contemporary world.
What is Hinduism?
A simple answer to this question might be that Hinduism is a term used to denote the religions of the majority of people in India and Nepal (and of some communities in other continents) who refer to themselves as “Hindus.” However, difficulties arise when we try to understand precisely what this means, for the diversity of Hinduism is truly vast, and its history long and complex. Some (from both
within the tradition and from outside of it) might claim that because of this diversity there is no such thing as Hinduism, while others claim that in spite of its diversity there is an “essence” which structures its appearances. The truth probably lies somewhere between these claims. Most Hindus will be certain that their identity as “Hindu” contrasts with that of Christian, Muslim, or
Buddhist. Yet the kinds of Hindus each Hindu is may vary as much as differences between Hindus, Buddhists, or Christians.
In India’s population of approximately nine hundred million people, seven hundred million are Hindus,1 the remainder are Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Jains, Buddhists, Parsees, Jews, and followers of “tribal” religions. There are 120 million Muslims, 45 million tribal peoples or adivasis, 14 million Sikhs, and an
estimated 14 million Christians. (Klostermaier, 1994) This is a wide mix of religions and cultural groups, all of which interact with Hinduism in a number of ways.
There are also sizeable Hindu communities beyond the South Asian boundaries in South Africa, East Africa, South America, the West Indies, the U.S.A., Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Bali, and Java. The 1981 U.S.A. census estimated the population of Indian communities as 387,223, most of whom would classify themselves as Hindu. The number of Hindus in the U.K. for the same year is estimated
at 300,000. (Knott and Toon, 1982) There are also many Westerners from Europe and America who would claim to follow Hinduism or religions deriving from it, and ISKCON is an example here. Ideas such as karma, yoga, and vegetarianism are now commonplace in the West.
The actual term “Hindu” first occurs as a Persian geographical term for the people who lived beyond the River Indus (from the Sanskrit word sindhu). In Arabic texts Al-Hind is a term for the people of modern day India. (Thapar, 1993:77) “Hindu” or “Hindoo,” was used towards the end of the eighteenth century by the British to refer to the people of
“Hindustan,” the area of northwest India. Eventually “Hindu” became virtually equivalent to any “Indian” who was not a Moslem, Sikh, Jain, or Christian, thereby encompassing a range of religious beliefs and practices.
The “ism” was added to “Hindu” around 1830 to denote the culture and religion of the high-caste Brahmans in contrast to other religions. The term was soon appropriated by Indians themselves as they tried to establish a national identity opposed to colonialism.
While a Hindu identity (as we might understand it today) developed during the nineteenth century, the term “Hindu” does occur in earlier Sanskrit and Bengali hagiographic texts (such as the Caitanya-caritamrta) from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. In these Bengali Vaisnava texts (one of which ISKCON
reveres), the term “Hindu” is used to indicate a class of people as distinct from the Yavanas, and is used along with the term dharma (law, duty, socio-cosmic order). Thus the term “Hindu dharma” indicates ritual practices of “Hindus” in contrast to those of the “foreigners,” the Yavanas or Mlecchas, which referred to the Muslims (O’Connell, 1973:340-344). So there would seem to be some indication of Hindu self-perception as Hindu in contrast to Moslem as early as the sixteenth century.
Defining Hinduism
There is a problem arriving at a definition of the term “Hindu” because of the wide range of traditions and ideas incorporated by it. Most Hindu traditions revere a body of sacred literature, the Veda, as revelation, though some do not; some traditions regard certain rituals as essential for salvation, while others do not; some Hindu philosophies postulate a
theistic reality who creates, maintains, and destroys the universe, yet others reject this claim. Hinduism is often characterized as belief in reincarnation (samsara) determined by the law that all actions have effects (karma), and that salvation is freedom from this cycle. Yet other South Asian religions, such as Buddhism and Jainism, also
believe in this.
Part of the problem of definition is due to the fact that Hinduism does not have a single historical founder, as do so many other world religions; it does not have a unified system of belief encoded in a creed or declaration of faith; it does not have a single system of soteriology; and it does not have a centralized authority or bureaucratic structure. It is therefore a very different kind of
religion in these respects to the monotheistic, Western traditions of Christianity and Islam, though there are arguably stronger affinities with Judaism.
Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of independent India, said that Hinduism is “all things to all men” (Smith, B.K., 1987:36), certainly an inclusive definition, but so inclusive as to be of little use for our purposes.
