H.H. Sivarama Swami Maharaj

Q What important instructions and leadership examples of Srila Prabhupada do you feel should be preserved and shared for the longevity and solidarity of ISKCON into the future?

HH: You know I have very limited direct experience or training from Srila Prabhupada (SP) about leadership or any specific theme. I had very little association with SP but I did have good quality association and training with some of SP’s close associates particularly, time permitting, that was Tamal Krishna Maharaj and part of our relationship was for him to actually train me or communicate to me the things that he learnt from SP that he considered to be really essential or important values that would ensure the perpetuation of Krishna Consciousness (KC) movement.I’m not directly answering your question but and we talked a lot particularly when Tamal Krishna Maharaj was in the UK and even when I used to serve under him in Dallas and Chicago. And one thing was that SP was very flexible whereas on one side he was very firm on principles but he was very clear about his vision and what he wanted to achieve but how he would go about doing that, SP was very flexible and he would respond to guidance and direction that he would get from his followers because those were the only people that he interacted with- his God-brothers were on the other continent for the most part and even when Prabhupada was here in India, they didnt interact that much in that sense. So this concept of SP’s flexibility that SP being a good to adjust according to time and circumstance was something that Tamal Krishna Maharaj was very clear about and used to talk about all the time because for ISKCON to move on the future and I mentioned this for that reason, hopefully devotees are always going to be quoting SP and at the same time, quoting SP doesn’t always work cause even though SP would have said something in the past, he’ll change according to time and circumstance based on what it is that actually gets across his mission and his intent. So this concept of fulfilling SP’s intent of establishing the worldwide KC movement, making pure devotees, getting people to chant Hare Krishna, distributing his books and SP would therefore would sometimes do very opposite things, contrary things and this is something that devotees find when they quote ‘SP says’; that SP said this, well SP also said that. Yes, and SP said many things where once he said black and the other he said white but yet SP’s intent was always the same. So this understanding SP’s intent as opposed to just knowing what SP said, not that what SP said is not important, but from what SP said according to time, place and circumstance, devotees are going to have to actually construct what SP’s intent is for the KC movement and for how leaders are going to function. And the point I’m getting to here is that the leader has to be very clear about what SP’s intent is otherwise there is the tendency for niyamagraha and yamagraha- to be too ​ ​ ​ ​ loose with SP’s instructions and to be too rigid with SP’s instructions and if we dont know or at least we don’t think we know what SP’s intent is, then we may actually lose the whole vision that SP was trying to pass on and this was something that SP’s close associates had real experience with. So, that was one of the very important things that I got from my association with Tamal Krishna Maharaj and I thought that that was something that I could share in terms of value and leadership-” knowing SP’s intent.” Q Please share some of the personal principles and practices which you have held on to in your journey through ups and downs in various leadership roles in ISKCON.

HH: I guess my basic theme as a leader is that, well I have I could say I have 2 main ones: one is, is that the goal of the KC movement is to produce pure devotees and that if the end result of our temples and books and so many activities doesn’t do that I mean that’s a hypothetical statement, wouldn’t do that, then we’re not really using them we’re not utilising them for what they’re given for. So our main business is to really become not just sadhakas, good sadhakas, and to ensure that devotees become sadhakas sadhana is just for sadhakas. But ultimately we’re not meant to become just sadhakas, we’re meant to become siddhas. Sukriti…... devotees are meant to attain Bhava and SP said ​ ​ ​ ​ yes, we should attain Prema- this is what he wanted us to achieve. It’s the purpose of ​ ​ the KC movement. So, in terms of my leadership and what I if you want to call it at that, and what I try to encourage other leaders with whom I work is that we cant lose sight of this goal. We need to be goal oriented but our primary goal is that our devotees become Sadhus and Saints and it’s not that we sacrifice devotees for the purpose of projects and therefore we’re compromising their ability to actually attain the goal of life because they don’t have the necessary facilities. Generally they don’t have enough time to put quality time or we emphasize on well, minimum 16 rounds is that KC or the practice of KC becomes a minimum. We barely read SP’s books and even read isn’t something that you do to textbooks because SP’s books are textbooks that are meant to be studied and chanting Hare Krishna isn’t something that you get over with- you just do minimum of 16 rounds- it’s something that you go into, deeply. So,our goal and our result should be pure devotees and if with all of our other projects and efforts we’re producing pure devotees, then the result of all of those projects is successful and if not, then we need to sort of re-gear and re-load our our mindsets to get the right mindset or the right result. I was going to mention 2, this was 1. And what oh, the other one was, is that devotees should not perish in KC. In other words KC is not some kind of extreme sport that most people just die in, that they’re meant to and it’s somewhat connected to the 1st point-they’re meant to actually come out of as pure devotees. So very often devotees get so much into the service aspect of KC that we lose them. We have a real high turnover of vaishnavas. They either, I’m not talking about devotees who give their whole lives to KC. The full time devotees, they stay for a short period of time, they don’t stick to their vows or they just become what I call sometimes ‘religious’ but they don’t become pure devotees. In other words you make KC your religion which means janme janme yes life ​ ​ after life after life you’re practicing it. But our business is to get out of this material world in this one life and for that you need to be more than religious. You need to be very very serious. So those are sort of 2 things that I will strive to keep in mind. We have to produce pure devotees and number 2 either leaders and followers cannot perish in KC. Leadership is not some kind of survival exercise.

