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emntk
The story of AC Bhaktivedanta Swami travelling to America from India in 1965 with nothing but a couple of books and $12 and ending up opening over 100 temples travelling the world several times and effectively establishing a whole new religion (in the West at least) arouses the skeptic in me.... I have yet to find any sugguestion that Bhaktivedanta was anything but the amazing spiritual figure that history remembers him as being, but there is quite a lack of in-depth non-ISKCON biographical information available too.... I just find it very hard to accept that a religion so full of evil and corrupt behaviour and contradictions left and right started out legitimately and the story that one man could achieve all this on the level.
Some parts of the standard Bhaktivedanta hagiography told by his followers are quite easy to confirm. Other parts are harder, and there are a few often-suppressed details that give helpful context.
Bhaktivedanta was a near-penniless mendicant when he arranged for free passage on a ship to the USA. The historian Klaus Klostermaier has written about meeting Bhaktivedanta in Vrindaban in the early 1960s. Bhaktivedanta came from a fairly wealthy familly, and was a fairly wealthy businessman in the 1930s and 1940s (he worked as a chemist), but he did abandon that wealth after some business reversals, and he became a mendicant monk in the 1950s.
Although he was initiated into the Gaudiya Matha spiritual lineage, he was not one of his guru's "senior disciples" -- and he spent very little time before age 60 living in Gaudiya Matha temples in India. Even after age 60, he lived away from his lineage's temples more than he lived in them. As a result, many others in his lineage perceive that he made innovations which rendered his ISKCON movement inauthentic. These innovations range from a few matters of theology, to some matters of conduct (e.g. his willingness to let his "monastic" disciples get deeply involved in money-making and money-collecting to a degree considered unseemly by his Godbrothers in India).
In his personal life, he was clearly not a charlatan on the order of a Sai Baba or a Rajneesh. However, he did use snuff (tobacco), and he took to wearing expensive Rolex watches after his disciples offered them as gifts. Some of his fellow Gaudiya Matha monks in India took these as signs that he was not a very advanced devotee -- but while they may have said he was not qualified to be a guru, they rarely said he was an outright charlatan or a nondevotee.
It has been documented that Bhaktivedanta knew about child abuse and drug smuggling going on within ISKCON, and that he on more than one occasion told his disciples to handle these problems internally rather than take them to the police. There is no record of him supporting drug smuggling or child abuse -- indeed, he spoke out against these practices -- but some consider him grievously culpable because his "keep it internal" policy allowed some criminals' activities to continue unchecked.
People often fail to realize just how uninvolved, in one sense, Bhaktivedanta was with ISKCON after 1970. He wanted to publish English-language books, and he was grateful that his disciples' fund-raising made this possible. But because he preferred to spend the largest portion of his time on his translating, he relied on corrupt disciples to serve as the managers of what became a multi-million-dollar movement. Could that be called criminal negligence? Perhaps.
Did Bhaktivedanta deliberately come to the USA to convert the hippies? Evidence suggests that he did not. One of his Godbrothers had gone to the USA a couple of times to raise funds for his own literary and academic pursuits, and it appears that Bhaktivedanta's original impetus was similar. At first, he stayed in Pennsylvania with the son of a man who had donated generously to his publishing in India. Bhaktivedanta hoped that wealthy Americans could fund his book publication. Initially, he tried to meet with the same "upscale" audiences that associated with established groups like the Ramakrishna Mission in the USA, but he failed to interest them. Only after he had failed to reach the wealthy who could support his publishing did he find his audience among the hippies. Ironically, the sheer number of hippies attracted to his message gave him far better financial support than the "wealthy" Ramakrishna Mission ever had in the USA. But even from the earliest days, Bhaktivedanta was primarily interested in his translation work, and he entrusted the preaching mission to his disciples. Since they were hippies and recent drug users, they reached that audience and spoke their language. Some of those early supporters turned out to be drug dealers, and as their devotion grew they sought to impress their guru and support his movement by giving him their drug profits. ISKCON gained far more money from a few drug dealers than from all the airport solicitors combined.
Was Bhaktivedanta a charlatan or a calculated opportunist? It appears not. Rather, he was a successful businessman on the fringe of his guru's organization, who became a monk after his business failed, and who then took advantage of wealthy Westerners to fund his ambitious plans for publishing English-language texts from his spiritual tradition. He had great success, but in the process alienated himself from most of his Godbrothers because of his personal choices (e.g. snuff use, displaying some personal wealth though a renunciant). Ironically, after his movement became hugely successful in India, many of his Godbrothers who had formerly opposed him started to praise him, and many have wondered whether they did so in a cynical attempt to get some of ISKCON's riches for themselves.