Yet while it might not be possible to arrive at a watertight definition of Hinduism, this does not mean that the term is empty. There are clearly some kinds of practices, texts, and beliefs which are central to the concept of being a “Hindu,” and there are others which are on the edges of Hinduism. I take the view that while “Hinduism” is not a category in the
classical sense of an essence defined by certain properties, there are nevertheless prototypical forms of Hindu practice and belief. The beliefs and practices of a high-caste devotee of the Hindu god Visnu, living in Tamil Nadu in South India, fall clearly within the category “Hindu” and are prototypical of that category. The beliefs and practices of a Radhasoami devotee in the Punjab,
who worships a God without attributes, who does not accept the Veda as revelation, and even rejects many Hindu teachings, are not prototypically Hindu, yet are still within the sphere and category of Hinduism. In other words, “Hinduism” is not a category in the classical sense to which something either belongs or doesn’t.
George Lakoff (Lakoof, 1987) maintains that categories do not have rigid boundaries, but rather that there are degrees of category membership in which some members of a category are more prototypical than others. He calls this Prototype Theory. These degrees of category membership may be related through family resemblance; “members of a category may be related to one another without all members
having any properties in common that define the category” (Lakoff, 1987:12). In this sense Hinduism can be seen as a category with fuzzy edges. Some forms of religion are central to Hinduism, while others are less clearly central but still within the category. And Ferro-Luzzi has developed a Protoype Theory approach to Hinduism2 (Ferro-Luzzi, 1991:187-95).
To say what is or isn’t central to the category of Hinduism is, of course, to make judgements about the degree of prototypicality. The question arises as to what the basis of such judgements is. Here we must turn to Hindu self-understandings, for Hinduism has developed categories for its own self-description (Piatigorsky, 1985:208-224), as well as looking at the scholars’ understandings of common
features or structuring principles seen from outside the tradition.
Although I have some sympathy with Jonathan Z. Smith’s remark that religion is the creation of the scholar’s imagination (Smith, J.Z., 1982:xi), in so far as the act of scholarship involves a reduction, a selection, a highlighting of some discourses and texts, and a backgrounding of others, there is nevertheless a wide body of ritual practices, forms of behaviour, doctrines, stories, texts, and
deeply felt personal experiences and testimonies, which the term Hinduism refers to.
In the contemporary world the term “Hindu” certainly does refer to the dominant religion of South Asia, albeit a religion which embraces a wide variety within it. But it is important to bear in mind that the formation of Hinduism as the world religion we know today has only occurred since the nineteenth century, when the term started being used by Hindu reformers and Western orientalists. However,
its origins and the “streams” which feed in to it are very ancient, extending back to the Indus Valley civilisation (Smart, 1993:1).
I take the view that Hinduism is not purely the construction of Western orientalists to make sense of the plurality of religious phenomena within the vast geographical area of South Asia, as some scholars have maintained3 (Smith, W.C., 1962:65; Stietencron, pp.1-22; Halbfass, 1991:1-22), but that Hinduism is also a development of Hindu self-understanding, a
transformation in the modern world of themes already present.
Religion and the Sacred
What we understand by Hinduism as a religion partly depends upon what we mean by “religion.” Our understanding of Hinduism has been mediated by Western notions of what religion is and the projection of Hinduism as an “other” to the West’s Christianity (Inden, 1990). While this is not the place for an elaborate discussion of the meaning of religion, it is nevertheless important to make some remarks about it, and to indicate some parameters of its use. The category “religion” has developed out of a Christian, largely Protestant, understanding, which defines it in terms of belief. This is indicated by the frequent use of the term “faith” as a synonym
for “religion.” If “religion” is to contribute to our understanding of human views and practices, its characterisation purely in terms of belief is clearly inadequate and would need to be modified to include a variety of human practices.
Definitions of religion provoke much debate and disagreement, but to use the term, we have to have some idea of what we mean by it. Religion needs to be located squarely within human society and culture; there is no privileged discourse of religion outside of particular cultures and societies. The famous sociologist Emile Durkheim in The Elementary Forms of the
Religious Life, first published in 1915, defined religion as “a unified set of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things” which creates a social bond between people (Durkheim, 1964:37). This unified set of beliefs and practices is a system of symbols which acts, to use Peter Berger’s phrase, as a “sacred canopy,” imbuing individual and social life with meaning. The “sacred”
refers to a quality of mysterious power which is believed to dwell within certain objects, persons, and places and which is opposed to chaos and death. Religion, following Berger, establishes a “sacred cosmos,” which provides the “ultimate shield against the terror of anomy” (Berger, 1990:26). I am also influenced here by Clifford Geertz’
definition of religion as that which “tunes human actions to an envisaged cosmic order and projects images of cosmic order on to the plane of human experience” (Geertz, 1993:90).