Q Please recount your best and most successful projects (or initiatives) during your tenure as leader/GBC

HH : In terms of the Hungarian Yatra and I guess we can focus on New Vraja Dham which is considered to be successful I guess you could say it’s a successful birth. Like a woman gives birth and the first the doctor says is : Your baby’s fine”. So that’s not the end of the story, there’s a whole life that’s coming on further down the road and New Vraja Dhama is 20 years old so it’s a baby and it maybe fine but before it really becomes the type of self-sustaining community that SP wanted us to be- a Varnashrama community-it’s got a long way to go. And I’m not going to be there to make it happen just because of the pace that things go at and I’m on my way out but the main thing that I tried to emphasize to devotees and I tried to practice myself is that over and above anything that we think that other ideas come from the secular world around us, always do what SP said. Have faith in SP’s vision, in SP’s mission and what SP wanted. It may sometimes be very difficult, it may sometimes be very impractical but I try to brainwash devotees that if you do what SP wants done, Krishna has to make it successful because Krishna cannot make SP’s word successful- it becomes an obligation on the Lord and I’m hoping that success of New Vraja Dhama will continue on the basis that the devotees have faith and they know SP enough, they now SP’s intent enough that they make New Vraja Dhama really a success by sticking to SP’s instructions on how he wanted things to happen because SP’s vision is the absolute truth. It’s right, it’s correct- as conditioned souls, all we can do is try to realize SP’s intent and when we do that then we get Krishna’s blessings and when you get Krishna’s blessings, everything works.

Which do you see as the core strengths of ISKCON which you feel should be preserved for the future generations? What do you think can be done to preserve and transmit them?

Q Which do you see as the core strengths of ISKCON which you feel should be preserved for the future generations? What do you think can be done to preserve and transmit them? Q Which do you see as underlying weaknesses/ shortcomings in the way ISKCON is growing and operating today? What do you think can be done to reduce them? Q Which do you see as the biggest opportunities which ISKCON should capitalize on in the near future? Q What do you think should be done to capitalize on them? Q Which do you see as the biggest threats to the movement in the near future? What do you think should be done to deal with them?

