Spring 2007

The pages of BTP have documented how, in order to sustain the Great Guru Hoax, the GBC gurus are forced to invent philosophies which state that Srila Prabhupada can no longer be accepted as Guru, and therefore we must instead accept their “living” representatives as substitute gurus for Srila Prabhupada.

Unfortunately for them, HH Narayana Maharaja (henceforward “NM”) from the Gaudiya Matha is beating the GBC at their own game, arguing that if we must accept “living representatives” as substitutes for Srila Prabhupada, there is no reason we cannot accept him as such a “living representative”, especially since he claims he is the “best” available.

And some have left ISKCON to join him, noting he is an elderly Indian sannyasi (renunciant) without any known record of external falldown, whereas ISKCON’s gurus have had an horrendous record in this regard. And with no order from Srila Prabhupada authorising any specific individuals to succeed him, the GBC have no authority to support the legitimacy of their gurus vis-a-vis NM, or any other competitors for that matter. Hence, in the absence of a clear mandate establishing individuals in ISKCON as the authorised successor-gurus to Srila Prabhupada, it is not too difficult for others to just as easily claim that they are also the “real successors” to Srila Prabhupada. Caught out by their own “any guru but Srila Prabhupada” philosophy, in a naked display of hypocrisy, ISKCON gurus have had no option but to fight a rear-guard action by advocating basically the same arguments advanced by the IRM, to justify why one should not go to NM, but “stay with Srila Prabhupada”. To fight off the IRM, the GBC gurus will argue we need them instead of Srila Prabhupada, and to fight off NM, the same gurus will argue we now need Srila Prabhupada instead of NM! Here is the proof of this blatant hypocrisy in action:
 

This is a blatant self-contradiction, since the same applies to Hridyananda Maharaja, the person who has made this statement:

“Srila Prabhupada never told in any book, article, interview or any other documented statements, that Hridyananda Maharaja should become a diksa guru of ISKCON.”

Yes this has not stopped Hrdyananda Maharaja (henceforward “HM”) from posing as such a guru for 30 years now. For HM became guru in 1978 via the following fraudulent GBC resolution:

And as the GBC themselves later acknowledged, when they dismantled this “zonal Acharya” guru system (Great Guru Hoax, part 1), no such appointment of “11” spiritual masters ever took place:

Similarly, there is nothing from Srila Prabhupada in any “book, article, interview or any other documented statements”, naming ANYONE as a diksa guru of ISKCON. Yet ISKCON is happy to run around with 80 such undocumented gurus, but want people to reject NM via the use of a standard that they themselves do not follow.
What makes this naked double-standard even more egregious is that HM admonishes against the use of precisely such a double standard:

Thus HM is more than happy to employ a rule requiring documented statements from Srila Prabhupada to deny NM acting as a guru competitor to himself and the other ISKCON gurus, but refuses to apply to it to establish the guru credentials for himself and other ISKCON gurus. Therefore HM needs to follow his own advice, otherwise he will make more than just a goose of himself.
 

By the same standard, we can note that in the matter of instructing “the members of ISKCON”, Srila Prabhupada issued the July 9th (1977) directive to the whole movement, stating that ritviks (representative priests) had been appointed to continue the process of initiation in ISKCON on his behalf. However, the GBC’s papers and ISKCON gurus are more than happy to establish their own case for guruship, based on what was said not to the wider “members of ISKCON”, but supposedly just to one person:

So again, the GBC refuse to apply the same standard of proof for their own gurus as they seek to impose on NM.
 

Again, ISKCON’s gurus are condemned by their own words, because similarly:

“Srila Prabhupada did not say that Umpati Swami or anyone else, mahabhagavata or not, should become the next ISKCON diksa guru.”

So ISKCON gurus suddenly invoke the lack of an explicit order to prevent NM coming “next” after Srila Prabhupada, but such an absence of an explicit order has not prevented them from coming “next” to replace Srila Prabhupada in their hordes. Umpati Swami even has the temerity to state that Srila Prabhupada: “set up the system of ISKCON gurus.”

This system of “ISKCON gurus” is that any person who gets a majority vote from the GBC can become a diksa guru:

Pray tell us WHEN, WHERE and HOW Srila Prabhupada “set up” this system, mandating that in the future his disciples must replace him as the diksa Guru for ISKCON by lining up to get voted-in as such by the GBC? Such evidence cannot exist for the simple reason that the system was manufactured as a result of a paper written in 1984 by Ravindra Svarupa Das, as we documented in BTP issue 12 (see “The man who expanded 11 to 70”), as an attempt to “reform” the “zonal Acharya” guru system in place at the time.
Thus it was a system “set up” by Ravindra Svarupa and his band of so-called “guru reformers”, not by Srila Prabhupada.
 

But the GBC are very happy to “jump over” Srila Prabhupada themselves when it comes to advocating re-initiation from other ISKCON gurus, for their paper on “re-initiation” quotes extensively not from Srila Prabhupada (who as noted above never spoke of this concept), but from Bhaktivinoda Thakura’s Jaiva Dharma and Narahari Thakura’s Krsna Bhajanamrita. And indeed, in trying to defeat Srila Prabhupada’s July 9th directive establishing a ritvik initiation system, they will happily try and quote previous Acaryas to try and “show the tradition”, realising that there are no instructions from Srila Prabhupada which can help them in defeating Srila Prabhupada’s own instructions!
 

Now if we do not require NM to explain Krsna book to us, pray tell why do we need Umapati Swami to explain it to us? And if we do not need him to explain it to us, then what is the point of the GBC’s “living guru” program where we must accept a “physically present” guru, since Srila Prabhupada’s books are supposedly “passive” and cannot “talk back” to us? So just exactly what do Umpati Swami’s “disciples” need him for? We know why he needs them – to worship him “as good as God”, give him daksina (donations) etc. But he apparently is not needed by his disciples at all.
 

But as we have seen, these very same “instructions of Srila Prabhupada” do not mandate Umpati Swami replacing Srila Prabhupada as the diksa Guru for ISKCON, and taking his own disciples. Therefore again there is a hypocritical self-contradiction, with Umapati Swami trying to invoke “Srila Prabhupada’s instructions” as the reason why “his disciples” should not take instruction from NM, when “Srila Prabhupada’s instructions” do not mandate that we take instruction from NM or that Umapati Swami should even have any disciples to begin with!
 

By making these hypocritical statements to establish a standard for evidence and proof in the case of NM, the GBC have well and truly “cooked their own goose”, for now they are admitting that all claims for their own guruship must be supported by documented statements from Srila Prabhupada to all ISKCON members specifically naming them as gurus. Similarly, they also cannot now ever quote from anyone other than Srila Prabhupada to support their claims. This then leaves us with the following standard for evidence, as given by the GBC themselves:

‘Srila Prabhupada must issue a documented instruction to all members of ISKCON, naming a person to a specific capacity.’

And guess what, this is exactly the standard which the IRM has been following all along to establish their case, since the July 9th directive constitutes such evidence, where Srila Prabhupada specifically named individuals only to act in the capacity as ritviks to initiate disciples on behalf of Srila Prabhupada.
The GBC are yet again not just comprehensively defeated, but defeated solely via using their own words. Not for nothing is Kali-Yuga known as the Age of Hypocrisy!