This sense of sacred power is of vital importance to the experience of men and women throughout the history of religions. In Hinduism a sense of the sacred might be experienced as the sense of a greater being outside of the self, a “numinous” experience (to use the term coined by the German theologian Rudolf Otto) characterised by a feeling of awe, fascination, and mystery (Otto, 1982). Or the sense
of the sacred might occur as an inner or contemplative experience within the self, what might be called a “mystical” experience (Smart, 1958; Smart, 1989:13-14).
There has been a tendency in recent studies to reduce the “religious” to the “political” (Dirks, 1993:106-107). While it is important to recognise that the religious exists only within specific cultural contexts, as does the political, the concept of the sacred is distinctive to a religious discourse within cultures. The sacred is regarded as divine power
manifested in a variety of contexts: temples, locations, images, and people. While this power is not divorced from political power, it can nevertheless exist independently, as is seen in popular religious festivals and personal devotional and ascetic practices which result in states of inner ecstasy.
The sacred exists entirely within culture. The categories of the sacred and the everyday are not substantive, as Jonathan Smith, the eminent scholar of religion, has observed, but relational; they change according to circumstance and situation. There is nothing in Hinduism which is inherently sacred. The sacredness of time, objects, or persons depends upon context, and the boundaries between the
sacred and the everyday are fluid. A temple image or icon prior to consecration is merely stone, metal, or wood; but once consecrated it is empowered and becomes the focus of mediation: “it becomes sacred by having our attention directed to it in a special way” (Smith, J.Z., 1982:55). I have used the term “icon” in preference to “image” to
indicate the physical manifestation of a deity. My use of the term has been influenced by Charles Pierce’s understanding of the icon as “a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes merely by virtue of characters of its own, and which it possesses just the same, whether any such object actually exists or not” (Pierce, 1932:247). There are also parallels between the Hindu murti and the Christian Orthodox “icon” as a material centre which, according to Vladamir Lossky, contains an energy and divine truth (Miguel, 1971:1236). On this account a person can be an icon as well as an “object” of stone or wood
General Features of Hinduism
Many Hindus believe in a transcendent God, beyond the universe, who is yet within all living beings and who can be approached in a variety of ways. Such a Hindu might say that this supreme being can be worshipped in innumerable forms—as a handsome young man (such as Krsna in the Bhagavata Purana), as a majestic king (such as Krishna in the Bhagavad-gita), as a beautiful young girl, as an old woman, or even as a featureless stone. The transcendent being is mediated through icons in temples, through natural phenomena, or through living teachers and saints. This sacred in Hinduism is mediated through innumerable, changing forms
which bear witness to a deeply rich, religious imagination, centred on mediation and transformation.
Hinduism is often characterised as being polytheistic, and while it is true that innumerable deities are the objects of worship, many Hindus will regard these as an aspect or manifestation of sacred power. Devotion (bhakti) to deities mediated through icons and holy persons provides refuge in times of crisis, and even final liberation (moksa) from action (karma) and the cycle of reincarnation (samsara). The transcendent is also revealed in sacred literature, called the Veda, and in codes of ritual, social, and ethical behaviour, called dharma, which that
literature reveals. The two terms veda and dharma are of central importance in what might be called Hindu self-understanding.
Veda and Dharma
The Veda is a large body of literature composed in Sanskrit, a sacred language of Hinduism, revered as revelation (sruti) and as the source of dharma. The term veda means “knowledge,” originally revealed to the ancient sages (rsi), conveyed to the community by them, and passed through the generations initially as an oral tradition. There is also a large body of Sanskrit literature, inspired but nevertheless regarded as being of human authorship, comprising rules of conduct (the Dharma literature), and stories about people and
gods (the Epics and mythological texts called Puranas). These texts might be regarded as a secondary or indirect revelation (smrti).4 There are also texts in vernacular Indian languages, particularly Tamil, which are revered as equal to the Veda by some Hindus.
The Veda as revelation is of vital importance in understanding Hinduism, though its acceptance is not universal among Hindus and there are forms of Hinduism which have rejected the Veda and its legitimising authority to sanction a hierarchical social order. However, all Hindu traditions make some reference to the
Veda, whether in its acceptance or rejection; and some scholars have regarded reference to its legitimising authority as a criterion of being Hindu.5 (Because of ISKCON’s acceptance of the Veda, it falls clearly within the realm of Hinduism.) While revelation as an abstract, or even notional entity, is important, the actual contents of the Veda has often been neglected by Hindu traditions. It has acted rather as a reference point for the construction of Hindu identity and self-understanding (Halbfass, 1991:1-22).