HH : One real strength of ISKCON is that SP’s followers, many of them, are still present. Let me correct that, his disciples are still present. That gives an opportunity for immediate or at least one generation away connection with SP in terms of SP’s intent and vision. The weakness is that those devotees are leaving the planet and everyone’s standing in queue and it’s moving on. And the tendency being that is that we may start to have a different vision than SP’s vision was for establishing KC. As I mentioned earlier, I would like to see a vision based on a social foundation of Varnashrama. The opportunity ​ ​ is here- the opportunity that we have specially, for instance you have in India, is that the underlying culture facilitates that and in most of the rest of the world the opportunity is that we have democratic governments in which you have freedom. You have freedom to believe and you have freedom to establish, organize yourself as long as you don’t contravene laws which are generally sort of quite liberal. There are certain countries that opportunity is not there. So there’s a good likelihood that we can achieve this but we have to be aware that both are strengths are going to become a weakness pretty soon because you’re not going to have the benefit of SP’s disciples. Therefore we really need to make sure that we get their vision in hand before they all go and devotees really really have to imbibe SP’s moods and of course that was some indologist that I heard said that “One of the real strengths of ISKCON is that we have so much written material from SP, spoken material from SP, about SP we’ve got Lilamrita Biographies, we’ve got many other biographies so that is something that the devotees really have to exploit because once again SP is the key to our success. I mean there are threats from the outside world but in the 50 years that I’ve been associated with KC, the major threats have come from devotees and I continue to see that where the major threat is from and the threat is that we don’t follow SP or we see when devotees fall down and break the trust of others when devotees don’t stay as pillars, foundational pillars, in the post upon which you can build on but they just sort of move on, there’s in-fighting, party spirit, this is the real threat and these are threats I’ve experienced. I had struggled with governments and with local city councils but these we’ve always won. I’ve very rarely seen that we actually lost any of the wars from threats outside any of the battles but the threats from within are a lot more difficult to handle and that I see as the major threat. We saw that with the Gaudiya Math, we saw that with the Gaudiya Vaishnavism right after Chaitanya Mahaprabhu’s disappearance. ……. (19.05) came from the devotees. I think I’ve said the most things in terms of safeguarding the society from these threats. SP had given us certain basic criteria-it will depend upon the strength of devotees’ KC that they’re really intuned with SP and Krishna and are therefore able to avoid that and avoid that seems to be party spirit. With Gaudiya Math, it became the individual Maths and ISKCON for instance, it becomes, rather than seeing the oneness of the ISKCON (full-form)- even now we see that devotees tend to become more aligned to their gurus and we’ve got 90 gurus in ISKCON so we’ve got 90 groups that ISKCON becomes a federation. It becomes a federation of people who follow the groups. So Gaudiya Math legally split into different parts- we may not legally split but if in effect that’s the same thing that’s happening then both strengths, I mean manpower, resources, finances, everything goes to the guru and then the guru starts to become and has become- and that has become a serious, I think one of the serious threats if not probably the most serious threats that the guru has become a parallel authority to the GBC Body, the GBC Secretaries- everyone they say I follow but that’s not necessarily the reality on the ground atleast everywhere in our society. So that’s a very interesting threat because culturally and it’s something that’s very much emphasized in SP’s books on every page is this allegiance to the guru and there’s very little, although SP of course did say by comparison, where the Guru is under the umbrella and the authority of the institution and the GBC and has to work and function and whatever he receives whether it’s praise, whether it’s money, whether it’s manpower, it cannot be independently managed. It has to belong to the society and it has to be overseen and managed by the society.

Q Please visualize your dream vision for a very successful worldwide ISKCON movement 25 years from now.

HH : Well if you’re looking at 25 years into the future, I’m telling how I would like to see ISKCON 25 years from now: I would like to see ISKCON( full form) and I’m emphasizing the word ‘Society’. I would like to see ISKCON- the “Varnashrama society” that SP ​ ​ envisaged. Multiple times SP said this was 50% of his work which he didn’t have time to personally implement but he gave ample instruction-he gave a vision for what that would be atleast in principle and he wanted us to realize that. So for me, 25 years from now means that our KC movement, devotees are engaged according to their Varna- that ​ ​ leaders are trained- those who have leadership ability, who have that Guna are trained ​ ​ to become leaders. You can train anyone to lead- that’s a different thing than someone who by nature is a leader. So you can make anyone a department head and so on but you can’t make anyone a Yudhishtira Maharaj unless you’ve got the Guna, you’re not ​ ​ going to have that type of Karma ability to do that and that of course comes by training, purification, samskaras and the more that we actually do that with our brahmins who do ​ ​ puja are really brahmins. I wont say that the alters in our society are the cleanest places ​ ​ ​ in the world-they should be and our deity departments are the most organized and one of the reason is because people who actually, not all the devotees who are doing brahminical activity are actually brahmanas. They are initiated but they don’t really have ​ ​ the qualifications of the brahmins. ……( 24.18) So, in terms of training SP envisaged that we train devotees. First we determine what people’s natures are and then we train them according to their nature and hopefully that within 25 years devotees will be able to accept the fact that everyone doesn’t have to be a brahmin and that it’s glorious also to just be following instruction and be a good follower which Bhagavad Gita calls it shudra ​ and because our primary identity is that we are Vaishnavas and as Vaishnavas, in one ​ ​ ​ ​ sense, we are above all of these designations but because we’re conditioned souls, we also have to act or we function better as people, we become more productive and also we practice KC better when we act according to our nature. So for me, I would like to be able to see- I don’t think I’ll see it but I’d like to see that the society is actually modelled on the Varnashrama vision which SP had which meant that we have Varnasharma ​ ​ ​ colleges and SP said that everyone of our centres should actually be a Varnashrama ​ college.