Bhaktivedanta Swami stepped off the ship that had nearly killed him at Boston Harbor and into a country where he had no support and no acquaintances beyond a single family who had agreed, as strangers, to sponsor his visa. He was sixty-nine years old, in fragile health after two heart attacks at sea, carrying forty rupees' worth of currency and little else. What he built over the following year, from a series of borrowed rooms and finally a converted storefront on the Lower East Side of New York, is the least comfortable chapter of his life in America, and the one his biographers are least inclined to soften.
| Detail | Description |
|---|---|
| First American contacts | The Agarwal family, Butler, Pennsylvania |
| First temple | 26 Second Avenue, a former curiosity shop called "Matchless Gifts" |
| Public turning point | Kirtan in Tompkins Square Park, reported by the New York Times |
| Regulative principles required of initiates | Four: no illicit sex, no meat, fish, or eggs, no intoxicants, no gambling |
| Daily practice required | Sixteen rounds of the Hare Krishna mantra |
| Initiates in the first year | Nineteen |
The Agarwals of Butler, Pennsylvania #
By his own later account of standing on the dock in an unfamiliar country with no plan beyond a name and an address, "I did not know whether to turn left or right." A representative from a travelers' aid service, sent ahead by the Agarwals, met him there and, after several hours' wait, put him on a bus bound directly for Butler, Pennsylvania, where Gopal Agarwal, the engineer whose sponsorship had made his visa possible, lived with his wife Sally. The connection was thin even by his own account: he had met Gopal's father as a guest in Agra years before and had simply asked, almost in passing, whether the son might sponsor him. After a nine-hour overnight ride he arrived in Butler between two and three in the morning, met at the bus stop by Gopal in a station wagon. The Agarwals had no spare room in their apartment, so he took meals with the family but slept elsewhere, arranged for by his hosts.
Lecturing at the Local YMCA #
With no room of his own at the Agarwals', Bhaktivedanta Swami stayed at the local YMCA for the three weeks he remained in Butler. Sally Agarwal arranged some speaking engagements around the town, and he lectured on Bhagavad-gita to whatever small groups could be gathered, including at the YMCA itself. It was a modest start by any measure, a foreign swami addressing curious strangers in a small Pennsylvania town, but it was the first audience he had found on American soil.
Back to New York, With No Fixed Address #
After roughly a month, he returned by bus to New York City, and here the arrangement that had sustained him in Butler simply ended. There was no second sponsor waiting, no institution, and no savings to draw on. He moved between uncertain lodgings over the following weeks and months — at one point a windowless room, at another a loft in the Bowery — with no guarantee from one stretch to the next of where he would stay. He was approaching seventy, recovering from cardiac episodes suffered at sea only weeks earlier, in a city where he had arrived owning almost nothing and had since acquired almost nothing more. Nothing about this period suggests a man cushioned by faith in an easy outcome; it was, by any ordinary reckoning, a precarious and often bleak stretch of his life.
Finding 26 Second Avenue #
The turn came with the help of a small number of early well-wishers who had begun attending his talks. Together they found a storefront on the Lower East Side, at 26 Second Avenue, that had previously operated as a curiosity shop under the name "Matchless Gifts." Bhaktivedanta Swami converted the space into a small temple — a single room that served simultaneously as his residence, his classroom, and the movement's first fixed address in America.
Bhagavad-gita Classes and Kirtan #
From that storefront he offered regular classes on the Bhagavad-gita and other Vaishnava texts, and led kirtan, group chanting, of the Hare Krishna mantra:
Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare
Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare
The daily rhythm of lecture and chanting, conducted for whoever wandered in off Second Avenue, was the entire operation. There was no publicity budget and no organization beyond the people already present in the room.
Chanting in Tompkins Square Park #
The chanting soon moved outdoors. On Sunday afternoons, Bhaktivedanta Swami and a growing handful of followers held kirtan under a tree in nearby Tompkins Square Park, in the open air, drawing the attention of passersby, largely young people from the surrounding counterculture of the mid-1960s.
The New York Times Takes Notice #
One of those Sunday gatherings caught the attention of a New York Times reporter, who covered it under the headline "Swami's Flock Chants in Park to Find Ecstasy; 50 Followers Clap and Sway to Hypnotic Music at East Side Ceremony." It was the first significant mainstream press attention the fledgling movement received, arriving less than a year after its founder had gotten off a cargo ship with no contacts and no plan beyond fulfilling his guru's order.
Four Regulative Principles and Sixteen Rounds #
None of this hardship translated into lowered standards for those who wanted to join him. To receive formal spiritual initiation, Bhaktivedanta Swami required his followers to vow to follow four regulative principles:
- No illicit sex — meaning no sexual activity outside of marriage
- No eating of meat, fish, or eggs
- No intoxicants — including alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, and even coffee and tea
- No gambling
Initiates also vowed to chant sixteen rounds of the Hare Krishna mantra daily, completing sixteen full circuits of a 108-bead strand each day without fail. Asking this of young Americans in the middle of the 1960s counterculture, a milieu built substantially around the very habits the four principles forbade, was a considerable demand from a teacher with no material means to offer in exchange, only the practice itself.
Nineteen Initiates in the First Year #
By the end of his first year in New York, Bhaktivedanta Swami had initiated nineteen people into that discipline. It was not a large number, and nothing about the room at 26 Second Avenue in 1965 and 1966 looked like the beginning of an international institution. But it was enough of a foundation that, in July 1966, he was able to incorporate the group formally as the International Society for Krishna Consciousness — built, in the end, on a year in which a man in his late sixties had arrived in a country he had never seen, with almost nothing, and simply kept teaching until a handful of people stayed to listen.