Dharma is revealed by the Veda. It is the nearest semantic equivalent in Sanskrit to the English term “religion,” but has a wider
connotation than this, incorporating the ideas of “truth,” “duty,” “ethics,” “law,” and even “natural law.” It is that power which upholds or supports society and the cosmos, that power which constrains phenomena into their particularity, which makes things what they are. Zaehner relates dharma to the
Sanskrit root dhr which means to “hold, have or maintain.” He defines dharma as “the ‘form’ of things as they are and the power that keeps them as they are and not otherwise” (Zaehner, 1966:2).
The nineteenth-century Hindu reformers speak of Hinduism as the eternal religion or law (sanatana dharma), a common idea among modern Hindus today as well as in ISKCON, in their self-description. More specifically, dharma refers to the duty of high-caste Hindus with regard to
their social position, caste, or class (varna), and the stage of life they are at (asrama). All this is incorporated by the term varnasrama-dharma.
One striking feature of Hinduism is that generally practice takes precedence over belief. What a Hindu does is more important than what a Hindu believes. Hinduism is not creedal. Adherence to dharma is therefore not an acceptance of certain beliefs, but the practice or performance of certain duties, which are defined in accordance with dharmic social stratification.
The boundaries of what a Hindu can and cannot do has been largely determined by his or her particular endogamous social group, or caste, stratified in a hierarchical order, and, of course, by gender. This social hierarchy is governed by the distinction between purity and pollution, with the higher, purer castes at the top of the structure, and the lower, polluted and polluting castes at the bottom.
Behaviour takes precedence over belief—orthopraxy over orthodoxy. As Fritz Staal says, a Hindu “may be a theist, pantheist, atheist, communist and believe whatever he likes, but what makes him into a Hindu are the ritual practices he performs and the rules to which he adheres, in short, what he does” (Staal, 1989:389).
This sociological characterisation of Hinduism is very compelling. A Hindu is someone born within an Indian social group, a caste, who adheres to its rules with regard to purity and marriage, and who performs its prescribed rituals which usually focus on one of the many Hindu deities such as Siva or Visnu. One might add that these rituals and social rules are derived from the Hindu primary
revelation, the Veda, and from the secondary revelation, the inspired texts of human authorship. The Veda and its ritual reciters, the highest caste or Brahmans, are the closest Hinduism gets to a legitimising authority, for the Brahman class has been extremely important in the dissemination and
maintenance of Hindu culture. It is generally the Brahman class that has attempted to coherently structure the multiple expressions of Hinduism, whose self-understanding any account of Hinduism needs to take seriously.
There have, however, been certain sects within Hinduism, particularly devotional sects, which have rejected caste and maintained that salvation is open to all. ISKCON needs to be understood in the context of such caste-transcending groups.
Hindu Traditions
The idea of tradition inevitably stresses unity at the cost of difference and divergence. In pre-Islamic India there would have been a number of distinct sects and regional religious identities, perhaps united by common cultural symbols, but no notion of “Hinduism” as a comprehensive entity. Yet there are nevertheless striking continuities in Hindu traditions.
There are essentially two models of tradition: the arboreal model and the river model. The arboreal model claims that various sub-traditions branch off from a central, original tradition, often founded by a specific person. The river model, the exact inverse of the arboreal model, claims that a tradition comprises multiple streams which merge into a single mainstream (Faure, pp.13-14). Contemporary Hinduism cannot be traced to a common origin, so the discussion is directed towards whether Hinduism fits the river model or, to extend the metaphor, whether the term “Hinduism” simply refers to a number of quite distinct rivers. While these models have restricted use in that they suggest a teleological direction or intention, the
river model would seem to be more appropriate in that it emphasises the multiple origins of Hinduism.
The many traditions which feed in to contemporary Hinduism can be subsumed under three broad headings: the traditions of brahmanical orthopraxy, the renouncer traditions, and popular or local traditions. The tradition of brahmanical orthopraxy has played the role of a “master narrative,” transmitting a body of knowledge and behaviour through time, and defining the conditions of orthopraxy, such as
adherence to varnasrama-dharma. From the medieval period a number of traditions (sampradaya) or systems of guru-disciple transmission (parampara) developed within the broadly brahmanical world. These traditions, which developed significantly during the first millennium CE, are focused upon a particular deity or group of
deities.
