By the summer of 1966, Bhaktivedanta Swami had been in New York for the better part of a year, chanting under a tree in Tompkins Square Park and lecturing from a rented storefront on the Lower East Side. What had begun as one elderly Vaishnava monk with a trunk of books was starting to draw a following of young Americans. The next two years turned that following into an institution, then into a movement with outposts on both American coasts.
| Detail | Description |
|---|---|
| ISKCON incorporated | July 1966, New York |
| First temple | 26 Second Avenue, "Matchless Gifts," Lower East Side |
| Krishna Consciousness album | December 1966, released on the Happening label |
| Bhagavad-gita As It Is completed | Mid-January 1967 |
| Mantra-Rock Dance | 1967, Avalon Ballroom, San Francisco, roughly 3,000 attendees |
| First Western Ratha-yatra | San Francisco, 1967, a flatbed truck standing in for Puri's chariots |
| "Prabhupada" adopted as name | From mid-1968 |
Incorporating the Society #
In July 1966, Bhaktivedanta Swami formally incorporated the International Society for Krishna Consciousness in New York. The storefront at 26 Second Avenue, a former curiosity shop called Matchless Gifts, had already been serving as an informal temple for months, with evening classes on the Bhagavad-gita and kirtan of the Hare Krishna mantra. A Sunday kirtan under a tree in nearby Tompkins Square Park had already drawn a small crowd and a line in The New York Times, reporting fifty followers clapping and swaying "to find ecstasy." Incorporation gave the enterprise a legal name and a founding document, but the daily reality changed little at first: a small room, a handful of young Americans learning to sit through a lecture, and one teacher determined that the society exist in more than name only.
Bhaktivedanta Swami asked those who wanted formal initiation to accept four regulative principles, a discipline sharply at odds with the counterculture around them:
- No eating of meat, fish, or eggs
- No gambling
- No intoxicants, including tea, coffee, alcohol, and drugs
- No sex outside of marriage
Along with the vow came a daily commitment to chant sixteen rounds of the Hare Krishna mantra on a strand of 108 beads. Nineteen people accepted initiation on these terms in the first year alone.
An Album on the Happening Label #
In December 1966, Bhaktivedanta Swami recorded an album of Krishna kirtan together with a short spoken introduction. Released under the small "Happening" record label as Krishna Consciousness, it was a modest production by any commercial standard, but it carried the maha-mantra beyond the Lower East Side and into circulation among the era's counterculture, helping the movement's earliest spread at a moment when it had almost no other means of reaching people who had never walked past the storefront.
Teaching by Example #
With only a few followers and no institutional machinery to speak of, Bhaktivedanta Swami taught everything directly and in person. He showed his first disciples how to cook and offer food to Krishna, how to collect donations, and how to chant the maha-mantra on the street rather than wait for people to come to them. He also put them to work on his own writing, having them type his manuscript for the second canto of the Srimad-Bhagavatam as he produced it. The society's earliest institutional culture was set this way, hands-on, before any of it was written into a rulebook.
Completing Bhagavad-gita As It Is #
By mid-January 1967, Bhaktivedanta Swami had finished his translation and commentary on the Bhagavad-gita, a project he had carried with him from Vrindavan to New York. There was still no publisher and no guarantee that a house would take on a full, heavily annotated Gita from an unknown swami running a storefront mission. He asked one of his new disciples to find one anyway, setting in motion a search that eventually placed the manuscript with the Macmillan Company, which brought out an abridged Bhagavad-gita As It Is in 1968 and, four years later, the complete edition with every verse and purport intact.
A Second Temple in Haight-Ashbury #
In 1967, the society opened a second center, this one in San Francisco, in the middle of the Haight-Ashbury district at the height of its countercultural fame. The location proved decisive for the movement's growth: a community already searching for spiritual alternatives to the world it had rejected found, a few blocks from its own gathering places, an actual temple with an actual teacher. San Francisco quickly became a second hub alongside New York, and it was here that the movement's public profile changed most sharply.
The Mantra-Rock Dance #
To draw attention and raise funds for the new San Francisco temple, Bhaktivedanta Swami's disciples organized a concert at the Avalon Ballroom pairing his own kirtan with performances by the Grateful Dead and other rock acts of the day. The Mantra-Rock Dance drew an estimated 3,000 people, an audience the storefront mission in New York could scarcely have imagined a year earlier. For many who attended, it was their first sight of the elderly monk chanting the Hare Krishna mantra, and for the local press it made the temple, briefly, the most talked-about address in the neighborhood.
San Francisco's First Ratha-yatra #
Later that year, Bhaktivedanta Swami's San Francisco followers organized the first Ratha-yatra festival held in the West, a flatbed truck fitted with four pillars and a canopy standing in for the three immense wooden chariots that carry the deities of Jagannatha through the streets of Puri every year. It was, in its way, a return: Vaishnava biographers record that Abhay had staged his own miniature version of the same festival as a six-year-old in Calcutta, persuading his father to have a small chariot built for him. Four decades later, he brought the real festival, however modest its first American form, to the opposite side of the world. Ratha-yatra would go on to become one of ISKCON's signature public events in cities everywhere; the fuller story of the society's spread across the globe continues from here.
From Swamiji to Prabhupada #
Through 1967 and into 1968, his followers addressed Bhaktivedanta Swami simply as "the Swami" or "Swamiji." From the middle of 1968 onward they began instead to call him "Prabhupada," an honorific traditionally reserved for a teacher at whose feet other teachers themselves sit. The change in address marked how far the mission had come since the storefront: no longer only a swami visiting from India, but the founder-acharya of a fast-growing worldwide society, now known to his disciples by the title history would remember him by.