Among these broadly brahmanical systems, three are particularly important in Hindu self-representation: Vaisnava traditions, focused on the deity Visnu and His incarnations; Saiva traditions, focused on Siva; and Sakta traditions, focused on the Goddess or Devi. The Vaisnava tradition reveres the Veda as revelation and also other texts, notably the Bhagavad Gita, Visnu Purana, and Bhagavata Purana.
Unlike the concept of “Hinduism,” the boundaries of these traditions, or rather the sub-traditions within them, are more clearly defined, often demanding initiation and adherence to a set of principles and practices. ISKCON has been within this general characterisation, with fairly clearly defined boundaries marked by patterns of thought and behaviour which distinguish the ISKCON devotee from
others. Today, however, the picture is less clear, with many lay devotees attending temples who are not clearly identified by their style of dress or other distinguishing behavioural features (such as chanting in the streets and so on) (Shaunaka Rishi, 1995).
Cutting across these religious traditions is the theology of Vedanta, the unfolding of a sophisticated discourse about the nature and content of sacred scriptures which explores questions of existence and knowledge. The Vedanta is the theological articulation of the Vedic traditions, a discourse which penetrated Vaisnava and, to a lesser extent, Saiva and Sakta thinking. The Vedanta tradition is the theological basis of Vaisnava tradition, including ISKCON, and was important in the nineteenth and twentieth century Hindu renaissance.
Vaisnavism
The terms “sect,” “order,” or “tradition” are rough equivalents of the Sanskrit term sampradaya, which refers to a tradition focused on a deity, often regional in character, into which a disciple is initiated by a guru. Furthermore, each guru is seen to be within a line of gurus, a santana or
parampara, originating with the founding father.
The idea of pupilliary succession is extremely important in all forms of Hinduism, as this authenticates the tradition and teachings; disputes over succession, which have sometimes been vehement, can be of deep religious concern, particularly in traditions which see the guru as the embodiment of the divine, possessing the power to bestow the Lord’s grace on his devotees. With initiation (diksa) into the sampradaya (and this is highly pertinent to ISKCON) the disciple undertakes to abide by the values of the tradition and community, and he or she receives a new name and a mantra particularly sacred to that tradition. A sampradaya might demand celibacy
and comprise only world renouncers, or it might have a much wider social base, accepting householders of both genders and, possibly, all castes including untouchables.
The most important Vaisnava orders and cults are:
The Gaudiya or Bengali Vaisnavas located mainly in Bengal, Orissa, and Vrndavana. They revere the teachings of the Saint Caitanya and focus their devotion on Krsna and Radha. The Hare Krishna movement is a development or branch of this tradition.
The Cult of Vithobha in Maharashtra, particularly in the pilgrimage centre of Pandarpur. Their teachings are derived from the saints (sant) Jńanesvara, Namdev, Janabai, etc.
The Cult of Rama located mainly in the northeast at Ayodhya and Janakpur and associated with an annual festival of Ramlila in which the Ramayana is performed. The ascetic Ramanandi order are devoted to Rama and Sita.
The northern Sant tradition, while not being strictly Vaisnava as it worships a transcendent Lord beyond qualities, nevertheless derives much of its teachings and names of God from Vaisnavism. Especially venerated are Kabir and Nanak, the founder of Sikhism. The Sri Vaisnavas are located in Tamil Nadu, whose centre is the temple at Srirangam, and for whom
the theology of Ramanuja is particularly important.
These sampradayas developed within the wider mainstream of brahmanical worship based on texts, especially the Puranas. The Gaudiya Vaisnava tradition is squarely within the Vedic, Puranic tradition.
Within these sampradayas, a number of devotional attitudes to the personal absolute developed. The relationship between the disciple and the Lord could be one of servant to master, of parent to child, friend to friend, or lover to beloved. Some sampradayas adopted one of
these modes. The Bengali Vaisnavas, for example, regarded the attitude of the lover to the beloved as the highest expression of devotion, not dissimilar to the braut-mystik tradition in western mystical theology; while the sect of Tukaram viewed the devotional relationship as one of servant to master. But what is significant here is that the
relationship between the devotee and the Lord is modelled on human relationships, and that the Lord can be perceived and approached in a variety of ways: the love of God takes many forms.
Gaudiya Vaisnavism
Devotional traditions focused on Krsna the Cowherd developed in northern India, and found articulation in Sanskrit devotional and poetic literature as well as in more popular devotional movements, particularly around Vrindavan and in Bengal. The form of Vaisnavism which grew in Bengal (Gaudiya) developed a theology which laid great emphasis on devotion and the love relationship between the devotee
and Krsna. It was this form of Hinduism which Srila Prabhupada brought to the West in 1965.
The 1960s saw many Hindu (as well as Buddhist and Chinese) ideas and practices come to the West which had a large impact upon the counter-culture then developing. Dominant figures in popular culture, pop stars such as the Beatles and poets such as Alan Ginsberg, promoted Hindu ideas and gurus. During this period, after the lifting of immigration restrictions in the U.S.A. in 1965, there was a flow
of Indian gurus to the West, such as Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder of the Transcendental Meditation (TM) movement, and Bhaktivedanta Prabhupada. Upon the demise of Prabhupada, eleven western gurus were chosen to succeed as spiritual heads of the Hare Krishna movement. But many notorious problems followed upon their appointment, and the movement has since veered away from investing
absolute authority in a few, fallible human teachers.
Concluding Remarks
After our description of some of the phenomena associated with the terms “Hinduism,” “Vaisnavism,” and “ISKCON,” we can summarise by saying that ISKCON certainly perceives itself to be an authentic Vedic tradition; though many Indian Brahmans do not recognise its authenticity because ISKCON devotees tend to be “foreign.” For example, ISKCON devotees have not been allowed into the Jagannatha temple
at Puri, though this may change in the future. But if the idea of pupilliary succession is regarded as a criterion of authenticity, then ISKCON is certainly authentic in so far as it has developed in a clear line of succession from Prabhupada, who was himself an initiate of Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Gosvami Maharaja. He in turn was a disciple of Srila Gaurakisora dasa Babaji
Maharaja, a disciple of Srila Thakura Bhaktivinoda. Indeed Bengali Vaisnavism, from which ISKCON clearly develops historically, is a more clearly defined entity than “Hinduism”.
Inevitably, when a tradition changes geographical location and culture there are bound to be changes. ISKCON followers are predominantly Westerners who have been born and brought up in Western cultures; they have Western presuppositions and deep forms of perception and conditioning which will inevitably influence the tradition they have adopted. Indeed the Central Governing Body (CGB) is a western
development, although initiated by Srila Prabhupada.
So far ISKCON seems to have been fairly successful in the need to adapt to the modern world, while at the same time, maintaining a continuity of tradition from India. But ISKCON will need to continually adapt and face contemporary challenges and issues, which, indeed, it appears to be doing. Three important issues, for example, which ISKCON will need to engage with are:
the issue of gender (ISKCON has been accused of occluding women’s rights in terms of significant positions within the organisation and relegating women to a minor role.);
the degree to which ISKCON continues to articulate a literal understanding of Vaisnava narrative traditions—or put crudely, a “fundamentalist” interpretation of mythology—in the face of its own Vedic tradition’s hermeneutics and in the face of Western science and, indeed, textual scholarship; and
the way in which it responds to global issues such as concern for the environment. (On the one hand ISKCON articulates an environment-friendly attitude, yet there are tensions within the tradition and a strong idea that the material world is a trap, the web of maya, and is degenerating as the dark age continues.)
So, one might conclude with the words of Mahatma Gandhi that “to swim in the waters of tradition is good, but to drown in them is suicide.”
Notes
1. The March, 1991 census of India estimated the population to be 843,930,861.
2. My thanks to Harald Keller for drawing my attention to Ferro-Luzzi.
3. For an interesting, brief survey of the idea of “Hinduism” and the development of recent scholarship about it, see Hardy, 1990:145-155.
4. The terms “secondary” and “indirect revelation” to refer to this literature of human authorship, are used by Alexis Sanderson. (Sanderson, 1988: 662)
5. Brian Smith has defined Hinduism as “the religion of those humans who create, perpetuate, and transform traditions with legitimising reference to the authority of the Veda”. (Smith, B.K., 1987:40)
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This paper was originally delivered at a conference entitled, "Sekten," Politik und Wissenschaft, held in Humboldt University, Berlin, July, 1995.
It is also a version of a chapter that is to be published in Introduction to Hinduism to be published by Cambridge University Press in 1996.
This article is reprinted with permission from ISKCON Communications Journal, Volume 3, Number 2, 1995, pages 5-15. The journal's address is: 63 Divinity Rd, Oxford, OX4 1LH, UK (E-mail: icj@bbt.se; Web site: http://www.icj.iskcon.net).
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